NASA’s Perseverance rover has been on the surface of Mars for several days, giving the team here on Earth time to run system checks and download preliminary data from the robot. The agency has now released the first large batch of media from the mission, including hundreds of still …
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NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance mission captured footage of its rover landing in Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021. The footage was captured by several cameras that are part of the rover’s entry, descent, and landing suite. The views include a camera looking down from the spacecraft’s descent stage, a camera …
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A team of geobiologists from Germany has found biologically-relevant primordial organic molecules and gases in fluid inclusions trapped in 3.5-billion-year-old barites from the Dresser mine, Marble Bar, Australia. Location of the Dresser mine in Western Australia (a) and black barite associated with originally sulfidic stromatolites at the sampling site (b) …
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A team of biologists from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the European Bioinformatics Institute and the Universidad de los Andes has identified 142,809 species of bacteriophages — viruses that infect and replicate in bacteria — living in the human gut. Camarillo-Guerrero et al. introduce the Gut Phage Database, a collection of …
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It used to be easy to know how many planets there were: nine. It had been nine planets for an entire generation before scientists started rethinking what counts as a planet. Pluto is out, but some astronomers believe there’s a real ninth planet lurking out there. Others aren’t convinced, …
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About eight and a half years ago, I stayed up until well after midnight to watch Curiosity make Marsfall. At the time, all eyes were glued to what is euphemistically referred to as the “seven minutes of terror.” It took Curiosity and will take Perseverance approximately that long to …
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Quercetin and 3,5-dihydroxybenzoic acid (DHBA), phytonutrients commonly found in apples, may help stimulate the production of new brain cells, according to a study published in the journal Stem Cell Reports. Quercetin and DHBA, natural compounds found in apples, are pro-neurogenic. Image credit: Ichwan et al., doi: 10.1016/j.stemcr.2021.01.005. Dr. Gerd Kempermann …
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An international team of scientists has sequenced and analyzed DNA from three mammoth specimens, two of which are more than one million years old. The results show that two distinct mammoth lineages were present in eastern Siberia during the Early Pleistocene; one of these lineages gave rise to the woolly …
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The source of hydrogen chloride (HCl) in the atmosphere of Mars is recent surface volcanism, subsurface magmatic activity, or aerosol chemistry occurring with the Martian dust particles lofted into the atmosphere. HCl increased during the 2018 global dust storm and declined soon after its end, pointing to the exchange between …
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NASA’s Perseverance rover is set to touch down on Mars this week, and we had the opportunity to talk to one of the people who had a hand in bringing this mission to fruition. Adam Steltzner is the chief engineer of the Mars 2020 project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion …
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