Sifting through soil on Mars, NASA's rover Curiosity paused to take a picture - and exposed its own bad behaviour. The shot included a bright object lying in the Martian dirt, and a closer look suggests that the rover is guilty of littering: it appears the object is a piece of plastic wrapper that has fallen from the robot.
The discovery has put a twist on the rover's current mission to scrub out its soil scoop and take its first sample of Martian dirt for analysis. More bright specks of unidentified matter in the soil - at first thought to be from Curiosity shedding - may actually be Martian in origin, although what they might be is a mystery. |  |
Is language unique to humans?
When Alex unexpectedly passed away after only thirty-one years of life, his last words to his dearest friend were, "You be good. See you tomorrow. I love you." A touching sentiment indeed, but all the more impressive because Alex was an African Grey Parrot. Over the course of thirty years of work between psychologist Irene Pepperberg and Alex, purchased from a Chicago pet store at one year of age, the parrot amassed a vocabulary of some 150 words. According to one report, he was able to recognize fifty different objects, could count quantities up to six, and could distinguish among seven colours and five shapes. He also understood the ideas of "bigger" and "smaller", and "same" and "different".
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Weatherwatch: Climate helped Genghis Khan create the Mongol empire
The Mongol empire in the 13th century conquered great swaths of Asia, the Middle East and even parts of Europe at staggering speed, but how did Genghis Khan and his armies manage to conquer so much and so fast? The answer may lie in some ancient dead trees found recently in an old volcanic lava flow in Mongolia. The trees were so well preserved that their annual growth rings were still visible and gave an astonishing insight into the climate of the 1200s. The wood rings were spaced wide apart showing that the trees grew well, thanks to plenty of rain. And because the trees did well, the chances are that the grasslands of the vast Mongolian plains also grew lush in the wet climate. Those rich grasslands would have fuelled the Mongol armies, giving plenty of grazing land for the thousands of horses that the troops relied on, and livestock to feed the soldiers.
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Maya watchtowers marked astronomical seasons
MEXICO CITY — Experts in Mexico say they have determined that the ancient Maya used watchtower-style structures at the temple complex of Chichen Itza to observe the equinoxes and solstices.
The bases of the structures were found atop the walls of the long ceremonial court, where a ritual ball game was played. But to determine their use, archaeologists first had to rebuild the small, stone-roofed structures. Each of the structures has a narrow slit running through it. |  |
Pyramids by the Nile. Egypt? No, Sudan.
“HOW much for your fastest camel?” I asked the tall man with the large turban and the drooping mustache.
Abdrahman smiled at me. “Come,” he said, and hurried off behind a mud-and-stick shed. There, regally posed, with a golden coat, stood Abrusa. Abdrahman lowered the camel to his knees and pointed to me. “You ride,” he said, waving a wooden switch in my face. With little choice I threw a leg over the great beast — and remembering Lawrence of Arabia — wrapped my left knee around the saddle horn and hooked my instep behind my other knee. Abdrahman snapped his switch, and Abrusa lurched to his feet. Suddenly we were tearing across the desert. |  |
Interstellar travelers may be helped by calculations that solve the Pioneer anomaly
Former President Bill Clinton recently expressed his support for interstellar travel at the 100 Year Spaceship Symposium, an international event advocating for human expansion into other star systems. Interstellar travel will depend upon extremely precise measurements of every factor involved in the mission. The knowledge of those factors may be improved by the solution a University of Missouri researcher found to a puzzle that has stumped astrophysicists for decades.
Sarah Brightman to travel to space station
British singer Sarah Brightman is to travel as a space tourist to the International Space Station.
The classical recording artist, once married to Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber, will be part of a three-person crew flying to the ISS. After completing a tour in 2013, Ms Brightman will embark on six months of preparation at the Star City cosmonaut training centre in Moscow. She will be the seventh space tourist to visit the ISS. The last space tourist, Cirque du Soleil chief executive Guy Laliberte, paid around $35m for the privilege. |  |
NASA pleased with flawless SpaceX docking
After getting off to a rocky start with an engine failure during launch Sunday, a commercial cargo capsule loaded with a half-ton of equipment and supplies, including ice cream, carried out a flawless final approach to the International Space Station early Wednesday, pulling up to within 60 feet so Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, operating the lab's robot arm, could pluck it out of open space for berthing.
Meet Polaris, The First Ice-Drilling Lunar Prospector-Bot
A first-of-its-kind solar-powered lunar rover can drill 3 feet into the lunar surface, hoisting a vertical triple solar array to capture sunlight from super low on the moon’s horizon. Roboticists at a company called Astrobotic, a spinoff from Carnegie Mellon University, built a working prototype and plan to test it in the next few months.
Astrobotic and CMU hope to nab the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon. Polaris is designed to seek out water ice trapped in the cold craters and regolith at the moon’s poles. It has 3-D cameras and laser guidance systems for navigation, and it will communicate directly with Earth using an S-band antenna. |  |
Most Alien Solar Systems Are 'Flatter Than Pancakes'
Our solar system is shaped like a thin-crust pizza, with most of the planets traveling around the sun close to the same plane, and it's apparently not alone. A new study suggests the majority of alien planetary systems are much like ours, "flatter than pancakes," scientists say.
UCLA astronomers looked at data from NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope and found that more than 85 percent of alien planets have inclinations of less than 3 degrees. This means they orbit around a star near the same axis as other planets in their system. |  |
Higgs Boson is an Indian discovery, claims Vedic scientist
INDORE: Defying the claims of CERN, which had recently told the world that it has found the god particle, a person from Indore claims that Higgs Boson (the real name of God's particle) is an Indian discovery as it finds mention in Vedas.
The most important discovery of the decade Higgs Boson is the Golden Embryo Hiranyagarbha in the Vedas, and foundation of Vedic Science. Vedic scientists have traced and knew the building block of the creation 18000 years ago.
The most important discovery of the decade Higgs Boson is the Golden Embryo Hiranyagarbha in the Vedas, and foundation of Vedic Science. Vedic scientists have traced and knew the building block of the creation 18000 years ago.
Clues to Ape (and Human) Evolution Can Be Seen in Sinuses
I was sick this weekend. The kind of sick where your nose runs so much that you begin to question how the human body can produce so much mucus. My throat hurt. I was coughing. But the worst part was the headache: My head felt like it was being continuously squeezed by a vise, or maybe some sort of medieval torture device. The pain was so bad even my teeth hurt. As I was lying in bed next to my half-empty box of Kleenex, I thought, “This wouldn’t be happening if we had descended from Asian, not African, apes.” (Yes, I was really thinking that.).
25 primate species reported on brink of extinction
NEW DELHI (AP) — Twenty-five species of monkeys, langurs, lemurs and gorillas are on the brink of extinction and need global action to protect them from increasing deforestation and illegal trafficking, researchers said Monday.
Six of the severely threatened species live in the island nation of Madagascar, off southeast Africa. Five more from mainland Africa, five from South America and nine species in Asia are among those listed as most threatened. |  |
Corn belt shifting north with climate change
Joe Waldman is saying goodbye to corn after yet another hot and dry summer convinced him that rainfall won't be there when he needs it anymore.
"I finally just said uncle," said Waldman, 52, surveying his stunted crop about 100 miles north of Dodge City, Kansas. Instead, he will expand sorghum, which requires less rain; let some fields remain fallow; and restrict corn to irrigated fields. |  |
Global warming is 'causing more hurricanes'
Scientists have found support for the controversial idea that global warming is causing more frequent and destructive hurricanes, a subject that has been hotly debated during the past decade.
Data gathered from tide gauges, which monitor the rapid changes to sea levels caused by storm surges, show a significant link between both the frequency and intensity of tropical storms and increases in annual temperatures since the tidal records began in 1923. |  |
Underwater dive to demand India protect the oceans
Greenpeace activists have dived to the bottom of the Indian Ocean to highlight the need to protect sea waters.
The dive comes as 70 environment ministers from around the world are meeting in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad to discuss biodiversity. On Tuesday, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pledged $50m (£30.96m) towards conservation schemes. India has taken over the presidency of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) until 2014. |  |
Scientists have 'limited knowledge' of how climate change causes extinction
A major review into the impact of climate change on plants and animals has found that scientists have almost no idea how it drives various species to extinction.
Though some organisms struggle to cope physiologically with rising temperatures – a simple and direct result of climate change – there was scarce evidence this was the main climate-related threat to many species whose numbers were already falling. More often, climate change took its toll on life through more complex and indirect routes, such as reducing the abundance of food, making diseases more rife, and disturbing natural encounters between species, the review concludes. |  |
What Singing Fish Reveal about Speech and Hearing
With the exception of the cast of Disney’s The Little Mermaid—and Big Mouth Billy Bass—fish do not spring to mind as the animal kingdom’s most vocally gifted members. But one unusual singing fish has been teaching biologists and neuroscientists a lot about speech and hearing. Its bulging eyes and blubbery lips have graced several research posters at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting, which is in New Orleans, Louisiana this year.
The finned crooner in question is the plainfin midshipman fish (Porichthys notatus), which belongs to a family of fish known as toadfish because of their squat, slimy appearance.
The finned crooner in question is the plainfin midshipman fish (Porichthys notatus), which belongs to a family of fish known as toadfish because of their squat, slimy appearance.
Shaman and British wife embark on rainforest campaign against oil threat
An Ecuadorean shaman and his British wife will embark this week on a house-to-house campaign in their Amazonian village to dissuade locals from granting exploration rights to an oil company in an area of pristine forest close to the Yasuni national park.
Patricio Jipa and Mari Muench hope to thwart the advances of PetroAmazonas, which has promised villagers from the Kichwa indigenous group that they will get cash, new schools, a new eco-lodge, better healthcare and university education for their children if they accept plans for a seismic survey. |  |
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