In what has practically become a routine event, NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is asking for a little extra cash. During a public presentation to the NASA Advisory Council’s planetary sciences subcommittee on 26 January, Jim Green, director of NASA’s planetary science division, said that the mission must add $82.1 million to its $2.476 billion budget after exhausting program funding reserves.

“Most of us were aware that MSL was having some difficulties,” says Ronald Greeley, an astronomer at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona and chair of the subcommittee. “Still, it was a disappointment.”

After a two year delay, the mission, which will land a rover on the red planet to search for signs of life, is expected to launch in November of this year. The latest funding overrun is due to a number of factors, mainly pegged to increased costs in the mission’s avionics, radar system, and drill, says Greeley.

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Almost a century after the famed Scopes Monkey Trial, battles over teaching evolution versus creationism in US public schools persist – but they have shifted to individual classrooms where teachers have a vast influence over whether evolution is present, a new study finds. In the courtroom, advocates for creationist thinking, or its re-packaged equivalent “intelligent design”, have lost nearly every major case in the last 40 years. While this has undoubtedly helped set a high scientific standard for state curricula, the study finds that a majority of public high school teachers are either uncomfortable with teaching evolution or doubtful of its accuracy.

“The official state content standards actually have very little impact on the way teachers teach in the classroom,” says Eric Plutzer, a political scientist from Pennsylvania State University in University Park, who co-authored the paper, which appears 27 January in Science. The major factors affecting what teachers taught were their own personal values and beliefs as well as the values and culture of their community, he adds.

Plutzer and his co-author, Michael Berkman, also of Pennsylvania State University, used a nationally representative sample of 926 public biology instructors and found that less than a third of teachers consistently crafted their lesson plans around evolution. At the same time, about 13% of teachers spent an hour or more of class time presenting creationism “in a positive light”.

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On the same day that President Obama delivered his annual State of the Union Address stressing science and education investments, Democrats announced their picks for ranking members on the subcommittees of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. The selections will be finalized during the committee’s organizational meeting, slated for early February.

The committee, chaired by Ralph Hall (R-TX), will have to grapple with how to direct funding for the agencies it oversees, including NASA, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), when the President’s speech called for both scientific investment and federal fiscal restraint.

The Democrats have assigned Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) as ranking member of the space and aeronautics subcommittee, which oversees NASA’s budget. Jerry Costello (D-IL) will be acting ranking member in Gifford’s stead, while she undergoes physical therapy after a shooting in Tuscon, Arizona on 8 January left her battling brain damage.

NASA, in particular, is facing tough decisions after it released plans for a third shuttle launch before the fleet retires, a move that will cost $500 million but is currently unfunded. As well, the agency needs a new budget, due in February, before it can stop funding the already-cancelled Constellation Program, which directed it to bring astronauts to the Moon and Mars.

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The 217th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) concludes today in Seattle, Washington. The conference’s posters and presentations focused on the largest objects imaginable – planets, stars, galaxies, the universe – and researchers presented fascinating news about rocky exoplanets, surprise black holes, enormous sky photos, and cosmic lensing. But in the midst of everything, there were also some smaller moments reflecting the fact that astronomy is an altogether down-to-Earth and very human activity.

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The infant universe just got a little dimmer. A phenomenon called gravitational lensing may be causing astronomers to overestimate the brightness of the earliest galaxies, according to a study published in the 13 January edition of Nature.

Gravitational lensing occurs because massive objects, like galaxies, distort spacetime. Light passing through the distortion will end up on a curving trajectory instead of a straight line. This, in turn, can both alter the shapes and enhance the brightness of distant sources, just as a lens might do. The effect turns the universe into “a cosmic house of mirrors,” says Rogier Windhorst, an astronomer from Arizona State University in Phoenix, who presented the new findings at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting on 12 January.

Looking at images from the Hubble Space Telescope’s Ultra Deep Field—which includes objects so distant the universe was less than 10% its current age when their light was emitted—Windhorst and his colleagues expected to see both close and distant galaxies randomly distributed across the image. Instead, they found many background galaxies lying near foreground galaxies. The likely explanation for this, they say, is that the foreground galaxies are lensing more distant objects, allowing astronomers to see more early galaxies than they should.

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Framing a group shot can be difficult. Capturing half a billion stars and galaxies in one picture is – well – overwhelming.

Yet the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which has taken images of the night sky using a dedicated 2.5-m optical telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico since 1998, managed to photograph this many objects for their latest release, SDSS III. The trillion-pixel snapshot is the largest sky image taken to date.

“It’s not just really big, it’s really useful,” says Michael Blanton, an astronomer from New York University in New York and member of the SDSS team, who presented the new results at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Seattle, Washington on 11 January.

The image is filled with galaxies in the process of being born or crashing violently into one another, he says. Previous images released from SDSS have provided astronomers will many such interesting “needles in a haystack” that help them understand the stages of galactic evolution, he adds. The latest release allows them to search a substantially bigger haystack, he says.

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Dwarf galaxies are usually thought to be too small to contain supermassive black holes yet Henize 2-10, located about 30 million light years from Earth, appears to be an exception. Work by Amy Reines, a graduate student in astronomy at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville reveals that the little galaxy harbors a big secret: a black hole more than 2 million times the mass of our Sun.

“There is thought to be a correlation between black hole mass and galaxy mass,” says Amy Reines, who presented the finding as part of her doctoral thesis at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Seattle, Washington, on 10 January. The new discovery undermines this assumption, she adds.

For instance, our Milky Way galaxy has a black hole at its center that weighs in at roughly 4 million times the mass of the Sun. The black hole in the center of Henize 2-10 is only half this mass, yet the dwarf galaxy is less than 10% the mass of the Milky Way. The finding suggests that something is missing in the standard picture of supermassive black hole formation.

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Proving that second chances do exist, the demonized blend of alcohol and caffeine known as Four Loko has found new life at the fuel pump. Following concerns that alcohol and caffeine combined were more harmful than when taken separately, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned drinks that mix the two substances on 17 November.

But Maumee Express, Inc., a transportation and waste disposal company, has agreed to take unsold cases of Four Loko from wholesalers in Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland and other East Coast states to their recycling facility in Abingdon, Virginia for conversion into ethanol. The company will then sell the fuel to be blended into gasoline.

The facility normally processes waste from industrial alcohol and drug manufacturing, perfumeries, and food additive and flavoring companies, as well as beer and wine that’s past its expiration, says Ron Potter, an MXI spokesman.

The company will go beyond just reprocessing the liquid itself into a new product. “Everything associated with the beverage is recycled,” says Potter, including any aluminum, glass, cardboard, and plastic that comes through the plant. The company plans to convert approximately 1 million cases of Four Loko to ethanol in the next year, which Potter estimates to be between one-third and one-half of the remaining supply.

Image: Wikimedia

The weather outside may be frightful where you are but at least it’s not -30 degrees Celsius. Yet in these sub-zero conditions, researchers at the South Pole have placed the final string of detectors for the Icecube Neutrino Observatory, a cubic kilometer-sized telescope meant to search for the origin of cosmic rays, on 18 December.

Icecube, which has been under construction since 2005, is composed of 86 wires set in the Antarctic ice at depths ranging from 1,450 to 2,450 meters, each with 60 basketball-sized detectors strung on them like Christmas lights. The detectors look for a characteristic blue flash of light, which signals that a neutrino has hit an oxygen atom. Such events are rare—trillions of neutrinos may pass through the ice without interaction—but each flash tells researchers where the neutrino came from and how much energy it had.

To build the telescope, researchers drilled holes in the ice with a jet of near-boiling water flowing out of a hose at around 760 liters/minute, explains Albrecht Karle, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. At that rate, it takes nearly a day to drill the full 2450 meters and, after inserting the detectors, the researchers wait five to six days for the hole to refreeze before they can begin taking data, he adds.

Within a few weeks the entire array will be completely frozen and, after calibration, data will be taken with the full array beginning around 1 May, says Karle. Aside from investigating the origin of high-energy cosmic rays, Icecube may shed light on the nature of dark matter and could even provide evidence for the extra dimensions predicted in string theory, says Spencer Klein, a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Berkeley, California.

NASA announced that it has decided put a hold on a controversial experiment at Brookhaven National Lab (BNL) in Upton, New York, according to a statement that appeared on BNL’s website on 12 December. The experiment, the agency’s first research involving primates in at least two decades, would expose squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus) to charged-particle radiation in an attempt to help determine safe levels for astronauts on lengthy missions.

Though officials at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in Norfolk, Virginia issued a statement on 8 December saying that the experiment is canceled, both BNL and NASA deny this.

The decision is pending a comprehensive review of “current research and technology development plans to see how they align with the President’s plan for human spaceflight,” according to a response to PETA’s claim posted on NASA’s website the same day.

“A decision will be made when the review is completed, depending on whether it’s still deemed to be a value added experiment,” says NASA spokesman Michael Braukus.

After NASA posted it’s statement, BNL issued their clarification. “NASA told us we should withdraw the experiment from consideration,” says BNL spokesman Pete Genzer. “It could be put back in the queue.”

Previously: Row over NASA primate-radiation experiment

Update: 14 December: A previous version of this post claimed that the Brookhaven experiment had been canceled. It has been updated to reflect the fact that the experiment is currently on hold.

Image: Wikimedia