NASA releases rover’s eye view of Mars landing
On Sunday evening, after an eight month journey of 352 million miles, Curiosity, a roving laboratory, landed on on Mars. As NASA have been celebrating the landing, over the last few days the News Blog have been updating readers on the latest coverage. In their most recent report, they are looking at what it’s like to be in the driver’s seat when touching down on another planet:
Curiosity's heat shield drops away as the rover images its own descent to Mars{credit}NASA/JPL-CALTECH{/credit}
Mars Decent Imager (MARDI) is attached to the underside of Curiosity. As the rover drifted down on its parachute during yesterday’s landing the camera switched on automatically just six seconds prior to heat shield separation.After a few frames of darkness, the video shows the protective shield falling away. Down below, the rover’s landing site looms ever closer, suddenly erupting in a cloud of disturbed dust when the rover is close enough to blast the surface with its descent stage rockets. The rover is then enveloped by the maelstrom of swirling dust which settles out to reveal the pebbled surface of Gale crater, just inches below the now-stationary camera.
Continue to the post to find out more and stay tuned for further coverage.
Meanwhile, Mohammed Yahia in the House of Wisdom blog asks, Why waste money on the Mars landing?
What we learn there may be relevant to us on Earth as well. Space exploration is, in general, about much more than what we see in space. Much of space exploration and the science involved in it is very much related to our lives here on Earth.For example, the Curiosity mission will explore the surface of Mars for water. On Earth, we already have serious water problems. The Middle East is mostly desert. The technologies that the rover will use to hunt for water on Mars can easily be adapted to hunt for water right here on our home planet.
Hear more of Mohammed‘s thoughts in his post.
Higgs discovery papers unveiled
This week, on the popular preprint server arXiv.org, ATLAS and CMS, the two main physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, posted their scientific papers describing a new Higgs-like particle (ref: ATLAS, CMS) explains Geoffrey Brumfiel in the News Blog:
The papers are lengthy and dense, 39 pages in the case of ATLAS and 59 pages for CMS. They describe, in painstaking detail, the decay of a new particle into a variety of known particles, including γ-rays and W and Z bosons. The upshot seems to be about the same as it was at the beginning of July: the signal is still there, and it’s even stronger than before. Both experiments now report significance well above five standard deviations, meaning that, assuming there was no particle, the chances of this being a statistical fluke stand at about one in half-a-billion.
{credit}ATLAS{/credit}
More is sure to come later in the year, so make sure you subscribe to the News Blog for updates.
Digital pills make their way to market
Amy Maxmen reports in the News Blog that digestible microchips embedded in drugs may soon tell doctors whether a patient is taking their medications as prescribed:
Digestible microchips embedded in drugs may soon tell doctors whether a patient is taking their medications as prescribed. These sensors are the first ingestible devices approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). To some, they signify the beginning of an era in digital medicine.“About half of all people don’t take medications like they’re supposed to,” says Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla,California. “This device could be a solution to that problem, so that doctors can know when to rev up a patient’s medication adherence.” Topol is not affiliated with the company that manufactures the device, Proteus Digital Health in Redwood City,California, but he embraces the sensor’s futuristic appeal, saying, “It’s like big brother watching you take your medicine.”
Find out what these sand-particle sized sensors consist of in Amy’s post.
Richard Van Noorden discloses in the News Blog that the first widespread outbreak of Ebola haemorrhagic fever since 2009 has killed 14 people in the Kibaale district of western Uganda:
Twenty cases have been reported since the beginning of July, but the presence of ebola virus was not officially confirmed until last week, by the Uganda Virus Research Institute (UVRI) in Entebbe.Today, after the virus spread to the capital, Kampala, Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni told people to avoid physical contact. There’s no treatment or vaccine against the virus, which is transmitted by direct contact with body fluids.According to the UVRI, this outbreak involves the Sudan subtype of the virus, which in a 2000–01 Ugandan outbreak killed 224 people — 53% of identified cases (a typically high fatality rate). The World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control don’t yet have confirmation of that diagnosis, however.
Read Richard’s report for more information.
The Olympics: A Gateway to Engineering
Engineering can overlap with science in approach and methodology, but the fields are not the same, and they generally take different, though complementary, routes to address societal needs.
While scientists do, and should, get wide recognition for discoveries and observations, engineers are often overshadowed by the technologies they create, or at times, are dubbed scientists in popular literature. That can lead to the public overlooking engineers’ unique approaches—such as those for problem solving, design and optimization—and missed opportunities to bring such approaches into national conversations.Working with engineering program officers at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and a team of leading engineers from academia and industry, we developed ten videos that show how engineers solve problems and enhance experiences for athletes competing in the London 2012 Olympic Games.
Links to Video: Science Of The Summer Olympics: The Strength And Flexibility Of Oscar Pistorius. Olympic runner Oscar Pistorius uses a pair of carbon-fiber prosthetic legs that are engineered to store and release energy from the impact of his strides. {credit}NSF/NBCLearn{/credit}
#BeginScights
On Thursday 26th July we saw the launch of SciLogs.com, a new WordPress-based English language blog network which is the new home for the Nature Network bloggers. To celebrate, we coordinated an NPG science blog network carnival focusing on the theme of “Beginnings.”
Joining in the festival were bloggers from SciLogs.com, Nature Education’s Scitable network and Scientific American’s blogging network, plus guest bloggers on the Soapbox Science blog.
So, what #BeginScights did we discover? Check out the summary of all the posts here and join in the conversation online.
Antibodies found in Peruvians suggest natural resistance to rabies in local vampire bats
Kathleen Raven reveals in the Spoonful of Medicine blog that epidemiologists at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have stumbled upon an intriguing finding: eight people living in two tiny Peruvian villages appear to have developed antibodies against the rabies virus found in local vampire bats without any prior vaccination or treatment for the infection:
This population study, the first of its kind, may provide clues to better understand how incremental exposure to rabies could lead to better vaccines or monoclonal antibody drugs.
“We think that these people were lightly bitten during the night, but were not exposed to enough of the virus to develop a full infection,” explains co-authorSergio Recuenoco, an epidemiologist at the CDC in Atlanta who published the findings today in theAmerican Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.The study suggests that humans are exposed to and develop antibodies against the virus without developing disease. Whether this reflects inadequate exposure or successful immune clearance of virus remains unclear, explains Ashley Banyard, a virologist at the UK Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency in Surrey, England, adding, “Personally, I believe this paper to be of great significance to the scientific community.”
Baby Turtledoves
Finally, something to smile about. Over the last few months Scitable’s Khalil A. Cassimally has been observing a turtledove pair nesting on a nearby tree at his home in Mauritius. He is now chronicling the first few weeks of their offspring, two baby turtledoves, on Instagram. Check out his feed, @notscientific, for more pictures.
