Billions of years ago, the Martian surface could have supported microbial life as we know it. But did such life ever actually exist there? NASA and its Mars 2020 mission hope to find out with the Perseverance rover, which launches to the Red Planet this summer. Scientists have sought answers to astrobiological questions on Earth, studying regions similar enough to Mars to understand what the Red Planet’s microscopic fossil record might look like....

This newly released video shows a short simulation of the space environment all the way out to Pluto in the months surrounding New Horizons’ July 2015 flyby. At the time, scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center worked with the New Horizons team to test how well their models—and other models contributed by scientists around the world—predicted the space environment at Pluto. Understanding the environment through which our spacecraft travel can ultimately help protect them from radiation and other potentially damaging effects....

In December 2017, President Donald Trump signed Space Policy Directive-1, in which the president directed NASA “to lead an innovative and sustainable program of exploration with commercial and international partners to enable human expansion across the solar system and to bring back to Earth new knowledge and opportunities.” In answer to that bold call, and consistent with the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017, NASA recently submitted to Congress a plan to revitalize and add direction to NASA’s enduring purpose....

Over the past few weeks, the operations team has been at work installing a major software update aboard the helicopter. This update provides Ingenuity with two major new capabilities: hazard avoidance when landing and the use of digital elevation maps to help navigate. Developed as a technology demonstration, Ingenuity was designed to operate on Mars in flat, smooth terrain like that at Wright Brothers Field. As Ingenuity moved on to exploring Jezero Crater alongside the Perseverance rover, we traveled through more challenging terrain than the team had ever anticipated....

More than halfway to the Red Planet, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover isn’t just shuttling sophisticated science instruments and tubes to be filled with Earth-bound rock samples. It’s carrying symbols, mottos, and objects that range from practical to playful — everything from meteorite fragments to chips carrying the names of 10.9 million people. The “extras” are part of a tradition that harks back to the early space age and is now called “festooning” in NASA lingo....

The robotic arm, which is designed for a lunar lander, leverages a highly capable smartphone processing technology used for the Mars Helicopter, Ingenuity, and can perform a variety of tasks in extremely cold temperatures without the need for a heater. This includes things like scooping and analyzing lunar soil, deploying instruments, and capturing photos of the lander’s surroundings. Current robotic arm designs for lunar landers require heaters to keep the gears inside the arm from stressing and breaking when exposed to extremely cold temperatures experienced during the lunar night....

The surface of the Moon is a harsh environment with no air, low gravity, dust, and micrometeorites—tiny rocks or metal particles—flying faster than 22,000 mph. These conditions can pose a hazard to astronauts, their dwellings, and spacecraft. Engineers at NASA Glenn Research Center’s Ballistic Impact Lab are working to help the agency select materials for future Artemis missions and predict how they will perform while on the lunar surface. The innovative lab, which features a 40-foot-long air gun capable of firing at velocities of 3,000 feet per second, has become a go-to destination for NASA as it examines situations ranging from the effects of bird collisions with aircraft to ballistic impacts on spacecraft....

On November 1, 2017 amateur astronomer Tadashi Kojima in Gunma Prefecture, Japan reported an enigmatic new object in the constellation Taurus. Astronomers around the world began follow-up observations and determined that this was an example of a rare event known as gravitational microlensing. Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity tells us that gravity warps space. If a foreground object with strong gravity passes directly in front of a background object in outer space this warped space can act as a lens and focus the light from the background object, making it appear to brighten temporarily....

“There is a very tight window of a few milliseconds when we come aware of stimuli and before the experience is passed on to be coded in our memory and analyzed,” said Dr. Hal Blumenfeld, the Mark Loughridge and Michele Williams Professor of Neurology and senior author of the research published in the journal Cerebral Cortex. At that precise moment, a wave of electrical activity flows from the visual cortex in the rear of the brain to the frontal lobes, the Yale team reports....

Wi-Fi is coming to our cars. Ford Motor Co. has been equipping cars with Wi-Fi transmitters since 2010; according to an Agence France-Presse story last year, the company expects that by 2015, 80 percent of the cars it sells in North America will have Wi-Fi built in. The same article cites a host of other manufacturers worldwide that either offer Wi-Fi in some high-end vehicles or belong to standards organizations that are trying to develop recommendations for automotive Wi-Fi....

Nor does it cut hospital stay and is associated with high side effect risk. Colchicine, a cheap anti-inflammatory drug normally used to treat gout, doesn’t lessen COVID-19 severity or stave off the risk of death from the infection in hospital patients, finds a pooled analysis of the available evidence, published in the open access journal RMD Open. What’s more, it’s associated with a high risk of side effects, particularly diarrhea, the analysis shows....

It is the first known time that enough physical evidence spanning millennia has come together to allow researchers to say definitively that: El Ninos, La Ninas, and the climate phenomenon that drives them have become more extreme in the times of human-induced climate change. “What we’re seeing in the last 50 years is outside any natural variability. It leaps off the baseline. Actually, we even see this for the entire period of the industrial age,” said Kim Cobb, the study’s principal investigator and professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences....

MIT engineers have now developed systems of mathematical equations that forecast the most informative data to collect for a given observing mission, and the best way to reach the sampling sites. With their method, the researchers can predict the degree to which one variable, such as the speed of ocean currents at a certain location, reveals information about some other variable, such as temperature at some other location — a quantity called “mutual information....

This is the most detailed view of Pluto’s terrain you’ll see for a very long time. This mosaic strip – extending across the hemisphere that faced the New Horizons spacecraft as it flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015 – now includes all of the highest-resolution images taken by the NASA probe. With a resolution of about 260 feet (80 meters) per pixel, the mosaic affords New Horizons scientists and the public the best opportunity to examine the fine details of the various types of terrain on Pluto, and determine the processes that formed and shaped them....

Method presents the immune system with several different coronaviruses at once. The SARS-CoV-2 virus that is causing the COVID-19 pandemic is just one of many different viruses in the coronavirus family. Many of these are circulating in populations of animals like bats and have the potential to “jump” into the human population, just as SARS-CoV-2 did. Researchers in the laboratory of Pamela Björkman, the David Baltimore Professor of Biology and Bioengineering, are working on developing vaccines for a wide range of related coronaviruses, with the aim of preventing future pandemics....

“What really impressed me was the trip down,” said astrophysicist James Buckley, PhD, speaking of the vertical mile he traveled to get to the site of an underground dark-matter experiment. “You can see you’re moving at a pretty good clip, which, by the way, is three times slower than the cage used to drop when it was a mine. It took us 10 minutes to get down a mile. You just watch the earth flashing by and every once in a while you go past a boarded-up tunnel....

At present, several vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 have been developed, and vaccination is being conducted worldwide. In the medical field, antibody tests using a technique called immunochromatography are performed to determine whether antibodies have been produced as a result of viral infection or vaccination. However, because the results of this test are determined by looking with the naked eye at colored stripes on paper, it is not precise and not very sensitive....

Kim-Vy Tran of ASTRO 3D and the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and colleagues have now evaluated 77 of the lenses using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the Very Large Telescope in Chile. Her international team verified that 68 of the 77 are strong gravitational lenses spanning immense cosmic distances. This 88% success rate shows that the algorithm is reliable and that we could have thousands of new gravitational lenses....

A new combination of cancer drugs delayed disease progression for patients with hormone-receptor-positive metastatic breast cancer, according to a multi-center phase II trial. The findings of the randomized study (S6-03) were presented at the 2014 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, held December 6-9, by Dr. Kerin Adelson, assistant professor of medical oncology at Yale Cancer Center and chief quality officer at Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven. The trial enrolled 118 post-menopausal women with metastatic hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer whose cancer continued to progress after being treated with an aromatase inhibitor....

“We feel very lucky to have spotted this object with a significant amount of high-quality data, which helps pinpoint the mass of the black hole and understand the nature of this spectacular event,” says Dacheng Lin, a research assistant professor at UNH’s Space Science Center and the study’s lead author. “Earlier research, including our own work, saw similar events, but they were either caught too late or were too far away....