NASA’s Curiosity rover which is testing Mars rock, has found traces of clay – that points to a watery past.
At a briefing at NASA’s Washington headquarters, NASA scientists have revealed that the rock contains clay minerals that formed in a watery environment – an environment that may be favourable for microscopic organisms, the Daily Telegraph reported.
The number of potentially habitable planets is greater than previously thought and some of those planets are likely lurking around nearby stars, a new analysis by a Penn State researcher as concluded.
“We now estimate that if we were to look at 10 of the nearest small stars we would find about four potentially habitable planets, give or take,” said Ravi Kopparapu, a post-doctoral researcher in geosciences.
“That is a conservative estimate. There could be more,” he added.
Mars could have harboured life, according to the analysis of a rock sample collected by the robot probe Curiosity, NASA reported.
Scientists identified sulphur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon in the sample, all of which are essential chemical ingredients for life as we know it.
“A fundamental question for this mission is whether Mars could have supported a habitable environment,” Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, said Tuesday.
“From what we know now, the answer is yes,” he said.
Researchers from US are working on 3D bioprinters to create replacement parts for damaged and failing human organs and tissue.
A new interdisciplinary manufacturing venture called the Advanced Manufacturing Technology (AMTecH) group at the University of Iowa College of Engineering’s Center for Computer Aided Design (CCAD) was formed to design, create, and test-both virtually and physically-a wide variety of electromechanical and biomedical components, systems and processes.
Comet Pan-Starrs, which is making a rare visit to the inner solar system in the middle of this week, and will fly past the sun, could pose danger to the eyes of astronomers, experts have warned.
The comet also known as C/2011 L4 will not be seen on earth again until the year 112,000.
But experts have warned that amateur astronomers should not to try and see it too soon.
Even as thousands are undertaking a march from Mathura to Delhi to raise awareness to save the “dying” Yamuna river, people in this Taj city wonder in sadness if it was still possible to revive one of India’s holiest rivers that is now seen as a mere sewer.
“Can we not think of the Sabarmati river-front experiment in Ahmedabad? Not too long ago, the river was a drain. Today, it is a sight to behold,” Surendra Sharma, president of the Braj Mandal Heritage Conservation Society, asked.
Parents in China are in dire need of a sound age-rating system for online games in order to protect their children, says a new study.
China does not have a unified content rating system for the online games industry, which relies on individual games developers to class their own products into suitability-related groups, Xinhua said.
According to the report by the government-backed www.youth.cn, only 39 percent of 423 games were age-rated by the developers.
The earthquake zones off of certain coasts-like those of Japan and Java-make them especially vulnerable to tsunamis, a new study has revealed.
These sea floor earthquake zones can produce a focusing point that creates massive and devastating tsunamis that break the rules for how scientists used to think tsunamis work, according to the study.
Until now, it was largely believed that the maximum tsunami height onshore could not exceed the depth of the seafloor.
NASA’s Curiosity rover has been exploring the region for over seven months around its landing site, investigating the Martian surface with its impressive suite of scientific tools.
Over the course of 208 Sols (Martian days), the rover has traveled nearly 500 meters (almost a third of a mile) across the pebbly terrain of Gale Crater toward its ultimate goal: Aeolis Mons, the crater’s 18,000-foot-high central peak.
Google-owned Motorola Mobility has closed down its India website and is reducing headcount in the world’s second largest mobile phone market in terms of subscribers amid rising operational cost.
“We are streamlining our business and support systems, and unfortunately, we’ll no longer have a dedicated website for India. Your local support site will remain open well into the future, and we’ll continue to provide support for our existing products,” Motorola Mobility website said.
NASA’s Curiosity rover has been exploring the region for over seven months around its landing site, investigating the Martian surface with its impressive suite of scientific tools.
Over the course of 208 Sols (Martian days), the rover has traveled nearly 500 meters (almost a third of a mile) across the pebbly terrain of Gale Crater toward its ultimate goal: Aeolis Mons, the crater’s 18,000-foot-high central peak.
Two asteroids, one of them bigger in size than the celestial body that burst over Russia last month, will fly by the Earth Saturday, though not as close as to threaten collision.
The 2013 EC20 was discovered Thursday by the Catalina Sky Survey project, which estimated it size at between 3 and 12 metres.
At 5.57 am Moscow time Saturday, the asteroid will pass about 169,000 km from the Earth, according to the Massachusetts-based Minor Planet Centre.
Canada’s Arctic Archipelago glaciers will melt faster than ever in the next few centuries.
Research by European-funded scientists has shown that 20 percent of the Canadian Arctic glaciers may have disappeared by the end of this century, which would amount to an additional sea level rise of 3.5cm
The researchers developed a climate model for the island group of the north of Canada in which they simulated the shrinking and growing of glaciers in this area.
Astronomers has taken an important step closer to finding the birth certificate of a star that’s been around for a very long time, thanks to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
“We have found that this is the oldest known star with a well-determined age,” said Howard Bond of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pa., and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md.
Nearly half of Africa’s wild lion populations may decline to near extinction over the next 20-40 years without urgent conservation measures, a report has said.
The report, entitled ‘Conserving large carnivores: dollars and fence’, which has been published today in the scientific journal Ecology Letters, said that the plight of many lion populations is so bleak, the report concludes that fencing them in, and fencing humans out, may be their only hope for survival.
Astronomers have improved the measurement of the distance to our nearest neighboring galaxy and, in the process, refine an astronomical calculation that helps measure the expansion of the universe.
The Hubble constant is a fundamental quantity that measures the current rate at which our universe is expanding. It is named after 20th Century Carnegie astronomer Edwin P. Hubble, who astonished the world by discovering that our universe has been growing continuously since its inception.
Google has announced its Maps app update for Apple iPhone, making it easier to find places and look up saved friends’ addresses.
Google Maps app, which will now include new search icons, can now be downloaded from the Apple App Store.
Now, users will be presented with icons for restaurants, coffee shops, bars and gas stations, which they can tap to search quickly for nearby locations.
In total, there are 13 different types of places users can search by, including hotels, hospitals and ATMs, ABC News reports.
Scientists have proposed a new portable gadget that could help one detect strokes based on eye movement, says an American study.
A bedside electronic device that measures eye movements can successfully determine whether the cause of severe, continuous, disabling dizziness is a stroke or something benign, according to results of a small study led by Johns Hopkins researchers, reports Science Daily.
Now a new technology has been developed that would allow users to draw letters in the air with their hand to write messages and emails.
Computer scientists at Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have created an innovative “air-writing” glove system that replace the ‘thumb-typing’ texts or emails on keyboards or touch screen smartphones.
The glove, created by Christoph Amma and colleagues, is equipped with accelerometers and gyroscopes that detect hand movements, the Discovery News reports.
Sharks need to be better protected or many species could face possible extinction, as nearly 100 million of them are killed every year, according to a new study.
The rate of commercial fishing far exceeds what many populations need to recover, scientists have warned.
Sharks take years to sexually mature, produce small litters and are exceptionally vulnerable to overfishing.
They are being caught at an average rate that is 30 percent to 60 percent higher than they can sustain, the study said.
Neanderthals became extinct as they were unable to adapt their hunting skills to catch small animals like rabbits, a new study has claimed.
For the study, John Fa of Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust in Trinity, Jersey, and his colleagues counted skeletons of animals that were found in three excavation sites in Spain and southern France.
The team found that up until 30,000 years ago, the skeletons of larger animals like deer were plentiful in caves.
But around the same time, coinciding with Neanderthals’ disappearance, rabbit skeletons became more abundant.
China is expected to send its second woman astronaut into space this year on-board the Shenzhou-10, the country’s new manned spacecraft, which should be launched sometime between June and August.
Zhou Jianping, the head designer of China’s manned space programme, told Xinhua news agency that he expects a female astronaut to participate in the mission, together with two male astronauts.
The Shenzhou-10 is expected to dock with the orbiting lab module Tiangong-1, he said.
India successfully tested its indigenously-built multi-barrel rocket launcher ‘Pinaka’ from a defence base in Odisha for the second consecutive day Friday, an official said.
The multi-barrel rocket launching system was tested from the Proof and Experimental Establishment (PXE) in Chandipur-on-sea in Balasore district, around 230 km from state capital Bhubaneswar.
“During today’s test, two rounds of rockets were fired successfully,” a senior PXE official told IANS.
A new less-known social network, Pheed, has become the most downloaded free app in the App Store.
In fact, Pheed is the number one most downloaded free app under the social networking category, outranking both Facebook and Twitter.
It is a social network that works much the same way as Facebook or Instagram, News.com.au reports.
A user needs to sign up, either with an email address or a Facebook or Twitter login.
In this app, you follow people and people follow you back, and you can comment on people’s posts and they can comment on yours.
For the first time, researchers at the Large Hadron Collider have observed particles called D-mesons flipping from matter into antimatter and back.
Such “oscillations” are well known among three other particle types, but this is the first time D-mesons have been seen doing it in a single study, the BBC reported.
Mesons are part of a large family of particles made up of the fundamental particles known as quarks.
The protons and neutrons at the centres of the atoms of matter are each made up of three such quarks.