"(Phys.org July 17) - NASA's most advanced planetary rover is on a precise course for an early August landing beside a Martian mountain to begin two years of unprecedented scientific detective work. However, getting the Curiosity rover to the surface of Mars will not be easy.

"The Curiosity landing is the hardest NASA mission ever attempted in the history of robotic planetary exploration," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "While the challenge is great, the team's skill and determination give me high confidence in a successful landing."

The Mars Science Laboratory mission is a precursor for future human missions to Mars. President Obama has set a challenge to reach the Red Planet in the 2030s.

To achieve the precision needed for landing safely inside Gale Crater, the spacecraft will fly like a wing in the upper atmosphere instead of dropping like a rock. To land the 1-ton rover, an airbag method used on previous Mars rovers will not work. Mission engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., designed a "sky crane" method for the final several seconds of the flight. A backpack with retro-rockets controlling descent speed will lower the rover on three nylon cords just before touchdown..."

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"(phys.org July 18, 2012) An international team of researchers, led by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the University of York, has provided the first molecular evidence that Neanderthals not only ate a range of cooked plant foods, but also understood its nutritional and medicinal qualities.

Until recently Neanderthals, who disappeared between 30,000 and 24,000 years ago, were thought to be predominantly meat-eaters. However, evidence of dietary breadth is growing as more sophisticated analyses are undertaken.

Researchers from Spain, the UK and Australia combined pyrolysis gas-chromatography-mass spectrometry with morphological analysis of plant microfossils to identify material trapped in dental calculus (calcified dental plaque) from five Neanderthals from the north Spanish site of El Sidrón.

Their results, published in Naturwissenschaften – The Science of Nature this week, provide another twist to the story - the first molecular evidence for medicinal plants being used by a Neanderthal individual.

The researchers say the starch granules and carbohydrate markers in the samples, plus evidence for plant compounds such as azulenes and coumarins, as well as possible evidence for nuts, grasses and even green vegetables, argue for a broader use of ingested plants than is often suggested by stable isotope analysis..."

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"(Phys.org July 16, 2012) Researchers led by Professor Caroline Dean have uncovered the genetic basis for variations in the vernalization response shown by plants growing in very different climates, linking epigenetic mechanisms with evolutionary change.

Vernalization is a period of prolonged cold that some plants require before they will flower. This ensures that they only produce flowers after the damaging cold of winter has passed. The plant must have a way of ‘remembering’ how much cold weather it has endured and in 2011 the researchers uncovered the mechanism plants use. When sufficient time in the cold has passed, an epigenetic switch silences a flowering-repressor gene called FLC. These epigenetic changes are then passed on to daughter cells during the rest of the plants developmental cycle.

Different plants have different vernalization requirements, as the length of winter cold they experience varies with geography and climate. In new research published in the journal Science, Professor Dean’s team have worked out how different plants set the level at which this epigenetic switch is triggered. They looked at a variety of Arabidopsis thaliana derived from North Sweden (Lov-1), and compared it to the reference ‘Columbia’ variety. Columbia needs 4 weeks of cold to trigger the epigenetic switch. The Lov-1 variety needs 9 weeks of cold to achieve the same, a natural variation to cope with the longer winters at northern latitudes..."

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"(ScienceDaily July 16, 2012) - New research shows that exercise is a key step in building a muscle-like implant in the lab with the potential to repair muscle damage from injury or disease. In mice, these implants successfully prompt the regeneration and repair of damaged or lost muscle tissue, resulting in significant functional improvement.

"While the body has a capacity to repair small defects in skeletal muscle, the only option for larger defects is to surgically move muscle from one part of the body to another. This is like robbing Peter to pay Paul," said George Christ, Ph.D., a professor at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center's Institute for Regenerative Medicine. "Rather than moving existing muscle, our aim is to help the body grow new muscle."

In the current issue of Tissue Engineering Part A, Christ and team build on their prior work and report their second round of experiments showing that placing cells derived from muscle tissue on a strip of biocompatible material -- and then "exercising" the strip in the lab -- results in a muscle-like implant that can prompt muscle regeneration and significant functional recovery. The researchers hope the treatment can one day help patients with muscle defects ranging from cleft lip and palate to those caused by traumatic injuries or surgery.

For the study, small samples of muscle tissue from rats and mice were processed to extract cells, which were then multiplied in the lab. The cells, at a rate of 1 million per square centimeter, were placed onto strips of a natural biological material. The material, derived from pig bladder with all cells removed, is known to be compatible with the body..."

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"(ScienceDaily July 12, 2012) - Archaeological work in Oregon's Paisley Caves has found evidence that Western Stemmed projectile points -- darts or thrusting spearheads -- were present at least 13,200 calendar years ago during or before the Clovis culture in western North America.

In a paper in the July 13 issue of Science, researchers from 13 institutions lay out their findings, which also include substantial new documentation, including "blind-test analysis" by independent labs, that confirms the human DNA pulled earlier from human coprolites (dried feces) and reported in Science (May 9, 2008) dates to the same time period.

The new conclusions are based on 190 radiocarbon dates of artifacts, coprolites, bones and sagebrush twigs meticulously removed from well-stratified layers of silt in the ancient caves. Absent from the Paisley Caves, said the project's lead researcher Dennis L. Jenkins of the University of Oregon's Museum of Natural and Cultural History, is diagnostic evidence of the Clovis culture such as the broad, concave-based, fluted Clovis projectile points.

The radiocarbon dating of the Western Stemmed projectiles to potentially pre-Clovis times, Jenkins said, provides new information in the decades-old debate that the two point-production technologies overlapped in time and may have developed separately. It suggests that Clovis may have arisen in the Southeastern United States and moved west, while the Western Stemmed tradition began, perhaps earlier, in the West and moved east..."

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"(phys.org July 12, 2012) Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed highly conductive and elastic conductors made from silver nanoscale wires (nanowires). These elastic conductors could be used to develop stretchable electronic devices.

Stretchable circuitry would be able to do many things that its rigid counterpart cannot. For example, an electronic "skin" could help robots pick up delicate objects without breaking them, and stretchable displays and antennas could make cell phones and other electronic devices stretch and compress without affecting their performance. However, the first step toward making such applications possible is to produce conductors that are elastic and able to effectively and reliably transmit electric signals regardless of whether they are deformed.

Dr. Yong Zhu, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State, and Feng Xu, a Ph.D. student in Zhu's lab have developed such elastic conductors using silver nanowires.

Silver has very high electric conductivity, meaning that it can transfer electricity efficiently. And the new technique developed at NC State embeds highly conductive silver nanowires in a polymer that can withstand significant stretching without adversely affecting the material's conductivity. This makes it attractive as a component for use in stretchable electronic devices..."

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"(ScienceDaily July 12, 2012) - Scientists from the Wits Institute for Human Evolution based at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg have just announced the discovery of a large rock containing significant parts of a skeleton of an early human ancestor. The skeleton is believed to be the remains of 'Karabo', the type skeleton of Australopithecus sediba, discovered at the Malapa Site in the Cradle of Humankind in 2009.

Professor Lee Berger, a Reader in Palaeoanthropology and the Public Understanding of Science at the Wits Institute for Human Evolution, will make the announcement at the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum in Shanghai, China on 13 July 2012.

"We have discovered parts of a jaw and critical aspects of the body including what appear to be a complete femur (thigh bone), ribs, vertebrae and other important limb elements, some never before seen in such completeness in the human fossil record," says Berger. "This discovery will almost certainly make Karabo the most complete early human ancestor skeleton ever discovered. We are obviously quite excited as it appears that we now have some of the most critical and complete remains of the skeleton, albeit encased in solid rock. It's a big day for us as a team and for our field as a whole...""

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"(sciencenews.org July 12th, 2012) Using tiny key cards glued to ants’ backs, researchers have figured out how colonies manage their food stores: A body weight–based strategy determines who’s doing the hunting and when.

To test the relevance of body weight and experience in foraging, researchers saddled ants (Temnothorax albipennis) with electronic tags smaller than a pinhead and installed a mini automatic door in the colony’s nest to control who could leave.

“It’s like if you didn’t want your teenage son to drive the car, you could disable his garage-door opener so he couldn’t get out,” says biologist Elva Robinson of the University of York in England.

Blocking lean ants from leaving forced stay-at-home tubby ants to gain experience foraging. But the insects switched back to their normal jobs when researchers reopened the doors, Robinson and colleagues report online July 12 in the Journal of Experimental Biology..."

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"(Nat. Geo. July 11, 2012) A battle-scarred, eighth-century town unearthed in northern Germany may be the earliest Viking settlement in the historical record, archaeologists announced recently.

Ongoing excavations at Füsing (map), near the Danish border, link the site to the "lost" Viking town of Sliasthorp—first recorded in A.D. 804 by royal scribes of the powerful Frankish ruler Charlemagne.

Used as a military base by the earliest Scandinavian kings, Sliasthorp's location was unknown until now, said dig leader Andres Dobat, of Aarhus University in Denmark.

Whether it proves to be the historic town or not, the site offers valuable insights into military organization and town planning in the early Viking era, according to the study team.

Some 30 buildings have been uncovered since excavations began in 2010. Aerial photographs and geomagnetic surveys indicate about 200 buildings in total..."

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"(Nat. Geo. July 12, 2012) Only a year after Hubble Space Telescope scientists discovered Pluto's still unnamed fourth moon, they've found a fifth.

Finding the new moon this summer was a "fringe benefit" of a monthlong program to scan Pluto for rocky rings that could endanger NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, said planetary astronomer Mark Showalter, who's leading the Hubble scanning project. The probe is to fly by the dwarf planet in July 2015.

Even in the Hubble's best images, the new moon—some 3.7 billion miles (5.9 billion) miles from the sun—is visible only as a speck of light.

Based on its brightness, the temporarily named P5 is probably 6 to 15 miles (10 to 25 kilometers) in diameter—about two-thirds the size of P4, the Plutonian moon discovered in 2011.

The new moon adds one more level to the complexity of the Pluto system, which was already surprisingly complex for a world that's only two-thirds the width of Earth's moon, the team says.

Pluto's "Russian Doll" Moons

At about 29,000 miles (47,000 kilometers) from Pluto, the new moon orbits in a 1:3 resonance with the dwarf planet's largest moon, Charon—meaning the newfound natural satellite takes about three times longer than Charon to circle Pluto.

Intriguingly, all of the other moons also lie in orbital resonances with Charon. Nix, discovered in 2005, lies in the 1:4 resonance. P4 lies in the 1:5 resonance. And Hydra, also discovered in 2005, is in the 1:6 resonance..."

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"(nytimes.com, July 7, 2012) Bilateral animals, or bilaterians - so called because unlike, say, jellyfish, they have left, right, back and front sides - are probably the first animals that could move on their own. Until now, the oldest fossil evidence for bilaterians dated back 555 million years.

However, scientists have found fossil burrows of a segmented slug that are about 30 million years older.

The burrows, found in northeastern Uruguay, have fine details that offer hints about the appearance and behavior of the animals that made them. The slugs were less than four-tenths of an inch long, and apparently moved in search of food, grazing on various kinds of organic material found on the sea bottom in shallow water. They had primitive "feet" that they could extend into the mud to help them slide along.

The researchers dated the fossils by measuring uranium decay over time, which allows them to estimate their age quite accurately, geologically speaking: within six million years..."

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(ALON HARISH, Good Morning America, July 5, 2012) To save money on the installation of central air-conditioning in his St. Joseph, Mo., home, Bryan Fite began replacing the wires in his attic, prying up the floor boards on the rafters. Along with possible savings, he found a treasure beneath the floorboards: 13 bottles of century-old whiskey.

Fite, 40, grew up in St. Joseph, and after working in Kansas City for several years, he returned to settle in his hometown in September 2011. The house he and his wife Emily Fite chose was built in the 1850s and needed work, Fite said.

The cost of installing central A/C and heat was prohibitive, he said, so he got to work in his attic. What first appeared to Fite as a set of strangely shaped insulated pipes turned out to be the secret whiskey stash of one of the house's former owners — or so goes Fite's main theory of how the liquor ended up there..."

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"(Phys.org, July 4, 2012) A study published in the July 5 edition of the journal Nature is challenging scientists' understanding of planet formation, suggesting that planets might form much faster than previously thought or, alternatively, that stars harboring planets could be far more numerous.

The study—a collaboration between scientists at the University of Georgia; the University of California, San Diego; the University of California, Los Angeles; California State Polytechnic University and the Australian National University—began with a curious and unexpected finding: Within three years, the cloud of dust circling a young star in the Scorpius-Centaurus stellar nursery simply disappeared.

"The most commonly accepted time scale for the removal of this much dust is in the hundreds of thousands of years, sometimes millions," said study co-author Inseok Song, assistant professor of physics and astronomy in the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. "What we saw was far more rapid and has never been observed or even predicted. It tells us that we have a lot more to learn about planet formation."

Lead author Carl Melis, a postdoctoral fellow at UC San Diego, said, "It's like the classic magician's trick: Now you see it, now you don't. Only in this case we're talking about enough dust to fill an inner solar system, and it really is gone."

The scientists first identified their star of interest by examining data from the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, or IRAS, which surveyed more than 96 percent of the sky in 1983. The star, known as TYC 8241 2652 1, was surrounded by a cloud of dust that was identifiable by its distinctive radiation of infrared energy. Like a skillet absorbing heat and then radiating it, the dust cloud was absorbing energy from the central star and radiating it in the infrared range. This warm dust is thought to be the raw material from which planets form, but scientists don't have a clear understanding of how long the process takes..."

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"(medicalxpress.com, July 2, 2012) Women infected with the Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii) parasite, which is spread through contact with cat feces or eating undercooked meat or unwashed vegetables, are at increased risk of attempting suicide, according to a new study of more than 45,000 women in Denmark. A University of Maryland School of Medicine psychiatrist with expertise in suicide neuroimmunology is the senior author of the study, which is being published online today in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

"We can't say with certainty that T. gondii caused the women to try to kill themselves, but we did find a predictive association between the infection and suicide attempts later in life that warrants additional studies. We plan to continue our research into this possible connection," says Teodor T. Postolache, M.D., the senior author and an associate professor of psychiatry and director of the Mood and Anxiety Program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He also serves as research faculty at the University of Maryland Child and Adolescent Mental Health Innovations Center and is a senior consultant on suicide prevention for the Baltimore VA Medical Center.

About one-third of the world's population is infected with the parasite, which hides in cells in the brain and muscles, often without producing symptoms. The infection, which is called toxoplasmosis, has been linked to mental illness, such as schizophrenia, and changes in behavior..."

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"(Phys.org July 6, 2012) The ability to distinguish and isolate rare cells from among a large population of assorted cells has become increasingly important for the early detection of disease and for monitoring disease treatments.

Circulating cancer tumor cells are a perfect example. Typically, there are only a handful of them among a billion healthy cells, yet they are precursors to metastasis, the spread of cancer that causes about 90 percent of cancer mortalities. Such "rogue" cells are not limited to cancer — they also include stem cells used for regenerative medicine and other cell types.

Unfortunately, detecting such cells is difficult. Achieving good statistical accuracy requires an automated, high-throughput instrument that can examine millions of cells in a reasonably short time. Microscopes equipped with digital cameras are currently the gold standard for analyzing cells, but they are too slow to be useful for this application.

Now, a new optical microscope developed by UCLA engineers could make the tough task a whole lot easier..."

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