ESA's hopes of landing on Mars shattered?
Europe’s dreams of landing on a planet appeared shattered tonight after the ExoMars Schiaparelli space probe lost contact with mission control during its descent to the surface of Mars.

In scenes reminiscent of the ill-fated Beagle 2 mission in 2003, the European Space Agency stopped receiving a signal from its probe shortly before landing.

Mission controllers in Darmstadt, Germany, were expecting the ‘all’s well’ signal at around 4pm yesterday afternoon, and even had cameras raised to capture the moment that the wavy line appeared on monitors to announce Schiaparelli’s safe arrival.

But as the minutes ticked over, it was clear that no signal was coming. Camera arms were lowered and hopeful expressions replaced with furrowed brows as the team started to hunt for signs of life from other spacecraft orbiting Mars.

However while the landing drama was unfolding, the ExoMars spacecraft which delivered the probe successfully managed to settle into orbit around Mars after making a 139 minute engine burn.

Starting next year, the orbiter will sniff the Martian atmosphere for traces of methane and help scientists decide whether it is being made be living creatures.

“Failure to make contact will have important implications for the rover mission – probably the most critical will be the political implications for securing funding for the Rover mission, which will be happening at the Ministerial in December.

“But the positive is that orbiter is safe, and gives us many years of ground-breaking science and discovery ahead.”

The loss of signal led to comparisons with the Beagle 2 mission, spearheaded by Prof Colin Pillinger of the Open University, which set off to look for signs of life on Mars in 2003, but disappeared on its way to the surface.

At 3.42pm, UK time on Wednesday it was due to begin a ‘six minutes of terror’ journey through the Martian atmosphere. During this time the probe was travelling on autopilot and mission controllers on Earth could only sit and wait.

Although it carries some instruments, Schiaparelli's main job is to test out the Russian-designed landing system for a future ExoMars rover which is currently being built by Airbus in Hertfordshire and is due to launch in 2020.

Schiaparelli was due to spend about four days gathering weather data before its batteries ran out.

Britain's David Parker, Director of Human Spaceflight at the ESA said he was confident that the second part of the mission, the rover, will still go ahead in 2020.

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Mars landing: ESA declare success despite Schiaparelli probe's silence

So that’s it for today. ESA will make their next official statements about the Trace Gas Orbiter and the Schiaparelli lander at 9am UK time tomorrow.

For the TGO, everything is peachy. The spacecraft is in the expected orbit and functioning normally. For Schiaparelli things don’t look so good.

The signal was received for a good part of its journey through the Martian atmosphere but was lost before the lander reached the surface. This is confirmed by both the radio telescope tracking from Earth and the Mars Express spacecraft, which was recording the descent from orbit.

Although it would be a disappointment for the landing to fail at the last moment, the most important thing was that it happens now and not in 2020 when ESA send their life-detecting rover to the surface.

So all in all, today was a success. A fantastic new science mission is now in orbit around Mars and the landing test returned invaluable data for the engineers to make the 2020 landing safer.

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What Happened to Europe's ExoMars Lander? - What We Know | Video
Transmissions from the Entry, descent and landing Demonstrator Module (EDM) "Schiaparelli" ceased during its descent through Mars' atmosphere on Oct. 19, 2016. A few hours later, data analyzed but ExoMars team from ESA's Mars Express orbiter confirmed the loss of signal at the same point. Data analysis will continue through the night.
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Europe Lost Contact with Mars Lander 1 Minute Before Touchdown

After a suspenseful night waiting for a signal from the ExoMars Schiaparelli lander, the European Space Agency (ESA) confirmed today that the spacecraft went silent less than a minute before it was set to reach the Martian surface Wednesday (Oct. 19).

ESA mission managers said this morning (Oct. 20) that they need more time to understand what went wrong with Schiaparelli, and to figure out exactly where and in what condition the test lander ended up. But the ExoMars team was optimistic that the capsule had collected enough data during its descent to set the stage for the next phase of the mission: the planned 2020 launch of a life-hunting ExoMars rover.


"The test has yielded a huge amount of data," David Parker, ESA's director of human spaceflight and robotic exploration, said at a news conference early this morning. "It gives us a lot of confidence for the future. We need to understand what happened in the last few seconds before the planned landing, and that is likely to take some time."
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European Schiaparelli Mars probe's parachute 'jettisoned too early'

Europe's Schiaparelli lander did not behave as expected as it headed down to the surface of Mars on Wednesday.
Telemetry recovered from the probe during its descent indicates that its parachute was jettisoned too early.
The rockets it was supposed to use to bring itself to a standstill just above the ground also appeared to fire for too short a time.
The European Space Agency has not yet conceded that the lander crashed but the mood is not positive.

Landing on Mars is always a daunting prospect.
It is necessarily a high-speed approach that has to be got just right or the spacecraft runs the risk of smashing into the ground.
Schiaparelli had a heatshield, a parachute and rocket thrusters in order to slow its approach to the surface.
If the robot is later confirmed as lost, it will clearly be a major blow to Esa which suffered the disappointment of the Beagle-2 lander's failure at Mars in 2003.
But officials here have underlined the fact that Schiaparelli was always viewed within the agency as a technology demonstrator - a project to give Europe the learning experience and the confidence to go ahead and land a more ambitious six-wheeled rover on Mars in 2021.

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Strange purple sea creatures found in deep ocean trenches

A stubby "googly-eyed" purple animal looking like a cross between an octopus and a squid

Scores of spectacular and rare under sea species have been found by expeditions this year to some of the deepest trenches in the Pacific Ocean.
They include strange purple orbs, "mud monsters" and a bizarre swimming sea cucumber reminiscent of a flying Mary Poppins.
Another voyage found around 500 new undersea methane vents off the US west coast.
This doubles the number of known seeps, bubbling up a powerful greenhouse gas.
The gas vents were found by an expedition mounted by Dr Robert Ballard, the man who first located the wreck of the Titanic.

A strange floating sea cucumber, said to be reminiscent of Mary Poppins

"At first people thought they were incredibly rare and now, thanks to these expeditions, these seeps may be very widespread, so the (methane) budgets may have to be recalculated, that's why the exploration is important."
One of this year's key expeditions mounted by the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), was a 59 day exploration of the Marianas Trench, the world's deepest underwater canyons.
As well as discovering three new "black smoker" hydrothermal vents stretching up to 30 metres in height, the voyage also revealed some rarely seen, mysterious creatures.

Rare and mysterious creatures have been discovered on this year's deep voyages include this purple orb

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A newly found planet, currently named: "Planet 9" may join our solar system family. The planet is 10 times the size of earth.
and gravitational effects of it are predicted to change the axial tilt in all of the constiuents of solar system.

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Either stars are strange, or there are 234 aliens trying to contact us

We all want there to be aliens. Green ones, pink ones, brown ones, Greys. Or maybe Vulcans, Klingons, even a being of pure energy. Any type will do.

That's why whenever a mysterious signal or energetic fluctuation arrives from somewhere in the cosmos and hits one of our many telescopes, headlines erupt across the media: "Have We Finally Detected An Alien Signal?" or "Have Astronomers Discovered An Alien Megastructure?" But science-minded people know that we're probably getting ahead of ourselves.

Skepticism still rules the day when it comes to these headlines, and the events that spawn them. That's the way it should be, because we've always found a more prosaic reason for whatever signal from space we're talking about. But, being skeptical is a balancing act; it doesn't mean being dismissive.

What we're talking about here is a new study from E.F. Borra and E. Trottier, two astronomers at Laval University in Canada. Their study, titled "Discovery of peculiar periodic spectral modulations in a small fraction of solar type stars" was just published at arXiv.

The two astronomers used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and analyzed the spectra of 2.5 million stars. Of all those stars, they found 234 stars that are producing a puzzling signal. That's only a tiny percentage. And, they say, these signals "have exactly the shape of an ETI signal" that was predicted in a previous study by Borra.

The 234 stars in Borra and Trottier's study aren't random. They're "overwhelmingly in the F2 to K1 spectral range" according to the abstract. That's significant because this is a small range centred around the spectrum of our own Sun. And our own Sun is the only one we know of that has an intelligent species living near it. If ours does, maybe others do too?

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DNA data offer evidence of unknown extinct human relative

Traces of long-lost human cousins may be hiding in modern people’s DNA, a new computer analysis suggests.

People from Melanesia, a region in the South Pacific encompassing Papua New Guinea and surrounding islands, may carry genetic evidence of a previously unknown extinct hominid species, Ryan Bohlender reported October 20 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics. That species is probably not Neandertal or Denisovan, but a different, related hominid group, said Bohlender, a statistical geneticist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. “We’re missing a population or we’re misunderstanding something about the relationships,” he said.

This mysterious relative was probably from a third branch of the hominid family tree that produced Neandertals and Denisovans, an extinct distant cousin of Neandertals. While many Neandertal fossils have been found in Europe and Asia, Denisovans are known only from DNA from a finger bone and a couple of teeth found in a Siberian cave.

Bohlender isn’t the first to suggest that remnants of archaic human relatives may have been preserved in human DNA even though no fossil remains have been found. In 2012, another group of researchers suggested that some people in Africa carry DNA heirlooms from an extinct hominid species.

Less than a decade ago, scientists discovered that human ancestors mixed with Neandertals. People outside of Africa still carry a small amount of Neandertal DNA, some of which may cause health problems. Bohlender and colleagues calculate that Europeans and Chinese people carry a similar amount of Neandertal ancestry: about 2.8 percent. Europeans have no hint of Denisovan ancestry, and people in China have a tiny amount — 0.1 percent, according to Bohlender’s calculations. But 2.74 percent of the DNA in people in Papua New Guinea comes from Neandertals, and another 3 to 6 percent stems from Denisovans, Bohlender calculated.

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It gives me immense pleasure to announce that a person with a background in Physics and Electrical engineering is gonna be the next Secretary-General of the United Nations.

António Guterres, will be succeeding Ban-Ki Moon. And his service period will start begin from 1st January 2017.

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Virus triggers immune proteins to aid enemy

Crucial immune system proteins that make it harder for viruses to replicate might also help the attackers avoid detection, three new studies suggest. When faced with certain viruses, the proteins can set off a cascade of cell-to-cell messages that destroy antibody-producing immune cells. With those virus-fighting cells depleted, it’s easier for the invader to persist inside the host’s body.

The finding begins to explain a longstanding conundrum: how certain chronic viral infections can dodge the immune system’s antibody response, says David Brooks, an immunologist at the University of Toronto not involved in the research. The new studies, all published October 21 in Science Immunology, pin the blame on the same set of proteins: type 1 interferons.

Normally, type 1 interferons protect the body from viral siege. They snap into action when a virus infects cells, helping to activate other parts of the immune system. And they make cells less hospitable to viruses so that the foreign invaders can’t replicate as easily.

But in three separate studies, scientists tracked mice’s immune response when infected with lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus, or LCMV. In each case, type 1 interferon proteins masterminded the loss of B cells, which produce antibodies specific to the virus that is being fought. Normally, those antibodies latch on to the target virus, flagging it for destruction by other immune cells called T cells. With fewer B cells, the virus can evade capture for longer.

The proteins’ response “is driving the immune system to do something bad to itself,” says Dorian McGavern, an immunologist at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Md., who led one of the studies.

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MICE SQUEAK BY EXPELLING AIR AT SUPERSONIC SPEED

The animal kingdom's mating rituals are almost as weird as humanity's: Frogs are out there inventing new sex positions, ocean crabs are embracing polygamy, and female bonobos are faking it to play the field.
The modest mouse, however, might be the most metal of them all. They're singing to soulmates using a mechanism similar to a supersonic jet engine, according to new research published in Current Biology.

This sound isn't new to scientists. They have known that mice and rats use their ultrasonic squeaks to call mates and defend their turf. The way they do it, however, has been up for debate: Is it more like blowing through a tiny flute, or strumming a super-taught guitar string? In fact, it's neither. "I found the standing hypothesis without proper evidence or poorly tested, and set out to do so with a team of experts," Coen Elemans, senior author on the study from the University of Southern Denmark told Popular Science

The team used high-speed imaging of the vocal folds from 15 excised mouse larynges to find that the mice enact a "glottal jet" of air aimed at the inner wall of the larynx. The vocal cords remain motionless. "Interestingly this mechanism is known only to produce sound in supersonic flow applications, such as vertical takeoff and landing with jet engines, or high-speed subsonic flows, such as jets for rapid cooling of electrical components and turbines," Anurag Agarwal, co-author and head of the Aero-acoustics laboratories at the University of Cambridge, UK noted in a release.

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Recent Supernova analysis shows feeble evidence for the existence of Dark Energy

As New statistical analysis casts doubt on accelerating expansion of the universe.

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First peek under clouds reveals Jupiter’s surprising depths

Jupiter’s clouds have deep roots. The multicolored bands that wrap around the planet reach hundreds of kilometers down into the atmosphere, NASA’s Juno spacecraft reveals, providing an unprecedented peek into the giant planet’s interior.

“Whatever’s making those colors and stripes still exists pretty far down,” planetary scientist Scott Bolton, head of the Juno mission, said October 19 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences. “That came as a surprise to many scientists.” Until now, researchers weren’t sure if Jupiter’s stripes were just blemishes atop the clouds or extended farther inward. The bands reach at least 350 to 400 kilometers beneath the cloud deck, Bolton reported in a news conference.

Juno arrived at Jupiter on July 4 and made its first up-close investigation of the planet on August 27. Coming within 5,000 kilometers of the cloud tops, Juno recorded the intensity of radio waves emanating from the planet. Different frequencies come from different depths; low frequencies originate from deep in the atmosphere while high frequencies originate higher up.

“Deep down, Jupiter is similar but also very different than what we see on the surface,” said Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Some bands broaden while others vanish. “We can’t tell what all of it means yet, but it’s telling us hints about the deep dynamics and chemistry of Jupiter’s atmosphere.”

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Elon Musk Talks SpaceX Mars Colony Ships and More in Reddit AMA
SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk provided some additional details Oct. 23 about a Mars transportation system he unveiled last month, including plans to test in the near future one of its key technologies.

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No, the Universe is not expanding at an accelerated rate, say physicists

Back in 2011, three astronomers were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery that the Universe wasn’t just expanding - it was expanding at an accelerating rate.

The discovery led to the widespread acceptance of the idea that our Universe is dominated by a mysterious force called dark energy, and altered the standard model of cosmology forever. But now physicists say this discovery might have been false, and they have a much larger dataset to back them up.

When Perlmutter, Riess, and Schmidt measured all the data for known Type 1a supernovae, recorded by the Hubble space telescope and a number of large ground-based telescopes, they found something incredibly strange.

As the Royal Swedish Academy explained on the morning of the Nobel Prize announcement in Stockholm:
"In a Universe which is dominated by matter, one would expect gravity eventually should make the expansion slow down. Imagine then the utter astonishment when two groups of scientists ... discovered that the expansion was not slowing down, it was actually accelerating.

By comparing the brightness of distant, far-away supernovae with the brightness of nearby supernovae, the scientists discovered that the far-away supernovae were about 25 percent too faint. They were too far away. The Universe was accelerating. And so this discovery is fundamental and a milestone for cosmology. And a challenge for generations of scientists to come."

The find was backed up by data collected separately on things like clustering galaxies and the cosmic microwave background - the faint afterglow of the Big Bang.

And earlier this year, NASA and ESA scientists found that the Universe could be expanding around 8 percent faster than originally thought.

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MRSA uses decoys to evade a last-resort antibiotic

The superbug MRSA uses decoys to evade a last-resort antibiotic, reveals new research. The findings suggest potential new ways of tackling the bacteria, such as interfering with the decoys.

The findings, from scientists at Imperial College London, suggest potential new ways of tackling the bacteria, such as interfering with the decoys.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is responsible for thousands of deaths around the world each year. However, because the bacteria are resistant to many different antibiotics, treatment options are limited, and often ineffective.

One of the few antibiotics that can be used against MRSA is a drug of last resort known as daptomycin. However nearly a third of MRSA infections are not cured by this drug, leaving patients with a poor prognosis.

But until now scientists didn't know how MRSA managed to survive daptomycin treatment.

In the latest findings, published in the journal Nature Microbiology, a team from Imperial discovered that MRSA releases decoy molecules that allow them to escape being killed by the antibiotic.

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Vaginal vs Clitoral orgasm: What's the difference?
It's still science 😉

Trip to Mars Could Throw Off Astronauts' Balance

After months in space, your crew has finally made it to Mars, but there's a nasty readjustment awaiting all of them.

Living in zero gravity during the Earth-Mars transit will have some pretty harsh side effects, but most urgently they'll have to readjust to gravity again. And those first few days on Mars will be busy as the first Mars explorers get their bearings, prepare their habitat for the stay and begin thinking about setting up experiments.

You can therefore see why NASA is so intent on figuring out how to help astronauts stay healthy and happy after long stays in space so they can adjust quickly for life on Mars. We already know that a six-month stay on the International Space Station wreaks havoc with bone and muscles, but at least when the space station crew return to Earth they have a team of medical professionals to look after them. The first Mars astronauts will have no such luxury.

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'Alien Megastructure' Star Targeted by $100 Million SETI Search

If intelligent aliens actually do live around Tabby's star, astronomers are determined to find them.

The Breakthrough Listen initiative, which will spend $100 million over the next 10 years to hunt for signals possibly produced by alien civilizations, is set to begin studying Tabby's star with the 330-foot-wide (100 meters) Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, project team members announced Tuesday (Oct. 25).

"The Green Bank Telescope is the largest fully steerable radio telescope on the planet, and it's the largest, most sensitive telescope that's capable of looking at Tabby's star given its position in the sky," Breakthrough Listen co-director Andrew Siemion, who also directs the Berkeley SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement.

"We've deployed a fantastic new SETI instrument that connects to that telescope, that can look at many gigahertz of bandwidth simultaneously and many, many billions of different radio channels all at the same time so we can explore the radio spectrum very, very quickly," Siemion added.

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