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Month: September 2012 (page 2 of 14)

09.28.2012

curiosity finds signs of ancient stream

on MARS!

Martian rocks resemble rocks in a streambed from Earth.

Curiosity has taken pictures that suggest that there was once a fast moving stream of water on the planet Mars. Photos of rocks on the planet’s surface are surprisingly similar to rock formations formed in ancient streambeds here on Earth. From Associated Press:

The NASA rover Curiosity has beamed back pictures of bedrock that suggest a fast-moving stream, possibly waist-deep, once flowed on Mars — a find that the mission’s chief scientist called exciting.

There have been previous signs that water existed on the red planet long ago, but the images released Thursday showing pebbles rounded off, likely by water, offered the most convincing evidence so far of an ancient streambed.

There was “a vigorous flow on the surface of Mars,” said chief scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology. “We’re really excited about this.”

The discovery did not come as a complete surprise. NASA decided to plunk Curiosity down inside Gale Crater near the Martian equator because photos from space hinted that the spot possessed a watery past. The six-wheeled rover safely landed Aug. 5 after a nail-biting plunge through the Martian atmosphere. It’s on a two-year, $2.5 billion mission to study whether the Martian environment could have been favorable for microbial life.

Martian rock formations near Curiosity’s landing site are thought to have been molded by an ancient fast moving stream of water.

09.27.2012

resitant gonorrhea

The New Yorker magazine reports this month on the appearance of drug resistant gonorrhea. The trend is worrisome to the medical community. Even though the body can usually get rid of the infection without antibiotics, most times it can’t do so before it wreaks havoc and leaves damage. The abstract is below. Click here for the article (requires subscription).

ABSTRACT: MEDICAL DISPATCHES about the rise of drug-resistant gonorrhea. In January, 2009, a prostitute visited a clinic in Kyoto, Japan, for a routine checkup. Her lab test came back positive for gonorrhea. She was given several doses of ceftriaxone, the definitive treatment for gonorrhea, over a period of time, but her condition persisted. Now, public-health experts view the Kyoto case as something far more alarming: the emergence of a strain of gonorrhea that is resistant to the last drug available against it, and the harbinger of a sexually transmitted global epidemic. Gonorrhea is the second most commonly reported infectious disease in the U.S. Only one class of drugs, called cephalosporins—cefixime and ceftriaxone—is known to reliably treat it, and for several years resistance to cefixime has been rising. Some public-health officials predict that in five to eight years the superbug will be widespread. In the U.S., gonorrhea in general is linked to poverty and youth. Scientists have made little progress in developing a vaccine that would protect against a gonococcus infection. The primary hope for stemming the expected epidemic of resistant gonorrhea lies in persuading people to alter their behavior. Mentions Boston Medical Center and the walk-in clinic at Fenway Health, in Boston.

09.27.2012

how many grains of sand? how many stars?

 

stars

Robert  Krulwich reports over at NPR:

Science writer David Blatner, in his new book Spectrums, says a group of researchers at the University of Hawaii, being well-versed in all things beachy, tried to calculate the number of grains of sand.

They said, if you assume a grain of sand has an average size and you calculate how many grains are in a teaspoon and then multiply by all the beaches and deserts in the world, the Earth has roughly (and we’re speaking very roughly here) 7.5 x 1018grains of sand, or seven quintillion, five hundred quadrillion grains.

That’s a lot of grains.

OK, so how about stars? Well, to my amazement, it turns out that when you look up, even on a clear and starry night, you won’t see very many stars. Blatner says the number is a low, low “several thousand,” which gives the sand grain folks a landslide victory. But we’re not limiting ourselves to what an ordinary stargazer can see.

Our stargazer gets a Hubble telescope and a calculator, so now we can count distant galaxies, faint stars, red dwarfs, everything we’ve ever recorded in the sky, and boom! Now the population of stars jumps enormously, to 70 thousand million, million, million stars in the observable universe (a 2003 estimate), so that we’ve got multiple stars for every grain of sand — which means, sorry, grains, you are nowhere near as numerous as the stars.

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