Scientists find liquid water near Mars surface

The image is from 'Hidden Valley' in Gale Crater on Mars. Very fine-grained sediments, which slowly fell down through the water, were deposited right at the bottom of the crater lake. The sediment plates at the bottom are level, so everything indicates that the entire Gale Crater may have been a large lake. (credit NASA/JPL, MSSS)

Researchers have long known that there is water in the form of ice on Mars. Now, new research from NASA's Mars rover Curiosity shows that it is possible that there is liquid water close to the surface of Mars. The explanation is that the substance perchlorate has been found in the soil, which lowers the freezing point so the water does not freeze into ice, but is liquid and present in very salty salt water - a brine. The results are published in the scientific journal Nature.

In August 2012, the Mars rover Curiosity landed on Mars in the large crater, Gale, located just south of the equator. The giant crater is 154 kilometers in diameter and the rim of the crater is almost 5 kilometers high. In the middle of the crater lies the mountain, Mount Sharp. In over 2½ years, Curiosity has travelled more than 10 km from the landing site towards Mount Sharp and has carried out many studies along the way.

NASA Puzzled By Massive Methane Cloud Above Miles of Fracking Wells

YouTuber only needs seconds to help solve methane mystery that has establishment scientists puzzled.

By Dutchsinse

News broke early morning April 9, 2015 that a giant cloud of methane has been detected over Southern Colorado / Northern New Mexico near the Four Corners region where Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico meet.

NASA + NOAA , as well as several other organizations are puzzled about the source of the methane.. blaming natural causes, and coal operations? 

Maybe they don't have access to Google Earth, which might explain why they don't know the "cause" of the giant methane cloud. Watch video below...

Want Cleaner and Purer Air? Try Air-Cleaning Plants, NASA Says

image source

Elizabeth Renter

NASA knows a thing or two about keeping air clean, sending astronauts into space with a limited amount of breathable air for months on end. After all, they can’t simply open a window when things get stuffy in space.

What NASA researchers have learned about air quality in the home concerning air-cleaning plants, however, is refreshing to say the least.

They’ve found several common houseplant varieties can essentially clean the air of certain chemicals. They tested a variety of plants to see which was best at removing carcinogens like trichloroethylene, formaldehyde, and benzene. But, these chemicals aren’t in my home—you might be thinking. And you would be wrong.

U.S And United Kingdom To Cut Power In Preparation of Massive Solar Storm

wiki commons

Alex Thomas
The Intel Hub

In a stunning announcement, The United States and United Kingdom are likely set to begin “controlled” power cuts in preparation of a giant solar storm.

The announcement by Thomas Bogdan, the director of the US Space Weather Prediction Centre, comes a week after a large-scale solar flare released a massive amount of radiation and threatened to cause moderate disruption.

The solar flare on June 7th, 2011 was luckily pointed away from Earth but caused many to wonder if another solar flare is imminent, this one aimed directly at earth.

NASA Headquarters Emergency Operations Launches New "Family Preparedness" Program For Employees (Video)

NASA

A major initiative has been placed on Family/Personal Preparedness for all NASA personnel. The NASA/Family Preparedness Program is designed to provide awareness, resources, and tools to the NASA Family (civil servants and contractors) to prepare for an emergency situation. The most important assets in the successful completion of NASA’s mission are our employees’ and their families. We are taking the steps to prepare our workforce, but it is your personal obligation to prepare yourself and your families for emergencies.

Listen to Administrator Bolden’s thoughts on why it’s important that we “know our stuff” and “be prepared”.  (YouTube video with comments from jcattera, Ed.)

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Astronauts Concerned About Strange Object During Spacewalk (CNN/NASA Video)

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Bad News from NASA: Proof That Comet Elenin Is Affecting Earth

Dees Illustration

Dr. Mark Sircus, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

This is going to be the most extraordinary communication so fasten your seatbelts; we are in for a rough ride. I have known in my heart for months that I would have to make a communication like this but had no idea it would be this soon. Back in January, while investigating the underground city that is alleged to have been built under the new Denver Airport, reported on by the former governor Jesse Ventura, I put the puzzle together and came to the conclusion that a planetary event was in store for us in 2012.

Today I am presenting rock solid information; it does not get any better when NASA is your source. What you are about to read and see is happening. Last night, looking at a NASA mathematical model of comet Elenin, I found out that a large celestial body has already penetrated the solar system and is on course for a near and possibly horrific encounter with the earth in the fall of 2011. What we do not know is the size and mass of comet Elenin though I have no doubt that it is known by the authorities.

NASA Begins Search for Parallel Universes and Dark Matter

Daily Galaxy

A futuristic experiment sounding like something out of a scifi novel, that will hunt for antimatter galaxies and signs of dark matter, was nearly cancelled but is finally poised to voyage into orbit aboard the next-to-last space shuttle mission.

The $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a more than 15,000-pound (6,900-kilogram) device searching for cosmic- rays -- high-energy charged particles from outer space -- will ride up to the International Space Station on the shuttle Endeavour this Friday April 29.

The instrument will employ a nearly 4,200-pound (1,900 kg) permanent magnet to generate a strong, uniform magnetic field more than 3,000 times more intense than Earth's. This deflects cosmic rays so that a battery of detectors can analyze their properties, such as charge and velocity, and beam their findings to mission control.

When NASA launches the experiment, Sam Ting, Principal Investigator for the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2 experiment, hopes that it will provide data that proves the existence of parallel universes that are composed of anti-matter. Discoveries could verify theories and answer basic questions regarding how the Universe formed.

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What Does Comet Elenin's Arrival Herald?

Here's its trajectory and timetable in a snapshot

Zen Gardner

Before It's News 

Eight things there be a comet brings, When on high it doth horrid range: Wind, famine, plague, and death to kings; War, earthquakes, floods, And direful change.

— From an old German poem. 

"And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring;" - the Bible

Elenin cometh. 

A lot of talk about this interplanetary body heading our way. It's charted to pass around the sun and close to the earth this fall. And NASA, aka "Never A Straight Answer", says hardly anything. With all their fancy equipment they couldn't pick it up, but some obscure astronomer from Russia does?

C'mon.  

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New Solar Cycle Prediction

Editor's Note: This was sent by a reader of Terrence Aym's article: Scientists' Research Warns Humanity May Be Facing "Vortex of Death" 

NASA Science News

May 29, 2009: An international panel of experts led by NOAA and sponsored by NASA has released a new prediction for the next solar cycle. Solar Cycle 24 will peak, they say, in May 2013 with a below-average number of sunspots.

"If our prediction is correct, Solar Cycle 24 will have a peak sunspot number of 90, the lowest of any cycle since 1928 when Solar Cycle 16 peaked at 78," says panel chairman Doug Biesecker of the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center.

(Upper) Right: A solar flare observed in Dec. 2006 by NOAA's GOES-13 satellite.

It is tempting to describe such a cycle as "weak" or "mild," but that could give the wrong impression.

"Even a below-average cycle is capable of producing severe space weather," points out Biesecker.

"The great geomagnetic storm of 1859, for instance, occurred during a solar cycle of about the same size we’re predicting for 2013."

Global Eruption Rocks the Sun

NASA Science News

On August 1, 2010, an entire hemisphere of the sun erupted. Filaments of magnetism snapped and exploded, shock waves raced across the stellar surface, billion-ton clouds of hot gas billowed into space. Astronomers knew they had witnessed something big.

It was so big, it may have shattered old ideas about solar activity.

"The August 1st event really opened our eyes," says Karel Schrijver of Lockheed Martin’s Solar and Astrophysics Lab in Palo Alto, CA. "We see that solar storms can be global events, playing out on scales we scarcely imagined before."

SEE THE VIDEO 

For the past three months, Schrijver has been working with fellow Lockheed-Martin solar physicist Alan Title to understand what happened during the "Great Eruption." They had plenty of data: The event was recorded in unprecedented detail by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory and twin STEREO spacecraft. With several colleagues present to offer commentary, they outlined their findings at a press conference today at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.


Explosions on the sun are not localized or isolated events, they announced. Instead, solar activity is interconnected by magnetism over breathtaking distances. Solar flares, tsunamis, coronal mass ejections--they can go off all at once, hundreds of thousands of miles apart, in a dizzyingly-complex concert of mayhem.

"To predict eruptions we can no longer focus on the magnetic fields of isolated active regions," says Title, "we have to know the surface magnetic field of practically the entire sun."


This revelation increases the work load for space weather forecasters, but it also increases the potential accuracy of their forecasts.

"The whole-sun approach could lead to breakthroughs in predicting solar activity," commented Rodney Viereck of NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, CO. "This in turn would provide improved forecasts to our customers such as electric power grid operators and commercial airlines, who could take action to protect their systems and ensure the safety of passengers and crew."

In a paper they prepared for the Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR), Schrijver and Title broke down the Great Eruption into more than a dozen significant shock waves, flares, filament eruptions, and CMEs spanning 180 degrees of solar longitude and 28 hours of time. At first it seemed to be a cacophony of disorder until they plotted the events on a map of the sun's magnetic field.

Title describes the Eureka! moment: "We saw that all the events of substantial coronal activity were connected by a wide-ranging system of separatrices, separators, and quasi-separatrix layers." A "separatrix" is a magnetic fault zone where small changes in surrounding plasma currents can set off big electromagnetic storms.

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NASA Finds New Life (Updating live)

Gizmodo

NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn't share the biological building blocks of anything currently living in planet Earth, using arsenic to build its DNA, RNA, proteins, and cell membranes. This changes everything.

All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same. NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon and her team have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the newly discovered microorganism—called GFAJ-1—uses arsenic for all its building blocks.

The new life forms up close, at five micrometers.

According to Felisa:

We know that some microbes can breathe arsenic, but what we've found is a microbe doing something new—building parts of itself out of arsenic. We know that some microbes can breathe arsenic, but what we've found is a microbe doing something new—building parts of itself out of arsenic.

The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don't have to be like planet Earth. Like NASA's Ed Weiler says: "The definition of life has just expanded. As we pursue our efforts to seek signs of life in the solar system, we have to think more broadly, more diversely and consider life as we do not know it."

Talking at the NASA conference, Wolfe Simon said that the important thing here is that this breaks our ideas on how life can be created and grow, pointing out that scientists will now be looking for new types of beings and metabolism that not only uses arsenic, but other element substitutions.

Even closer, showing their internal structure.

While this life hasn't been found in another planet, this discovery does indeed change everything we know about biology. I don't know about you but I've not been so excited about a bacteria since my STD tests came back clean. And that's without counting yesterday's announcement on the discovery of a massive number of red dwarf stars, which may harbor a trillion Earths, dramatically increasing our chances of finding extraterrestrial life.

Mono Lake photography by Sathish J — Creative Commons

Send an email to Jesus Diaz, the author of this post, at jesus@gizmodo.com.

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