The team operating NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit plans diagnostic tests this week after Spirit did not report some of its weekend activities, including a request to determine its orientation after an incomplete drive.

On Sunday, during the 1,800th Martian day, or sol, of what was initially planned as a 90-sol mission on Mars, information radioed from Spirit indicated the rover had received its driving commands for the day but had not moved. That can happen for many reasons, including the rover properly sensing that it is not ready to drive. However, other behavior on Sol 1800 was even more unusual: Spirit apparently did not record the day's main activities into the non-volatile memory, the part of its memory that persists even when power is off.

Recent studies have suggested that autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may be more prevalent among children born very prematurely. The early symptoms of ASD are also associated with other conditions related to preterm births, such as cerebral palsy, which can make it difficult to correctly screen children for ASD. Because of this, researchers have begun to explore the relationship between preterm birth, cognitive and developmental impairments, and ASD.

Two articles soon to be published in The Journal of Pediatrics explore this possible correlation between preterm birth and ASD.

Name it and the milk will come, say scientists at Newcastle University.  It's not "Field of Dreams" it's Milk of Dreams.   Or whatever analogy you want to use for a correlation-causation fantasy that leads to a conclusion that a cow with a name produces more milk than one without.

Drs Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson say they have shown in their study in Anthrozoos ("A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People and Animals"!!) that by giving a cow a name and treating her as an individual farmers can increase their annual milk yield  - by over 60 gallons.

We get a spectacular new into the active galaxy Centaurus A - NGC 5128 -  as the jets and lobes emanating from the central black hole have been imaged at submillimeter wavelengths for the first time.

Centaurus A is our nearest giant galaxy - about 13 million light-years away in the southern constellation of Centaurus. It is an elliptical galaxy, currently merging with a companion spiral galaxy, resulting in areas of intense star formation and making it one of the most spectacular objects in the sky. Centaurus A hosts a very active and highly luminous central region, caused by the presence of a supermassive black hole (see ESO 04/01), and is the source of strong radio and X-ray emission.

Taking up valuable land and growing edible crops for biofuels poses a dilemma: Is it ethical to produce inefficient renewable energies at the expense of an already malnourished population? David Pimentel and colleagues from Cornell University highlight the problems linked to converting a variety of crops into biofuels. Not only are these renewable energies inefficient, they are also economically and environmentally costly and nowhere near as productive as projected.

Rocks formed only under the extreme heat and friction during earthquakes, called pseudotachylytes, may be more abundant than previously reported, according to new research focused on eight faults found in the Sierra Nevada. The research appears in the February issue of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.

Geologists have previously debated whether these rocks are rarely produced or not based on an apparent absence in the rock record, most likely brought about by the difficulty in identifying them. Only a small fraction of the energy released in an earthquake is consumed by seismic waves, the formation of pseudotachylytes reveals the importance of the heat generated by the earthquake process. 

How the brain keeps tabs on what happened and when is still a matter of speculation but a computational model developed by scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies now suggests that newborn brain cells—generated by the thousands each day—add a time-related code, which is unique to memories formed around the same time. 

They didn't set out to explain how the brain stores temporal information but were interested in why adult brains continually spawn new brain cells in the dentate gyrus, the entryway to the hippocampus. The hippocampus, a small seahorse-shaped area of the brain, distributes memory to appropriate storage sections in the brain after readying the information for efficient recall.

Is it possible to share a pain that you observe in another but have never actually experienced yourself?  A new study uses brain-imaging  to try and answer this question and the research,  published in Neuron, may provide insight into the brain mechanisms involved in empathy.

Brain-imaging studies have shown similar patterns of brain activity when subjects feel their own emotions or observe the same emotions in others. It has been suggested that a person who has never experienced a specific feeling would have a difficult time directly empathizing with a person through a "mirror matching" mechanism that requires previous experience and would instead have to rely on a higher inferential processes called "perspective taking." 

Show me the science: 30 days of evolution blogging, day 1

Birds are the modern day descendants of dinosaurs, or as paleontologist Kevin Padian likes to say, birds are dinosaurs. But how did birds evolve from grounded, naked reptiles into plumed aviators? Evolutionary biologists have been piecing together the details for nearly 40 years, and this month, a major prediction about feather evolution has been vindicated.

Xing Xu and colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences report the discovery of 120 million-year-old primitive fossil feathers, whose structure matches a prediction about the evolution of feathers made 10 years ago. With this fossil discovery, all major stages of feather evolution predicted by evolutionary biologists have been found in the fossil record.
Xu, et al., Figure 1, copyright PNAS

Via Pharyngula, some non-scientist MD thinks that ~21,000 protein-coding genes aren't nearly enough to make a human (which of course then means that evolution is wrong):

4) The Human Genome Project showed that only 1-2% of Human DNA codes for proteins, or about 25,000 genes. These are not enough to account for the complexity of the organism. What is the other 98% of the genome's function? We don't know.

(BTW, the count of human genes has gone down since the genome sequence was first released; the latest number I hear from my gene-finding colleagues is about 21,000.)

PZ points out the absurdity of this claim that we're short on genes: