The Phoenix Mars Lander is dead, says NASA.  Last week, the Mars Odyssey orbiter flew over the Phoenix landing site in final attempts to communicate with the lander but no transmission was detected and since Phoenix also did not communicate during 150 flights earlier this year, NASA declared its mission over.

The latest image transmitted by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter showed what appears to be ice damage to the lander's solar panels.

Arctic Heroes #1 - Alfred Wegener


The history of Arctic and Antarctic exploration and discovery is filled with the names of heroes.  Many of those names get repeated over and over in popular writings on polar exploration.  Other names tend to get forgotten.  Here, in no particular order, I hope to write of some of these heroes, both remembered and forgotten.


Alfred_Wegener is most famous for his Theory of the Drift of the Continents.  He is less widely known for his enthusiastic contributions to climatology and meteorology, which led to his death on the Greenland ice sheet in 1930 under the most heroic circumstances.

Scientists from the University of California, Berekley have captured images of a comet diving into the sun.

Using instruments aboard NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft, the researchers were able to track the comet as it approached the sun and estimate an approximate time and place of impact. STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) was launched in 2006 and consists of identical spacecraft orbiting the sun, one ahead of Earth and one behind Earth, providing a stereo view of the sun.

After tracking the comet, the team studied data from the ground-based Mauna Loa Solar Observatory in Hawaii, and found images in the predicted spot of what appears to be a comet approaching the edge of the sun from behind the solar disk.

The 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks effected Americans in many ways, even those not directly involved. Now researchers claim that the stress caused by psychological shock from the attacks may have led to an increased number of male children being miscarried in the US.

The authors of a new paper in BMC Public Health found that the fetal death rate for boys spiked in September 2001, and that significantly fewer boys than expected were born in December of that year.

A new study published in Genome Research has identified intrinsic properties of DNA that influence mutation rate, shedding light on an area of biology that still needs to be investigated - the mechanisms involved in genome maintenance .

Some DNA mutations are subject to natural selection, either conferring a biological advantage that is selected for, or a negative effect that is selected against. Mutations not under selection are said to be neutral, and the rate at which neutral mutations accumulate is reflective of the true DNA mutation rate. Researchers can estimate this mutation rate by comparing neutrally evolving sequences in species that share a common ancestor.

A major earthquake, comparable to the one that hit Chile earlier this year, could strike the Pacific Northwest coast of the United States, Oregon State geologists say.There is more than a one-in-three chance that it will happen within the next 50 years.

The team's new analysis has provided fresh insights into the Northwest's turbulent seismic history – where magnitude 8.2 (or higher) earthquakes have occurred 41 times during the past 10,000 years. Those earthquakes were thought to generally occur every 500 years, but as scientists delve more deeply into the offshore sediments and other evidence, they have discovered a great deal more complexity to the Cascadia Subduction Zone.

Bone marrow cells play a critical role in fighting respiratory viruses, making the bone marrow a potential therapeutic target, especially in people with compromised immune systems, say researchers writing in Cell Host&Microbe. They have found that during infections of the respiratory tract, cells produced by the bone marrow are instructed by proteins to migrate to the lungs to help fight infection. The data are published in the current issue of.