The Huygens landing: One year on

One year ago this week, on 14 January 2005, ESA’s Huygens probe reached the upper layer of Titan’s atmosphere and landed on the surface after a parachute descent 2 hours and 28 minutes later. As part of the joint NASA/ESA/ASI mission to Saturn and its moons, the Huygens probe was sent from the Cassini spacecraft to explore Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Titan’s organic chemistry may be like that of the primitive Earth around 4000 million years ago, and may hold clues about how life began on our planet.

Improved Armored Vests Reflect Changing Enemy Tactics

U.S. military members serving in Iraq, Afghanistan and other dangerous locales will soon receive revamped armored vests that provide more side protection, senior officials said today. The vest changes are designed to prove effective in protecting servicemembers from shrapnel fragments, especially those who man gun turrets atop vehicles, Maj. Gen. Steven Speaks, the Army’s director of force development, said during a teleconference call with military analysts.

Quasar Study Highlights Stars That Ended the ‘Dark Ages’

A team of astronomers has uncovered new evidence about the stars whose formation ended the cosmic “Dark Ages” a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. In a presentation today at the annual winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), California Institute of Technology graduate student George Becker is scheduled to discuss his team’s investigation of several faraway quasars and the gas between the quasars and Earth. The paper on which his lecture is based will be published in the Astrophysical Journal in March.

Anti-Adhesive Layers Leave No Hope for Insects

Plants are able, using organic substances, to achieve effects that we otherwise mostly know only from technical materials. One example of this is the carnivorous pitcher plant, as researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research and the University of Hohenheim have shown. These plants catch insects and hold them using traps with a double layer of crystalline wax. The upper layer has crystalloids which contaminate the attachment organs that insects use to adhere themselves to surfaces. The lower layer additionally reduces the contact area between the insect feet and plant surface. The insects thus slip into the pitcher-shaped traps, where they are digested These results provide ideas for further developments of technological anti-adhesive surfaces.

Deep-rooted plants have much greater impact on climate than experts thought

Trees, particularly those with deep roots, contribute to the Earth’s climate much more than scientists thought, according to a new study by biologists and climatologists from UC Berkeley. While scientists studying global climate change recognize the importance of vegetation in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and in local cooling through transpiration, they have assumed a simple model of plants sucking water out of the soil and spewing water vapor into the atmosphere.

Astronomers find magnetic Slinky in constellation of Orion

Astronomers have announced what may be the first discovery of a helical magnetic field in interstellar space, coiled like a snake around a gas cloud in the constellation of Orion. “You can think of this structure as a giant, magnetic Slinky wrapped around a long, finger-like interstellar cloud,” said Timothy Robishaw, a graduate student in astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. “The magnetic field lines are like stretched rubber bands; the tension squeezes the cloud into its filamentary shape.”

Donner, party of five!

The Donner Party used tea cups and other tableware and ate domestic and wild animals while stranded in the Sierra Nevadas during 1846-47, but all group members may not have resorted to cannibalism. Results of recent analyses of bone fragments found at the Donner Family campsite in California’s Tahoe National Forest are inconclusive with regard to cannibalism, according to research presented today by scientists at the Society for Historical Archaeology’s conference on historical and underwater archaeology.

FAT chance of becoming manic depressive

A collaboration has discovered the first risk gene specifically for bipolar disorder, also known as manic-depressive illness. This means that people who have a particular form of this gene are twice as likely to develop the disease. Dr Ian Blair, lead author of the research paper, says: “We are the first group in the world to take a multi-faceted approach to identify a bipolar risk gene – we used a number of families, unrelated patients, and therapeutic drug mouse models. Each of these three lines of investigation led us to a gene called FAT.”

NASA Refines Design For Crew Exploration Vehicle

NASA’s Constellation Program is making progress toward selecting a prime contractor to design, develop and build the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), America’s first new human spacecraft in 30 years. The agency has issued Phase II of a Request for Proposals. It is a “Call for Improvements” that incorporates the results of additional analysis and study.