Rover photographs perfectly round ball on Mars surface

NASA's Curiosity Rover has sent back a photo from Mars of a perfectly round object that looks like a ball.

But sad news for conspiracy theorists: No one has been playing golf on the Red Planet.

Instead, experts told Discovery.com they believe the ball is an example of a geological process called concretion — when a mass of minerals embeds in a "host" sedimentary rock.

NASA said the sphere, which was photographed Sept. 11, is likely one centimetre wide.

It's not the first time a rover has photographed a similar phenomenon on Mars. In 2004, the rover Opportunity relayed images of a small grouping of concretions that looked similar to blueberries. The existence of the spheres suggests that area of Mars had groundwater at one point, the scientists said in a paper in Nature in June 2004.

NASA Curiosity Rover Drills its First Hole at Mount Sharp

NASA's Curiosity rover has reached the ultimate destination in its science mission on Mars and has officially broken the ground at Mount Sharp.

According to Space.com, Curiosity drilled about 2.6 into the base of the mountain in the middle of the Gale Crater, the rover's landing spot. The one-ton rover collected pieces of powdered rock for future analysis.

Curiosity has been on a track to reach Mount Sharp, which stands about 3.4 miles high, since landing on the Red Planet in Aug. 2012.

"This drilling target is at the lowest part of the base layer of the mountain, and from here we plan to examine the higher, younger layers exposed in the nearby hills," Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said in a press release. "This first look at rocks we believe to underlie Mount Sharp is exciting because it will begin to form a picture of the environment at the time the mountain formed, and what led to its growth."

Curiosity took its time to get from Yellow Knife Bay to Mount Sharp, about a five-mile trek. In 15 months, Curiosity plodded along while making various stops to collect samples and examine them. Thanks to the rover, NASA mission managers have enjoyed a wealth of information that have changed the way many people look at Mars.

"We're putting on the brakes to study this amazing mountain," Jennifer Trosper, Curiosity deputy project manager at JPL, said in the release. "Curiosity flew hundreds of millions of miles to do this."

Curiosity will now take its time with analyzing the sample because the results could determine whether or not it is safe for filtration and delivery to the rover's internal lab.

ultra-fast lasers turns quartz glass into metal

 

In an advance that can lead to ultra-fast light based electronics, scientists have used laser pulses to change the properties of quartz glass into metal.

Quartz glass does not conduct electric current, it is a typical example of an insulator. With ultra-short laser pulses, however, the electronic properties of glass can be fundamentally changed within femtoseconds.

If the laser pulse is strong enough, the electrons in the material can move freely. For a brief moment, the quartz glass behaves like metal. It becomes opaque and conducts electricity.

This change of material properties happens so quickly that it can be used for ultra-fast light based electronics.

Scientists at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) have now managed to explain this effect using large-scale computer simulations.

In recent years, ultra-short laser pulses of only a few femtoseconds have been used to investigate quantum effects in atoms or molecules.

Now they can also be used to change material properties. In an experiment at the Max-Planck Institute in Garching, Germany, electric current has been measured in quartz glass, while it was illuminated by a laser pulse.

After the pulse, the material almost immediately returns to its previous state.

TU Wien researchers explained this peculiar effect, in collaboration with researchers from the Tsukuba University in Japan.

Quantum mechanically, an electron can occupy different states in a solid material. It can be tightly bound to one particular atom or it can occupy a state of higher energy in which it can move between atoms.

"The laser pulse is an extremely strong electric field, which has the power to dramatically change the electronic states in the quartz," said Georg Wachter.

"The pulse can not only transfer energy to the electrons, it completely distorts the whole structure of possible electron states in the material," said Wachter.

That way, an electron which used to be bound to an oxygen atom in the quartz glass can suddenly change over to another atom and behave almost like a free electron in a metal.

Once the laser pulse has separated electrons from the atoms, the electric field of the pulse can drive the electrons in one direction, so that electric current starts to flow.

Extremely strong laser pulses can cause a current that persists for a while, even after the pulse has faded out.

Science is very close to unlock mistry of birth of sun

Using radioactive materials, researchers have investigated the solar system's prehistoric phase and the events that may have led to the Sun's birth.

The team used radioactivity to date the last time that heavy elements such as gold, silver, platinum, lead and rare-earth elements were added to the solar system matter by the stars that produced them.

"We can now tell with confidence the final one percent of gold, silver and platinum were added to the solar system matter roughly 100 million years before the birth of the sun," said researchers Maria Lugaro and Alexander Heger from Monash University's centre for astrophysics in Melbourne, Australia.

The final one percent of lead and rare-earth elements such as those that make your smartphone, were added much later - at most, 30 million years before the birth of the sun, they added.

The detailed timing opened up new opportunities to understand the series of events that led to the formation of the sun.

Some time after the last addition of heavy elements, the solar system matter went into an "incubation" period, during which time the stellar nursery formed - where the Sun was born together with a number of other stars.

"We now know this incubation period could not have lasted more than 30 million years. This offers us the chance to determine the lifespan of the nursery where the Sun was born, how massive it was and how many stars were born there together," Lugaro explained.

Understanding the time-scale and processes leading to the formation of our solar system is key to relate its birth environment with that of other planetary systems in the galaxy, he noted. The findings were published in the journal Science.

The study was published in the journal Science.

wood frogs freeze for 7 months and survive

Each September, the wood frogs of Alaska do a very strange thing: They freeze.

They do not freeze totally solid, but they do freeze mostly solid. Two-thirds of their body water turns to ice. If you picked them up, they would not move. If you bent one of their legs, it would break.

Inside these frozen frogs other weird physiological things are going on. Their hearts stop beating, their blood no longer flows and their glucose levels sky rocket.

Read More at Candidshare.com

spinach can convert sunlight into fuel

Spinach gave Popeye super strength. Now it is all set to boost up our engines.

Scientists have discovered that the humble spinach has the ability to convert sunlight into a clean, efficient alternative fuel.

Purdue University physicists are part of an international group using spinach to study the proteins involved in photosynthesis, the process by which plants convert the sun's energy into carbohydrates used to power cellular processes.

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