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The scars of impacts on Mars

ESA's Mars Express has returned new images of an elongated impact crater in the southern hemisphere of Mars. Located just south of the Huygens basin, it could have been carved out by a train of projectiles striking the planet at a shallow angle.

The large Huygens basin (not visible in the main image but seen in the wider contextual image) is about 450 km in diameter and lies in the heavily cratered southern highlands. In this area there are many impact scars but none perhaps are more intriguing than the 'elongated craters'.

Doctors lax in monitoring potentially addicting drugs

March 3, 2011 — (BRONX, NY) — Few primary care physicians pay adequate attention to patients taking prescription opioid drugs — despite the potential for abuse, addiction and overdose, according to a new study by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University.

Oldest objects in solar system indicate a turbulent beginning

LIVERMORE, Calif. – Scientists have found that calcium, aluminum-rich inclusions (CAIs), some of the oldest objects in the solar system, formed far away from our sun and then later fell back into the mid-plane of the solar system.

The findings may lead to a greater understanding of how our solar system and possibly other solar systems formed and evolved.

Oxygen isotope analysis tells of the wandering life of a dust grain 4.5 billion years ago

Scientists have performed a micro-probe analysis of the core and outer layers of a pea-sized piece of a meteorite some 4.57 billion years old to reconstruct the history of its formation, providing the first evidence that dust particles like this one experienced wildly varying environments during the planet-forming years of our solar system.

What is good for you is bad for infectious bacteria

Plants are able to protect themselves from most bacteria, but some bacteria are able to breach their defences. In research to be published in Science on Friday, scientists have identified the genes used by some strains of the bacterium Pseudomonas to overwhelm defensive natural products produced by plants of the mustard family, or crucifers.

"Microbes only become pathogens when they find a way to infect a host and overwhelm the host defences," said lead author Dr Jun Fan from the John Innes Centre on the Norwich Research Park.

New observations of the giant planet orbiting beta Pictoris

Astronomy & Astrophysics publishes new high angular resolution observations of the giant planet orbiting the star beta Pictoris. Located at 63.4 light-years from the Sun, beta Pic is a very young star of about 12 million years old [1], which is 75% more massive than our Sun. beta Pic is well known for harboring an extended and structured circumstellar disk. It was actually the first star to have its disk directly imaged more than 25 years ago. In 2009, a giant planet was seen orbiting within the disk.

Clouds amplify ecological light pollution

The brightness of the nightly sky glow over major cities has been shown to depend strongly on cloud cover. In natural environments, clouds make the night sky darker by blocking the light of the stars but around urban centers, this effect is completely reversed, according to a new study by a group of physicists and ecologists at the Free University of Berlin (FU) and the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB).

Worms strike see-saw balance in disease resistance

New research, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) has shown that nematode worms have to trade-off resistance to different diseases, gaining resistance to one microbe at the expense of becoming more vulnerable to another. This finding, published in PLoS ONE today (2 March 2011), reveals that the worms, called C. elegans, have a much more complex immune system than was previously thought and shows how important such trade-offs are across the animal kingdom.

Researchers focus on human cells for spinal cord injury repair

For the first time, scientists discovered that a specific type of human cell, generated from stem cells and transplanted into spinal cord injured rats, provide tremendous benefit, not only repairing damage to the nervous system but helping the animals regain locomotor function as well.

Black holes: a model for superconductors?

Urbana, Ill.—Black holes are some of the heaviest objects in the universe. Electrons are some of the lightest. Now physicists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have shown how charged black holes can be used to model the behavior of interacting electrons in unconventional superconductors.

Scientists target aggressive prostate cancer

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center have identified a potential target to treat an aggressive type of prostate cancer. The target, a gene called SPINK1, could be to prostate cancer what HER2 has become for breast cancer.

Like HER2, SPINK1 occurs in only a small subset of prostate cancers – about 10 percent. But the gene is an ideal target for a monoclonal antibody, the same type of drug as Herceptin, which is aimed at HER2 and has dramatically improved treatment for this aggressive type of breast cancer.

Montana State University team solves mystery of missing sunspots, helps predict space weather

BOZEMAN, Mont. –- Solar scientists from around the world were puzzled when sunspots recently disappeared for more than two years, but a former Montana State University physics graduate student and two collaborators have solved the mystery.

In the process, they found a way to predict the next lapse in solar activity, which will help people who oversee communication systems or plan long trips into space, said MSU solar physicist Piet Martens.

Solar mystery solved

The Sun has been in the news a lot lately because it's beginning to send out more flares and solar storms. Its recent turmoil is particularly newsworthy because the Sun was very quiet for an unusually long time. Astronomers had a tough time explaining the extended solar minimum. New computer simulations imply that the Sun's long quiet spell resulted from changing flows of hot plasma within it.

The dusty disc of NGC 247

The spiral galaxy NGC 247 is one of the closest spiral galaxies of the southern sky. In this new view from the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope in Chile large numbers of the galaxy's component stars are clearly resolved and many glowing pink clouds of hydrogen, marking regions of active star formation, can be made out in the loose and ragged spiral arms.

Cannabis use precedes the onset of psychotic symptoms in young people

Cannabis use during adolescence and young adulthood increases the risk of psychotic symptoms, while continued cannabis use may increase the risk for psychotic disorder in later life, concludes a new study published on bmj.com today.