NASA bit off more than it could chew when it sent the Perseverance rover to Mars to collect samples.

The US$2.4 billion mission landed the rover in Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient lake. It's the ideal spot to search for the fossils of Martian microbes that may have existed when the planet was lush with lakes and rivers.

Perseverance's main mission is to collect samples of the rock and sediment along the lake bed and the crater rim, in hopes of finding a sign that life once thrived on the red planet. The rover has done a fine job – so far it's secured 24 samples – but NASA no longer knows how it's going to bring them to Earth for analysis.

NASA's original design for the retrieval mission, called Mars Sample Return, has fallen apart. The agency is asking companies to step in and propose better ideas.

Researchers at the University of Iowa in a new study have linked a region in the brain to how humans redirect thoughts and attention when distracted. The connection is important because it offers insights into cognitive and behavioral side effects to a technique being used to treat patients with Parkinson's disease.

The subthalamic nucleus is a pea-sized brain region involved in the motor-control system, meaning our movements. In people with Parkinson's disease, those movements have been compromised: Researchers believe the subthalamic nucleus, which normally acts as a brake on sudden movement, is exerting too much influence. That overactive brake, researchers think, is what contributes to the tremors and other motor deficiencies associated with the disease.

4.5 million gamers around the world have advanced medical science by helping to reconstruct microbial evolutionary histories using a minigame included inside the critically and commercially successful video game Borderlands 3. Their playing has led to a significantly refined estimate of the relationships of microbes in the human gut.

The results of this collaboration will both substantially advance our knowledge of the microbiome and improve on the AI programs that will be used to carry out this work in the future.

By playing Borderlands Science, a mini-game within the looter-shooter video game Borderlands 3, these players have helped trace the evolutionary relationships of more than a million different kinds of bacteria that live in the human gut, some of which play a crucial role in our health.

This information represents an exponential increase in what we have discovered about the microbiome up till now. By aligning rows of tiles that represent the genetic building blocks of different microbes, humans have been able to take on tasks that even the best existing computer algorithms have been unable to solve yet.

Crucial connection for 'quantum internet' made for the first time
Researchers have produced, stored, and retrieved quantum information for the first time, a critical step in quantum networking.

The ability to share quantum information is crucial for developing quantum networks for distributed computing and secure communication. Quantum computing will be useful for solving some important types of problems, such as optimizing financial risk, decrypting data, designing molecules, and studying the properties of materials.

However, this development is being held up because quantum information can be lost when transmitted over long distances. One way to overcome this barrier is to divide the network into smaller segments and link them all up with a shared quantum state.

To do this requires a means to store the quantum information and retrieve it again: that is, a quantum memory device. This must 'talk' to another device that allows the creation of quantum information in the first place.

For the first time, researchers have created such a system that interfaces these two key components and uses regular optical fibers to transmit the quantum data.

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Team Says Goodbye … for Now
Engineers working on NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter assembled for one last time in a control room at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California on Tuesday, April 16, to monitor a transmission from the history-making helicopter. While the mission ended Jan. 25, the rotorcraft has remained in communication with the agency’s Perseverance Mars rover, which serves as a base station for Ingenuity. This transmission, received through the antennas of NASA’s Deep Space Network, marked the final time the mission team would be working together on Ingenuity operations.

Now the helicopter is ready for its final act: to serve as a stationary testbed, collecting data that could benefit future explorers of the Red Planet.

"With apologies to Dylan Thomas, Ingenuity will not be going gently into that good Martian night,” said Josh Anderson, Ingenuity team lead at JPL. “It is almost unbelievable that after over 1,000 Martian days on the surface, 72 flights, and one rough landing, she still has something to give. And thanks to the dedication of this amazing team, not only did Ingenuity overachieve beyond our wildest dreams, but also it may teach us new lessons in the years to come.”

Originally designed as a short-lived technology demonstration mission that would perform up to five experimental test flights over 30 days, the first aircraft on another world operated from the Martian surface for almost three years, flew more than 14 times farther than the distance expected, and logged more than two hours of total flight time.

Ingenuity’s mission ended after the helicopter experienced a hard landing on its last flight, significantly damaging its rotor blades. Unable to fly, the rotorcraft will remain at “Valinor Hills” while the Perseverance rover drives out of communications range as it continues to explore the western limb of Jezero Crater...

NASA’s Dragonfly Rotorcraft Mission to Saturn’s Moon Titan Confirmed
NASA has confirmed its Dragonfly rotorcraft mission to Saturn’s organic-rich moon Titan. The decision allows the mission to progress to completion of final design, followed by the construction and testing of the entire spacecraft and science instruments.

Dragonfly is confirmed with a total lifecycle cost of $3.35 billion and a launch date of July 2028. This reflects a cost increase of about two times the proposed cost and a delay of more than two years from when the mission was originally selected in 2019.

To compensate for the delayed arrival at Titan, NASA also provided additional funding for a heavy-lift launch vehicle to shorten the mission’s cruise phase.

The rotorcraft, targeted to arrive at Titan in 2034, will fly to dozens of promising locations on the moon, looking for prebiotic chemical processes common on both Titan and the early Earth before life developed. Dragonfly marks the first time NASA will fly a vehicle for science on another planetary body. The rotorcraft has eight rotors and flies like a large drone.

Your Spinal Cord Can Learn And Recall Without Brain Input And We Finally Know How
Devoid of a head, many insects will continue to kick and twitch until at last, drained of all life, their movements grind to a complete stop.

Scientists have known for some time that the spinal cord is capable of executing limb movements beyond reflex jerking motions, even to the point of adapting to avoid unpleasant stimulations.

Just how its neurons 'learn' new responses without the brain's say-so has never been clear.

A study on transgenic mice conducted by researchers from the VIB-Neuro-Electronics Research Flanders in Belgium has discovered the role of a specific gene expressed in spinal nerves in memorizing responses to potential threats.

As NASA continues to study the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, two space telescopes have made new observations, together providing more information about its size, physical properties, and chemical makeup.

NASAWebb observed the object with its Near-Infrared Spectrograph instrument https://t.co/gICD3Y7l4x and the new SPHEREx telescope contributed new data as well https://t.co/4Rh8sHfLsE

All about this comet, the third such interstellar visitor that NASA has observed:
https://t.co/dEHTuQNNKC

Data from 1977 was hard to parse, given the lack of modern computer systems, but volunteers from the Big Ear Observatory in Delaware, Ohio, where the original signal was collected, preserved the records after the observatory was shut down in 1998 and turned into a golf course. Using modern computing technology, the volunteers ran over 75,000 pages of original data through an optical character recognition routine, with visual help from human validators, allowing in-depth computational analysis of the original signal for the first time.

This more detailed analysis led to slight changes in three of the signal’s main characteristics.

...the signal was likely astronomical in origin, though the most likely explanation still isn’t extraterrestrials. The most likely culprit is a HI cloud - clouds of neutral atomic hydrogen floating in space that have been known to produce narrow-band signals that look similar to the “Wow!” Signal, but never on anything approaching the power levels seen that one time in 1977.

The European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) is on track for its gravity-assist flyby at Venus on 31 August, following the successful resolution of a spacecraft communication anomaly that temporarily severed contact with Earth.

On August 20, IBM and NASA announced the launch of Surya, a foundation model for the sun. Having been trained on large datasets of solar activity, this AI tool aims to deepen humanity’s understanding of solar weather and accurately predict solar flares—bursts of electromagnetic radiation emitted by our star that threaten both astronauts in orbit and communications infrastructure on Earth.

Surya was trained with nine years of data collected by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), an instrument that has orbited the sun since 2010, taking high-resolution images every 12 seconds. The SDO captures observations of the sun at various different electromagnetic wavelengths to estimate the temperature of the star’s layers. It also takes precise measurements of the sun’s magnetic field—essential data for understanding how energy moves through the star, and for predicting solar storms.

Déjà vu? Professor Avi Loeb has sparked controversy by suggesting - again - that a recently detected interstellar body passing through the Solar System (3I/ATLAS) could be an alien spacecraft. Today, we dive into what he his claiming and whether it holds up - just the science.

Scientists at UT Southwestern Medical Center have identified how a hormone binds to a receptor on immune cells, allowing cancer cells to evade the body’s defenses. The study, published in Nature Immunology, points to potential new directions in cancer immunotherapy and may also open avenues for treating inflammatory and neurological conditions.

Like Jupiter's moon Europa, and Saturn's moons Titan and Enceladus, scientists have speculated that Ceres could be an "Ocean World," meaning that it could have a liquid water interior that could support life. Dawn's findings indicated that the planetoid is too cold in its interior to prevent water from freezing, and any liquid it contains is likely to be concentrated brines. But according to new research by NASA scientists, Ceres may have had the right conditions to support single-celled lifeforms about 2.5 to 4 billion years ago.