Ancient Mars lake could have supported life, Curiosity rover shows

NASA's Curiosity rover has found evidence of an ancient Martian lake that could have supported life as we know it for long stretches — perhaps millions of years.

This long and skinny freshwater lake likely existed about 3.7 billion years ago, researchers said, suggesting that habitable environments were present on Mars more recently than previously thought.

"Quite honestly, it just looks very Earth-like," said Curiosity lead scientist John Grotzinger, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. [Ancient Mars Could Have Supported Life (Photos)]

"You've got an alluvial fan, which is being fed by streams that originate in mountains, that accumulates a body of water," Grotzinger told SPACE.com. "That probably was not unlike what happened during the last glacial maximum in the Western U.S."

Habitable Mars
The lake once covered a small portion of the 96-mile-wide Gale Crater, which the 1-ton Curiosity rover has been exploring since touching down on the Red Planet in August 2012.

'Quite honestly, it just looks very Earth-like.'

- Curiosity lead scientist John Grotzinger, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena

The main task of Curiosity's $2.5 billion mission is to determine whether Gale Crater could ever have supported microbial life. The rover team achieved that goal months ago, announcing in March that a spot near Curiosity's landing site called Yellowknife Bay was indeed habitable billions of years ago.

The new results, which are reported Monday, Dec. 9, in six separate papers in the journal Science, confirm and extend Curiosity's landmark discovery, painting a more complete picture of the Yellowknife Bay area long ago.

This picture emerged from Curiosity's analysis of fine-grained sedimentary rocks called mudstones, which generally form in calm, still water. The rover obtained powdered samples of these rocks by drilling into Yellowknife Bay outcrops.

The mudstones contain clay minerals that formed in the sediments of an ancient freshwater lake, researchers said. Curiosity also spotted some of the key chemical ingredients for life in the samples, including sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon.

The lake could have potentially supported a class of microbes called chemolithoautotrophs, which obtain energy by breaking down rocks and minerals. Here on Earth, chemolithoautotrophs are commonly found in habitats beyond the reach of sunlight, such as caves and hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor.

"It is exciting to think that billions of years ago, ancient microbial life may have existed in the lake's calm waters, converting a rich array of elements into energy," Sanjeev Gupta of Imperial College London, co-author of one of the new papers, said in a statement.

An icy Martian lake?
The shallow ancient lake may have been about 30 miles long by 3 miles wide, Grotzinger said. Based on the thickness of the sedimentary deposits, the research team estimates that the lake existed for at least tens of thousands of years — and perhaps much longer, albeit on a possibly on-and-off basis.

Taking into account the broader geological context, "you could wind up with an assemblage of rocks that represent streams, lakes and ancient groundwater systems — so for times when the lake might have been dry, the groundwater's still there. This could have gone on for millions or tens of millions of years," Grotzinger said.

The lack of weathering on Gale Crater's rim suggests that the area was cold when the lake existed, he added, raising the possibility that a layer of ice covered the lake on a permanent or occasional basis. But such conditions wouldn't be much of a deterrent to hardy microbes.

"These are entirely viable habitable environments for chemolithoautotrophs," Grotzinger said.

Researchers still don't know if the Gale Crater lake hosted organisms of any kind; Curiosity was not designed to hunt for signs of life on Mars. But if chemolithoautotrophs did indeed dominate the lake, it would put an alien twist on a superficially familiar environment.

"You can imagine that, if life evolved on Mars and never got beyond the point of chemolithoautotrophy, then in the absence of competition from other types of microbes, these systems might have been dominated by that type of metabolic pathway," Grotzinger said. "And that's an un-Earth-like situation."

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EU could impose pesticide ban to protect bees

By Charlie Dunmore

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - EU governments failed to agree a ban on three widely used pesticides linked to the decline of honeybees on Friday, but the European Commission could force one through by the summer unless member states agree a compromise.

A sharp fall in bee populations around the world, partly due to a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder, has fuelled concerns over the impact of widespread use of pesticides, notably the neonicotinoids class.

Syngeta and Bayer, leading global producers of neonicotinoids, say the harmful effects on bees is unproven and that a ban would cost the EU economy billions.

But campaign groups and some scientists accuse governments of caving into pressure from the agribusiness lobby.

Under EU rules, member states now have two months to reach a compromise or the Commission will be free to adopt the proposal.

"Forcing through the ban is one of the options available to us but first we need to reflect politically on the best way to proceed," said EU health spokesman Frederic Vincent.

The Commission, which could also try to get a majority for a compromise proposal, put forward the restrictions in January after the EU's food safety watchdog EFSA said neonicotinoids posed an acute risk to honeybee health.

However, the survey found no link between use of the pesticides and the specific problem of colony collapse.

Bees and other insects are crucial in pollinating most crops in Europe but neonicotinoids are used on more than 8 million hectares to boost yields of rapeseed, wheat and other staples.

The proposal would ban neonicotinoids on all crops except winter cereals and plants not attractive to bees, such as sugar beet. It would apply from July 1, 2013, ensuring this spring's maize sowing is unaffected, with a review after two years.

BEE-KILLERS

Sources close to the discussions said 13 EU governments favored a ban and nine voted against. Britain, Germany and three other states abstained.

"We are pleased that EU member states did not support the European Commission's shamefully political proposal," said John Atkin, chief operating officer for Swiss firm Syngeta.

"Restricting the use of this vital crop protection technology will do nothing to help improve bee health," his statement added.

While few deny that neonicotinoids can be harmful to bees, there are conflicting scientific opinions on the actual threat they pose under normal growing conditions.

"Of course they can kill bees, they are insecticides; but whether they actually do this, or whether sub-lethal effects occur and damage the colonies on any important scale, has not been proven," said Lin Field, head of biological chemistry at Britain's Rothamsted Research centre.

Some point to habitat decline and disease-carrying parasites such as the Varroa mite as the chief cause of bee deaths.

But David Goulson, professor of biological sciences at the University of Stirling in Scotland, said there was clear evidence feeding on treated crops was likely to cause bees significant harm.

"Yet politicians choose to ignore all of this. Presumably their opinions were swayed by the spurious claims that restricting use of these insecticides will cause vast economic losses to farming," he said.

A Syngenta and Bayer funded study showed a blanket ban on treating seeds with neonicotinoids would cut EU net wheat exports by 16 percent and lead to a 57 percent rise in maize imports, costing the EU economy 4.5 billion euros per year.

Separately, researchers have put the financial contribution of insect pollinators to the EU farming sector at 22 billion euros ($28.5 billion) a year, and 153 billion euros globally.

Campaign group Avaaz, which has collected more than 2.5 million signatures on a petition for the European Union to ban the products, accused governments of ignoring public opinion.

"Today, Germany and Britain have caved in to the industry lobby and refused to ban bee-killing pesticides," Avaaz campaigner Iain Keith said in a statement.

(Additional reporting by Mike Hogan in Hamburg, Katharina Bart in Zurich and Kate Kelland in London; Editing by Jon Boyle)

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Could global warming change tornado season, too?

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — With the planet heating up, many scientists seem fairly certain some weather elements like hurricanes and droughts will worsen. But tornadoes have them stumped.

These unpredictable, sometimes deadly storms plague the United States more than any other country. Here in tornado alley, Oklahoma City has been hit with at least 147 tornadoes since 1890.

But as the traditional tornado season nears, scientists have been pondering a simple question: Will there be more or fewer twisters as global warming increases?

There is no easy answer. Lately, tornado activity in America has been Jekyll-and-Hyde weird, and scientists are unsure if climate change has played a role in recent erratic patterns.

In 2011, the United States saw its second-deadliest tornado season in history: Nearly 1,700 tornadoes killed 553 people. The Joplin, Mo., twister was the single deadliest in American history, killing 158 people and causing $2.8 billion in damage.

The following year, 2012, started even earlier and even busier. Through April there were twice as many tornadoes as normal. Then the twisters suddenly disappeared. Tornado activity from May to August of that year was the lowest in 60 years of record-keeping, said Harold Brooks, a top researcher at the National Weather Center in Norman, Okla.

Meanwhile, Canada saw an unusual number of tornadoes in 2012; Saskatchewan had three times the normal number.

That year, the jet stream moved north and "essentially shut down" tornadoes in the American Midwest said Greg Carbin, warning meteorologist at the federal storm center. A tremendous drought meant far fewer storms, which not only shut off the spigot on rain but on storm cells that spawned tornadoes.

For much of America, tornadoes are seasonal. Typically, there are more during spring, and the numbers dwindle in the worst heat of the summer. Last year "essentially was an extended period of summertime conditions over the U.S.," Carbin said. "The real question is: What is spring now? Is it February?"

"Summer may be happening earlier and may be muscling out what we consider a transition between summer and winter," he said.

The last two seasons aren't alone in illustrating extremes in tornado activity.

Tornado record-keepers tally things like the most and least tornadoes in a month. Records for that category have been set 24 times over the past 60 years. Ten of those records have been set in the past decade — six for the fewest tornadoes and four for the most, Brooks said. Also, the three earliest starts of tornado season and the four latest have all occurred since 1997, he said.

What does that mean?

"We've had a dramatic increase in the variability of tornado occurrence," Brooks said.

The jet stream, a major player in tornado formation, has been in a state of flux, varying wildly in recent years, said Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann.

"It's hard to predict future tornado seasons when we don't understand current tornado seasons," Brooks said between sessions at the National Tornado Summit here earlier this week. "We're not sure what's going to happen with the tornado numbers."

A new study in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society looks at all sorts of extreme weather, how it is changing because of global warming and how things are predicted to change in the future. The study says tornadoes and the severe thunderstorms that spawn them are the hardest to predict.

Public opinion polls show Americans blame global warming for bad tornado outbreaks, but climate scientists say that's not quite right.

One reason scientists can't figure out how global warming might affect tornadoes is that twisters are usually small weather events that aren't easily simulated in large computer models. And records of tornadoes may not have been accurate over the years as twisters twirled unnoticed around unpopulated areas.

So Brooks and others are looking at the ingredients that cause tornadoes. But even that isn't simple. They look at two main factors: moist energy in the atmosphere and wind shear. Wind shear is the difference between wind at high altitudes and wind near the surface. The more moist energy and greater the wind shear, the better the chances for tornadoes.

The atmosphere can hold more moisture as it warms, and it will likely be more unstable so that means more moist energy, several experts said. But wind shear is another matter. Brooks and Stanford University scientist Noah Diffenbaugh think there will be less of that.

That would suggest fewer tornadoes. But if there's more moist energy, that could lead to more tornadoes. One ingredient has to win out, and Brooks says it's hard to tell which one will. Diffenbaugh says recent computer simulations show the moist energy may overcome the reduced shear and produce at least more severe thunderstorms, if not tornadoes.

Given what's happening lately, Brooks believes there will be fewer days of tornadoes but more twisters on the days when they occur.

___

Seth Borenstein can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears

___

Online:

The National Weather Center: http://nwcnorman.org/

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Climate scientists say warming could exceed 3.5 C

Climate researchers said Thursday the planet could warm by more than 3.5 degrees Celsius (6.3 degrees Fahrenheit), boosting the risk of drought, flood and rising seas.

The UN's target is a 2 C (3.6 degree Fahrenheit) limit on warming from pre-industrial levels for manageable climate change.

In a report issued on the penultimate day of new UN talks in Bonn, scientists said Earth's average global temperature rise could exceed the dangerous 3.5 C (6.3 F) warming they had flagged only six months ago.

Marion Vieweg, a policy researcher with German firm Climate Analytics, told AFP the 3.5 C (6.3 F) estimate had been based on the assumption that all countries will meet their pledges, in themselves inadequate, to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

New research has found this is not "a realistic assumption," she said, adding that right now "we can't quantify yet how much above" 3.5 C (6.3 F) Earth will warm.

The monitoring tool is called Climate Action Tracker (CAT), a joint project of Climate Analytics, Ecofys and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

Her colleague, Bill Hare, said the gap between countries' promised interventions and the reality was "getting bigger."

Projections are for greenhouse-gas overshoot of between nine and 11 billion tonnes per year beyond the annual 44-billion-tonne ceiling needed by 2020 to achieve the 2 C (3.6 F) target.

At the moment, the world emits about 48 billion tonnes of these gases, including CO2 and methane.

The United States accounts for six billion tonnes, China seven and the European Union (EU) five, the CAT said.

The 195 parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are meeting in the former German capital of Bonn for the first time since they agreed in Durban, South Africa, last December to forge a new global pact.

The accord would be completed by 2015 and take effect in 2020.

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How NASA Could Get Its Spaceflight Groove Back (SPACE.com)

NASA's better days can appear long past to the public. The U.S. space agency that once landed a man on the moon now wrestles with questions of existential crisis after retiring its space shuttle fleet this year. But it may still have enough leftover mojo to boldly set new goals to go where no man has gone before — if it can shake off its instinct to always look for guidance from the president and Congress.

A chance exists for NASA to declare a new vision for space exploration, said Jeff Leitner, founder and dean of Insight Labs. His nonprofit group wants to help the space agency control its destiny based on the authority of its "smartest, badass scientists" and spaceflight achievements, rather than acting as a political football for lawmakers while waiting for someone to decide its next mission.

"If they were in Silicon Valley, we'd be worshiping them," said Jeff Leitner, founder and dean of Insight Labs. "But they're NASA, so we're cutting their budget."

Removing the blinders

Part of the uncertainty problem surrounding space exploration is that "the public narrative around NASA seems broken," Leitner explained. Even as news reports glowed over fantastical visions of possible new technologies from the secretive Google X lab in November, NASA was carefully preparing to launch its nuclear-powered Curiosity rover — the size of a Mini Cooper — to explore the possibility of life on Mars.

The other part of the problem may come from NASA's blindness to its own "cool" factor. That realization came to Leitner during a 3-hour Friday-morning talk among NASA representatives and big thinkers from all walks of life at NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia on Nov. 18.

"We got there by having people in [the] room who are experts in science and technology say [to the NASA representatives], 'You know we're looking to you for that guidance on space exploration," and watch NASA be surprised by their own credibility," Leitner told InnovationNewsDaily.

NASA's blindness to its brand's coolness became more evident as the discussion wore on. Leitner and his Insight Lab colleagues posed a hypothetical to the NASA representatives: If they summoned Larry Page, Google cofounder, and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, to a meeting, would the Silicon Valley VIPs attend?

The NASA representatives said they didn't know. "Of course [they'd come], you're NASA!" Leitner and his colleagues responded.

Taking control

NASA's chance to take a new leadership role arises in a time when new countries and private spaceflight companies alike have begun crowding into an area once dominated by the United States and the former Soviet Union. That "fragmented environment" gives a chance for NASA to possibly become both architect and chief builder for space exploration.

"Somebody has to be the architect; NASA has earned that role," Leitner said. "We were in the building where Orville Wright had his office. If you're that guy, you get to declare the nation's priorities for flight."

By setting its own grand strategy, NASA could better hold a steady course despite new presidential administrations or changing budgets. That would buck the trend of allowing Congressionally-approved budgets to decide spaceflight missions and goals.

"NASA has an opportunity that they didn't know they had," Leitner explained."They currently judge their value in the world based on budgetary guidelines; that doesn't quite resonate with public perception or narrative."

One small step

Insight Labs organized its "Reclaiming Public Fascination" meeting with the goal of sparking a conversation among outside thinkers about changing NASA's public narrative and message. Such a target seemed more achievable in a 3-hour meeting than changing the mission of NASA or figuring out a new direction for technological breakthroughs.

But Insight Labs also aims to do much more than simply provide standard consulting advice to organizations for free. It aims to help tackle the big problems that keep the heads of government agencies and nonprofits up at night.

"A lot of people say, 'Here's how you can reorganize yourself to be more efficient,' but a lot of big-name organizations are solving the wrong problem," Leitner said. "We go way up the headwaters of the problem."

The Insight Labs founders have already begun more in-depth interviews with some of the thinkers who attended the meeting, and continue to talk with NASA about making slight changes to past assumptions to make the path forward easier. In one email, Leitner told a NASA contact that the space agency was still "planning for gravity in a zero-gee environment." Why not float free?

You can follow InnovationNewsDaily Senior Writer Jeremy Hsu on Twitter @ScienceHsu. Follow InnovationNewsDaily on Twitter @News_Innovation, or on Facebook.

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Could Natural Nuclear Reactors Have Boosted Life on This and Other Planets? (SPACE.com)

Clara Moskowitz, Astrobiology Magazine
Space.com Clara Moskowitz, Astrobiology Magazine
space.com – Fri Dec 2, 10:15 am ET

While modern-day humans use the most advanced engineering to build nuclear reactors, Nature sometimes makes them by accident.

Evidence for a cluster of natural nuclear reactors has been found on Earth, and some scientists say our planet may have had many more in its ancient past. There's also reason to think other planets might have had their own naturally occurring nuclear reactors, though evidence to confirm this is hazy. If they did exist, the large amounts of radiation and energy released by such reactors would have had complicated effects on any life developing on this or other worlds, experts say.

Natural nuclear reactors occur when deposits of the radioactive element uranium build up in one spot, and eventually ignite a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction where uranium divides, in a process called fission, producing other elements. The reaction releases a powerful punch of energy.

This energy could prove beneficial and highly detrimental to developing life, depending on the circumstances. [7 Theories on the Origin of Life]

Only example

The only known examples of natural nuclear reactors on Earth were discovered in the Oklo region of Gabon, Africa, in 1972. French miners discovered that the uranium samples they extracted were depleted in the rare isotope uranium 235, the only naturally occurring material on Earth capable of sustaining fission reactions. It was as if the material had already gone through a nuclear reaction and been used up.

In fact, that's the scenario most supported by studies. Scientists think a concentration of uranium 235 there went critical around 2 billion years ago and underwent fission, just as it does inside man-made nuclear reactors.

"As far as we know, we only have evidence of natural reactors forming and operating at the one site in Gabon, but that demonstrates that it's possible, and our calculations suggest it was much more probable earlier in Earth's history," said Jay Cullen of the University of Victoria in Canada.

Cullen and Laurence A. Coogan, a colleague at the University of Victoria, researched how likely these reactions were when Earth was much younger, based on how much uranium in a given area is necessary for the material to go critical and start a self-sustaining fission reaction. They found that during the Archean epoch, between around 2.5 billion and 4 billion years ago, natural nuclear reactors could have been relatively frequent.

"It certainly seems more than likely that these sorts of reactors would have been much more common in the Earth's early history because the amount [of uranium] you need is actually quite small," Cullen told Astrobiology Magazine.

However, because there is such a poor geologic record left from so long ago, scientists have very little way of confirming this idea.

The spark of life

If natural nuclear reactors were present on early Earth, they could have had interesting effects on any nascent life.

The ionizing radiation released by a nuclear reaction can damage DNA, the precious instruction code built into every cell of life. If organisms were living too close to the site of a reactor, they could have been wiped out completely. However, life hanging out on the outskirts of a nuclear reactor might have received a smaller dose of radiation — not enough to kill it, but enough to introduce mutations in its genetic code that could have boosted the diversity in the local population.

"The ionizing radiation would actually provide some genetic variation," Cullen said. “That’s the quantity that natural selection is going to act upon, and it might help to promote change in organisms with time. I think that most people view ionizing radiation as a bad thing, but that’s not always necessarily so."

Furthermore, the nuclear reactors themselves could have provided an even greater boon to life by giving it the spark it needed to originate in the first place, some scientists think. Zachary Adam, now a graduate student at Montana State University in Bozeman, suggested the possibility in a 2007 paper in the journal Astrobiology, which he wrote  as a graduate student at the University of Washington.

Scientists don't know for sure how life got started on Earth, but they think it required some kind of burst of energy to start it off. This energy would have been required to break the bonds of simple elements such as carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen, so that they could recombine to form the first complex organic molecules.

Other researchers have suggested that a strike of lightning might have provided the requisite energy, but Adam thinks that the energy released by a natural nuclear reactor might have provided the catalyst.

"I think it is at least as possible as other ideas, if not more plausible, but I realize everyone is partial to their own ideas," Adam said.

Life elsewhere?

If natural nuclear reactors might have helped life arise on this planet, it's also possible they've played a role in seeding life elsewhere.

So far, scientists' limited knowledge of the geology of extrasolar planets means they can't say how common natural nuclear reactors might be on other worlds. Adam said that some elements on early Earth that might have helped these reactors form don't seem to be as abundant on the surfaces of other planets.

For example, the moon's tidal forces on Earth, which used to be stronger than they are today due to the moon's closer proximity long ago, played a vital role in causing heavy minerals like uranium 235 to collect in dense patches on beaches, Adam said. The Earth had also differentiated into separate layers, including a crust and a mantle, which helped to separate out and concentrate the heavy radioactive elements.

These characteristics, especially crustal differentiation like that on Earth, don't seem to be as common among the other planets of the solar system, Adam said.

But not all experts are pessimistic about natural nuclear reactors on other worlds.

Plasma physicist John Brandenburg of Orbital Technologies Corp. analyzed results from NASA's Mars Odyssey Orbiter, which surveyed the surface of the Red Planet with various instruments, including a gamma-ray spectrometer. Brandenburg says the gamma-ray results show evidence of an abundance of radioactive uranium, thorium and potassium, especially in one particular spot on Mars, which he attributes to a major nuclear reaction taking place there around half a billion years ago.

"Basically it looked as though Mars was covered with a thick layer of radioactive substances, and also the atmosphere was full of radiogenic products," Brandenburg said. "It's kind of a no-brainer at that point. There appears to have been a large radiological event on Mars and it appears to have been violent."

If such a huge nuclear event did occur, it would have been disastrous for any budding Martian life.

"It would have been a terrible catastrophe," Brandenburg said. "Whatever biosphere was on Mars at the time probably suffered a massive extinction event, and it really set back life on Mars."

However, many Mars geologists have greeted Brandenburg's proposal with skepticism.

"This hypothesis is not likely to be true," the University of Arizona's William Boynton, principal investigator for Mars Odyssey's gamma-ray spectrometer, wrote in an email. "Yes, we did find both thorium and uranium, and they are natural elements found everywhere. The amount varies, but the explanations are very mundane."

Boynton said he doubts that natural nuclear reactors like the ones in Gabon are common elsewhere.

"The natural reactor in Africa is real, but the reason it was of so much interest is that it is so rare," Boynton said. "I would say it is all but impossible that any natural reactor has happened anywhere else in the solar system. It may be it has only happened once on Earth!"

This story was provided by Astrobiology Magazine, a web-based publication sponsored by the NASA astrobiology program.

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Space Washing Machine Could Blast Laundry with Microwaves (SPACE.com)

Jeremy Hsu, InnovationNewsDaily Senior Writer
Space.com Jeremy Hsu, Innovationnewsdaily Senior Writer
space.com – Fri Dec 2, 10:15 am ET

Imagine putting dirty clothes into a washing machine, leaving, and only coming back once the freshly cleaned clothes have been dried out by microwaves. That out-of-this-world-laundry concept could someday become a reality for astronauts and space explorers headed for the moon, asteroids or Mars.

Such a washing machine is designed to clean dirty astronaut clothing inside a sealed plastic bag that can also receive a drying blast of microwaves. The simple one-step process represents an energy- and water-efficient solution that spares space travelers from hauling a water-intensive washing machine up into space or bringing along disposable clothing.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station can get by with specially engineered, stink-free underwear and steady resupply missions launched from Earth. But longer-lasting missions beyond the moon won't have such luxuries.

"On a long-duration mission to Mars you won't have resupply — you either have to fly naked or have a washing machine," said William Michalek, project manager at the UMPQUA Research Company. "I haven't heard of them flying naked, and I don't think that's really an option."

NASA recently chose UMPQUA's washing-machine concept as part of its selection of Small Business Innovative Research proposals eligible to receive up to $125,000 in early funding.

An earlier version of UMPQUA's machine avoids making the foamy mixture of detergent, water and air — something that would be troublesome to handle in the seemingly weightless space environment. The company also faced the challenge of washing clothes without the tumbling or back-and-forth action of typical washing machines that require Earth's gravity to work.

"We developed a system of water jets inside a plastic bag with clothes and water and no air," Michalek told InnovationNewsDaily. "The jets would bend the clothes back and forth to work the soap solution through all the fibers."

The water only enters the plastic bag through connected tubes after all the air has been sucked out first. Once cleaning is done, the clothes stay in the bag within a larger chamber as a microwave generator irradiates them — similar to heating up a microwave meal inside a Tupperware container.

Finally, a tumble cycle uses air jets to make any space laundry extra soft. The design conveniently saves astronauts time they might normally spend switching wet clothes from a washer to a separate dryer.

UMPQUA plans to make a more energy- and water-efficient version of its device with the new NASA funding. It also wants to vaporize some of the water with outside vacuum pressure on the bag in order to temporarily free up more room inside the bag during the cleaning process — a concept it must prove within the next six months.

The company originally worked with Westinghouse, a home-appliances manufacturer, on the microwave-drying concept. That could still find its way into commercial washing machines on Earth, Michalek said.

But Westinghouse didn't like the idea of a combined washing and drying machine because it doesn't allow people to simultaneously wash and dry big loads of laundry quickly, even if it might be more time-efficient for astronauts' purposes.

So when might people on Earth see a water-efficient washing machine that combines both cleaning and drying?

"When we get to the point where we're wearing dirty clothes because we don't have enough water to wash them," Michalek said.

This story was provided by InnovationNewsDaily, sister site to SPACE.com. You can follow InnovationNewsDaily Senior Writer Jeremy Hsu on Twitter @ScienceHsu. Follow InnovationNewsDaily on Twitter @News_Innovation, or on Facebook.

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Stormy sun could knock out power grids: report

By Ethan Bilby

LONDON | Fri Dec 2, 2011 12:40pm EST

LONDON (Reuters) - An upcoming cycle of stormy solar activity risks causing damage to electrical transformers and threatening vulnerable energy infrastructure around the globe, a report by an insurance group says.

The sun follows a predictable 11 year activity cycle, with the next period of stormy activity expected to begin in 2012-13.

The report by German insurance group Allianz said a high impact solar storm, not easily predicted due to its recorded rarity, could cause blackouts and economic losses of over $1 trillion and that the worst case scenario would be even worse.

"What we're coming into at the moment is the bad (space)weather period," Jim Wild of Britain's Lancaster University, an expert in solar plasma physics, told Reuters.

A large explosion on the surface of the sun could release billions of tones of superheated magnetically charged gas at a speed of a million miles per hour, and when that gas hits the earth's magnetic field, it can trigger a big solar storm.

The severity of a potential disruption has made experts at insurance and national security institutions take notice.

"When you start to imagine not having electricity in a sizeable fraction of a country or a continent for weeks or even months ... it's serious business," Wild said.

SMALL LEAD TIME

The difficulty lies in predicting how often serious solar type events occur.

The small lead time given by satellites is also a problem for preventing solar storm damage, as currently no satellite is close enough to the sun to give more than an hour's warning, Wild said.

Updating the satellites to give the earth more preparation time would cost around $1 billion, he added.

Space weather is a relatively new area of study, with sophisticated observations going back only 50 years and lacking an international coordinated tracking system such as that found with normal meteorological weather.

"We have very little on a solar time scale," Wild said.

The most damaging storm in recent memory was a 1989 outage in Quebec, Canada, which affected six million people.

The first scientific recording of a large solar storm was made in 1859 by English astronomer Richard Carrington, who observed a white light explosion on the surface of the sun.

Wild said: "what they didn't know back then was why about two or three days later you could see the northern lights over Cuba and all of the telegraph system was disrupted by geomagnetic activity."

According to the Allianz report, an event on the same scale today would cause extensive damage to electrical infrastructure.

(Editing by Henning Gloystein and James Jukwey)

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Thunder on Saturn Moon Could Shed Light on Lightning (SPACE.com)

Nola Taylor Redd, SPACE.com Contributor
Space.com Nola Taylor Redd, Space.com Contributor
space.com – Tue Jun 7, 10:14 am ET

Future missions to the Saturn moon Titan may look for lightning in a novel way — by searching for its rumbling companion, thunder.

Detecting thunder on the frigid, distant moon won't be as simple as pointing a microphone and reading the signal. Sound waves are shaped and altered by the material they travel through, and Titan's air is much different than Earth's.

To help identify any possible signals, two teams of scientists modeled what the sound wave for a thunderclap would look like where lightning touches down on Titan, and how it would shift after traveling through the moon's atmosphere. [Photos: The Rings and Moons of Saturn]

Different atmospheres make (different) waves

Nitrogen dominates the frosty air of Titan, the only moon in the solar system known to have a significant atmosphere. Methane clouds cross the planet, periodically raining liquid hydrocarbons onto the surface.

Many scientists hope that such storms bring with them lightning. The electrical discharge creates pockets of high temperatures that could allow the creation of complicated molecules. These, in turn, could have implications for the possibility of life on the moon.

The characteristics that make Titan's atmosphere so different from Earth also make it, from an acoustical standpoint, better.

"Sound carries farther on Titan than on Earth, or even Mars or Venus," Andri Petculescu, who worked on both of the recent studies, told SPACE.com.

Because of this, a detector could hear thunder rumble from relatively far away. But it would have to be created specifically for Titan.

"You can't bring any microphone off the shelf, designed for Earth, and assume it would work on Titan without modifications," Petculescu said. "Future missions would have microphones tailored for Titan's conditions."

Researchers would also have to keep in mind that lightning isn't the only possible source of loud noises on Titan. Petculescu pointed out that a meteorite hitting the surface or detonating in the air would boom loudly, much like thunder. The need to identify the distinguishing features of thunder is critical.

The two studies are part of a larger project to determine how thunder sounds on Titan, and to develop an accurate soundscape for the moon. Scientific documentaries, planetarium shows and even science fiction movies could utilize such a tool to accurately replicate the sounds heard by an astronaut standing on the surface of Titan, or various other planetary environments.

Petculescu described the various noises that could conceivably be heard on Titan, from the cascading of a methane creek to the rumble of thunder in the distance.

Scientists presented the two related projects at the May meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Seattle..

Exploring Titan

Much of what scientists know about Titan comes from NASA's Cassini satellite, which studies the moon as part of its path around Saturn. In 2005, the Huygens probe, released from Cassini, took 2 1/2 hours to pass through the atmosphere and touch down on the surface of Titan.

The instruments on board Huygens were designed to study the surrounding atmosphere. The data was relayed from the probe to Cassini and back to Earth.

Because scientists knew about the potential for clouds — and thus lightning — Huygens was built with the idea that it might, in fact, be struck on the way in.

Neither Huygens nor Cassini (which is still sending information back to Earth) has detected lightning. However, NASA is presently exploring the possibility of another trip to the moon. The Titan Mare Explorer (TiME) is one of three missions considered for launch in 2016. If selected, it will attempt to land in and float on one of the large methane seas on the surface of Titan.

Unfortunately, the current proposal for TiME does not plan to include the equipment necessary to search for thunder. Studying the storms around the seas, however, will help scientists to understand more about how the weather cycle affects the moon.

The selection process will continue over the upcoming months, as teams continue to demonstrate progress.

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