Microscopic worms may hold key to living on Mars

NASA?s Phoenix Mars Lander?s solar panel and the lander?s Robotic Arm with a sample in the scoop are seen in this image taken June 10, 2008 by the lander's Surface Stereo Imager.

Credit: Reuters/NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Handout

LONDON | Wed Nov 30, 2011 8:08am EST

LONDON (Reuters) - British scientists believe microscopic worms which are biologically very similar to humans may be the key to helping humans colonize other planets like Mars by giving clues on coping with long-term space living.

A team of scientists led by Nathaniel Szewczyk from Notthingham University blasted 4,000 of the worms, known as known as Caenorhabditis elegans, or C. elegans, into space on board the Space Shuttle Discovery, and studied their progress.

Many experts -- including astrophysicist Stephen Hawking -- believe the ultimate survival of humanity could be dependent on the human colonization of other planets.

"While this sounds like science fiction, it is a fact that if mankind wants to avoid the natural order of extinction then we need to find ways to live on other planets," Szewczyk said in a statement about his research.

But there are some major challenges associated with long-term space living -- including high levels of radiation exposure and rapid loss of bone strength.

In a study published in Interface, a journal of The Royal Society, Szewczyk's team found that in space, their worms developed from egg to adulthood and produced offspring just as they do on earth.

This makes them an ideal and cost-effective experimental way to study the possible effects of long-term and long-distance space exploration in humans, they said.

The researchers were able to successfully monitor the effect of low Earth orbit (LEO) on 12 generations of C. elegans during the first three months of a six month voyage on the International Space Station.

"While it may seem surprising, many of the biological changes that happen during spaceflight affect astronauts and worms and in the same way," Szewczyk said.

"We have been able to show that worms can grow and reproduce in space for long enough to reach another planet and that we can remotely monitor their health."

C. elegans was the first multi-cellular organism to have its genetic structure completely mapped, and many of its 20,000 genes have the same functions as those in humans, Szewczyk's team explained in their study.

Around two thousand of these genes play a role in promoting muscle function and 50 to 60 percent of these have obvious human counterparts, they said.

The C. elegans worm has long been used by scientists to help further the understanding of human biology, so now Szewczyk thinks it could help researchers investigate living on Mars.

Szewczyk's team worked with experts at the Universities of Pittsburgh and Colorado in the United States and the Simon Fraser University in Canada, to develop a compact automated C. elegans culturing system which could be monitored remotely for the effects of environmental toxins and in-flight radiation.

"Worms allow us to detect changes in growth, development, reproduction and behavior in response to environmental conditions such as toxins or in response to deep space missions," Szewczyk said.

"Given the high failure rate of Mars missions, use of worms allows us to safely and relatively cheaply test spacecraft systems prior to manned missions."

(Reporting by Kate Kelland, editing by Paul Casciato)

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NASA rover launched to seek out life clues on Mars

An artist's concept of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover.

Credit: Reuters/NASA/JPL-Caltech

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Tue Nov 29, 2011 3:51pm EST

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - An unmanned Atlas 5 rocket blasted off from Florida on Saturday, launching a $2.5 billion nuclear-powered NASA rover toward Mars to look for clues on what could sustain life on the Red Planet.

The 20-story-tall booster built by United Launch Alliance lifted off from its seaside launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 10:02 a.m. EST (3:02 p.m. GMT).

It soared through partly cloudy skies into space, carrying NASA's Mars Science Laboratory on a 354-million mile (556 million km), nearly nine-month journey to the planet.

"I think this mission is an important next step in NASA's overall goal to address the issue of life in the universe," lead scientist John Grotzinger, with the California Institute of Technology, told reporters shortly after the launch.

The car-sized rover, nicknamed Curiosity, is expected to touch down on August 6, 2012, to begin two years of detailed analysis of a 96-mile (154-km) wide impact basin near the Martian equator called Gale Crater.

The goal is to determine if Mars has or ever had environments to support life. It is the first astrobiology mission to Mars since the 1970s-era Viking probes.

Scientists chose the landing site because it has a three-mile-high (4.8-km high) mountain of what appears from orbital imagery and mineral analysis to be layers of rock piled up like the Grand Canyon, each layer testifying to a different period in Mars' history.

The rover has 17 cameras and 10 science instruments, including chemistry labs, to identify elements in soil and rock samples to be dug up by the probe's drill-tipped robotic arm.

'LONG SHOT'

The base of the crater's mountain has clays, evidence of a prolonged wet environment, and what appears to be minerals such as sulfates that likely were deposited as water evaporated.

Water is considered to be a key element for life, but not the only one.

Previous Mars probes, including the rovers Spirit and Opportunity, searched for signs of past surface water.

"We are not a life-detection mission," Grotzinger said. "We have no ability to detect life present on the surface of Mars. It's an intermediate mission between the search for water and future missions, which may undertake life detection."

With Curiosity, which is twice as long and three times heavier than its predecessors, NASA shifts its focus to look for other ingredients for life, including possibly organic carbon, the building block for life on Earth.

"It's a long shot, but we're going to try," Grotzinger said.

Launch is generally considered the riskiest part of a mission, but Curiosity's landing on Mars will not be without drama.

The 1,980-pound (898 kg) rover is too big for the airbag or thruster-rocket landings used on previous Mars probes, so engineers designed a rocket-powered "sky-crane" to gently lower Curiosity to the crater floor via a 43-foot (13-meter) cable.

"We call it the 'six-minutes of terror,'" said Doug McCuistion, director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, referring to the landing. "It is pretty scary, but my confidence level is really high."

Curiosity is powered by heat from the radioactive decay of plutonium. It is designed to last one Martian year, or 687 Earth days.

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Gender inequality persists in multitasking: study

A woman pushes her pram towards an ice cream vendor on Portstewart Strand beach, Northern Ireland, May 10, 2009.

Credit: Reuters/Cathal McNaughton

By Patricia Reaney

NEW YORK | Fri Dec 2, 2011 8:07am EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Men may be helping more in the home but working women still do more multitasking in U.S. families than their partners and are finding it stressful, according to a new study.

Whether it is housework, cooking or childcare, women do about 10 hours more multitasking in the home each week -- 48.3 hours compared to 38.9 -- which researchers say constitutes an important source of gender inequality.

"When you look at men and women in similar kinds of work situations they look very similar," Barbara Schneider, a professor of sociology at Michigan State University and a co-author of the study, said in an interview.

"But when they come home it is very clear that women are shouldering much more of the responsibilities of housework and childcare."

Schneider and Shira Offer, an assistant professor at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, used data from the 500 Family Study, which looked at how families in eight U.S. urban and suburban communities balance work and family life.

Their research, which is published in the American Sociological Review journal, is based on responses from a subset of 368 mothers and 241 fathers in dual-income families, which they said reflects the most time-pressured segment of the population.

"This (the findings) suggests that working mothers are doing two activities at once more than two-fifths of the time they are awake, while working fathers are multitasking more than a third of their waking hours," Schneider said.

In addition to doing more, the jobs women perform at the same time in the home are more labor intensive, such as housework and childcare, than what men tackle.

The study showed that 52.7 percent of all multitasking for working mothers involved housework, compared to 42.2 percent for fathers, and 35.5 percent was taken up with childcare, as opposed to 27.9 percent for men.

"Fathers, by contrast, tend to engage in other types of activities when they multitask at home, such as talking to a third person or engaging in self-care. These are less burdensome experiences," Schneider explained.

The researchers said the study showed multitasking is also more stressful for women. Only women reported negative emotions when they multitasked at home or in public, while men found it a positive experience.

"We should not be under any false assumptions that things have dramatically changed," said Schneider when asked about the role of women at home and at work.

"I think there are still many issues, both in the workplace and certainly in the home, that suggest there are and continue to be gender inequalities."

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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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Apollo 13 notebook fetches $388,375 at auction

By Marice Richter

DALLAS | Wed Nov 30, 2011 7:25pm EST

DALLAS (Reuters) - Shortly after Apollo 13 astronauts reported, "Houston, we have had a problem," Commander James Lovell jotted down handwritten calculations in hopes of guiding his crew safely home.

The notebook with those calculations from the aborted 1970 NASA mission to the moon fetched $388,375 at auction on Wednesday in Dallas when it was sold to an American collector who was not identified.

The notebook, the main attraction of a space memorabilia auction, was part of retired NASA commander Lovell's personal collection of artifacts. Lovell, 83, said he had forgotten about the notebook until recently.

"I was cleaning out some old stuff on a bookcase and found it," said Lovell, who now has homes in Horseshoe Bay, Texas, and the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest. "My kids took all they wanted and I donated a lot of my collection to museums."

"I decided to put this up for auction so that someone who is really interested in this piece of history can enjoy it," he told Reuters.

People around the world watched as Lovell and astronauts Jack Swigert and Fred Haise aborted their mission to the moon and maneuvered quickly in space to survive after encountering a critical operating problem aboard the spacecraft's command module. They had to shift to the lunar module to return home.

Lovell's calculations in the notebook were critical to identifying the crew's position in space.

"We didn't have the technology back then that we have now," Lovell said. "I didn't even have a calculator to do the arithmetic. I had to ask the people in Houston to double-check my numbers."

If the calculations had not been correct, the result could have been different, said Michael Riley, a senior historian at Heritage Auctions.

"That's why this is a very, very important piece of space memorabilia and American history," Riley said.

The drama of that moment in history was captured in Ron Howard's 1995 film "Apollo 13," starring Tom Hanks as Lovell.

Also sold at auction on Wednesday was an American flag from the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, which was bought for $33,460. The overall training jacket with tags and patches worn by retired astronaut John Young sold for $17,925.

(Editing by Corrie MacLaggan and Cynthia Johnston)

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Medvedev suggests prosecution for Russia space failure

Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev speaks to a group of Russian regional journalists in the Gorki residence outside Moscow, November 26, 2011.

Credit: Reuters/Mikhail Klimentyev/Ria Novosti/Kremlin (

MOSCOW | Sat Nov 26, 2011 10:19am EST

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev raised the prospect of criminal prosecution for space mishaps on Saturday following a series of failed launches that have embarrassed Russia.

Earlier this month, a probe designed to bring back soil samples from the Mars moon Phobos got stuck in Earth's orbit, leaving Russia's first interplanetary mission in years with almost no chance of success.

The probe failure came less than three months after a cargo ship carrying food and fuel to the International Space Station burned up in the atmosphere shortly after launch.

"Recent failures are a strong blow to our competitiveness. It does not mean that something fatal has happened, it means that we need to carry out a detailed review and punish those guilty," Medvedev told reporters in televised comments.

"I am not suggesting putting them up against the wall like under Josef Vissarionovich (Stalin), but seriously punish either financially or, if the fault is obvious, it could be a disciplinary or even criminal punishment," he said.

Medvedev has recently made similar calls for strict punishment after disasters blamed on carelessness, corruption and problems with Russia's rusty infrastructure, such as a riverboat sinking in July that killed 122.

(Reporting by Maria Kiselyova; Editing by Steve Gutterman and Sophie Hares)

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Elan to create research centre with Cambridge University

DUBLIN | Sun Nov 27, 2011 4:14am EST

DUBLIN (Reuters) - Elan Corp Plc has signed an agreement with Britain's Cambridge University to create a research center focused on therapies for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, the Dublin-headquartered biotech group said on Sunday.

Elan, whose main research facility is in San Francisco, will spend $10 million over the next five years on the research center and has an option to extend the deal for another five years.

Researchers from Cambridge and Elan want to discover ways of altering the behavior of proteins that can spread neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

"This agreement is a natural next step in the existing working relationship between our scientists in South San Francisco and scientists at the University of Cambridge," Dale Schenk, chief scientific officer at Elan, said in a statement.

"This collaborative effort complements our portfolio of programmes in neuroscience and supports the process of discovery which we believe may lead to a class of therapeutics that no one has thought possible before."

(Reporting by Carmel Crimmins; Editing by David Holmes)

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