New Mars rover arrives at Florida launch site

Technicians check the wiring of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover 'Curiosity', where it is undergoing pre-flight tests, in the 'clean room' of the spacecraft assembly facility at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California September 16, 2010.

Credit: Reuters/Fred Prouser

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Thu Jun 23, 2011 5:52pm EDT

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory, a nuclear-powered, car-sized rover designed to assess the planet's suitability for life, reached the Kennedy Space Center for launch preparations, officials said on Thursday.

Aboard the Air Force cargo plane with the rover, named Curiosity, was the complicated landing system it will use for a pinpoint touchdown on Mars in August 2012.

Curiosity is about four times bigger and has many more science instruments than NASA's last Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, which reached the Red Planet in 2004 for what were expected to be three-month missions.

Seven years later, Spirit is no longer working, but Opportunity remains operational. Those rovers were dispatched to look for signs of past water on Mars.

The new rover's bigger size and more robust science capabilities are intended to answer a thornier riddle: Does the Red Planet have, or has it ever had, the right conditions for microbial life to arise?

The rover is designed to spend at least one Martian year -- the equivalent of almost two Earth years -- surveying the selected region to assess habitability.

Problems developing the "sky crane" descent system forced NASA to miss its original launch opportunity in 2009 and added $800 million to the project.

"The design and building part of the mission is nearly behind us now," David Gruel, manager of Mars Science Lab's assembly, test and launch operations at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.

The agency's inspector general warned earlier this month that NASA was in danger of missing this year's launch opportunity as well, a period that opens November 25 and runs through December 18 when Earth and Mars are favorably aligned for interplanetary transport.

But NASA said it had resolved issues by the June 8 report and is in good shape for meeting the opening of the probe's launch window.

NASA is in the midst of a final assessment of four potential landing sites.

(Editing by Tom Brown and Sandra Maler)

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Researchers take dinosaurs' temperature with teeth

A Camarasaurus tooth from the Jurassic Morrison Formation of North America, in a photo courtesy of Caltech.

Credit: Reuters/Lance Hayashida/Caltech

By Steve Gorman

LOS ANGELES | Fri Jun 24, 2011 9:28am EDT

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Scientists in California say they have for the first time devised a way to accurately take the body temperatures of dinosaurs -- by examining the creatures' teeth.

Chemical analysis of the Jurassic period fossil teeth from two sauropods -- long-tailed, long-necked dinosaurs that rank among the largest land animals ever to roam the Earth -- showed they were about as warm as most modern mammals.

But they also were cooler than some experts had predicted for animals of such gigantic size.

The findings from a team led by researchers at the California Institute of Technology were published Thursday in an online edition of the journal Science.

"This is like being able to stick a thermometer in an animal that has been extinct for 150 million years," said Robert Eagle, an evolutionary biologist and post-doctoral scholar at Caltech who was lead author of the report.

The study supports a growing body of research suggesting dinosaurs were more active and energetic than scientists originally believed.

But it leaves unanswered the key question of whether dinosaurs were cold-blooded, relying on their environments for heat, or warm-blooded, with self-regulated metabolism like modern mammals and their evolutionary descendants, birds.

Eagle said that determination will have to come with further analysis of a much greater range of dinosaur species.

The two dinosaurs initially selected for study -- Brachiosauraus brancai and camarasaurus -- were close cousins of the massive plant-eating dinosaur known as brontosaurus.

The temperature of brachiosaurus was measured at 38.2 degrees Celsius, or 100.8 degrees Fahrenheit. Camarasaurus registered a temperature of 35.7 degrees C, or 96.3 degrees F. Researchers say those figures are accurate to within 2 degrees Celsius.

WARMER THAN CROCS, COOLER THAN BIRDS

While equivalent to the temperature of most modern mammals, that range is warmer than modern and extinct crocodiles and alligators but cooler than birds.

Still, because of their sheer enormous size, sauropod dinosaurs would be expected to retain their body heat more efficiently than smaller warm-blooded animals, like humans, even if dinosaurs themselves were cold-blooded, Eagle said.

To explain this, researchers suggested the dinosaurs may have had some physiological or behavioral adaptation that allowed them to avoid getting too hot. One possibility is they dissipated excess heat through their long necks and tails.

In any case, scientists will learn more as they apply their new technique to other species, such as meat-eating predators like Tyrannosaurus rex or velociraptors, which were smaller and probably faster on their feet, Eagle said.

Researchers previously had to gauge dinosaur body temperatures indirectly, inferring energy needs and metabolism from the spacing of fossil footprints that indicated how fast they ran, or the presumed ratio of predators to prey in the fossil record.

Eagle's more direct technique was adapted from geological research perfected by other Caltech scientists, he said. It examines concentrations of rare carbon and oxygen isotopes in a mineral found in tooth enamel and bone.

Researchers based their study on an examination of 11 fossil teeth unearthed in Tanzania, Wyoming and Oklahoma and donated by museums.

Eagle said his team started with sauropods because their plant-munching teeth were bigger and contained more enamel to work with. Sauropod teeth are also easier to come by in the fossil world, in part because museums and collectors are less willing to part with the teeth of dynamic predator species like T. rex, he said.

(Editing by Jerry Norton)

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Ocean life on the brink of mass extinctions: study

A scuba diver swims near a school of swirling jacks on the Indonesian resort island of Bali, May 14, 2011.

Credit: Reuters/David Loh

OSLO | Tue Jun 21, 2011 1:41pm EDT

OSLO (Reuters) - Life in the oceans is at imminent risk of the worst spate of extinctions in millions of years due to threats such as climate change and over-fishing, a study showed on Tuesday.

Time was running short to counter hazards such as a collapse of coral reefs or a spread of low-oxygen "dead zones," according to the study led by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO).

"We now face losing marine species and entire marine ecosystems, such as coral reefs, within a single generation," according to the study by 27 experts to be presented to the United Nations.

"Unless action is taken now, the consequences of our activities are at a high risk of causing, through the combined effects of climate change, over-exploitation, pollution and habitat loss, the next globally significant extinction event in the ocean," it said.

Scientists list five mass extinctions over 600 million years -- most recently when the dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago, apparently after an asteroid struck. Among others, the Permian period abruptly ended 250 million years ago.

"The findings are shocking," Alex Rogers, scientific director of IPSO, wrote of the conclusions from a 2011 workshop of ocean experts staged by IPSO and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) at Oxford University.

Fish are the main source of protein for a fifth of the world's population and the seas cycle oxygen and help absorb carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from human activities.

OXYGEN

Jelle Bijma, of the Alfred Wegener Institute, said the seas faced a "deadly trio" of threats of higher temperatures, acidification and lack of oxygen, known as anoxia, that had featured in several past mass extinctions.

A build-up of carbon dioxide, blamed by the U.N. panel of climate scientists on human use of fossil fuels, is heating the planet. Absorbed into the oceans, it causes acidification, while run-off of fertilizers and pollution stokes anoxia.

"From a geological point of view, mass extinctions happen overnight, but on human timescales we may not realize that we are in the middle of such an event," Bijma wrote.

The study said that over-fishing is the easiest for governments to reverse -- countering global warming means a shift from fossil fuels, for instance, toward cleaner energies such as wind and solar power.

"Unlike climate change, it can be directly, immediately and effectively tackled by policy change," said William Cheung of the University of East Anglia.

"Over-fishing is now estimated to account for over 60 percent of the known local and global extinction of marine fishes," he wrote.

Among examples of over-fishing are the Chinese bahaba that can grow 2 meters long. Prices per kilo (2.2 lbs) for its swim bladder -- meant to have medicinal properties -- have risen from a few dollars in the 1930s to $20,000-$70,000.

(Editing by Jan Harvey)

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Analysis: Scientists getting closer to artificial pancreas

French surgeon performs an operation to fit a prosthesis onto a pancreas tumour to facilitate circulation in the biliary tract on a patient in an operating room at the Ambroise Pare hospital in Marseille, southern France March 25, 2008.

Credit: Reuters/Jean-Paul Pelissier

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO | Fri Jun 24, 2011 5:05pm EDT

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Researchers are coming closer to developing an "artificial pancreas," a long-sought system of insulin pumps and glucose sensors that deliver insulin to diabetics, mimicking the function of a real pancreas.

The devices have been in development for more than three decades, but lawmakers and diabetes advocates are ramping up the pressure and U.S. regulators this week outlined a regulatory path for a preliminary version of the device.

And while a seamless device that tracks a diabetic's blood sugar and automatically administers the right dose of insulin is still years away from commercial use, results of several studies being presented this week at the American Diabetes Association meeting in San Diego show real promise.

In one, researchers from Boston University and Massachusetts General Hospital tested a system using Abbott Laboratories' FreeStyle Navigator continuous glucose monitor and two insulin pumps made by Insulet Corp, all controlled by a laptop.

The system, which is designed to better mimic the body's natural mechanism of controlling both high and low blood sugar, was portable enough to allow adults with type 1 diabetes to roam around a hospital and use an exercise bike.

At the end of the 51-hour study, which involved daily exercise, two nights and six meals -- all of which affect a diabetic's blood sugar levels -- six patients had an average blood glucose in the normal range -- in the high 140s, which is about the equivalent of an A1c reading of about 7.

"It is very good. This is what we would call near normal blood glucose," said Dr. Steven Russell of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston who is developing the system with Edward Damiano, a biomedical engineer at Boston University.

In another study, a team at Mayo Clinic hooked patients up with devices called accelerometers that tracked movements and found that even moderate exercise plays a role in glucose. The team, led by Yogish Kudva, will incorporate this data into a sophisticated software program that acts as the "brain" of an artificial pancreas system, analyzing blood sugar and calculating when diabetics need a dose of insulin.

The team plans to start a clinical trial with the system this year or early next year, Kudva says.

CLOSING THE LOOP

So-called closed-loop systems -- in which a computer calculates a person's insulin dose and delivers insulin automatically through an insulin pump -- are a far cry from the earliest version of an artificial pancreas developed in the late 1970s, says Dr. Aaron Kowalski of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation or JDRF.

"The problem is it was the size of a refrigerator," said Kowalski, who oversees the group's Artificial Pancreas Project, a multimillion-dollar initiative aimed at accelerating progress toward a closed-loop automated insulin-delivery system .

With that device, patients were hooked up to an IV and could not leave their hospital bed.

Researchers have since been working to develop a so-called artificial pancreas to deliver insulin to patients with type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease in which the body destroys its own ability to make insulin, rendering sufferers unable to properly break down sugar.

People with the condition must frequently monitor and take insulin to regulate blood sugar and prevent diabetic complications such as eye damage, kidney failure and heart disease.

An estimated 3 million Americans have type 1 diabetes, usually diagnosed in childhood or in young adults.

The JDRF is working with Johnson & Johnson's Animas unit, which makes insulin pumps, and DexCom Inc, which makes continuous glucose monitoring devices.

Kowalski said nearly five years into the project, researchers are showing promising results, but he is frustrated with the pace of progress.

"People need better tools. Despite insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors, there are still big challenges in diabetes management," Kowalski said.

The group on Wednesday urged a Senate hearing to call on the FDA to stop delaying the study and approval of an artificial pancreas.

They cited a study published in the British Medical Journal that found that if an artificial pancreas were available, Medicare would save nearly $2 billion over 25 years in costs related to diabetes complications.

The group is pushing to move beyond studies in academic settings and begin studies of the devices outside of the hospital setting.

"It's great that we can do this in academic centers, and we're learning a ton, but we need to get these projects to reach people with diabetes," he said.

"We need to see these products commercialized. That is the big challenge, and that is why we are working with the FDA."

FDA WANTS APPROVAL, TOO

Charles "Chip" Zimliki, chairman of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Artificial Pancreas Critical Path Initiative, which was created in 2006 to accelerate the availability of an artificial pancreas system, says he is eager to have a system approved.

"The FDA wants the artificial pancreas on the market as much as anyone else does. We just have to operate within U.S. laws to make sure it is safe and effective," Zimliki said.

Last week, the agency released guidance for how to develop a low glucose suspend system, an automatic shut-off mechanism used with an insulin pump. Medtronic already sells pumps with this the feature in Europe. It safeguards against a dangerous drop in glucose levels by temporarily halting glucose delivery.

By year-end, FDA plans to release detailed guidance on more complicated closed-loop systems, Zimliki said.

"We think of this system, the artificial pancreas, as one unit. There is going to have to be agreement among various companies to determine who is the reporting party for submitting it," he said.

"That is a relatively new idea with respect to these systems."

Zimliki, who is a type 1 diabetic, thinks the first approved devices will be ones that deliver insulin only, but he is very encouraged by the system being developed by the team at Boston University and Massachusetts General.

"They have what I call the Cadillac of closed-loop systems," he said. In addition to delivering insulin, the device also delivers an infusion of glucagon, a hormone released by the pancreas to raise blood sugar levels.

"They are showing some very promising results," he said.

(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen, editing by Matthew Lewis)

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US lawmakers press Taiwan on Falungong-linked TV (AFP)

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US lawmakers called on Taiwan to ensure broadcasts of a Falungong-linked television network as the spiritual movement feared that a satellite contract would end due to pressure from China.

New Tang Dynasty television makes its way onto some mainland Chinese televisions through a commercial satellite operated by Chunghwa Telecom, in which Taiwan's government is the largest stakeholder. The contract runs out in August and the company has said it would not renew it.

In letters this week to Taipei authorities, several members of the US House of Representatives known for sympathy to Taiwan voiced concern that political considerations may have been part of the decision.

"As a supporter of a robust bilateral relationship between our two governments, I am concerned that Chunghwa Telecom's decision could reflect poorly on the government of Taiwan," wrote Representative Shelley Berkley, a member of President Barack Obama's Democratic Party from Nevada.

Representative Gerry Connolly, a Democrat from Virginia, urged a "speedy resolution" of the issue and said that due to the government stake in Chunghwa, "any decision made by the satellite company could be perceived as official (Taiwan) policy."

Chunghwa has said that there was insufficient bandwidth on the new satellite it launched with Singapore Telecommunications and that it had offered to help New Tang Dynasty to find a new satellite.

"We've been trying to solve the issue. But apparently our efforts have not been accepted as the matter has been politicized," spokeswoman Chen Hui-yen said earlier in Taipei.

Media rights group Reporters Without Borders has cast doubt on the explanation. New Tang Dynasty focuses on news and cultural programming often unavailable in communist China, which strictly controls the media.

Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou has dramatically improved relations with China, which claims the island. The Taipei government was founded in 1949 by nationalists defeated in the mainland's civil war.

Samuel Zhou, executive vice president of New Tang Dynasty, said that the network wanted to stay with Chunghwa as the Taiwanese government stake ensured more protection than purely commercial satellites, which could face intense pressure.

Zhou, who recently visited Taiwan for talks on the dispute, said that the island had a special role to play as a democracy in the Chinese world.

"It's good to have economic development. There is nothing to blame. But still the Taiwanese government should not yield and take a step back on democracy," Zhou, who is based in New York, told AFP.

Falungong's Buddhist-inspired teachings focus on meditative, martial arts-like exercises. China banned Falungong in 1999 and declared it an "evil cult" after growing alarmed at its organizational clout.

The group says that its practitioners are treated harshly in China and even killed.

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NASA Delivers Cargo to Launch Pad for Last-Ever Shuttle Flight (SPACE.com)

Robert Z. Pearlman, SPACE.com contributor
Space.com Robert Z. Pearlman, Space.com Contributor
space.com – Fri Jun 17, 2:14 pm ET

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – NASA rolled out its final space shuttle mission's cargo pod to the launch pad Thursday (June 16) here at Kennedy Space Center, in preparation for installing it on board space shuttle Atlantis.

Packed with more than 8,000 pounds of supplies and equipment for the International Space Station, the "Raffaello" logistics module and a separate experiments platform were packed inside a shuttle cargo bay-sized canister for the trip out to the pad.

The 60-foot tall canister took about two-and-a-half hours to make the journey, arriving at the base of the pad's rotating service structure at about 11:30 p.m. EDT Thursday (0330 GMT Friday). It was then hoisted up into the pad's payload handling room where its contents will be prepared for installation into the shuttle's cargo bay on Monday.

Atlantis is targeted to lift off on STS-135, NASA's 135th and final space shuttle mission, on July 8. During the 12-day flight, commander Chris Ferguson and his three crewmates, Doug Hurley, Sandra Magnus and Rex Walheim, will deliver Raffaello to the space station, completing the shuttle program's last cargo delivery to the orbiting laboratory.

After transferring the cargo pod's contents onto the station, the STS-135 crew will then repack Raffaello with more than 5,000 pounds of refuse, supplies and experiment results for the trip back to Earth. [Gallery: Shuttle Atlantis' Last Launch Pad Trek]

The payload's delivery to the pad followed a successful tanking test performed earlier this week during which Atlantis' external fuel tank was checked for structural defects. The test, which loaded the tank with approximately 535,000 gallons of super-cold propellants exposed the tank to the same extreme low-temperatures it will experience on launch day.

Initial inspections revealed no apparent cracks to the tank's exterior insulating foam. On Saturday, technicians will X-ray the tank to verify its underlying support beams, or stringers, are also crack-free.

During the test, engineers saw evidence of a possible liquid-hydrogen leak from one of Atlantis' three main engines. The source of the leak, a main fuel valve, will be replaced, but the work is not expected to impact the shuttle's planned July 8 launch date.

On Monday (June 20), the STS-135 astronauts will arrive at the Kennedy Space Center to begin several days of training, culminating Thursday (June 23) in a full-up dress rehearsal for their launch countdown. The four crewmembers will don their orange pressure suits and board Atlantis to practice the procedures leading up to their liftoff.

Robert Pearlman is a contributing writer for SPACE.com and the editor of collectSPACE.com. You can follow him on Twitter @robertpearlman and @collectSPACE, or on Facebook. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Monitor says north army masses in Sudan oil state (Reuters)

KHARTOUM (Reuters) – Satellite images taken on Friday showed northern Sudanese military vehicles including heavy transports and artillery massing in the capital of the conflict-stricken Southern Kordofan state, a monitor said.

Fighting between the northern military and southern-aligned groups has spread across the key north-run oil state since June 5. Tens of thousands have fled the violence, according to the United Nations.

The clashes have also raised tensions at a sensitive time in Sudan, with the south less than three weeks away from becoming an independent country following a January referendum.

"New imagery ... confirms that the Sudan Armed Forces, or SAF, control the town of Kadugli in Sudan's tense border region of South Kordofan, and that thousands of civilians have been displaced," the Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP) said in a report.

The images "show a massing of SAF artillery, light vehicles, and heavy transports of the kinds used to carry tanks, troops, and munitions."

Set up last year by Hollywood actor George Clooney and other activists, the SSP says it seeks to head off renewed fighting and atrocities in Sudan by publishing commercial satellite images collated and analyzed with the help of a U.N. agency.

A spokesman for the northern military was not immediately available to comment on the report. It has previously said its forces were fighting to end an armed rebellion in the state.

Southern Kordofan -- the main oil-producing state that will be left in the north after the south secedes on July 9 -- is home to thousands of fighters who fought against Khartoum during the last civil war, many of them from the Nuba mountains region.

Officials with the south's dominant Sudan People's Liberation Movement have said clashes started when the north tried to disarm fighters there.

Northern officials have blamed the southern-aligned groups for provoking the fighting after an official from the north's ruling National Congress Party was named winner of a state gubernatorial election last month.

The south's independence vote was promised in a 2005 peace deal that ended decades of civil war. That conflict claimed some 2 million lives.

(Reporting Alexander Dziadosz; Editing by Dan Williams)

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