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Mars Base

Asteroid Mining is Possible for $2.6 Billion | How to Mine Asteroids | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/-mining-feasibility-study.html

sciByte44 Asteroid AsteroidMining

shared by Mars Base on 25 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • mining asteroids
  • new company Planetary Resources, Inc. plans to do
  • The in-depth study of the feasibility of asteroid mining was prepared for the Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Planetary Resources is still years away from actually snatching up an asteroid and staking a cosmic claim
  • What the study did was show that, for the first time in history, this was now feasible using technology available in this decade
  • it appears feasible to identify, capture and return close to Earth an entire asteroid that is roughly 23 feet (7 meters) wide. This so-called near-Earth asteroid (NEA) would weigh in the neighborhood of 500 tons
  • According to the study
  • Placing a 500-ton asteroid in high lunar orbit would provide a unique, meaningful and affordable destination for astronaut crews in the next decade
  • This disruptive capability would have a positive impact on a wide range of the nation’s human space exploration interests. It would provide a high-value target in cislunar space that would require a human presence to take full advantage of this new resource.
  • Such a venture represents a new synergy between robotic and human missions in which robotic spacecraft retrieve significant quantities of valuable resources for exploitation by astronaut crews to enable human exploration farther out into the solar system.
  • Water or other material extracted from a captured volatile-rich near-Earth asteroid could be used to provide affordable spacecraft shielding against galactic cosmic rays. The extracted water could also be used for propellant to transport a shielded habitat.
  • This undertaking could jump-start an entire in situ resource utilization industry. The availability of a multi-hundred-ton asteroid in lunar orbit could also stimulate the expansion of international cooperation in space as agencies come together to determine how to sample and process raw material from an asteroid.
  • may someday have to deflect a much larger near-Earth object
  • the idea of exploiting the natural resources of asteroids dates back over 100 years.
  • the feasibility of this retrieval concept is made possible by three key developments.
  • Firstly, the ability to discover and characterize an adequate number of sufficiently small near-Earth asteroids for mining.
  • Secondly, there is evolving ability to implement sufficiently powerful solar electric propulsion systems to enable transportation of the captured asteroid.
  • Lastly, the proposed human presence in cislunar space in the 2020s both enables exploration and exploitation of the returned near-Earth asteroid.
  • NASA's findings are put in the public domain, as in the earlier cases of communication, weather and navigation satellites, for use by competing commercial enterprises
  • companies can then work to generate revenues — and pay taxes — while lowering the cost of access to resources for the good of all
Mars Base

Space Telescope Crowdfunding Project Raises $167,000 | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/e-telescope-raises-167000.html

scibyte96 CrowdSourcing

shared by Mars Base on 30 May 13 - No Cached
  • A commercial asteroid-mining company aiming to launch a crowdfunded space telescope raised more than $200,000 on the first day of its campaign
  • Planetary Resources, a private venture aiming to mine near-Earth space rocks
  • announced
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • May 29) that it would build and launch a space telescope for public use if it could raise at least $1 million in 33 days.
  • The telescope will be a twin copy of the Arkyd spacecraft the company is developing to detect, track and study asteroids in preparation for its mining mission
  • A test version of the spacecraft is set for its maiden trial flight in April 2014, while the crowdfunded model would launch in early 2015
  • public backers would use it to study celestial objects of their choice
  • also have the option of sponsoring research projects at schools, universities or museums that could use the instrument.
  • The telescope will also take
  • self portraits that show the telescope in orbit, with a user-submitted photo displayed on the instrument's screen
  • A camera mounted on the hull of the spacecraft will snap the photo.
  • Already more than 200 backers have ordered selfies for $25 and above.
  • But if the crowdfunding campaign fails to reach its $1 million goal by June 30, the company will receive none of the money it has raised
Mars Base

Another tiny miracle: Graphene oxide soaks up radioactive waste - 0 views

phys.org/...raphene-oxide-radioactive.html

scibyte77

shared by Mars Base on 09 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Graphene oxide has a remarkable ability to quickly remove radioactive material from contaminated water
  • A collaborative effort by the Rice lab of chemist James Tour and the Moscow lab of chemist Stepan Kalmykov
  • microscopic, atom-thick flakes of graphene oxide bind quickly to natural and human-made radionuclides and condense them into solids
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • flakes are soluble in liquids and easily produced in bulk
  • The discovery
  • could be a boon in the cleanup of contaminated sites like the Fukushima nuclear plants
  • could also cut the cost of hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") for oil and gas recovery and help reboot American mining of rare earth metals
  • Graphene oxide's large surface area defines its capacity to adsorb toxins
  • high retention properties are not surprising
  • What is astonishing is the very fast kinetics of sorption, which is key
  • the collaboration took root when
  • a graduate student
  • graduate student in Kalmykov's group, met at a conference several years ago.
  • researchers focused on removing radioactive isotopes of the actinides and lanthanides – the 30 rare earth elements in the periodic table – from liquids, rather than solids or gases
  • Naturally occurring radionuclides are also unwelcome in fracking fluids that bring them to the surface in drilling operations
  • When groundwater comes out of a well and it's radioactive above a certain level, they can't put it back into the ground
  • Companies have to ship contaminated water to repository sites around the country at very large expense
  • The ability to quickly filter out contaminants on-site would save a great deal of money
  • even greater potential benefits for the mining industry
  • Environmental requirements have "essentially shut down U.S. mining of rare earth metals, which are needed for cell phones
  • China owns the market because they're not subject to the same environmental standards
  • this technology offers the chance to revive mining here, it could be huge
  • capturing radionuclides does not make them less radioactive, just easier to handle
  • Where you have huge pools of radioactive material, like at Fukushima, you add graphene oxide and get back a solid material from what were just ions in a solution
  • Then you can skim it off and burn it
  • Graphene oxide burns very rapidly and leaves a cake of radioactive material you can then reuse
  • The low cost and biodegradable qualities of graphene oxide should make it appropriate for use in permeable reactive barriers, a fairly new technology for in situ groundwater remediation,
Mars Base

Double Dispatch: Self-Balancing Electric Unicycle - 0 views

www.stephanboyer.com/...lancing-electric-unicycle.html

scibyte27

shared by Mars Base on 30 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • A custom MIG-welded steel chassisA 450 Watt electric motorTwo 7 Ah 12 Volt batteriesA 5DOF intertial measurement unitThe OSMC H-bridgeAn ATmega328P microcontroller
  • operates much like a Segway -- you lean forward to accelerate, and lean back to brake
  • holding in my right hand (in the video at the bottom) is a "kill switch" -- if I let go of it, the unicycle deactivates the motor,
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Bullet integrates readings from the gyro and accelerometer using a complementary filter. To balance, the angle estimate is fed through a PID loop (with no integral term). The loop runs at 625 Hz. The output from this stage determines the duty cycle of a 1.22 kHz PWM signal, which is connected to the H-bridge. The code was written in C, and is in the public domain.
  • It took me several hours to be able to ride in a straight line without crashing, and it took several days to learn how to turn in a controlled manner. Many of my friends have tried riding it, usually with little success (including some actual unicyclers).
  • I am certainly not the first person to build an electric unicycle. Perhaps the most well-known self-balancing unicycle is Trevor Blackwell's Eunicycle, which also uses the OSMC. His design is similar to mine, but uses a much more expensive battery pack ($218 for his vs $44 for mine). Also, the Eunicycle's motor and gearbox cost a grand total of $644, whereas Bullet's drive system (including the wheel itself) was $195. Finally, the IMU he uses is about $100 more than mine. Overall, Bullet is several hundred dollars cheaper than the Eunicycle, but this comes at a price (mostly weight).
Mars Base

Billion-year-old water could hold clues to life on Earth and Mars - 0 views

phys.org/...old-clues-life-earth-mars.html

scibyte94 AncientWater

shared by Mars Base on 16 May 13 - No Cached
  • A UK-Canadian team of scientists has discovered ancient pockets of water, which have been isolated deep underground for billions of years and contain abundant chemicals known to support life
  • This water could be some of the oldest on the planet and may even contain life
  • the similarity between the rocks that trapped it and those on Mars raises the hope that comparable life-sustaining water could lie buried beneath the red planet's surface
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Researchers
  • analysed water pouring out of boreholes from a mine 2.4 kilometres beneath Ontario, Canada
  • found that the water is rich in dissolved gases like hydrogen, methane and different forms – called isotopes – of noble gases such as helium, neon, argon and xenon
  • there is as much hydrogen in the water as around hydrothermal vents in the deep ocean, many of which teem with microscopic life
  • The hydrogen and methane come from the interaction between the rock and water, as well as natural radioactive elements in the rock reacting with the water
  • These gases could provide energy for microbes that may not have been exposed to the sun for billions of years.
  • The crystalline rocks surrounding the water are thought to be around 2.7 billion years old. But no-one thought the water could be the same age, until now
  • Using ground-breaking techniques
  • researchers show that the fluid is at least 1.5 billion years old, but could be significantly older.
  • interconnected fluid system in the deep Canadian crystalline basement that is billions of years old, and capable of supporting life
  • Before this finding, the only water of this age was found trapped in tiny bubbles in rock and is incapable of supporting life
  • the water found in the Canadian mine pours from the rock at a rate of nearly two litres per minute
  • don't yet know if the underground system in Canada sustains life
Mars Base

Planetary Resources Group Wants to Mine Asteroids - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...-group-wants-to-mine-asteroids

scibyte44 Asteroid AsteroidMining

shared by Mars Base on 25 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • this company has been in existence for about three years, working quietly in the background, assembling their plan.
  • will initially focus on developing Earth orbiting telescopes to scan for the best asteroids, and later, create extremely low-cost robotic spacecraft for surveying missions.
Mars Base

Asteroid Miners Wanted to Tap Space Rock Riches | Planetary Resources | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/lanetary-resources-hiring.html

sciByte44 Asteroid AsteroidMining

shared by Mars Base on 25 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • One of the reasons that we chose to announce the company at this time is because we're beginning to aggressively search for the world's best engineers, to complement our team
  • looking for engineers to help design and build a fleet of asteroid-mining robots
  • not a motley crew led by Bruce Willis
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • among its investors Google execs Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, who are worth $16.7 billion and $6.2 billion
  • company's advisers include filmmaker and adventurer James Cameron, former NASA astronaut Tom Jones and MIT planetary scientist Sara Seager
  • Water can be broken into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen, the chief components of rocket fuel
  • platinum-group metals it plans to extract will help lower the cost of many products here on Earth, including hand-held electronic devices and monitors for televisions and computers.
Mars Base

'Space Selfie' Telescope Could Hunt Alien Planets … If It Raises A Cool $2M - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...planets-if-it-raises-a-cool-2m

scibyte98 CrowdSourcing Arkyd

shared by Mars Base on 12 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • A crowdfunded telescope
  • is now considering a search for alien planets.
  • Planetary Resources Inc. (the proposed asteroid miners) announced a new “stretch goal” for its asteroid-hunting Arkyd-100 telescope.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • If the company can raise $2 million — double its original goal — it promises to equip the Arkyd telescope to look at star systems for exoplanets
  • partnering with exoplanet researchers at MIT [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Arkyd would use two methods to hunt down planets
  • Transiting, or seeing the dip in a star’s brightness when a planet passes in front of it;
  • Gravitational microlensing, or finding planets by measuring how the gravity of the star (and its planets) distorts light from stars and galaxies behind
  • If it can raise $1.3 million, Planetary Resources proposes to build a ground station at an undisclosed “educational partner” that would double the download speed of data from the orbiting observatory
  • Two more stretch goals will be revealed if Arkyd receives 11,000 backers and 15,000 backers
Mars Base

Dark matter detector reports hints of WIMPs | Atom & Cosmos | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...etector_reports_hints_of_WIMPs

scibyte91 DarkMatter

shared by Mars Base on 16 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Ultracold crystals designed to catch particles of dark matter deep underground have come up with three potential detections
  • The researchers do not have enough evidence to say they have discovered dark matter particles
  • Theoretical physicists have put forth some ideas for particles that might constitute dark matter, including one called a weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • The experiment that made the newly reported detections is designed to pick up the signal of a WIMP as Earth passes through the galaxy
  • The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search consists of a network of silicon and germanium crystals cooled to near absolute zero
  • in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in Minnesota, a former iron mine more than 700 meters beneath the surface
  • If WIMPs exist, one should very occasionally slam into the nucleus of a silicon or germanium atom, causing a release of energy and a detectable vibration in the crystal
  • The hundreds of meters of earth above the experiment prevent other particles, such as protons and neutrons, from reaching the crystals and triggering a false positive
  • between July 2007 and September 2008, two of the experiment’s 11 silicon crystal detectors picked up three signals consistent with those expected from WIMP interactions
  • If the signals were caused by WIMPs
  • estimates the dark matter particle would weigh in at about 10 times the mass of the proton, well below many theoretical estimates
  • While the crystals’ underground setup provides plenty of shielding, some non-WIMP particles, such as electrons on the crystals’ surface, can cloud the results
  • it’s extremely unlikely that three events would show up from non-WIMP sources.
  • the energy released by the potential WIMPs is at the very lower limit of the detectors’ sensitivity
  • making erroneous WIMP detections more likely
  • concerns that the two crystals that picked up the signal could be more susceptible to false positives than the rest
  • In 2009, CDMS published a paper reporting that its germanium detectors had snagged two potential WIMPs, but further analysis revealed them to be surface electrons
  • more convinced if the detectors had picked up 10 or 12 signs of WIMPs, rather than just three
  • definitive detection would require multiple experiments worldwide to converge on the same characteristics for a dark matter particl
  • One in Italy called DAMA, short for Dark Matter, has made bold claims of dark matter detection that have drawn skepticism from many scientists
  • Other experiments have claimed to find signals at masses similar to this latest CDMS calculation but have not definitively said they have observed WIMPs
  • each experiment uses a different detection technique and has its own protocol for distinguishing WIMPs from background noise, making it hard to compare results
  • As for CDMS, the silicon detectors that found these signals are no longer collecting data
  • Researchers recently upgraded the Soudan facility with supersensitive germanium detectors
  • Over the next few years, the germanium detectors will move to a new, deeper underground home in Sudbury, Ontario, about 2 kilometers below the surface
Mars Base

Crowd funds $1 million for asteroid miners' public space telescope | collectSPACE - 0 views

www.collectspace.com/...news-062013a.html

scibyte99 Arkyd

shared by Mars Base on 22 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Planetary Resources intends to mine near-Earth asteroids for resources such as water and precious metals
  • The company has designed its Arkyd-100 space telescope to search for potential target space rocks.
Mars Base

Listen to solar storm activity in new sonification video - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...-storm-sonification-video.html

scibyte38 solar flare

shared by Mars Base on 14 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • What does a solar storm sound like
  • Take a listen
  • sonification of the recent solar storm activity turns data from two spacecraft into sound
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • measurements from the NASA SOHO spacecraft and the University of Michigan's Fast Imaging Plasma Spectrometer (FIPS) on NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft at Mercury
  • creator is Robert Alexander, a design science doctoral student at the University of Michigan and NASA fellow.
  • a composer with a NASA fellowship to study how representing information as sound could aid in data mining.
  • raw information to an audio waveform
  • To sonify the data
  • in its original sampling rate of 44,100 hertz, it played back in less than a quarter of a second
  • benefits of sonifying data. You can zip through days' worth of information in an instant
  • Sonification is the process of translating information into sound
  • used in Geiger counter radiation detectors, which emit clicks in the presence of high-energy particles
  • not typically used to pick out patterns in information, but scientists on the U-M Solar and Heliospheric Research Group are exploring its potential in that realm. They're looking to Alexander to make it possible.
  • used to looking at wiggly-line plots and graphs, but humans are very good at hearing things. We wonder if there's a way to find things in the data that are difficult to see."
  • his approach led to a new discovery
  • a particular ratio of carbon atoms that scientists had not previously keyed in to can reveal more about the source of the solar wind than the ratios of elements they currently rely on. The solar wind is a squall of hot plasma, or charged particles, continuously emanating from the sun.
  • hopes to build a bridge between science and art.
  • movies were silent and people just accepted that that's the way it
  • this high res footage of what's happening on the surface of the sun, and it's silent. I'm creating a soundtrack
Mars Base

Self-Propelled Floating Robot Navigates an Arizona Lake | Space Exploration | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/ot-navigates-arizona-lake.html

scibyte39 robot MarMedia

shared by Mars Base on 21 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • floating robot made to land on a lake, propel itself around and gather data about the water and atmosphere as it goes
  • built it for future lake-landing missions to one of Saturn's moons, Titan.
  • could also be used for science and military missions on Earth,
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • weighs about 100 pounds,
  • In the video, the robot turns some circles and navigates on the lake's surface.
  • can carry 150 pounds' worth of sensing equipment
  • can be controlled from anywhere around the world using an Internet connection
  • working on making the craft more autonomous
  • wants to create data-gathering robots that have a sense of curiosity
  • investigate certain places, learn from what they find and use that information to decide what to explore next. 
  • an improved version
  • could help officials survey the cleanup of dangerously polluted water in munitions dumps and mines
  • also could help ocean scientists gather data about currents and pollution.
  • For a mission to Titan
  • NASA is interested in rovers that can land on liquid rather than on solid ground
Mars Base

Twitter Kept Up With Haiti Cholera Outbreak - Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...up_with_Haiti_cholera_outbreak

scibyte29 twitter diseas

shared by Mars Base on 13 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Twitter, blogs and other social media can be powerful tools for tracking infectious diseases as they spread
  • researchers who followed social media during Haiti’s post-earthquake cholera outbreak in 2010.
  • Twitter posts and news about cholera gathered
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • in the first 100 days of the outbreak tracked closely
  • data reported from hospital and clinics
  • social media data were available almost instantly
  • others have shown that Twitter and other online sources can provide meaningful information about outbreaks of diseases such as H1N1 and swine flu
  • new work establishes that the approach is useful for tracking a disease that emerges in the unsafe living conditions that often follow a disaster, says Polgreen.
  • 188,819 tweets that contained or were tagged with the word cholera during the first 100 days of the cholera outbreak
  • analysis suggests the social tool provides a good measure of the disease’s spread
  • The researchers compared the tweets to data from HealthMap, a disease-tracking tool that mines Internet news stories, blogs and discussion groups and lets the public report illness by cell phone. Both the Twitter and HealthMap data corresponded to official data from the Haitian Ministry of Public Health.
  • Official sources of data are better validated, but on the downside they are going to take time
Mars Base

Acidic Europa may eat away at chances for life - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...cidic-europa-chances-life.html

scibyte36 Jupiter Europa

shared by Mars Base on 03 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Europa's interior. The moon is thought to have a metallic core surrounded by a rocky interior, and then a global ocean on top of that surrounded by a shell of water ice
  • ocean underneath the icy shell of Jupiter's moon Europa could be too acid to support life
  • Europa, which is roughly the size of Earth's moon, could possess an ocean about 100 miles deep
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Recent findings even suggest its ocean could be loaded with oxygen, enough to support millions of tons worth of marine life like the kinds that exist on Earth
  • However, chemicals found on the surface of Europa might jeopardize any chances of life evolving there
  • compounds in question are oxidants, which are capable of receiving electrons from other compounds
  • usually rare in the solar system because of the abundance of chemicals known as reductants such as hydrogen and carbon
  • oxidants from Europa's surface might react with sulfides and other compounds in this moon's ocean before life could nab it
  • generating sulfuric and other acids
  • . If this has occurred for just about half of Europa's lifetime, not only would such a process rob the ocean of life-supporting oxidants
  • could become relatively corrosive, with a pH of about 2.6, "about the same as your average soft drink
  • ecosystem would need to evolve quickly to meet this crisis, with oxygen metabolisms and acid tolerance developing in only about 50 million years to handle the acidification
  • analogous to microbes found in acid mine drainage on Earth
  • bright red Río Tinto river in Spain
  • dominant microbes found there are acid-loving "acidophiles" that depend on iron and sulfide as sources of metabolic energy.
  • microbes there have figured out ways of fighting their acidic environment
  • If life did that on Europa, Ganymede, and maybe even Mars, that might have been quite advantageous
  • Others have questioned whether or not rock in Europa's seabed might actually neutralize the effects of this acidity
  • not think this is likely
  • one of the interesting possibilities is that they might have use blue phosphates as their bone material instead to evolve large organisms
Mars Base

How A Simple New Invention Seals A Gunshot Wound In 15 Seconds | Popular Science - 0 views

www.popsci.com/...seals-gunshot-wound-15-seconds

scibyte119

shared by Mars Base on 04 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • When a soldier is shot on the battlefield
  • A medic must pack gauze directly into the wound cavity, sometimes as deep as 5 inches into the body, to stop bleeding from an artery
  • startup called RevMedx, a small group of veterans, scientists, and engineers who were working on a better way to stop bleeding.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • RevMedx recently asked the FDA to approve a pocket-size invention: a modified syringe that injects specially coated sponges into wounds
  • XStat, the device could boost survival
  • by plugging wounds faster and more efficiently than gauze. 
  • early efforts were inspired by Fix-a-Flat foam for repairing tires
  • They bought some ordinary sponges from a hardware store and cut them into 1-centimeter circles
  • Then, they injected the bits of sponge into an animal injury
  • After seeing early prototypes, the U.S. Army gave the team $5 million to develop a finished product
  • The final material would need to be sterile, biocompatible, and fast-expanding
  • The team settled on a sponge made from wood pulp and coated with chitosan, a blood-clotting, antimicrobial substance that comes from shrimp shells
  • To ensure that no sponges would be left inside the body accidentally, they added X-shaped markers that make each sponge visible on an x-ray image.
  • In just 15 seconds, they expand to fill the entire wound cavity, creating enough pressure to stop heavy bleeding
  • Getting the sponges into a wound,
  • proved to be tricky.
  • RevMedx needed a lightweight, compact way to get the sponges deep into an injury
  • 30 millimeter-diameter, polycarbonate syringe that stores with the handle inside to save space
  • To use the applicator, a medic pulls out the handle, inserts the cylinder into the wound, and then pushes the plunger back down to inject the sponges as close to the artery as possible.
  • Three single-use XStat applicators would replace five bulky rolls of gauze in a medic’s kit
  • RevMedx also designed a smaller version of the applicator, with a diameter of 12 millimeters, for narrower injuries
  • Each XStat will likely cost about $100, Steinbaugh says, but the price may go down as RevMedx boosts manufacturing
  • When RevMedx submitted its application to the FDA, the U.S. Army attached a cover letter requesting expedited approval
  • In the future, RevMedx hopes to create biodegradable sponges that don’t have to be removed from the body
  • To cover large injuries, like those caused by land mines, the team is working on an expanding gauze made of the same material as XStat sponges
Mars Base

2013 in science - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...2013_in_science

scibyte114 2013YearInReview

shared by Mars Base on 23 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Morocco in 2011, and report that it is a new type of Mars rock with an unusually high water content.[8][9][10] American researchers state that a gene associated with active personality traits is also linked to
  • Astronomers affiliated with the Kepler space observatory announce the discovery of KOI-172.02, an Earth-like exoplanet candidate which orbits a star similar to the Sun in the habitable zone
  • 13 January – Massachusetts doctors invent a pill-sized medical scanner that can be safely swallowed by patients, allowing the esophagus to be more easily scanned for disease
  • ...101 more annotations...
  • 17 January – NASA announces that the Kepler space observatory has developed a reaction wheel issue
  • 2 January A study by Caltech astronomers reports that the Milky Way Galaxy contains at least one planet per sta
  • 3 January
  • 8 January
  • 20 January – Scientists prove that quadruple-helix DNA is present in human cells
  • 25 January
  • An international team of scientists develops a functional light-based "tractor beam", which allows individual cells to be selected and moved at will. The invention could have broad applications in medicine and microbiology
  • 30 January – South Korea conducts its first successful orbital launch
  • 6 February
  • Astronomers report that 6% of all dwarf stars – the most common stars in the known universe – may host Earthlike planets
  • Scientists discover live bacteria in the subglacial Antarctic Lake Whillans
  • American scientists finish drilling down to the subglacial Lake Whillans, which is buried around 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) under the Antarctic ice
  • 10 February NASA's Curiosity Mars rover uses its onboard drill to obtain the first deep rock sample ever retrieved from the surface of another plane
  • 15 February A 10-ton meteoroid impacts in Chelyabinsk, Russia, producing a powerful shockwave and injuring over 1,000 people
  • 28 February
  • Astronomers make the first direct observation of a protoplanet forming in a disk of gas and dust around a distant sta
  • A third radiation belt is discovered around the Eart
  • 1 March – Boston Dynamics demonstrates an updated version of its BigDog military robot
  • 3 March – American scientists report that they have cured HIV in an infant by giving the child a course of antiretroviral drugs very early in its life. The previously HIV-positive child has reportedly exhibited no HIV symptoms since its treatment, despite having no further medication for a year
  • researchers replace 75 percent of an injured patient's skull with a precision 3D-printed polymer replacement implant. In future, damaged bones may routinely be replaced with custom-manufactured implants
  • 7 March
  • A study concludes that heart disease was common among ancient mummies
  • 11 March
  • 12 March NASA's Curiosity rover finds evidence that conditions on Mars were once suitable for microbial life after analyzing the first drilled sample of Martian rock, "John Klein" rock at Yellowknife Bay in Gale Crater. The rover detected water, carbon dioxide, oxygen, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, chloromethane and dichloromethane. Related tests found results consistent with the presence of smectite clay minerals
  • 14 March CERN scientists confirm, with a very high degree of certainty, that a new particle identified by the Large Hadron Collider in July 2012 is the long-sought Higgs boson
  • 18 March
  • NASA reports evidence from the Curiosity rover on Mars of mineral hydration, likely hydrated calcium sulfate, in several rock samples, including the broken fragments of "Tintina" rock and "Sutton Inlier" rock as well as in the veins and nodules in other rocks like "Knorr" rock and "Wernicke" rock.[177] Analysis using the rover's DAN instrument provided evidence of subsurface water, amounting to as much as 4% water content, down to a depth of 60 cm
  • 27 March – A potential new weight loss method is discovered, after a 20% weight reduction was achieved in mice simply by having their gut microbes altered.
  • NASA scientists report that hints of dark matter may have been detected by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the International Space Station
  • 3 April
  • 15 April A functional lab-grown kidney is successfully transplanted into a live rat in Massachusetts General Hospital
  • 18 April – NASA announces the discovery of three new Earthlike exoplanets – Kepler-62e, Kepler-62f, and Kepler-69c – in the habitable zones of their respective host stars, Kepler-62 and Kepler-69. The new exoplanets, which are considered prime candidates for possessing liquid water and thus potentially life, were identified using the Kepler spacecraft
  • 21 April The Antares rocket, a commercial launch vehicle developed by Orbital Sciences Corporation, successfully conducts its maiden flight
  • After years of unpowered glide tests, Scaled Composites' SpaceShipTwo hybrid spaceplane successfully conducts its first rocket-powered fligh
  • 29 April
  • 1 May IBM scientists release A Boy and His Atom, the smallest stop-motion animation ever created, made by manipulating individual carbon monoxide molecules with a scanning tunnelling microscope
  • A new study finds that children whose parents suck on their pacifiers have fewer allergies later in life
  • NASA reports that a reaction wheel on the Kepler space observatory may be malfunctioning and may result in the premature termination of the observatory's search for Earth-like
  • 15 May
  • 16 May Water dating back 2.6 billion years, by far the oldest ever found, is discovered in a Canadian mine
  • 27 May Four-hundred-year-old bryophyte specimens left behind by retreating glaciers in Canada are brought back to life in the laboratory
  • 29 May
  • Russian scientists announce the discovery of mammoth blood and well-preserved muscle tissue from an adult female specimen in Siberia
  • A new treatment to "reset" the immune system of multiple sclerosis patients is reported to reduce their reactivity to myelin by 50 to 75 percent
  • 4 June
  • During the Shenzhou 10 mission, Chinese astronauts deliver the country's first public video broadcast from the orbiting Tiangong-1 space laboratory
  • 20 June
  • China's Shenzhou 10 manned spacecraft returns safely to Earth, having conducted China's longest manned space mission to date
  • 26 June
  • 20 June
  • 20 June
  • 6 July
  • Scientists report that a wide variety of microbial life exists in the subglacial Antarctic Lake Vostok, which has been buried in ice for around 15 million years. Samples of the lake's water obtained by drilling were found to contain traces of DNA from over 3,000 tiny organisms
  • 15 July
  • ASA engineers successfully test a rocket engine with a fully 3D-printed injector
  • 19 July
  • NASA scientists publish the results of a new analysis of the atmosphere of Mars, reporting a lack of methane around the landing site of the Curiosity rover
  • Earth is photographed from the outer solar system. NASA's Cassini spacecraft releases images of the Earth and Moon taken from the orbit of Saturn
  • 29 July – Astronomers discover the first exoplanet orbiting a brown dwarf, 6,000 light years from Earth
  • exoplanet
  • 7 January
  • Astronomers
  • report that "at least 17 billion" Earth-sized exoplanets are estimated to reside in the Milky Way Galaxy
  • 20 February
  • NASA reports the discovery of Kepler-37b, the smallest exoplanet yet known, around the size of Earth's Moon
  • 10 June
  • Scientists report that the earlier claims of an Earth-like exoplanet orbiting Alpha Centauri B, a star close to our Solar System, may not be supported by astronomical evidence
  • 25 June – In an unprecedented discovery, astronomers detect three potentially Earthlike exoplanets orbiting a single star in the Gliese 667
  • 11 July For the first time, astronomers determine the true colour of a distant exoplanet. HD 189733 b, a searing-hot gas giant, is said to be a vivid blue colour, most likely due to clouds of silica in its atmosphere
  • NASA announces that the failing Kepler space observatory may never fully recover. New missions are being considered
  • 15 August
  • Phase I clinical trials of SAV001 – the first and only preventative HIV vaccine – have been successfully completed with no adverse effects in all patients. Antibody production was greatly boosted after vaccination
  • 3 September
  • 12 September NASA announces that Voyager I has officially left the Solar System, having travelled since 1977
  • NASA scientists report the Mars Curiosity rover detected "abundant, easily accessible" water (1.5 to 3 weight percent) in soil samples
  • 26 September
  • In addition, the rover found two principal soil types: a fine-grained mafic type and a locally derived, coarse-grained felsic type
  • mafic
  • as associated with hydration of the amorphous phases of the soi
  • perchlorates, the presence of which may make detection of life-related organic molecules difficult, were found at the Curiosity rover landing site
  • earlier at the more polar site of the Phoenix lander) suggesting a "global distribution of these salts
  • Astronomers have created the first cloud map of an exoplanet, Kepler-7b
  • 30 September
  • 8 October The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to François Englert and Peter Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider"
  • 16 October Russian authorities raise a large fragment, 654 kg (1,440 lb) total weight, of the Chelyabinsk meteor, a Near-Earth asteroid that entered Earth's atmosphere over Russia on 15 February 2013, from the bottom of Chebarkul lake.
  • Researchers have shown that a fundamental reason for sleep is to clean the brain of toxins. This is achieved by brain cells shrinking to create gaps between neurons, allowing fluid to wash through
  • 17 October
  • 22 October – Astronomers have discovered the 1,000th known exoplanet
  • 4 November - Astronomers report, based on Kepler space mission data, that there could be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of sun-like stars and red dwarf stars within the Milky Way Galaxy
  • 11 billion of these estimated planets may be orbiting sun-like stars
  • 5 November – India launches its first Mars probe, Mangalyaan
  • The IceCube Neutrino Observatory has made the first discovery of very high energy neutrinos on Earth which had originated from beyond our Solar System
  • 21 November
  • 1 December – China launches the Chang'e 3 lunar rover mission, with a planned landing on December 16
  • 3 December – The Hubble Space Telescope has found evidence of water in the atmospheres of five distant exoplanets: HD 209458b, XO-1b, WASP-12b, WASP-17b and WASP-19b
  • 9 December NASA scientists report that the planet Mars had a large freshwater lake (which could have been a hospitable environment for microbial life) based on evidence from the Curiosity rover studying Aeolis Palus near Mount Sharp in Gale Crater
  • 12 December NASA announces, based on studies with the Hubble Space Telescope, that water vapor plumes were detected on Europa, moon of Jupiter
  • 14 December – The unmanned Chinese lunar rover Chang'e 3 lands on the Moon, making China the third country to achieve a soft landing there
  • 18 December
  • nomers have spotted what appears to be the first known "exomoon", located 1,800 light years away
  • 20 December – NASA reports that the Curiosity rover has successfully upgraded, for the third time since landing, its software programs and is now operating with version 11. The new software is expected to provide the rover with better robotic arm and autonomous driving abilities. Due to wheel wear, a need to drive more carefully, over the rough terrain the rover is currently traveling on its way to Mount Sharp, was also reported
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