SciByte

April 22

plans to land four people on the Red Planet in 2023

permanent human colony on the Red Planet, with new crews arriving every two years thereafter

Human explorers

will doubtless contaminate whatever site is chosen for the settlement

so the organization will try to pick a place unlikely to host indigenous life

localize the pollution

Mars One is working with experts to minimize the risks its colonization effort may pose to potential Red Planet lifeforms

While Mars One hasn't picked a precise location for its settlement yet, the organization is targeting a swath of the Red Planet between 40 and 45 degrees north latitude

Mars One astronauts will not necessarily be scientists

Anyone over the age of 18 is eligible to apply, with the selection committee prizing traits such as intelligence, resourcefulness, determination and psychological stability over academic background

Science is

not the main focus of what we are doing

Crewmembers will take some scientific gear with them

but Mars One officials won't dictate what the experiments should be.

There will of course be a budget for equipment that they want to take for scientific research

, workers began carefully cutting back the 16,000 square feet (1,486 square meters) of shrink wrap that protected Atlantis as its $100 million exhibition building was completed around it

By the end of the first day, the shuttle's nose, tail, aft engines and left wing were exposed.

the workers completed the process, revealing Atlantis' right wing and its 60-foot-long (18 meter) payload bay

Opening the payload bay is

set to begin in May, will take about two weeks, as the doors are very slowly hoisted open, one by one.

Atlantis has been mounted. Thirty feet (9 meters) in the air, the space shuttle has been tilted 43.21 degrees, such that its left wing extends toward the ground.

Atlantis will appear to be back in space — an effect that will be enhanced by lighting and a mural-size digital screen that will project the Earth's horizon behind the shuttle

Telescopes had previously spotted water in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, some 100 kilometers above the planet’s ammonia cloud tops, but those surveys could not determine where the water came from

create a high-resolution map of water vapor distribution throughout Jupiter’s atmosphere

used the E

astronomers

researchers

found that the concentration of water peaked in the planet’s southern hemisphere, right in the region where the comet struck

More water also appeared at higher altitudes around the planet, which

supports the comet as its origin.

Water from other sources such as Jupiter’s icy moons would likely spread out more evenly around the planet and would gradually filter down to lower altitudes

When injected into mice, the tiny decoys protect mice against lethal doses of a toxin produced by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA.

Follow-up studies need to be done in humans

One of the mainstay strategies of bacteria and poison is to poke holes in cells, disrupting their internal chemical balance and causing them to burst

far, researchers haven't had much success creating all-purpose treatments to exploit this vulnerability

researchers created a tiny spherical core of a lactic acid byproduct, which forms naturally during metabolism in the human body

They then wrapped the cores in the outer surface of red blood cells. (To get the outer skin of red blood cells, they used a difference in particle concentration inside and outside the cells to cause them to burst, and then collected their outer membranes

The entire ensemble became a tiny nanosponge, which was about 85 nanometers in diameter, or 100 times smaller than a human hair

In cell cultures, the camouflaged sponges act as decoys, luring the toxins from

the bacteria that causes strep throat) and bee venom

then binding to the structure the "poisons" normally use to poke through cells

When they stick onto the nanosponge, that particular damaging structure gets preoccupied, and then the body can digest the entire particle

the team injected 18 mice with a lethal dose of a MRSA toxin. Half the mice then got a dose of the nanosponges

Whereas all the mice in the control group died, all but one that received the treatment survived

Because so many bacteria use the same pore-forming strategy, the nanosponges could be used as a universal treatment option when doctors don't know exactly what is causing an illness

The sponges' tiny size means a small amount of blood, for camouflage, can be used to make an effective dose

also allows them to circulate freely through blood vessels, lure enough of the toxins to have an impact and still be degraded safely

the researchers want to see whether the method works in human blood, and against other toxic chemicals, such as scorpion venom and anthrax, which use similar attack strategies

The new beta cells only produce insulin when called for by the body, offering the potential for the natural regulation of insulin

The researchers who discovered betatrophin

caution that much work remains to be done before it could be used as a treatment in humans

the results of their work, which was supported in large part by a federal research grant, already have attracted the attention of drug manufacturers.

could eventually mean that instead of taking insulin injections three times a day, you might take an injection of this hormone once a week or once a month, or in the best case maybe even once a year

Type 2 diabetes,

usually caused by a combination of excess weight and lack of exercise

causes patients to slowly lose beta cells and the ability to produce adequate insulin

provide this hormone, the type 2 diabetic will make more of their own insulin-producing cells, and this will slow down, if not stop, the progression of their diabetes

betatrophin primarily as a treatment for type 2 diabetes, he believes it might play a role in the treatment of type 1 diabetes as well

perhaps boosting the number of beta cells and slowing the progression of that autoimmune disease when it's first diagnosed

betatrophin could be in human clinical trials within three to five years, an extremely short time in the normal course of drug discovery and development

not for the federal funding of basic science research, there would be no betatrophin

impressed National Institutes of Health grant reviewers, and received federal funding for 80 percent of the work leading to the discovery of betatrophin

just wondering what happens when an animal doesn't have enough insulin. We were lucky to find this new gene that had largely gone unnoticed before

Another hint came from studying

What happens during pregnancy

During pregnancy, there are more beta cells needed, and it turns out that this hormone goes up during pregnancy

in pregnant mice

when the animal becomes pregnant this hormone is turned on to make more beta cells

not interested in curing mice of diabetes, and we now know the gene is a human gene

know that the hormone exists in human plasma; betatrophin definitely exists in humans

Kepler-62e and f take 122 and 267 days, respectively, to complete one orbit around their star, which is just 20 percent as bright as the sun

The telescope needs to observe three transits to flag a planet candidate, so detecting a potentially habitable world in a relatively distant orbit can take several years

Kepler cannot search for signs of life on worlds like Kepler-62e, Kepler-62f and Kepler-69c, but the telescope is paving the way for future missions that should do just that

a sun-like star located 2,700 light-years away,

As of April 2013, Kepler data has uncovered more than 2,700 potential planets, with about 120 of them having been confirmed to date

mission scientists expect that more than 90 percent of the planets detected are real and not illusions in the data

early evidence supports the optimistic view that at least 62f is rocky

biggest uncertainty about both planets is their composition

an astronomer at the University of Washington

not involved in the research

Kepler-62e

may be too close to its star – and therefore too hot – to sustain life

if 62e is a rocky planet, it’s almost certainly tidally locked with its star, with one half of its surface always illuminated and the other perpetually dark

Kepler 62 is about two-thirds the size of the sun and several hundred degrees Celsius cooler

Finding planets in the habitable zones of larger stars

harder because those planets have relatively long orbits and barely cast a shadow as they pass across the faces of their suns

another study

led by

NASA Ames Research Center

identified two planets around a sunlike star called Kepler-69, some 2,700 light-years away

One of the planets is 1.7 times the size of Earth and teeters on the inner edge of the habitable zone

probably too hot for life

almost certainly a super-Venus rather than a super-Earth

even a planet 75 percent larger than Earth is potentially habitable

Next-generation missions like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which NASA approved earlier this month for launch in 2017, will take on the task of finding nearer planets that astronomers can study in depth

The curves show the mass-radius-relation (average density) for different types of planets

The blue line indicates

planets made mostly (75%) of water, the black line that of planets like our Earth that consist almost exclusively of rock (

estimate of their mass places them in a region (blue areas) where it is highly probable for them to be earth-like planets, that is: planets with a solid (if possibly covered in water) surface

the empirical habitable zone, liquid water can exist on the surface of a planet if that planet has sufficient cloud cover. In the narrow habitable zone, liquid water can exist on the surface even without the presence of a cloud cover

while the sizes of Kepler 62e and 62f are known, their mass and densities are not.

every planet found in their size range so far has been rocky, like Earth

Life on these worlds would be under water with no easy access to metals, to electricity, or fire for metallurgy

life’s inventiveness to get to a technology stage will surprise us

Kepler-62e would have a bit more clouds than Earth according to computer models

More distant Kepler-62f would need the greenhouse effect from plenty of carbon dioxide to warm it enough to host an ocean

Kepler-62e probably has a very cloudy sky and is warm and humid all the way to the polar regions

Kepler-62f would be cooler, but still potentially life-friendly

the two would exhibit distinctly different colors and make our search for signatures of life easier on such planets in the near future

planets in the habitable zone were until now discovered by what is known as the radial velocity method

gives you a lower limit for the planet’s mass, but no information about its radius

What makes Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f so exciting is

We know their radius, which indicates that these are indeed rocky planets, and they orbit their star in the habitable zone

makes it difficult to assess whether or not a planet is rocky, like the Earth. A small radius (less than 2 Earth radii), on the other hand, is a strong indicator that a planet around is indeed rocky – unless we are talking about a planet around a very young star