SciByte

museum exhibit

will explore changing perceptions of human identity against the background of rapid progress in bionics

Rex is not strictly bionic as he does not include living tissue

take the powder we acquired and swish it around to scrub the internal surfaces of the drill bit assembly

use the arm to transfer the powder out of the drill into the scoop, which will be our first chance to see the acquired sample

To get to the point of making this hole in a rock on Mars, we made eight drills and bored more than 1,200 holes in 20 types of rock on Earth

Inside the sample-handling device, the powder will be vibrated once or twice over a sieve that screens out any particles larger than six-thousandths of an inch (150 microns) across

portions of the sieved sample will fall through ports on the rover deck into the Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument and the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument

"John Klein" in memory of a Mars Science Laboratory deputy project manager who died in 2011

The fresh hole, about 0.63 inch (1.6 centimeters) wide and 2.5 inches (6.4 centimeters) deep in a patch of fine-grained sedimentary bedrock, can be seen in images and other data Curiosity beamed to Earth Saturday.

Pre-drilling observations of this rock yielded indications of one or more episodes of wet environmental conditions

space scientists estimate that as many as 15 percent of those observable are binaries

This observation has caused scientists problems

due to the

evidence of binaries striking the Earth – as few as 2 to 4 percent

the team

suggests that many of the craters evident on the surface of the Earth, and believed to have been caused by a single asteroid, may in fact have been caused by binaries

a binary could cause just one crater if the two asteroids were close enough together when they struck.

suggest such craters would likely have a peanut shape, or have one side distorted

came to these conclusions after building computer simulations that showed asteroids hitting the earth

Some of the craters that resulted were oblong, or irregularly shaped, which they say, means the same could be true of real craters here on Earth

that the crater has some asymmetries that could be explained by a binary strike

If that were the case, they further suggest it likely that the combined size of the asteroid would have been roughly the same as the calculated size of a single entity

a combined diameter of 7 to 10 k

The crater left behind has a diameter of approximately 180 km, which means, the researchers say, that twin asteroids could have been as far apart as 80 km and still produced a single crater.

scientists will have to take a new look at other existing craters to try to determine if they too are possibly the result of binary strikes and if so, recalculate their number

Sky, the new smartpens sync with Evernote, the popular Internet-based notetaking and storage service, rather than with the user's computer. And they typically connect to Evernote directly through their built-in Wi-Fi radios

near a hotspot, their Sky pens will begin syncing their notes as soon as they stop recording them.

the new pens is that they - and the notes they record - are no longer tethered to an individual computer

Sky pen owners can send up to 500 megabytes of data for free from their smartpens. That's about 70 hours worth of recordings or 10,000 pages of notes

The two companies have built into Evernote a Livescribe player that allows users to see and hear their notes at the same time

Evernote arranges the notes by page in their notebook, but when you click or tap on the page, the Livescribe player will collect and display all the pages of notes from that particular recording.

the service scans them for recognizable characters and words so users can search them

has several shortcomings

the pen is married to Evernote. You can't choose to sync your notes with any other service

Another limitation of the Sky pen is that it can be slow to transfer recordings

All Livescribe pens allow users to replay audio recordings by simply tapping their pen on their written notes

you have to use them with company approved paper

does allow users to print out paper with the patterns on it, but if you want to use a notebook, you have to choose one approved by the company

if it survives, Comet Pan-STARRS might send an amazing stream of gas and dust into the night sky

Pan-STARRS should be very active, producing a lot of dust and therefore a nice dust tail

it could still be difficult to see

From our point of view on Earth, the comet will be very close to the sun

it is only observable in twilight when the sky is not fully dark

comes from the Oort Cloud,

discovered in June 2011 by the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System, or Pan-STARRS telescope, in Hawaii

nearest approach to Earth on March 5, when it will come be about 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) away

the best time to look for it might be at sunset March 12 and 13, when the comet will appear not far from the crescent moon

The comet's tail will probably require binoculars or a small telescope

These amyloid balls latch on to the surface of nerve cells in the brain by attaching to proteins on the cell surface called prions

investigate whether the precise shape of the amyloid balls is essential for them to attach to the prion receptors

if so, we wanted to see if we could prevent the amyloid balls binding to prion by altering their shape, as this would stop the cells from dying

The team formed amyloid balls in a test tube and added them to human and animal brain cells

When we added the extracts from red wine and green tea, which recent research has shown to re-shape amyloid proteins, the amyloid balls no longer harmed the nerve cells

this was because their shape was distorted, so they could no longer bind to prion and disrupt cell function

showed, for the first time, that when amyloid balls stick to prion, it triggers the production of even more amyloid

the team's next steps are to understand exactly how the amyloid-prion interaction kills off neurons

that this will increase our understanding of Alzheimer's disease even further, with the potential to reveal yet more drug targets,

While these early-stage results should not be a signal for people to stock up on green tea and red wine, they could provide an important new lead in the search for new and effective treatments