SciByte

The reverse drive validated feasibility of a technique developed with testing on Earth to lessen damage to Curiosity's wheels when driving over terrain studded with sharp rocks.

On Tuesday, Feb. 18, the rover covered 329 feet (100.3 meters), the mission's first long trek that used reverse driving and its farthest one-day advance of any kind in more than three months.

The mission's destinations remain the same: a science waypoint first and then the long-term goal of investigating the lower slopes of Mount Sharp, where water-related minerals have been detected from orbit.

Soviet spacecraft reaches Venus surface

In 1966, the mission of the Soviet Union's unmanned spacecraft Venera 3 (Venus 3) was a partial success when it reached Venus and automatically released a small landing capsule intended to explore the planet's atmosphere during a parachute descent. However, contact had been lost since 16 Feb 1966. Although no data was returned before the capsule impacted, it became the first man-made object to touch the surface of another planet. The Soviet Union issued a commemorative stamp to mark the achievement. Venera 3 was launched on 16 Nov 1965. The landing capsule (0.9-m diam., about 300-kg) had been designed to collect data on pressure, temperature, and composition of the Venusian atmosphere. Failure is believed due to overheating of internal components and the solar panels

Saccharin discovered

In 1879, saccharin, the artificial sweetener, was discovered by Constantin Fahlberg, while he was researching coal tar compounds for Ira Remsen at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland With hands unwashed since leaving his laboratory work, during a meal, he accidentally discovered its intensely sweet taste when his fingers touched his lips. He subsequently obtained patents on its synthesis, and with his uncle, Dr. Adolf List, started a factory to produce and market it.

It turns out that the six wheeled Opportunity unknowingly ‘created’ the mystery herself when she drove over a larger rock, crushing it with the force from the wheels and her 400 pound (185 kg) mass.

Fragments were sent hurtling across the summit of the north facing Solander Point

One piece unwittingly rolled downhill.

NASA’s renowned Mars rover Opportunity has been spied

y from above and below

orbital view above – just released

The largest clinical study ever conducted to date of patients with advanced leukemia found that 88 percent achieved complete remissions after being treated with genetically modified versions of their own immune cells.

Adult B cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL), a type of blood cancer that develops in B cells, is difficult to treat because the majority of patients relapse.

Patients with relapsed B-ALL have few treatment options; only 30 percent respond to salvage chemotherapy.

A team of researchers

has, for the first time, successfully grown a human lung in a lab

Windpipes, for example, have been successfully grown and implanted into human patients, and just last spring

Researchers

discovered that MRI-based imaging techniques may be just as effective as other conventional scanning methods minus the radiation risks that come with cancer detection

medical officials often must send radioactive traces through the body as part of PET-CT scans that expose a patient to the equivalent of 700 chest X-rays

Police in Queensland Australia have reported

that they now have and are using a device

hand held and can be used to laser scan a crime scene in just a matter of minutes for creation of a 3D image

10th February 2014

some nice signals are detected from the Lunar Lander but nothing from the Lunar Rover - several news outlets report that the Rover has had a failure after its Lunar sleep, and that it was not expected to become alive again

t doesn't hurt to monitor the downlink now and then.

In 1630, popcorn was introduced to the English colonists by an Indian named Quadequina who brought it in deerskin bags as his contribution at their first Thanksgiving dinner. Popcorn is a type of corn with smaller kernels than regular corn, and when heated over a flame, it "pops" into the snack we know it as today. Native Americans were growing it for more than a thousand years before the arrival of European explorers. In 1964, scientists digging in southern Mexico found a small cob of popcorn discovered to be 7,000 years old. Today, the United States grows nearly all of the world's popcorn.

Popcorn

Glenn in orbit

In 1962, John Glenn piloted the Mercury-Atlas 6 Friendship 7 spacecraft on the first U.S. manned orbital mission. Launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, he completed three-orbits around the earth, at a maximum altitude of approx. 162 miles and an orbital velocity of approx. 17,500 mph. He spotted Perth, Australia, when that city's residents greeted him by switching on their house lights in unison. A four-cent U.S. stamp was put on sale the same day, making it the first U.S. stamp issued on the day of the event it commemorated. Glenn returned to space 36 years later, making 134 more orbits as a crew member of the space shuttle Discovery (29 Oct - 7 Nov 1998) for investigations on space flight and the aging process.

In 1986, the Soviet Union launched into orbit Mir, a new space station. Mir, the Russian word for peace, had six docking ports and special laboratories for scientific research. Weeks later, a veteran crew was sent to man the 56-ft-long and 13.6-ft wide station. The core module provided living quarters for the cosmonauts: galley/table, cooking elements and storage, individual crew cabins and personal hygiene area. They also had a working compartment for monitoring and commanding the core systems supported by an electric power system, thermal control system, computer systems, environmental control and life support, communications and tracking systems. Five additional modules were launched between Mar 1987 and April 1996

In 1947, Edwin H. Land first demonstrated his Polaroid Land camera, the first used self-developing film, at a meeting of the Optical Society of America at the Hotel Pennsylvania, New York City. It produced a black-and-white photograph in 60 seconds, using developer and fixer chemicals sandwiched in pods with the photographic paper and film. After exposure, developing was initiated by turning a knob that squeezed open the pod of chemicals.

Polaroid camera

In 1924, Edwin Hubble wrote a letter to Harlow Shapley, which he concluded by saying, “...the distance [to the Andromeda nebula] comes out something over 300,000 parsecs.” Hubble discussed in the letter his measurement of the magnitudes of the Cepheid variable stars in the Andromeda nebula he had found and confirmed. He used their measured characteristics to calculate their distance, definitely about a million light years from our Solar System. This was the evidence that Andromeda was a separate galaxy, far beyond the Milky Way. This was the first proof of an “island universe.” After collecting more data, Hubble sent a paper read on 1 Jan 1925 to a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Meanwhile, Shapley remained unconvinced, as when he debated Heber Curtis on 26 Apr 1920.

Hubble notifies Shapley of Andromeda distance

A treasure trove of fossils chiseled out of a canyon in Canada's Kootenay National Park rivals the famous Burgess Shale, the best record of early life on Earth, scientists say.

The Burgess Shale refers to both a fossil find and a 505-million-year-old rock formation made of mud and clay

Burgess Shale fossil quarry, a UNESCO World Heritage site located in Yoho National Park, is in a glacier-carved cliff in the Canadian Rockies.