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When NASA's Mars 2020 rover lands on the Red Planet in February 2021, it will touch down in Jezero Crater, the site of a lake that existed 3.5 billion years ago. The next generation rover will build on the goals of previous robotic explorers by collecting the first samples of Mars, which would be returned to Earth at a later date.

"We're very much thinking about how Mars could be inhabited, how humans could come to Mars and make use of the resources that we have there in the Martian environment today," said Stack. "We send our robotic scouts first to learn about these other places, hopefully for us to prepare the way for us to go ourselves."

"Combining an understanding of the composition of the rocks, but also the very fine detail that we see in the rocks and the textures, can make a powerful case for ancient signs of life," Stack said. "We know that ancient Mars was habitable. But we haven't yet been able to show that we have signs, real signs, of ancient life yet. And with our instrument suite, we think we can make real advances towards that on the surface.

SAN FRANCISCO — Life on Mars? Today? The notion may not be so far-fetched after all.

Curiosity has now recorded a burst of methane that lasted at least two months.

for the first time, they had confirmed the presence of carbon-based organic molecules in a rock sample. The so-called organics are not direct signs of life, past or present, but they lend weight to the possibility that Mars had the ingredients required for life, and may even still have them.

Once, Mars was a warm planet that could potentially support life and water on its surface. But something changed about 3.5 billion years ago and it lost most of its atmosphere.

A new study published this week in the journal Science reveals that more water vapor is accumulating in the upper atmosphere of Mars, allowing more of it to escape into space. This means that Mars is losing water more quickly than anticipated.

The accumulation of unprecedented amounts of water vapor is occurring about 50 miles up from the Martian surface. The orbiter revealed that parts of the atmosphere actually act like pockets, reaching supersaturated level. These pockets contain anywhere between 10 to a hundred times more water vapor than the atmospheric temperature should allow.

After six years of planetary observations, scientists at NASA say they have found convincing new evidence that ancient Mars had an ocean.

It was probably the size of the Arctic Ocean, larger than previously estimated, the researchers reported on Thursday

“The existence of a northern ocean has been debated for decades, but this is the first time we have such a strong collection of data from around the globe,”

There was no question in the mind of Percival Lowell, the astronomer, after he finished his observations of Mars during the 1907 opposition, when it was that much closer to Earth.

“It is a direct sequitur from this that the planet is at present the abode of intelligent constructive life,” he continued. “I may say in this connection that the theory of such life upon Mars was in no way an a priori hypothesis on my part, but deduced from the outcome of observation, and that my observations since have fully confirmed it. No other supposition is consonant with all the facts here.”

By the time of Lowell’s death in 1916, his theories about the Martian canals and their creators had been discredited. As The Times noted gently in a valedictory editorial, “The present judgment of the scientific world is that he was too largely governed in his researches by a vivid imagination.”

We may be captivated by the thought of organisms on another planet, but we seem to have lost interest in our own. The Oxford Junior Dictionary has been excising the waymarks of the living world. Adders, blackberries, bluebells, conkers, holly, magpies, minnows, otters, primroses, thrushes, weasels and wrens are now surplus to requirements.

past four decades, the world has lost 50% of its vertebrate wildlife. But across the latter half of this period, there has been a steep decline in media coverage

as many news stories broadcast by the BBC and ITV about Madeleine McCann (who went missing in 2007) as there were about the entire range of environmental issues.

By watching how the human body and mind adapts in Antarctica, we can plan and predict what would happen in space,"

has felt the effects of living there on both his mind and his body.

"You're cut off from the rest of the world and in winter, completely cut off as no flights go in or out," he adds.

Shares, oil and the US dollar were all under pressure as global financial markets took fright at the prospect that Donald Trump would fail to deliver on his growth-boosting promises.

stock markets in Asia and Europe fell in response to Tuesday’s sharp decline on Wall Street.

Markets have become increasingly impatient with the new Trump administration for failing to follow through on pledges to use a package of tax cuts and infrastructure spending to raise the US growth rate.

There's a great Louis C.K. routine in which he describes getting flustered by his daughter's incessant question—"why?—to everything he says. "You don't even know who the fuck you are at the end of the conversation," he joked. That's basically what psychologists at the University of Illinois discovered in their research on political convictions. They found that if you just ask a highly partisan person "why" three times, hoping to clarify their stances, they tend to drift into politically moderate territory. "We used the ground zero mosque as a particularly polarizing issue," says University of Illinois professor Jesse Preston. "People feel strongly about it generally one way or the other." But they felt much less strongly about the proposed mosque near grounds zero when asked why they held such strong beliefs three times.

We observed that liberals and conservatives became more moderate in their attitudes. After this very brief task that just put them in this abstract mindset, they were more willing to consider the point of view of the opposition." [University of Illinois at Urbana Champaig

“Just as we are seeing a step function increase in the spread of AI, something else is happening: the rise of ultra-nationalism, rightwing authoritarianism and fascism,” she said.

All of these movements have shared characteristics, including the desire to centralize power, track populations, demonize outsiders and claim authority and neutrality without being accountable. Machine intelligence can be a powerful part of the power playbook, she said.

“We should always be suspicious when machine learning systems are described as free from bias if it’s been trained on human-generated data,” Crawford said. “Our biases are built into that training data.

The great point is to bring them the real facts."

People aren't interested in facts; they like theories about the world that fit into their pre-existing ideas about how it is.

the impact of fact-checking is usually very limited to some media commentators and those actively looking to get informed. The audience is limited to a few websites or perhaps a newspaper like the Guardian.

Elon Musk says his companies SpaceX and Tesla are both still alive only "by the skin of their teeth".The entrepreneur told an audience at the South by South West (SXSW) conference that both companies almost went bankrupt in 2008.

He said 2008 was an incredibly difficult year - SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket failed for the third time, and Tesla almost went bankrupt two days before Christmas.

Mr Musk also got divorced, and he said he had to borrow money from his friends to pay his rent.

Elon Musk, a man prone to ludicrous deadlines, has birthed another: test flights of his Mars spaceship next year."I think we’ll be able to do short flights, up and down flights, some time in the first half of next year," he told an audience at the South by South West (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas.

Elon Musk is unquestionably the most interesting businessman in Silicon Valley - arguably the world - thanks to his almost single-handed reignition of the space race.After a string of failed rockets - and near bankruptcy - SpaceX wowed the world with its latest flight, Falcon Heavy, in February.

"This is a situation where you have a very serious danger to the public. There needs to be a public body that has insight and oversight so that everyone is delivering AI safely. This is extremely important.

On the night before Halloween in 1938, a strange story crackled over radios across the United States. An announcer interrupted the evening’s regular programming for a “special bulletin,” which went on to describe an alien invasion in a field in New Jersey, complete with panicked eyewitness accounts and sounds of gunfire. The story was, of course, fake, a dramatization of The War of The Worlds, the science-fiction novel published by H. G. Wells in 1898. But not all listeners knew that. The intro to the segment was quite vague, and those who tuned in a few minutes into the show found no suggestion that what they were hearing wasn’t true.

The exact nature of the reaction of these unlucky listeners has been debated in the decades since the broadcast. Some say thousands of people dashed out of their homes and into the streets in terror, convinced the country was under attack by Martians. Others say there was no such mass panic. Regardless of the actual scale of the reaction, the event helped cement an understanding that would later be perpetuated in science-fiction television shows and films: Humans, if and when they encounter aliens, probably aren’t going to react well.

But what if the extraterrestrial life we confronted wasn’t nightmarish and intelligent, as it’s commonly depicted, but rather microscopic and clueless?

It is a global emergency that has already killed on a mass scale and threatens to send millions more to early graves. As its effects spread, it could destabilise entire economies and overwhelm poorer countries lacking resources and infrastructure. But this is the climate crisis, not the coronavirus. Governments are not assembling emergency national plans and you’re not getting push notifications transmitted to your phone breathlessly alerting you to dramatic twists and developments from South Korea to Italy.

More than 3,000 people have succumbed to coronavirus yet, according to the World Health Organization, air pollution alone – just one aspect of our central planetary crisis – kills seven million people every year. There have been no Cobra meetings for the climate crisis, no sombre prime ministerial statements detailing the emergency action being taken to reassure the public. In time, we’ll overcome any coronavirus pandemic. With the climate crisis, we are already out of time

Pandemics and the climate crisis may go hand in hand, too: research suggests that changing weather patterns may drive species to higher altitudes, potentially putting them in contact with diseases for which they have little immunity.

To really grasp the present, we need to imagine the future – then look back from it to better see the now. The angry climate kids do this naturally. The rest of us need to read good science fiction. A great place to start is Kim Stanley Robinson.

read 11 of his books, culminating in his instant classic The Ministry for the Future, which imagines several decades of climate politics starting this decade.

The first lesson of his books is obvious: climate is the story.

With the first presidential debate coming up on Wednesday, it is striking — if not surprising — how bland and predictable the candidates have been in discussing America’s role in space.

neither candidate, and neither party, has addressed the scientific question of why we want to bother with exploring space.

Maybe scientists should simply face reality and accept that science doesn’t play a central role in the government’s equation.

alarm bells of the climate crisis have been ringing in our ears for years and are getting louder all the time - yet humanity has failed to change course. What is wrong with us?

Many answers to that question have been offered, ranging from the extreme difficulty of getting all the governments in the world to agree on anything, to an absence of real technological solutions, to something deep in our human nature that keeps us from acting in the face of seemingly remote threats, to – more recently – the claim that we have blown it anyway and there is no point in even trying to do much more than enjoy the scenery on the way down.

all are ultimately inadequate