Ralph Bond | Tech Reporter KEX & Computer America
Story 1: Significant amounts of water found in massive “Grand Canyon” on Mars
Source: CNN Story by Ashley Strickland
Link: https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/16/world/exomars-water-mars-grand-canyon-scn/index.html
Mars has its own version of the Grand Canyon, called the Valles Mar-i-ner-is, and scientists with the European Space Agency recently learned it contains “significant amounts of water”.
The discovery was made by the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, launched in 2016 as a joint mission between the European Space Agency and Russia’s Roscosmos.
This Martian canyon is 10 times longer, five times deeper and 20 times wider than Earth’s Grand Canyon.
The water is located a little more than a yard beneath the surface of the canyon’s floor and was detected by the orbiter’s Fine Resolution Epithermal Neutron Detector.
Why this is important:
Most water on Mars is located in the planet’s polar regions and remains frozen as water ice.
But this huge Martian canyon is just south of the planet’s equator.
So, the discovery of water makes the canyon a key target for future human exploration as its water would be potentially accessible and might help sustain long term human outposts on Mars.
Story 2: A UK startup is making, and reprograming, human cells
Source: Wired Story by Matt Reynolds
Link: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/bit-bio-programming-cells
Almost every human cell contains the genetic information it needs to become any other kind of cell.
A skin cell, for example, has the same set of genes as a muscle cell or a brain neuron.
But in each type of cell only some of those genes are switched on, while others remain inactive.
If we can figure out the switching on and off recipe behind each type of cell, then theoretically you could use this information to engineer every single cell type in the human body.
That’s the goal of bit.bio—a Cambridge, UK-based company that wants to make precisely engineered batches of human cells.
The team at bit.bio says that by inserting the right bit of code into a cell’s complete set of genes, you can control how that cell behaves.
In other words, the company says they can reprogram human cells.
For example, what if you could test a potential Alzheimer’s drug on a human brain cell engineered to have signs of Alzheimer’s disease?
This could give a much clearer indication of whether a test drug is likely to be successful.
Now today bit.bio sells two different reprogrammed human cell lines: muscle cells and a specific kind of brain neuron.
But the plan is to create a wide range of specific human cell lines for use in pharmaceutical and academic research.
Story 3: Hydras can regrow their heads. Scientists want to know how they do it.
Source: Popular Science Story by Kate Baggaley
Link: https://www.popsci.com/science/hydra-animals-regrow-head-mystery/
Okay, it’s weird science time!
For a group of small aquatic animals known as hydra, decapitation is more an inconvenience than anything else!
To date, how hydra manage to regrow their heads has remained mysterious.
To understand the genetic mechanics of this feat, scientists at the University of California, Irvine took a close look at which genes are switched on and off during regeneration and how they’re controlled.
They found that near their mouthparts, hydra have a cluster of up to 300 cells
collectively called the head organizer; which directs the development of the head.
If a hydra is beheaded, a new head organizer can form and prompt the animal to regrow its head.
Okay, so what? According to the researchers, investigating how regeneration works in simple organisms like hydra, and how similar it is to the process in other animals [like lizards growing new tails], could potentially lead to insights about how growth development sometimes goes awry in humans.
Story 4: Some fun facts about the James Webb Space Telescope that launched into space on December 25
Source: NASA Fact sheet
Link: https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/about/faqs/faq.html#whowas
Last month we saw tons of coverage about the James Webb Space Telescope.
Most of the coverage centered on:
how it is the successor to the Hubble telescope,
its 10 billion dollar price tag,
and how scientists are keeping their fingers crossed that its complex system will deploy properly
And just this week there’s the good news that the Webb Space Telescope completed its complex mirror deployment, and the observatory is getting close to completing its journey to L2, where it will orbit the Sun a million miles away from Earth.
And L2 is short-hand for the second Lagrange Point, a wonderful accident of gravity and orbital mechanics, and the perfect place to park the Webb telescope in space.
There are five so-called “Lagrange Points” – areas where gravity from the sun and Earth balance the orbital motion of a satellite.
But I thought it would be good to highlight two fun facts that did not get a lot of attention.
First, who was James Webb?
James Webb was NASA’s second administrator.
Webb is best known for leading the Apollo program, which landed the first humans on the Moon.
And here’s another fun fact:
The James Webb telescope is designed to discover and study the first stars and galaxies that formed in the early Universe.
To see these faint objects, it must be able to detect things that are ten billion times as faint as the faintest stars visible to our eyes without a telescope.
That’s up to 100 times fainter than the Hubble space telescope can see.