Giant Freakin Robot

When you look at a bottle of water, do you ever think to yourself that the water inside the bottle is new? It’s a strange concept to consider: new water. I make sure and pour my tap water into cellophane and really hard-to-open plastic packaging,so it has that new water smell, even if I know it’s probably just the same old water.

Barbara SherwoodLollar, a geneticist at the University of Toronto, and her colleagues recently published a study in the journal Nature reporting their astounding find: pockets of water that are between 1.5 billion and 2.64 billion years old. The research team were investigating copper, zinc, and gold mines near Timmons in Ontario, Canada. The pockets were found a whopping two miles underground, and contained fluids far older than anyone expected. It will definitely fit into research involving life in waters deep beneath the ground, both on Earth and on Mars.

The water’s noble gases — argon, helium, neon, and xenon — were analyzed, their ratios matched to the point in Earth’s history that equaled out to be a really, really long time ago, in an area that was formed by activity similar to that which causes hydrothermal vents near volcanic sites beneath the ocean.

These days the Mars Curiosity Rover is the one getting all of the attention and hype, glory hound that it is. However, its predecessor, NASA’s nine-year-old Opportunity Rover, just broke a distance record that is more than four decades old.

On Wednesday, May 15, Opportunity took a quick jaunt, a little stroll of 263 feet, as part of its normal day-to-day routine exploring the Endeavor crater on Mars. Only this particular day, those few feet put the grand total the rover has traveled at 22.22 miles. This means that it has now driven farther on a non-terrestrial surface than any vehicle in NASA history.

22.22 is .01 more than the previous record holder, the Apollo 17 lunar rover, driven across the Moon by Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt in December of 1972.

Cernan said, “The record we established with a roving vehicle was made to be broken, and I’m excited and proud to be able to pass the torch to Opportunity.”

If you’re a regular GFR reader, the name Chris Hadfield probably rings a bell or two. During the Canadian astronaut’s five-month mission as the commander of the International Space Station, he’s become a social media sensation thanks to his videos, pictures, and even songs he’s shared with those of us down here on planet Earth. He’s answered questions we didn’t even know we had. What happens if you wring out a washcloth in microgravity? Been there. Can you cry in space? He doesn’t recommend it. Nachos, however, are a-okay.

Well, it’s the end of an era, because earlier this evening Hadfield boarded a Russian Soyuz capsule and began his trip back to the surface, along with American astronaut Tom Marshburn and Russian Roman Romanenko. They’re set to touch down in the steppes of Kazakhstan later tonight. But Hadfield had one last treat for us, seen up above: a cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”…from space!

From today’s “this is a bad idea” file comes the news from China that a team of researchers have created a new hybrid flu virus. If that isn’t fun enough, the new bug can go airborne and spread from mammal to mammal. Did no one see Contagion or 12 Monkeys, or read any of the ever-increasing number of terrifying nonfiction books about the potential for worldwide pandemics? Hell, much of the recent zombie paranoia ties back into fear of disease.

The scientists mixed genes from the H5N1 virus with those from the strain H1N1, which was responsible for the 2009 swine flu epidemic. This new concoction has been shown capable of spreading between guinea pigs.

The whole purpose behind this move is to show that, despite the hype surrounding the current outbreak of H7N9 bird flu in China, other avian flus such as H5N1 still pose a substantial threat of global pandemic. It is also possible that two different types of viruses could combine naturally. While there is no evidence that H5N1 and H1N1 have come together, this experiment shows that hybrids like this are a viable risk. These two strains overlap geographically and in the type of animals they infect. While H5N1 tends only to associate with its own kind, “the pandemic H1N1 strain seems to be particularly prone to reassortment.”