Mars "Avalanche" Captured By NASA's HiRISE Camera

It's avalanche season...on Mars, and this latest out-of-this-world photograph reveals 'snow' landslides on the Red Planet.


As the snap shows, Martian skiers might have some problems negotiating the steep slopes photographed by NASA's HiRISE camera.


The camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbitercaptured the avalanche taking place on a cliff in the Mars polar region.


As this photograph shows, clouds of 'snow' are clearly visible as a large avalanche thunders down the mountainside.


The HiRISE high resolution camera took the amazing photograph at 85 degrees north on the planet. The team say the occurrence of avalanches is revealed by the accompanying clouds of fine material that continue to settle out of the air.


The avalanches are a result of carbon-dioxide frost that clings to the slopes in the darkness of winter, which then loosens up and falls when hit by sunlight.

These events happen mostly in the middle of spring, roughly equivalent to April to early May on Earth. And it seems this is a regular spring process at Mars’ north pole that may be expected every year.

Body Hair (submitted by Marisol Pantigoso)

We have just as much hair all over our bodies as chimpanzees or monkeys or any other furry primate. Most of it is just very short and light. It's called "vellus hair" or "peach fuzz". I think it's bizarre that most of our thick hair is on the tops of our heads. Imagine if dogs looked like that! On second thought, maybe it's better if you don't imagine that.
Research shows that we humans lost all our body hair through evolution about a million years before somebody finally figured out how to purchase clothes at one of the first primitive Walmarts.
One theory says that we lost our all body hair in an attempt to avoid parasites like ticks, fleas, and lice, and that we've only kept the hair on our heads because other people think it's pretty. As proof, consider that you haven't seen many bald pregnant women.
There is a very special kind of louse that only lives in human clothing. DNA tests indicate that it evolved from a louse that only lives in human hair, and that this happened about 42,000 to 72,000 years ago. So, that's probably roughly when clothes first went on sale. There are no special lice that live in any form of footwear, so DNA testing cannot solve the troubling mystery of exactly at what point in the past Hello Kitty themed socks were invented

First Picture of Alien Planet.....Isnt? (Submitted by Agustin Solano)

Brian Handwerk

for National Geographic News

Published January 30, 2012

In 2008, astronomers spotted the first exoplanet in visual light orbiting a distant star. But now, a new study suggests that Fomalhaut b may simply be a swirl of space dust.

The Hubble Space Telescope first spotted a possible planet circling the star Fomalhaut about 25 light-years away in the Southern Fish constellation, Piscis Australis.

The star is surrounded by a debris ring that stretches some 21.5 billion miles across and bears an uncanny visual resemblance to the Eye of Sauron, from the Lord of the Rings films.

The cloud's distinctive cat's-eye shape, astronomers say, is evidence that at least one small planet is orbiting Fomalhaut.

Though it can't be seen, researchers suspected the planet is there because of its gravitational calling card: The oval shape and sharp inner edge of Fomalhaut's halo are signs that a planet is "sweeping" through the dust and gas.

(Related: "First Pictures of Alien Planet System Revealed.")

Now, new data from the Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that Fomalhaut b may be a dust cloud resulting from a collision between comets or asteroids, according to study leader Markus Janson, an astrophysicist at Princeton University.

That could explain why the potential object's light appears very blue in visible light but is nearly invisible in infrared—which would be true of an object with little mass, such as a dust cloud.

Collision-Theory Dustup

Paul Kalas, one of Fomalhaut b's original discoverers, said his team originally considered the same collision theory.

But Kalas, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, believes such collisions are rather rare—and the odds of observing one even more unlikely.

"It's not excluded, but the bottom line is that scientists don't favor arguments that depend on fortunate observations," Kalas said. "You'd have to be quite lucky to observe such a collision between objects."

Janson, leader of the new study, doesn't think such cosmic smashups are all that uncommon in that galactic neighborhood.

"These kinds of collisions must happen quite frequently in this system, because they are the cause of the massive ring of dust that we see," said Janson, whose study will be published in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

(Also see "Picture: New ALMA Telescope Peers Into Galaxy Smashup.")

Planet ... Or Not?

Likewise, if a planet existed at that location it would be young and hot, and thus glow with light visible to the infrared eye of the Spitzer Space Telescope, Janson noted.

"It should emit much more light at near-infrared wavelengths than it does at visible wavelengths," he said. "And that's the opposite of what's been observed."

But co-discoverer Kalas countered that the infrared observations simply aren't sensitive enough to detect a planet that's less than the mass of Jupiter.

Kalas believes that Fomalhaut b is such a planet, and that its brightness in visible light is boosted by a ring system of icy particles, as with Saturn in our own solar system.

"If you look at Saturn, it has held onto a ring system for 4.5 billion years," Kalas said.

"That means a collection of dust surrounding a planet can be long-lived, whereas a dust cloud produced by two coments colliding has an extremely short lifetime, and you would be lucky to observe it. That's why planetary rings are more plausible."

But Princeton's Janson finds the ring hypothesis less convincing. For instance, the Hubble data show more variations in brightness than you'd expect from a ring that circles the planet, he said.

Exciting Time for New Planets

Whatever Fomalhaut b's true identity, it's an exciting time to study exoplanets—planets outside our solar system, which currently number more than 700, and counting, Kalas noted.

(Related: "Fifty New Planets Found—Largest Haul Yet.")

"Our understanding of these exoplanets is constantly evolving," he said.

"There are many surprises—and fewer hard answers."

A Fish The Size Of A Bus Caught (submitted by Stefano Cassino)

Fishermen tie ropes around the carcass of a whale shark in a harbor in Karachi, Pakistan, on Feb. 7, 2012. The 40-foot whale shark was said to have been found dead in the Arabian Sea.

Fishermen in the Pakistani port of Karachi got more than they bargained for Tuesday as they reeled in one of the biggest fish in the sea: a whale shark.

The Express Tribune, a Pakistani newspaper, reported that the 40-foot fish was first spotted ten days ago in seas about 150 km (93 miles) from the city. Mehmood Khan, the owner of a local fishery, said the shark was unconscious at that time and other reports said that it was found dead Tuesday.

A large crowd gathered as a succession of cranes were brought in to lift the shark on to the pier. After several hours and a number of failed attempts, the leviathan was finally brought ashore and promptly sold for 1.7m Rupees ($18,750).

The whale shark was added to the World Conservation Union's list of threatened species in 2008. 

Boa Constrictors Know When To Stop Squeezing By Monitoring Heartbeat Of Prey

Boas and other constrictors kill by literally squeezing the life out of their prey--no secret there. But how do they know when to stop squeezing?

With the help of a bunch of hungry boas and a tempting smorgasbord of rats, scientists at Dickinson University in Pennsylvania have found the answer: Through their tightly wrapped coils, thesnakes can feel the heartbeat of their prey--and they stop squeezing once the hearts stop beating.

It's lucky for that the snakes have this ability, the scientists point out in their macabre study. Why? Because the snakes expend huge amounts of energy when they squeeze--and stopping squeezing as soon as possible helps prevent precious calories from being wasted. What's more, the snakes are more vulnerable to attack by predators--or even the prey the're trying to subdue--when they're busy squeezing.

For the study, published in the journal Biology Letters, Dr. Scott Boback and his team put wild and captive-born snakes through their paces. To make their measurements as accurate as possible, the biologists offered the snakes not wildly thrashing live rats but cadaveric (dead) rats fitted with simulated hearts (water-filled bulbs made to pulsate via pump).

What happened next was pretty dramatic.

"I couldn't believe my eyes the first time we tested a snake with a rat with a simulated heart," Dr Boback told BBC Nature. "It was writhing and squeezing the rat in an apparent effort to kill it."

And the longer the artificial hearts kept beating, the longer the boas kept up the pressure. According to Discover magazine, the pressure is now on biologists to explain exactly how the snakes evolvedto have this heart-sensing ability.

Black Hole Picture, Never Before Possible, To Be Planned At University Of Arizona Conference

At the center of our galaxy, an enormous black hole has worked invisibly for billions of years, and now scientists are gearing up to snap its picture.

A conference will be held to discuss the never-before-attempted photographic gambit on January 18 at the University of Arizona (UA). There scientists will map out an interstellar imaging project that astronomers of previous decades never could have imagined.

Why unimaginable? According to the statement,

Even though the black hole suspected to sit at the center of our galaxy is a supermassive one at 4 million times the mass of the sun, it is tiny to the eyes of astronomers. Smaller than Mercury’s orbit around the sun, yet almost 26,000 light years away, it appears about the same size as a grapefruit on the moon.

Getting the picture will be a herculean task. The team will connect 50 telescopes of all sizes, from Hawaii to the South Pole, and use them as components of a single, enormous virtual telescope. The Event Horizon Telescope, as the project is called, will bring scientists "as close to the edge of black hole as we will ever come," according to the telescope's website. "In essence," said Sheperd Doeleman, principal investigator of the project, "we are making a virtual telescope with a mirror that is as big as the Earth."

Dimitrios Psaltis, co-organizer of the conference and associate professor of astrophysics at UA's Steward Observatory, spoke of the project in ambitious terms. "We need the entire world to come together to build this instrument because it is as big as the planet," he said. "People are coming from all over the world because they have to work on it."

And for good reason: the black hole image will verify or disprove a part of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. General relativity predicts that the swirl of dust and gases around a black hole—which is all the telescope will be able to see, since the hole itself is, of course, black—should form a perfect circle. If it looks even slightly distorted, we may have to rethink parts of Einstein's important theory.

Scientists find evidence of lakes on Jupiter's moon, Europa

New research that suggests Jupiter's moon Europa has a body of water the size of the Great Lakes just two miles below its icy surface has brought scientists one step closer to determining whether or not the freezing satellite is suitable for the development of extraterrestrial life.

According to NASA, scientists have long thought that a huge ocean -- more voluminous than all of earth's oceans combined -- existed below Europa's surface. But since the moon is so far from the sun, the surface ice is thought to be tens of miles thick.

Now, scientists analyzing data from NASA's Galileo spacecraft have found ice blocks on Europa's surface that suggest an interaction between the moon's icy shell and a lake-like body of water under the surface, Discovery reports.

According to Britney Schmidt, the lead author of the study that appears in the journal Nature, this could mean nutrients and energy are moving between the ocean and icy shell.

"One opinion in the scientific community has been if the ice shell is thick, that's bad for biology. That might mean the surface isn't communicating with the underlying ocean," Schmidt said in a statement. "Now, we see evidence that it's a thick ice shell that can mix vigorously and new evidence for giant shallow lakes. That could make Europa and its ocean more habitable."

To come to this conclusion, Schmidt and her team analyzed "chaos terrains," areas of dark, bumpy, irregular features on the surface of Europa. According to TIME and the paper's abstract, the team created models based on the formation of similar terrain on Earth -- subglacial volcanos and ice shelves -- to determine how the chaos terrain on Europa could have formed.

Europa Water: Scientists Find Evidence Of Lakes On Jupiter's Moon (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

While scientists are confident about their findings, NASA says the only way to confirm them is if a spacecraft were to explore the shell.

According to Wired, this won't happen anytime in the near future -- the Europa Jupiter System Mission (EJSM), proposed spacecrafts that would orbit Jupiter and Europa, would cost an estimated $4.6 billion.

From Space.com:

The researchers determined that it was heat rising from the moon's deep subterranean ocean and melting ice near the surface, creating briny lakes inside the moon's thick ice shell, that may have caused the collapse of these roughly circular structures above them.