For all the hopes NASA has pinned on the rover it deposited on Mars last month, one wish has gone unspoken: Please don't find water.
Scientists don't believe they will. They chose the cold, dry equatorial landing site in Mars' Gale Crater for its geology, not its prospects for harboring water or ice, which exist elsewhere on the planet.
Curiosity could pollute any water found on Mars
Arctic melt could affect weather long-term
"It is a greater change than we could even imagine 20 years ago, even 10 years ago," the institute's international director, Kim Holmen, told the BBC. "And it has taken us by surprise and we must adjust our understanding of the system and we must adjust our science and we must adjust our feelings for the nature around us."
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Scientists knew biological attack alert was flawed
Scientists who helped pioneer BioWatch, the government's system for detecting a biological attack on the U.S., knew from the start that it was prone to false alarms, records show.
Between 2003, when the nationwide network of air samplers was first deployed, and 2006, officials at the federally funded Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory filed five patent applications aimed at improving BioWatch's reliability.
Mach 6 aircraft reaches 3,600 mph for 5 minutes
Engineers hoped the X-51 would sustain its top speed for five minutes, twice as long as it's gone before. The B-52 took to the skies, but no other information about the test flight was available, John Haire, a spokesman for Edwards Air Force Base in California, said in an email.
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Seeing Through Walls With a Wireless Router
U.S. Navy researchers stumbled upon the concept of radar when they noticed that a plane flying past a radio tower reflected radio waves.
Scientists have now applied that same principle to make the first device that tracks existing Wi-Fi signals to spy on people through walls.
Astronomers hear 'death cry' of star shredded by black hole
A team of astronomers has detected the "death cry" of a star being devoured by a supermassive black hole. The black hole had been sitting quietly -- almost lying in wait, as it were -- until its gravity reached out and shredded a passing star, pulling the star into its death grip and causing it to emit a characteristic signal.
"You can think of it as hearing the star scream as it gets devoured, if you like," said astronomer Jon Miller of the University of Michigan, lead author of a report appearing in Science Express.
First spiral galaxy in early Universe stuns astronomers
Astronomers have spotted the earliest known spiral galaxy, dating to just three billion years after the Big Bang. Theories of galaxy formation held that the Universe was still too chaotic a place to allow such a perfectly formed or "grand-design" spiral to form.
It should take far longer for gravity to bring matter into thin, neat discs. But a team reporting in Nature says the galaxy BX442 got the gravitational "kick" it needed to form a spiral from a smaller "dwarf galaxy" orbiting it.
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