There's ice on Mars! Maybe. NASA's Phoenix Lander found evidence that has scientists convinced that they've found ice on the Red Planet. The lander then made an igloo to spend the night in. Well, no, that part's not true. Story in the full article.

A recent study has confirmed that there are hundreds of other planets which carry conditions similar to Earth in the outskirts of the Solar System and even across the Milky Way Galaxy.

The scientists hope to know more about this in the continued search for life and possible future colonies. Know more after the jump!

As the first planet of our solar system, Mercury usually doesn't get the same level of attention as, say, the more loved dwarf planet Pluto. But once we consider that Mercury is also the closest planet to the Sun, we won't argue the point of actually going there - unless, of course, the Sahara Desert's your kind of Bora Bora. But NASA's braved the effort, and right after Messenger flew around Mercury this January 2008, they're willing to share the experience.

  

Life on Mars has always been a topic of popular science fiction novels, and one that has captured many an imagination. There is still a pretty strong movement among scientists who believe that life can exist on the red planet, therefore NASA has launched the Phoenix Probe.

The spacecraft is expected to arrive on Mars after nine months. The probe has been designed to dig underneath the surface of the planet on a mission to find any evidence of life. The scientists from NASA are hoping that the vehicle will land on relatively flat lands at a Martian latitude equivalent to our own northern Alaska. This particular location was chosen due to the fact that water ice is thought to lie just a few tens of centimetres below the surface, well within reach of the unit's robotic arm.

The mission's principal investigator is a professor at the University of Arizona named Peter Smith discussed the details and goals of the mission:

The real question we're trying to answer is: "has that ice melted", because liquid water in contact with soil may provide us with a habitable environment. For microbes, the word 'habitable' means you have liquid water, complex organic molecules of the type our bodies are made of - proteins, amino acids and so on - and it also means you have energy sources.

That's a lot of necessary requirements that the planet has to possess to be considered habitable. Mission scientist William Boynton gave a few interesting details relating this mission with the NASA mission last 1970 and why the group has not yet given up on the idea of life on the planet despite previous findings:

One of the interesting questions is why organic molecules weren't found on the surface of Mars by Viking [Nasa Mars mission from the 1970s]. The answer is we think there is a mechanism which can destroy organic molecules on Mars. This mechanism might not be operating in the polar regions because water and ice can decompose the oxidants that destroy the organics.

After this mission has concluded, we'll be one step closer to finding out if there are any other planets within our own solar system that can support life. However, even if they find nothing, you can always bet that somewhere, someone will still be believing that there is life on Mars and that we just need to look closer to find it.

The most recent findings about gas giants have given astronomers a better idea of how the universe tends to arrange its planets. Leading a team of stargazing astronomers, Beth Biller of the University of Arizona has been hard at work observing other solar systems for the last three years, shuttling between telescope sites in Arizona and Chile. What they discovered was surprising.

The team initially set out to find evidence that gas giants formed far from their suns. Of the 250 planets that they have discovered outside our solar system, the team noticed that the greater amount of gas giants were actually closer to their suns than previously thought. These "hot Jupiters," as the team calls them, were observed to orbit their suns so closely that they'd put Mercury to shame.

There was some idea that there might possibly be a reservoir of giant planets [far from their stars] that would eventually migrate in, and we don't really find evidence for this reservoir.

However, the team did point out another plausible explanation, stating that the survey of planets assumed that young gas giants are, in theory, brighter and thus easier to find as compared to older gas giants. Some recent studies would debate this but for now, the team holds that theory in reserve. Does this mean our solar system is some sort of universal misfit, not really fitting into the mold? Maybe we'll have a more definite answer in the near future as the team's findings will be published in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal.

New radar images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which is currently orbiting the Saturn moon Titan, provide new evidence of seas that could be the largest liquid formations reported on the planet's surface. Cassini's instruments have picked up these dark features near Titan's north pole, and one amazing feature is that one of the larger dark areas have been measured to be approximately 100,000 square kilometers (39,000 square miles) - out-sizing America's Lake Superior, which stands at 82,414 square kilometers (31,820 square miles). The image on the left shows this comparison.

"We've long hypothesized about oceans on Titan and now with multiple instruments we have a first indication of seas that dwarf the lakes seen previously," said Dr. Jonathan Lunine, Cassini interdisciplinary scientist at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

It is hypothesized that these seas are composed of methane and ethane - the most abundant gas in Titan's clouds and atmosphere - which have been condensed into liquid form due the much colder polar temperatures on Saturn. At the moment, however, these formations are yet to be verified as liquid-filled by the Cassini-Hyugens team.

Meanwhile, the image on the right shows a similar and much larger dark feature that was captured by Cassini's imaging cameras. According to NASA's reports, this dark area stretches for more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles). If verified to be liquid-filled, this other sea will stand to be almost as large as the Earth's Caspian Sea which measures 3,626,000 square kilometers (1,400,000 square miles).

Further Cassini flybys are being planned for the dark areas in May to verify if these formations are indeed liquid-filled.

For the past half-century medical practitioners have come to agree that the brain's memory system is similar to how a computer downloads data from the internet. New theories proposed by German and American scientists, however, are challenging the notion.

The old belief that memories for a day were temporarily stored in the hippocampus, similar to how data passes through the RAM. The hippocampus is a curved part of the brain which fires electric signals during sleep. When this happens, the information goes to the neocortex (which is similar to a hard drive) for permanent storage.

This was the basis of the explanation why people with damaged hippocampi had trouble with creating short term memories but could easily recall old ones because the neocortex is intact.

The old theory made a lot of sense, but new findings by researchers at Brown University and the Max Planck institute of Medical Research suggest a different explanation. They say that the hippocampus is not the engine driving the neocortex. Brown neuroscientist Mayank Mehta says "what seems to be [happening] is that all the neuron types in the hippocampus are showing some echo or antiecho of the neocortex. None of them seem to be driving neocortex."

In a nutshell, there is really no one-way data transfer that happens during sleep. The truth is, they claim, that both parts actually show activity through resonances of information. When all is said and done, the hippocampus is cleared of its content, and gets set for another day of data gathering.

Some experts, however, are not fully convinced that this explanation is entirely accurate. Pointing out to how the research was conducted. "One has to be very careful, in interpreting the results done under anesthesia," he warns, "because it's totally not the same brain." says Bruce McNaughton, University of Arizona director for the Division of Neural Systems, Memory and Aging.

In an act of class and professionalism, Mehta acknowledged the fragility of the theory, saying that many a researcher have been fooled by the brain before, and it will be foolhardy to say that this is how the brain really works at this point.

After an earlier analysis of gamma ray emission from the black hole located in the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, scientists have come to conclude that the emissions may be the product of dark matter decaying. But other scientists believe the constantly moving magnetic fields around the black hole can become a giant particle accelerator. And when particles collide in extreme speeds, it produces gamma rays.

Gamma-ray observatories have detected energetic gamma rays in the tens of Tera-electron volts (TeV) streaming from the center of the Milky Way outward. David Ballantyne from the University of Arizona led the study investigating on the possible particle acceleration scenario.

Results helped scientists conclude that protons could reach energies of 1000 TeV as they travel outward from the black hole, constantly gaining more and more velocity. This number is 100 times higher than the energies protons will be able to reach in the Large Hadron Collider (to be the world's largest particle accelerator) under construction in Geneva, Switzerland.

Now how about that? Our galaxy's biggest vacuum doubles as a super weapon. Sure beats the ring world Master Chief blew up, eh?

Opportunity has come and spent its first week at the Victoria Crater in Mars to explore and document its surroundings from above. Designed specifically for the expansion and reinforcement of NASA's Mars missions in orbit and on the surface, Opportunity is the agency's newest eye in the Martian sky.

In 1997, NASA was encouraged to pick the Victoria Crater as the long-term destination for Opportunity after images from their Mars Global Surveyor, orbiting the red planet, revealed that the one-half-mile-wide crater has scalloped edges of alternating cliff-like high, jutting ledges and gentler alcoves. The significance of this is that it exhibits the planet's environmental history through its exposed geological layers of the crater's inner walls.

It was also Opportunity which found geological evidence back in 2004 that the red planet had a wet environment long-ago. Through the layers in Victoria, it is the hope of the scientists to be able to determine if that wet environment was persistent, fleeting or cyclical. The images from the orbiter is particularly critical as it will be the basis for the team working on this Mars mission to choose which way to send Opportunity around the rim, and where to stop for the best views. As for the ground-level observations, these will be useful in providing information for interpreting orbital images.

"The ground-truth we get from the rover images and measurements enables us to better interpret features we see elsewhere on Mars, including very rugged and dramatic terrains that we can't currently study on the ground," says Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, principal investigator for the orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera.

The Mars missions attempt to discover if the red planet could become habitable by man in the future. Finding out about the environmental history, especially its water capacity, is crucial to coming to the conclusion that we could, someday, live and be sustained by Mars.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft sent back images from Saturn's giant moon and scientists are almost sure the black patches near the pole are lakes. They think the dark patches could have been caused by Cassini's radar beam hitting very smooth surfaces, most probably liquid methane or ethane, on Titan's surface.

If the scientists are right, Titan is only the second body known to have liquid surfaces. The lakes are thought to be filled by rainfall and even seasonal storms, which are part of Titan's methane cycle.

The largest lakes are around 62 miles (100 km) across, although there is also a network of smaller, interconnected lakes said to resemble parts of Finland and Canada. Some appear to be deposits left behind as the methane lake evaporated. The lakes are more common near the pole probably because the temperature is cooler and the methane is less likely to evaporate. But since the temperature differences are small, lakes may exist at lower latitudes.

"When we have more coverage of the equator, we could see lakes there, too. We've only covered a few per cent of the surface so far," says Enrico Flamini of the Italian Space Agency in Rome.

"We could hope to see sea-surface textures due to waves diffracting around islands, or vortices in the wake of islands," says Cassini radar scientist Ralph Lorenz of the University of Arizona, US. "These sort of dynamic features would make liquids 'come alive'." While evidence of lakes is strong, the patches could turn out to be areas of soot, or dry lake beds. Imaging the areas again could show if the lakes grow or shrink or have waves.