Month: August 2016

It has now been nearly a decade since the HiRISE camera arrived in orbit around Mars and began taking high-resolution images of the Red Planet. Tucked aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, HiRISE has a telescope aperture of 0.5 meter, making it the most powerful camera ever sent into deep space, with a maximum resolution of about 0.3 meter/pixel. This has allowed NASA to spy on its Curiosity and Opportunity rovers from space.

The camera was sent to Mars to help scientists identify regions of the Red Planet that would be good candidates for sample return missions (which NASA hopes to fly sometime in the 2020s), as well as possible landing sites for humans on Mars (no earlier than the late 2030s, for NASA). The instrument has also allowed scientists to characterize the surface of Mars and better understand its evolution over billions of years. Finally, the high-resolution images also helped dispel pareidolia such as the "face on Mars."

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has now completed about 50,000 orbits around Mars, taken nearly 250,000 images, and returned nearly 300 terabits of data about the planet to Earth. It has survived well past its original 5.5-year mission, which was supposed to end in late 2010.

(credit: California Stem Cell Agency)

On Thursday, the National Institutes of Health announced that it was revising the rules that govern its funding of stem cell research. The rules focus on cases where human stem cells are introduced into embryonic animals, creating an embryo that's a mixture of human and animal tissues. While the rules would lift a blanket moratorium on funding for this research, they'd also tighten the regulations that were in place prior to the moratorium.

An animal that's a mixture of two different organisms is called a chimaera. While they're named after mythological beasts, creating them is rather run-of-the-mill in modern research, where chimaeras between different mouse strains are an essential part of knocking out genes to study the effects. Human-mouse chimaeras are also quite common, as we inject human tumor cells into mice to study cancer and replace the mouse immune system with a human one in order to study diseases like AIDS.

Some stem cell research would be similar in nature. For example, if you wanted to determine if it is safe and effective to use stem cells to repair cardiac injury in humans, a reasonable first step would be to see what happens when you inject human stem cells into an adult mouse that has a damaged heart.

(credit: Matt Reinbold)

Yesterday, Verizon faced complaints from customers and government officials about maintenance of its copper network in areas of New Jersey. Hearings were held yesterday by the state Board of Public Utilities (BPU) on Verizon service in rural parts of South Jersey, where the company hasn't upgraded its networks to fiber. About 200 "frustrated residents" attended and nearly 80 signed up to speak, airing their complaints for hours, according to a story on NJ.com.

Theresa Duffy-Diamond of Cedarville owns three businesses but complained that she has trouble running them because of how hard it is to make phone calls. She played a voicemail that she received—it contained "nothing but crackling sounds," the article said.

63-year-old John Dowling of Estell Manor, who suffers from a chronic lung disease and needs frequent medical attention, reported not being able to make phone calls from his landline when it rains. When he complains to Verizon, "four days later they would come out on a sunny day and say the lines are all clear," he said.