Pouring Down All Over Mars.

“So, how does water flow in the frigid Martian temperatures that are present, even in the summer months? Researchers think that there may be a naturally-occurring anti-freeze in the water, caused by the high-iron content…the water and ferric iron flowed together as part of a brine.”

Via io9, Scientists at NASA’s JPL find the strongest evidence of currently extant water on Mars yet. “We still don’t have a smoking gun for existence of water…Although we’re not sure how this process would take place without water.”

Only One Absolute…Everything Freezes.

“‘We’re going to study matter at temperatures far colder than are found naturally,’ says Rob Thompson of JPL…’We aim to push effective temperatures down to 100 pico-Kelvin.’ 100 pico-Kelvin is just one ten billionth of a degree above absolute zero, where all the thermal activity of atoms theoretically stops. At such low temperatures, ordinary concepts of solid, liquid and gas are no longer relevant. Atoms interacting just above the threshold of zero energy create new forms of matter that are essentially…quantum.”

In the nearest reaches of space (a.k.a. the ISS), NASA scientists plan to create the coldest spot in the universe, in order to toy with the fabric of reality. “No one knows where this fundamental research will lead. Even the ‘practical’ applications listed by Thompson — quantum sensors, matter wave interferometers, and atomic lasers, just to name a few — sound like science fiction. ‘We’re entering the unknown,’ he says.’

This is Your Film on Drugs.

“What do those substances, when they’re not altering minds, actually look like? To find out…Schoenfeld turned to a logical source: photographs. She converted her photo studio into a lab, then set to work exposing drugs (legal and illegal) to film negatives. She took the images that emerged from the reactions and magnified them—to gorgeous, and sometimes fairly creepy, results.” The Atlantic‘s Megan Garber points the way to All You Can Feel, an often-beautiful gallery of drugs on film on drugs.

Nova Close, Water Closer.

Water, water everywhere: ESA’s Herschel space observatory discovers that Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt, is emitting plumes of water. “The discovery of Ceres’ plumes comes at a fortuitous time. NASA currently has a probe, the Dawn spacecraft, speeding toward the object. Dawn will arrive and enter orbit around Ceres in 2015, giving researchers a front-row view of the activity.” (Ceres image via here.)

Also in recent discoveries among the stars: A supernova erupts in the relatively nearby galaxy M82, 11.5 million light years away (meaning it blew 11.5 million years ago.) “It is one of the closest and brightest supernovae seen from Earth since the 1987 observation of a supernova just 168,000 light years away…[B]ecause these supernovae are used to calibrate distances in space, understanding them better may help clarify the shape of the Universe.” (M82 image via Earl Foster, here.)

As A Matter of Fact, It’s All Dark.

“‘There is no escape from a black hole in classical theory,’ Hawking told Nature. Quantum theory, however, ‘enables energy and information to escape from a black hole’…[The paper] does away with the notion of an event horizon, the invisible boundary thought to shroud every black hole, beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape. In its stead, Hawking’s radical proposal is a much more benign ‘apparent horizon’, which only temporarily holds matter and energy prisoner before eventually releasing them, albeit in a more garbled form.”

Also in potentially earth-shattering space news, Stephen Hawking — “one of the creators of modern black-hole theory” — has released a new paper (not-yet-peer-reviewed) arguing that there are no black holes, really: Quantum theory suggests that matter eventually escapes from them. “A full explanation of the process, the physicist admits, would require a theory that successfully merges gravity with the other fundamental forces of nature. But that is a goal that has eluded physicists for nearly a century.”

Martian Vineyard.

“The layer of rock, called the Sheepbed mudstone, has several qualities that indicate it formed in an environment that was hospitable to life. First, the thickness of the rock indicates that the lake existed in that area for a long period of time. Second, chemical analysis showed that the lake had all the right ingredients for life. According to Grotzinger, the lake would have been roughly half the size of one of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York.”

Where do bad folks go when they die? They don’t go to heaven where the angels fly. Mars? Hrm…well, maybe. Curiosity finds the remnants of what appears to be an ancient Martian lake in Yellowknife Bay, part of Gale Crater. Unfortunately, “[e]ven if there were fossils in the mudstone, Curiosity doesn’t have the right kind of equipment to see them. That job will be left to the Mars rover set to launch in 2020.”

Farewell, Europa.

“The ASRG program was created to help extend the life of the remaining Pu-238 supply. It uses a Stirling engine to generate electricity at four times the efficiency of a regular RTG. This means more missions to these harsh places using less Plutonium. While NASA has started to generate Pu-238 again, it won’t be ready to use until 2019, and even then the Department of Energy will only produce about 1kg – 1.5kg per year. The New Horizons mission to Pluto used about 11kg, which would take anywhere from 7 – 11 years to generate under the current plan.”

Because of sequestration and other budget cuts, NASA is forced to cancel its advanced spacecraft power program, threatening future missions past the asteroid belt. “ASRGs had been under development by NASA for over a decade, and had been planned for use by 2016 in the next low-cost planetary exploration missions…Because of the limited cost cap imposed on these missions, they’re now essentially limited to the inner solar system. Missions with bigger budgets that could afford regular RTGs will be bottlenecked by the production rate of Plutonium to maybe once or twice per decade. Goodbye, outer planets.”

Make it Better Do It Faster.

“Before now, the record for storing quantum data at room temperature was two seconds. One. Two. Done. But researchers in Canada announced they’ve now hit 39 minutes. That’s right — they’ve raised the bar from 2 seconds to 39 minutes…The advance clears a major hurdle in developing powerful new supercomputers and has outside experts excited about the not-so-distant future of the field.”

(Our work is never over.) In more promising future-tech news, scientists figure out a way to store quantum data for much longer than ever before. “Though surviving for 39 minutes may not sound like very long, it only requires one-hundred-thousandth of a second to perform an operation on a single qubit. So theoretically, over 20 million operations could be performed before the qubits’ data decayed by 1 percent.”

Of Mice and Memory.

“‘Prof Roger Morris, from King’s College London, said: “This finding, I suspect, will be judged by history as a turning point in the search for medicines to control and prevent Alzheimer’s disease.’ He told the BBC a cure for Alzheimer’s was not imminent but: I’m very excited, it’s the first proof in any living animal that you can delay neurodegeneration. The world won’t change tomorrow, but this is a landmark study.'”

Some good news for a change, by way of Dangerous Meta: Scientists have developed (for mice, at least) what appears to be a breakthrough drug that could prevent Alzheimers and other neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s(!):

“When a virus hijacks a brain cell it leads to a build-up of viral proteins. Cells respond by shutting down nearly all protein production in order to halt the virus’s spread. However, many neurodegenerative diseases involve the production of faulty or ‘misfolded’ proteins. These activate the same defences, but with more severe consequences…The researchers used a compound which prevented those defence mechanisms kicking in and in turn halted neurodegeneration.”

Skynet, Year One.

“‘If a drone’s system is sophisticated enough, it could be less emotional, more selective and able to provide force in a way that achieves a tactical objective with the least harm,’ said Purdue University Professor Samuel Liles. ‘A lethal autonomous robot can aim better, target better, select better, and in general be a better asset with the linked ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] packages it can run.'”

Er, right, but aren’t we forgetting something here? And don’t you people ever go to the movies? Scientists are apparently working toward drones that can make their own autonomous decisions about targets. “Though they do not yet exist, and are not possible with current technology, LARs are the subject of fierce debate in academia, the military and policy circles. Still, many treat their development as inevitability.”

Meanwhile, over on the other side of the world:

“Scientists at Korea’s Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have come up with one solution to the jellyfish problem: build robots to kill them. For the last three years, the team has been working to create robots that can travel the ocean, seeking out swarms of jellyfish using a camera and GPS. Once the jellyfish are located, the robots set about shredding the jellies with an underwater propeller.”

INITIATING PROTOCOL SHRED-ORGANBAGS 101101111…Due to a climate-change-fueled ascendance of jellyfish across the world, Korean scientists have unleashed automated robotic sentinels to mitigate the problem. “[T]he video at top is what they’re doing beneath the surface, using a specialized net and propeller. Be warned, it’s graphic. In preliminary tests, the robots could pulverize 2,000 pounds of jellyfish per hour.”

Sigh…this will all end in tears, people. Paging Kent Brockman.