420 articles from THURSDAY 18.2.2021

What Perseverance, NASA’s New Mars Rover, Will Be Doing in its Years on the Red Planet

There was plenty of reason to celebrate when the Perseverance rover successfully touched down in Mars’s Jezero Crater this afternoon. But in some ways, the rover showed up too late—3.5 billion years too late, in fact. Long ago, in an earlier epoch, as studies of Mars have shown, Jezero Crater was Jezero Lake, a 45 km (28 mi.) depression in the northern Martian hemisphere, fed with...

Mars rover landing: Nasa's Perseverance safely touches down in search of life

Radio signals confirmed that the six-wheeled rover had survived its perilous descent and arrived within its target zoneNasa’s science rover Perseverance, the most advanced astrobiology laboratory ever sent to another world, streaked through the Martian atmosphere on Thursday and landed safely on the floor of a vast crater, its first stop on a search for traces of ancient microbial life on the...

NASA’s Perseverance rover has landed on Mars

NASA’s Perseverance rover has landed safely on Mars. The spacecraft survived its journey through the Martian atmosphere and made a soft touchdown at Jezero crater.  What happened: Perseverance began its descent into the Martian atmosphere Thursday afternoon, a process affectionately called the “seven minutes of terror.” The spacecraft survived scorching temperatures thanks to its heat...

Explainable AI for decoding genome biology

Researchers at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, in collaboration with colleagues at Stanford University and Technical University of Munich have developed advanced explainable artificial intelligence (AI) in a technical tour de force to decipher regulatory instructions encoded in DNA. In a report published online February 18, 2021, in Nature Genetics, the team found that a neural network...

Is odor the secret to bats' sex appeal?

When falling in love, humans often pay attention to looks. Many non-human animals also choose a sexual partner based on appearance. Male birds may sport flashy feathers to attract females, lionesses prefer lions with thicker manes and colorful male guppies with large spots attract the most females. But bats are active in the dark. How do they attract mates? Mariana Muñoz-Romo, a senior Latin...

Touchdown! NASA's Mars Perseverance Rover Safely Lands on Red Planet

Portal origin URL: Touchdown! NASA's Mars Perseverance Rover Safely Lands on Red PlanetPortal origin nid: 468441Published: Thursday, February 18, 2021 - 15:42Featured (stick to top of list): noPortal text teaser: The largest, most advanced rover NASA has sent to another world touched down on Mars Thursday, after a 203-day journey traversing 293 million miles (472 million...

Poor swelter as urban areas of U.S. Southwest get hotter

Acres of asphalt parking lots, unshaded roads, dense apartment complexes and neighborhoods with few parks have taken their toll on the poor. As climate change accelerates, low-income districts in the Southwestern United States are 4 to 7 degrees hotter in Fahrenheit—on average—than wealthy neighborhoods in the same metro regions, University of California, Davis, researchers have found in a new...