Humans may begin colonizing Mars in the next decade or two. And images sent back from orbiting and roving spacecraft show a familiar landscape. Arid valleys and plains, dotted with mesas, often cut with flash-flood gulches. It looks a lot like the high desert southwest in the US. But Mars is not Earth, the similarities conceal chemistry and conditions that aren’t just alien, they’re lethal:
It turns out that these perchlorates are actually highly toxic to life when bathed in UV radiation that pummels Mars. Researchers from the United Kingdom Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh exposed a strain of bacteria commonly found on spacecraft to levels of perchlorates and UV light found on the Red Planet and found that nearly all of them were dead within a minute. They tried this with several different kinds of perchlorate, and found similar results every time. Adding in additional environmental factors found on Mars like low temperatures, additional minerals found on Mars and a lack of oxygen also failed to keep the bacteria alive.
On a related topic, it seems like a really fun research project would be trying to cultivate extremophile bacteria to Martian conditions over many generations. But cursory searches for such an effort reveal surprisingly little information.
- This should go without saying, but a cell phone that is plugged into a wall charger is dangerous, because it’s part of a giant circuit grounded through the home’s foundation. Don’t become a human resistor in that circuit.
- Climate change is bad enough as is. There’s really no need to overstate the threat.
- Surely we all agree that gorgeous images from the solar system and beyond are awesome! But closer to home, way, way more people are directly affected—and helped—by weather and climate forecasting. So you can guess what the orcs are doing:
A fiscal year 2018 spending bill that will be marked up by the House Appropriations Committee July 13 includes record funding levels for NASA’s planetary science program, but severely cuts a NOAA weather satellite program.
A brief editorial note on the so-called healthcare debate: conservatives are well served when the media portrays it as a disagreement about how to best make health care affordable and accessible. That’s not what this is about, it never was. The orcs want to take any government support or regulation for health care away from millions and give the “savings” to their flaky mega-rich buddies. Since that’s ugly, immoral, and serves a tiny, greedy handful at the expense of legions, they use all kinds of shenanigans to disguise their cruel intent. The vast majority of the rest of us want affordable, accessible health care for everyone and recognize that there is no pure, free market solution that can ever provide it.