Heavy hydrogen excess hints at Martian vapour loss

Gravity means most things are lighter on Mars but it seems the Red Planet likes its hydrogen heavy. In its first chemical analysis of the Martian soil, the Curiosity rover has discovered an unusually high proportion of heavy hydrogen, also known as deuterium. Combined with future results, the finding may help pin down when and how Mars lost most of its atmosphere.

Most hydrogen atoms contain just a proton and an electron, but some contain an extra neutron, forming deuterium. On Earth, deuterium is much rarer than hydrogen – for example, in our oceans one in every 6420 hydrogens also has a neutron. As deuterium is thought to have been produced in the big bang, it should have once appeared in similar abundances on all the planets in the solar system.

That's why the new discovery by Curiosity, which landed in an area of Mars called Gale Crater on 6 August, is intriguing. After heating a soil sample to 1100 °C and analysing the resulting vapour, Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) experiment found a deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio that is five times higher than that on Earth: one deuterium for every 1284 hydrogens.

"This is one of those ratios that's just way, way different," SAM principal investigator Paul Mahaffy told a press conference on 3 December at the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting in San Francisco.

Bygone water

Mars's atmosphere is much thinner than Earth's and is thought to be vanishing. Mahaffy suggests that Mars could have lost a bunch of its light hydrogen when its climate was warmer and wetter. Ultraviolet light from the sun could have broken up water vapour in the atmosphere, creating free hydrogen. The lighter isotopes of hydrogen would then escape into space more rapidly, leaving proportionately more deuterium behind.

Knowing the modern deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio doesn't paint that picture on its own. But looking at the ratio captured in hydrated minerals on Aeolis Mons, a mountain thought to preserve a layered history of Martian geology, could help fill in the historical record. "It will help us understand the processes that may have stripped an early atmosphere from Mars," Mahaffy said.

More details will come with the MAVEN mission, set to launch in 2013, which will measure the current rate at which hydrogen is escaping from the atmosphere.

"Those escape rates extrapolated back in time, combined with atmospheric measurements we're making, and hopefully combined with what we might find in very ancient rocks 3.5 billions years ago when a lot more water could have been at Gale Crater, all of those will help us make a model of the early environment and whether it's conducive to life," Mahaffy said.

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McDonald's seeks place in Australian dictionary

SYDNEY: The Australian arm of McDonald's has urged the national Macquarie Dictionary to include "Macca's" -- the brand's local nickname -- in its next edition.

The hamburger giant said Macca's was second only to "footy" among recognisable words in local slang, according to a branding survey it commissioned that found 55 per cent of Australians referred to the golden arches in the abbreviated form.

"The research findings have shown that Macca's is Australia's favourite brand nickname and that half of the population use the iconic Australianism," said McDonald's Australia's chief marketing officer Mark Lollback.

"Knowing this, we think it's time that Macquarie Dictionary Publishers added our moniker to their dictionary of Australian English."

Lollback said Australia was the only country in the world that referred to McDonald's as Macca's and the abbreviation "reflects our place in the Australian community", which has a penchant for jocular nicknames.

The restaurant has formally submitted the word to the Macquarie Dictionary for consideration in their 2012 update and said it hoped to hear back in the next few weeks.

The Macquarie Dictionary accepts submissions for new words and phrases and runs an annual word of the year poll on new inclusions.

Last year's addition was burqini, a swimsuit for Muslim women, with the popular vote going to fracking -- shorthand for hydraulic fracturing, a process using chemicals and water to split rock-beds to extract gas or oil.

- AFP/ck

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Mobile Internet traffic gaining fast on desktop Internet traffic

Mary Meeker at D10

(Credit:
CNET/Rafe Needleman)

Global mobile traffic is growing so fast that in some places it has already surpassed desktop traffic.

That was one of the key conclusions of a year-end Internet trends report delivered this evening at Stanford University by Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist Mary Meeker.

Once known by many as the "Queen of the Net," Meeker reported that 13 percent of all Internet traffic is now executed from a mobile device, up from just 4 percent just two years ago. In tech-savvy India, mobile Internet traffic has reached 60 percent, surpassing desktop Internet traffic, which has declined to 40 percent.

Monetization of the mobile sector is also growing rapidly, turning in a compounded annual growth rate of 129 percent in the past four years. Mobile apps will take home the lion's share of the $19 billion the sector is expected to generate this year, 67 percent compared with the 33 percent generated by ads.

Other key tidbits in the report:

• Sales of mobile devices such as smartphones and
tablets is expected to gradually increase over the next three years, moving more than 1.7 billion units in 2015. Meanwhile, sales of PC and laptops is expected to remain relatively anemic with less than 400 million units sold.

• The adoption rate of
Android phones in the first 16 quarters after their launch has well eclipsed the rate at which people bought iPhones in their first 16 quarters on the market, selling more than 600 million handsets compared with Apple's 100 million, she found.

• Nearly 30 percent of adults in the U.S. own a tablet or e-reader, an impressive adoption rate considering that less than three years ago only 2 percent owned one of the gadgets.

The report also touched on the ways technology has dramatically changed our lives in the past few years, from smartphones vs. cameras to social media vs. newspapers and even file storage, mobile payments, and education.

See the entire slide show presentation below:

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Mars Rover Detects Simple Organic Compounds

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has detected several simple carbon-based organic compounds on Mars, but it remains unclear whether they were formed via Earthly contamination or whether they contain only elements indigenous to the planet.

Speaking at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in San Francisco, Curiosity mission leaders also said that the compound perchlorate—identified previously in polar Mars—appeared to also be present in Gale Crater, the site of Curiosity's exploration.

The possible discovery of organics—or carbon-based compounds bonded to hydrogen, also called hydrocarbons—could have major implications for the mission's search for more complex organic material.

It would not necessarily mean that life exists now or ever existed on Mars, but it makes the possibility of Martian life—especially long ago when the planet was wetter and warmer—somewhat greater, since available carbon is considered to be so important to all known biology.

(See "Mars Curiosity Rover Finds Proof of Flowing Water—A First.")

The announcements came after several weeks of frenzied speculation about a "major discovery" by Curiosity on Mars. But project scientist John Grotzinger said that it remains too early to know whether Martian organics have been definitely discovered or if they're byproducts of contamination brought from Earth.

"When this data first came in, and then was confirmed in a second sample, we did have a hooting and hollering moment," he said.

"The enthusiasm we had was perhaps misunderstood. We're doing science at the pace of science, but news travels at a different speed."

Organics Detected Before on Mars

The organic compounds discovered—different combinations of carbon, hydrogen, and chlorine—are the same or similar to chlorinated organics detected in the mid-1970s by the Viking landers.

(Related: "Life on Mars Found by NASA's Viking Mission?")

At the time, the substances were written off as contamination brought from Earth, but now scientists know more about how the compounds could be formed on Mars. The big question remains whether the carbon found in the compounds is of Martian or Earthly origin.

Paul Mahaffy, the principal investigator of the instrument that may have found the simple organics—the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM)—said that while the findings were not "definitive," they were significant and would require a great deal of further study.

Mahaffy also said the discovery came as a surprise, since the soil sample involved was hardly a prime target in the organics search. In fact, the soil was scooped primarily to clean out the rover's mobile laboratory and soil-delivery systems.

Called Rocknest, the site is a collection of rocks with rippled sand around them—an environment not considered particularly promising for discovery. The Curiosity team has always thought it had a much better chance of finding the organics in clays and sulfate minerals known to be present at the base of Mount Sharp, located in the Gale Crater, where the rover will head early next year.

(See the Mars rover Curiosity's first color pictures.)

The rover has been at Rocknest for a month and has scooped sand and soil five times. It was the first site where virtually all the instruments on Curiosity were used, Grotzinger said, and all of them proved to be working well.

They also worked well in unison—with one instrument giving the surprising signal that the minerals in the soil were not all crystalline, which led to the intensive examination of the non-crystalline portion to see if it contained any organics.

Rover Team "Very Confident"

The simple organics detected by SAM were in the chloromethane family, which contains compounds that are sometimes used to clean electronic equipment. Because it was plausible that Viking could have brought the compounds to Mars as contamination, that conclusion was broadly accepted.

But in 2010, Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center and Rafael Navarro-Gonzalez of the National Autonomous University of Mexico published an influential paper describing how dichloromethane can be a byproduct of the heating of other organic material in the presence of the compound perchlorate.

They conducted the experiment because NASA's Phoenix mission had discovered large amounts of perchlorate in the northern polar soil of Mars, and it seems plausible that it would exist elsewhere on the planet.

"In terms of the SAM results, there are two important conclusions," said McKay, a scientist on the SAM team.

"The first is confirming the perchlorate story—that it's most likely there and seems to react at high temperatures with organic material to form the dichloromethane and other simple organics."

"The second is that we'll have to either find organics without perchlorates nearby, or find a way to get around that perchlorate wall that keeps us from identifying organics," he said.

Another SAM researcher, Danny Glavin of Goddard, said his team is "very confident" about the reported detection of the hydrocarbons, and that they were produced in the rover's ovens. He said it is clear that the chlorine in the compounds is from Mars, but less clear about the carbon.

"We will figure out what's going on here," he said. "We have the instruments and we have the people. And whatever the final conclusions, we will have learned important things about Mars that we can use in the months ahead."

Author of the National Geographic e-book Mars Landing 2012, Marc Kaufman has been a journalist for more than 35 years, including the past 12 as a science and space writer, foreign correspondent, and editor for the Washington Post. He is also author of First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth, published in 2011, and has spoken extensively to crowds across the United States and abroad about astrobiology. He lives outside Washington, D.C., with his wife, Lynn Litterine.

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Kate's Illness Sometimes Linked to Twins

Hyperemesis gravidarum, the reason newly pregnant Kate Middleton is in the hospital, is a rare but acute morning sickness that results in weight loss and accounts for about 2 percent of all morning sickness, doctors say.

The condition is sometimes associated with women having twins, experts said.

Women diagnosed with hyperemesis gravidarum have lost 5 percent of their pre-pregnancy weight, or 10 pounds, said Dr. Ashley Roman, a professor and OB/GYN at New York University Langone Medical Center.

It poses little danger to the tiny heir, doctors said.

"It's traditionally thought that nausea and vomiting is a sign of a healthy pregnancy," Roman said

Dr. Nancy Cossler, an OB/GYN at University Hospitals in Ohio said the condition does not cause loss of pregnancy or birth defects, but it can be a torture to endure.

"The biggest problem with this is how it interferes with your life," Cossler said. "Constantly feeling sick and puking is difficult."

Click here to read about other women with hyperemesis gravidarum.

Hyperemesis gravidarum is thought to be caused by higher levels of the pregnancy hormone, hCG, or human chorionic gonadotropin, Cossler said. Extra hCG can often be brought on by carrying more than one fetus, she said.

Chris Jackson/AFP/Getty Images

Kate Middleton Pregnant, Admitted to Hospital Watch Video

Kate Middleton, Prince William Expecting Their First Child Watch Video

Prince William and Kate Middleton's Big News Watch Video

In other words, it could be a sign that Middleton is carrying twins. Although there's very little data on twins and hyperemesis gravidarum, one study showed that women carrying twins had a 7.5 percent higher risk of experiencing the acute morning sickness, Roman said.

The extreme morning sickness is usually diagnosed about nine weeks into the pregnancy, and in most cases resolves itself by 16 or 20 weeks, Roman said. In rare cases, it can last the whole pregnancy.

"As the pregnancy is in its very early stages, Her Royal Highness is expected to stay in hospital for several days and will require a period of rest thereafter," a statement from St. James Palace said. Prince William is at the hospital with Middleton, according to the Britain's Press Association.

Click here for photos of Kate through the years.

Roman said doctors prescribe vitamins and ginger capsules at first. If that doesn't stop the vomiting, they will prescribe antihistamines and stronger anti-nausea medications.

Women with hyperemesis gravidarum are also treated with fluids, said Dr. Jessica Young, an OB/GYN at Vanderbilt University. But if left untreated, a pregnant woman who is severely dehydrated for a long period of time could die, "just like any person," Young said.

In extreme cases in which the woman is losing weight and unable to eat, doctors will treat her with intravenous nutrition, Young said.

Hospital stays can vary, and women will often have to be admitted more than once before the condition passes, doctors said.

Hyperemesis gravidarum is somewhat mysterious because some expectant mothers have acute morning sickness during only one of their pregnancies, but have no morning sickness for subsequent pregnancies.

There is a chance that higher levels of hCG, which likely caused Middleton's nausea, could be a sign of a molar pregnancy instead of twins, Cossler said. This would mean Middleton is carrying only a benign growth in her uterus instead of a fetus, or she is carrying a fetus with abnormal DNA and a benign growth. Neither is considered a viable pregnancy.

However, Cossler said molar pregnancies become apparent early on, and doctors would already know whether Middleton had one.

"They would not have released this information," Cossler said of the birth announcement. "I'm certain that they have already eliminated both of those [types of molar pregnancies]."

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Tiny tug of war in cells underpins life

TUG of war could well be the oldest game in the world. Cells use it for division, and now researchers have measured the forces involved when an amoeba plays the game.

Hirokazu Tanimoto and Masaki Sano at the University of Tokyo, Japan, studied what happens during the division of Dictyostelium - a slime mould that has barely changed through eons of evolution. The amoeba uses tiny projections or "feet" to gain traction on a surface.

The pair placed the amoeba on a flexible surface embedded with fluorescent beads. They used traction force microscopy to measure how the organism deformed the pattern of beads: the greater the deformation, the greater the force.

Dictyostelium normally exerts a force of about 10 nanonewtons when it moves, but the pair found this roughly doubles during division. That's because the cell uses its feet to pull itself in opposite directions, as if playing tug of war with itself.

The forces involved are about 100 billion times smaller than those used in the human form of the game, Tanimoto says (Physical Review Letters, in press).

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

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6 weeks' jail for SMRT bus driver involved in strike

SINGAPORE: A SMRT bus driver from China has been sentenced to six weeks' jail for taking part in an illegal strike.

Bao Feng Shan, 38, admitted that he committed the offence on 26 November.

He appeared grim in court on Monday, as the charge was read out to him in Mandarin, accusing him of "commencing" the strike between 6am and 7am on 26 November at Woodlands Dormitory.

Bao, who did not engage a lawyer, acknowledged the "adverse effects" of the strike.

Speaking through a court interpreter, he said he was "deeply remorseful and apologetic".

Bao, who teared several times, also apologised to the government of Singapore, SMRT and his family.

He said a jail sentence would have adverse effects on his eight-year-old daughter.

Bao was deployed to Kranji Depot to drive Service 106 at the time of the offence.

The tall and bespectacled man had been working for SMRT since 2008.

Some time between 6am and 7am on 26 November, he joined many drivers in refusing to go to work.

Deputy Public Prosecutor Peggy Pao told the court that Bao was not happy that he was not entitled to the same year-end bonuses and increments as his Malaysian counterparts.

He did not give notice of his intention to strike on 26 and 27 November.

The court heard that Bao did not start the strike, but took on a participatory role.

But DPP Pao pointed out that although Bao was not charged as an instigator, he was "far from a mere passive participant".

She acknowledged that there may have been "a genuine sense of frustration" but stressed that there was no justification to resort to a strike.

The DPP had pushed for a deterrent sentence of six weeks' jail, on the grounds of the "considerable public disquiet" caused by the strike.

She said a lenient approach may encourage others to think that they can commit similar offences and "conveniently express remorse to escape custodial sentence".

She stressed that the illegal strike was not a case of a few workers refraining from work but was a large-scale organised effort to use illegal means to coerce the management of SMRT into giving in to the workers' demands.

During sentencing, Senior District Judge See Kee Oon highlighted an aggravating factor - that the act was calculated to cause obstruction and inconvenience to transport services.

He noted that Bao did not return to work the next day, even though he was advised to do so by SMRT and the manpower ministry.

He also made a number of threatening comments, warning of further strikes if the demands were not met.

The judge acknowledged Bao's plea of leniency, saying he showed remorse by pleading guilty right after he was charged.

But he agreed with the prosecution that deterrence must be a primary consideration and that a jail sentence was warranted.

He said while Bao may have been motivated by sense of grievance, he went against the law.

Bao is the first of five SMRT drivers who have been charged to plead guilty.

Four other drivers were charged last Thursday with instigating the drivers to take part in the strike.

They are He Jun Ling (32), Gao Yue Qiang (32), Liu Xiangying (33), Wang Xianjie, (33).

One of them, He, faces an additional charge of making an online post about the strike.

The four are currently remanded at the Central Police Station.

SMRT said 171 bus drivers did not report for work on 26 November and 88 of them continued to stay away from work on 27 November.

Twenty-nine of them were sent back to China on Sunday. The remaining drivers involved will be let off with police warning letters.

- CNA/xq

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Facebook interested in buying mobile chat app WhatsApp?

WhatsApp Messenger running on iOS.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Steven Musil/CNET)

WhatsApp, the maker of a popular cross-platform mobile chat program, has been in talks to be acquired by Facebook, sources tell TechCrunch.

TechCrunch had no information about a possible price range or how advanced the talks might be. CNET has contacted Facebook and WhatsApp for comment and will update this report when we learn more.

Founded in 2009, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company provides a smartphone app for
Android, BlackBerry, iOS, Symbian, and Windows Phone that delivers text messages as well as images and audio and video messages. The ad-free app reportedly has about 100 million daily users, with a presence in 250 countries on a variety of platforms.

The startup announced in October 2011 that it was serving up 1 billion messages per day: "Just how much is 1 billion messages? That is 41,666,667 messages an hour, 694,444 messages a minute, and 11,574 messages a second," the company wrote in a blog post at the time. The company added that it was a "small step closer towards our goal: providing a great mobile messaging system for a global market, regardless of your handset."

The WhatsApp Messenger app came under criticism recently from security and mobile researchers who alleged security risks based on its authentication process. Several anonymous bloggers called the process a "security nightmare," saying the app leaked data collected off the device when it's being sent to servers. A research paper also concluded that the local database storage encryption could be decrypted.

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Photos: Kilauea Lava Reaches the Sea

• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Into the Sea

  Photograph by Hugh Gentry, Reuters

  A spectacular natural phenomenon was on display early this week as lava from a vent in Hawaii's Kilauea volcano flowed into the ocean, sending up plumes of steam as it made contact with the waves.

  Though lava can still be viewed from Kalapana near the Big Island's Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park, ocean entry is no longer occurring, according to the National Park Service.

  Published November 30, 2012

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Sea of Fire

  
  Photograph by Hugh Gentry, Reuters
  

  The lava traveled 7 miles (11 kilometers) from Kilauea’s Pu'u O'o vent to the ocean. When lava reaches the water, it cools and hardens, forming a lava delta that can be dangerous to nearby onlookers, according to Reuters.

  The news service reported that no communities on the Big Island were threatened by the lava flow.

  Published November 30, 2012

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Volcanic Flare

  
  Photograph by Hugh Gentry, Reuters
  

  A burst of volcanic activity erupts from Kilauea’s crater in Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park on November 27.

  The volcano has been erupting continuously for nearly 30 years. No major damage has been suffered by a town since 1986, according to Reuters.

  Published November 30, 2012

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Fiery Encounter

  Photograph by Hugh Gentry, Reuters

  “Ocean entries are beautiful but dangerous,” said Janet Babb, spokeswoman for the U.S. Geological Survey's Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, in a statement reported by Reuters. She warned that the steam could be more hazardous than it appears.

  Published November 30, 2012

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Point of Contact

  
  Photograph by Matt Northam, My Shot
  

  A plume of smoke billows where lava from Kilauea meets the sea in this aerial photo taken November 27.

  Published November 30, 2012

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Photograph by Peter Vancoillie, Your Shot

  Published November 30, 2012

  
  

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Boehner on Fiscal Cliff Talks: 'You Can't Be Serious'

President Obama and his White House team appear to have drawn a line in the sand in talks with House Republicans on the "fiscal cliff."

Tax rates on the wealthy are going up, the only question is how much?

"Those rates are going to have to go up," Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner flatly stated on ABC's "This Week." "There's no responsible way we can govern this country at a time of enormous threat, and risk, and challenge ... with those low rates in place for future generations."

But the president's plan, which Geithner delivered last week, has left the two sides far apart.

In recounting his response today on "Fox News Sunday," House Speaker John Boehner said: "I was flabbergasted. I looked at him and said, 'You can't be serious.'

"The president's idea of negotiation is: Roll over and do what I ask," Boehner added.

The president has never asked for so much additional tax revenue. He wants another $1.6 trillion over the next 10 years, including returning the tax rate on income above $250,000 a year to 39.6 percent.

TOBY JORRIN/AFP/Getty Images

Obama Balances Fiscal Cliff, Defense Department Appointment Watch Video

Boehner is offering half that, $800 billion.

In exchange, the president suggests $600 billion in cuts to Medicare and other programs. House Republicans say that is not enough, but they have not publicly listed what they would cut.

Geithner said the ball is now in the Republicans' court, and the White House is seemingly content to sit and wait for Republicans to come around.

"They have to come to us and tell us what they think they need. What we can't do is to keep guessing," he said.

The president is also calling for more stimulus spending totaling $200 billion for unemployment benefits, training, and infrastructure projects.

"All of this stimulus spending would literally be more than the spending cuts that he was willing to put on the table," Boehner said.

Boehner also voiced some derision over the president's proposal to strip Congress of power over the country's debt level, and whether it should be raised.

"Congress is not going to give up this power," he said. "It's the only way to leverage the political process to produce more change than what it would if left alone."

The so-called fiscal cliff, a mixture of automatic tax increases and spending cuts, is triggered on Jan. 1 if Congress and the White House do not come up with a deficit-cutting deal first.

The tax increases would cost the average family between $2,000 and $2,400 a year, which, coupled with the $500 billion in spending cuts, will most likely put the country back into recession, economists say.

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