//screams// THIS IS LOVELY OMG

The science world is freaking out over this 25-year-old's answer to antibiotic resistance

Could this be the end of superbugs?

A 25-year-old student has just come up with a way to fight drug-resistant superbugs without antibiotics.

The new approach has so far only been tested in the lab and on mice, but it could offer a potential solution to antibiotic resistance, which is now getting so bad that the United Nations recently declared it a “fundamental threat” to global health.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria already kill around 700,000 people each year, but a recent study suggests that number could rise to around 10 million by 2050.

In addition to common hospital superbug, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), scientists are now also concerned that gonorrhoea is about tobecome resistant to all remaining drugs.

But Shu Lam, a 25-year-old PhD student at the University of Melbourne in Australia, has developed a star-shaped polymer that can kill six different superbug strains without antibiotics, simply by ripping apart their cell walls.

“We’ve discovered that [the polymers] actually target the bacteria and kill it in multiple ways,” Lam told Nicola Smith from The Telegraph. “One method is by physically disrupting or breaking apart the cell wall of the bacteria. This creates a lot of stress on the bacteria and causes it to start killing itself.”

The research has been published in Nature Microbiology, and according to Smith, it’s already being hailed by scientists in the field as “a breakthrough that could change the face of modern medicine”.

Before we get too carried away, it’s still very early days. So far, Lam has only tested her star-shaped polymers on six strains of drug-resistant bacteria in the lab, and on one superbug in live mice.

But in all experiments, they’ve been able to kill their targeted bacteria - and generation after generation don’t seem to develop resistance to the polymers.

Continue Reading.

ExoMars Orbiter’s First Images

(Image credit: ESA/Roscosmos/ExoMars/CaSSIS/UniBE)

Chasma Boreale and North Polar Ice Cap of Mars by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center on Flickr.

Mars has bright polar caps of ice that are easily visible from telescopes on Earth. A seasonal cover of carbon-dioxide ice and snow is observed to advance and retreat over the poles during the Martian year. Scientists using radar data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) have found a record of the most recent Martian ice age recorded in the planet’s north polar ice cap. This image is a simulated 3-D perspective view of Chasma Boreale, a canyon that reaches 570 kilometers (350 miles) into the north polar cap. It was created from image data taken by the THEMIS instrument on NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft. Canyon walls rise about 1,400 meters (4,600 feet) above the floor of Chasma Boreale. Where the edge of the ice cap has retreated, sheets of sand are emerging that accumulated during earlier ice-free climatic cycles. Winds blowing off the ice have pushed loose sand into dunes, then driven them down-canyon in a westward direction.

The Solar System!

bonus Pluto!

ARE MYSTERY MARS PLUMES CAUSED BY SPACE WEATHER?

Mysterious high-rise clouds seen appearing suddenly in the martian atmosphere on a handful of occasions may be linked to space weather, say Mars Express scientists.

Amateur astronomers using telescopes on Earth were the first to report an unusual cloud-like plume in 2012 that topped-out high above the surface of Mars at an altitude around 250 km.

The feature developed in less than 10 hours, covered an area of up to 1000 x 500 km, and remained visible for around 10 days.

The extreme altitude poses something of a problem in explaining the features: it is far higher than where typical clouds of frozen carbon dioxide and water are thought to be able to form in the atmosphere.

Indeed, the high altitude corresponds to the ionosphere, where the atmosphere directly interacts with the incoming solar wind of electrically charged atomic particles.

Speculation as to their cause has included exceptional atmospheric circumstances, auroral emissions, associations with local crustal anomalies, or a meteor impact, but so far it has not been possible to identify the root cause.

Unfortunately, the spacecraft orbiting Mars were not in the right position to see the 2012 plume visually, but scientists have now looked into plasma and solar wind measurements collected by Mars Express at the time.

They have found evidence for a large ‘coronal mass ejection’, or CME, from the Sun striking the martian atmosphere in the right place and at around the right time.

“Our plasma observations tell us that there was a space weather event large enough to impact Mars and increase the escape of plasma from the planet’s atmosphere,” says David Andrews of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, and lead author of the paper reporting the Mars Express results.

“But we were not able to see any signatures in the ionosphere that we can categorically say were due to the presence of this plume.

“One problem is that the plume was seen at the day–night boundary, over a region of known strong crustal magnetic fields where we know the ionosphere is generally very disturbed, so searching for ‘extra’ signatures is rather challenging.”

To go further, the scientists have looked at the chances of these two relatively rare events – a large and fast CME colliding with Mars, and the mysterious plume – occurring at the same time.

They have been searching back through the archives for similar events, but they are rare.

For example, the Hubble Space Telescope observed a similar high plume in May 1997, and a CME was registered hitting Earth at the same time.

Although that CME was widely studied, there is no information from Mars orbiters to judge the scale of its impact at the Red Planet.

Morning on Mars

6 Martian sunrises, as seen by the HiRISE orbiter.  Once again, not artist’s renditions.

OMG congrats! How exciting! I can't wait to see your photos! I've tried with my SLR and uh it has NOT gone well lol.

I did it.

After a year of talking I finally bit the bullet and got a DSLR camera (Nikon D5300) for astrophotography. Will be using it at the observatory (16″ Cassegrain) as well as during hikes for sweeping vistas under the Milky Way. Very excited to explore astrophotography as a hobby and can’t wait to start uploading pictures

The Earth at night. Photographs taken by NASA.

(Source)

The beautiful chaos of watching 12 frantic astrophysics students try to save a theoretical astronaut from falling into a black hole. I’ve never seen a group of people work so quickly and efficiently before.

Even after dozens of spacecraft have been sent to Mars, much remains unknown about that world. Here we have 7 fascinating yet unanswered questions about Mars.