a highly conserved set of six genes that allows the virus to swap genes with flu viruses from other species much more freely than the seasonal H1n1 that circulated before 2009 (see Pandemic 2009 H1n1 virus gives wings to avian flu).
and to conduct targeted surveys led by scientists and park rangers. Wilkinson and his colleagues at the WWF plan to gather leeches from the Vietnamese side of the Annamites
15 21 june 2012space X-rays NASA s Nustar telescope, which will examine high-energy X-rays produced at the thresholds of black holes (see Nature 483,255;
Chinafotopress/Gettychina celebrates space-station success In a milestone for China s space programme, three astronauts boarded the country s orbiting Tiangong 1 space module on 18 Â June.
Their flight on the Shenzhou 9 craft was the country s fourth manned space launch,
but is the first of a series of missions in efforts to build a manned space station, the Tiangong (Heavenly Palace),
) The mission carried China s first female astronaut, Liu Yang. See go. nature. com/f5qkka for more.
R. Sachs/CNP/Corbissally Ride dies Scientist, astronaut and educator Sally Ride (pictured), who was the first US woman in space,
Ride s first space flight was aboard the shuttle Challenger in June 1983; she later served on the commissions investigating the Challenger
After working at NASA, she headed the California Space Institute in San diego, and founded a company, Sally Ride Science,
Fausto Llerena, a ranger at the Galapagos National park and George s long-term keeper, found him slumped in his corral.
astronauts and former NASA officials, says that the telescope would be the world s first privately funded deep-space mission.
Van Ittersum and his colleagues are creating a'Global Yield Gap Atlas'using simulation-based models to capture data on agronomic conditions, water usage and crop yield.
and US President Barack Obama unveiled an aid package for stricken farmers on 13 Â August 17-23 august NASA s Mars rover Curiosity will attempt its first drive on the red planet next week
although no firm date had been set as Nature went to press. www. nasa. gov/msl19-23 august The American Chemical Society holds its autumn meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
Mars landing NASA announced on 6 Â August that its Mars rover, Curiosity, had landed successfully in Gale Crater after an 8-month journey
Higgs papers Researchers at ATLAS and the CMS, the two main physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, posted their papers describing a new Higgs-boson-like
particle to the online preprint server arxiv. org on 31 july (ATLAS Collaboration http://arxiv. org/abs/1207.7214 (2012) and CMS Collaboration http://arxiv org
He confirmed his field observations with 2006 data from the LANDSAT Earth-observing satellites operated by NASA and the US Geological Survey.
The report also found evidence that local forest rangers were involved in the illegal timber trade,
and that illegal coal mining in the area was taking place in full knowledge of the rangers.
Private spaceflight California firm Spacex launched its first mission to resupply the International Space station on 7 october, a milestone in commercial spaceflight.
the Dragon craft was due to dock with the space station on 10 october. The launch saw one engine fail,
A year in space Two astronauts one American and one Russian will stay on the International Space station for an entire year in a mission beginning in spring 2015,
NASA said on 5 october. Space-station missions are restricted usually to six months. The mission will collect more data about how humans react to long stays in space.
But one year is not a record: Russian cosmonaut Valery Polyakov spent 437 days in space on the Mir space station in 1994-95.
SOURCE: CIMMYT/FAOSTATAN analysis of agricultural potential in 12 African countries, released on 9 october, suggests that farmers are making use of just 10-25%of the land where wheat can be grown profitably without irrigation.
the outcome of last week s European space agency (ESA) budget negotiations was expected better than, given the continent s economic troubles.
But for Volker Liebig, ESA s head of Earth observation, there is a sting in the agreement.
The multi-year budget that member states approved which falls some  2  billion (US$2. 6  billion) short of ESA s proposed spending of about  12 Â
but in April ESA lost contact with Envisat, the one satellite providing such data (see Nature 484,423-424;
) Neither Japan s existing Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite nor NASA s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2),
says atmospheric physicist David Crisp of NASA s Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California, who is the science team leader of OCO-2."A timely launch of this satellite should be among the highest priorities of ESA.
Carbonsat s competitor for ESA funding, FLEX, would also help to pin down carbon sinks, by measuring the faint fluorescence generated by plants during photosynthesis a measure of how efficiently they absorb carbon."
"The last thing we want to do is to destroy the forests or whatever is absorbing almost half of the CO2 that we are emitting,
However, there was better news for other ESA programmes. Europe s Ariane  5 rocket launcher, which is more expensive than competitors,
They also reached a deal on how to pay for Europe s contribution to operating the International Space station between 2017 and 2020.
The costs will be covered in kind by a German-backed plan to provide the propulsion and avionics for NASA s Orion manned spacecraft.
ESA also agreed to Russian involvement in its twin Exomars missions an ambitious programme of orbiters and landers scheduled for launch in 2016 and 2018.
NASA pulled out of the project earlier this year. But ESA s science programme faces a squeeze:
it will receive  508  million a year for the five-year period from 2013 to 2017.
Willy Benz of the University of Bern, chair of ESA s Space science Advisory Committee, says that this could force the agency to delay a future large mission;
David Hughes, an assistant professor of entomology and biology at The Pennsylvania State university, says. Every few months scientists are discovering yet another peculiar trait that,
As Hughes notes, ants have been incredibly successful, currently comprising an estimated half of all insect biomass worldwide.
Hughes and his colleagues wrote in a 2011 BMC Ecology paper describing some of the latest findings.
Hughes explains, the ant would fall to the ground, destroying the launching point for the fungus's spores.
Hughes and his colleagues noted in their BMC Ecology paper. The doomed ants do not wander too far afield, often ending up within meters of their familiar territory.
Hughes says. But this zombie fungus is natural selection's tax man. The zombie fungus, however, cannot live without the winning ants'continued success. It appears to be an obligate parasite,
Hughes and Simon Elliot (of the Department of Animal Biology at the Federal University of Vicosa in Brazil) described four new species of the Ophiocordyceps fungus that were found in just a small section of rainforest in Brazil
The researchers, led by Hughes, describe the find as perhaps the first example of behavioral manipulation in the fossil record.
Hughes says. It seems their entire nutrition comes from eating the fungus that manipulates ant behavior.
and most ant cadavers have hyperparasites exploiting the zombie-ant fungus at some stage, Hughes notes.
Indeed, Evans, Hughes and others continue to hunt for more bizarre, opportunistic organisms. Evans is collecting more zombie ants in Brazil,
as part of what he and Hughes have dubbed unofficially the World Ant Tour. The hunt may be a race against time, however.
As Hughes notes, discovering more about both the fungus and the ant behavior and signaling dynamics could add to research about pest control for agriculture.
So for the latest study, Sassan Saatchi, a remote-sensing expert at the California Institute of technology Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California, studied the forest s microwave silhouette,
which are unaffected by clouds, from a NASA Â probe. When it passed over lush canopy,
such as this Biolleyana costalis in San Lorenzo forest, are distinguished by the pattern of venation on their delicate wings.
according to results from NASA s MESSENGER probe, published on 29 november in Science. Although  the surface of the planet reaches temperatures of 400 °C,
a systems engineer who is spearheading the monitoring initiative at NASA s Jet propulsion laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
says Charles Miller, a colleague of Duren s at the JPL. Tuned to near-infrared wavelengths,
25 31 january 2013nasa joins Euclid  NASA is joining a  1-billion (US$1. 3-billion) European space agency mission to explore the dark parts of the Universe.
On 24 Â January the US space agency announced that it would join Euclid, a space telescope that will measure the locations and shapes of some 2 Â billion distant galaxies.
Under the agreement, 40 NASA scientists will join the project and NASA will contribute 20 infrared detectors, valued at around $50 million in total,
for one of the instruments on the spacecraft. The mission is scheduled to launch in 2020. Reed Schererdrilling team reaches Lake Whillans A US research team drilled through 800-metre-thick ice to reach the subglacial Lake Whillans in Western Antarctica on 28 january.
The project is the first to retrieve fully intact samples of liquid water (pictured) and sediment from a subglacial lake,
ESA s climate-eye dilemmasnow, trees or the air we breathe? Europe s environmental research community is facing the difficult task of settling
this week to weigh up the scientific benefits of projects proposed for the roughly  300-million (US$390-million) seventh Earth Explorer mission of the European space agency (ESA).
Neither NASA s Landsat programme, which has captured images of Earth since 1972 (see Nature 494,13-14;
And climate scientists have been warning of an impending data crisis after the 2010 retirement of NASA s ICESAT mission,
) Once ESA has decided which it will back, a satellite could be ready for launch by the end of the decade.
Whichever proposal prevails at the Graz meeting is almost certain to be funded by ESA. A final decision is expected at the agency s board meeting in May in Svalbard, Norway,
but ESA has backed the verdict of the scientists in the past.""If I had my way, I would love to see all three missions fly,
Spain, France and Italy last year reduced their contributions to ESA, leaving the agency with  600 million less for its 2013-17 Earth-observation budget than it had hoped for.
says Volker Liebig, director of ESA s Earth-observation programmes. But tight budgets are likely to shrink the size and ambition of future missions."
The rocket is the first vehicle to take off from NASA s new launch pad at the Wallops Flight Facility In virginia.
The flight puts NASA one step closer to having two US cargo carriers available to resupply the International Space station."
said NASA launch commentator Kyle Herring. See go. nature. com/b6oeoz for more. Lawsuit settlement Cancer researcher Philippe Bois has settled a lawsuit against the US Department of health and human services (DHHS) over scientific misconduct, according to an announcement on 18 Â April.
With the warm weather this month, the nymphs have been crawling out of the ground before moulting for one last time and taking wing.
Ron Edmonds/AP Photoa cicada moults for the last time before taking wing. To synchronize their emergence, the nymphs must somehow keep track of how long they have been underground.
said the European space agency. Astronomers have hailed the legacy of the observatory, which over three years has helped them to revise theories about the birth
the German Aerospace Center (DLR) reported on 9 july, on the basis of images collected by its Terrasar-X satellite.
Economy rocket The European space agency (ESA) announced the design of its next rocket Ariane  6, on 9  July.
ESA s choice of a more cost-effective design was influenced by competition from rockets abroad, notably the Russian Proton launcher.
NASA/ESA/M. Kornmessertrue blue planet Using the Hubble Space Telescope astronomers have discovered the deep blue hue of exoplanet HD Â 189733 Â b (pictured in an artist s impression) the first planet beyond the Solar system to have its colour directly measured.
Red rover NASA s next Mars explorer will be a leaner meaner version of the Curiosity rover, with one major upgrade:
NASA proposed the mission in December, less than a year after it disappointed planetary scientists by pulling out of Europe-led Mars missions planned for 2016 and 2018.
19 july NASA s Cassini spacecraft turns to image Saturn and its entire ring system while also capturing a picture of Earth from 1. 44 Â billion kilometres away. 20-24 july In Kagoshima, Japan,
S. Wiessinger/NASA Goddard Space Flight Centerastronomers image pink exoplanet A magenta exoplanet 17.5 parsecs from Earth is the lowest-mass planet that has ever been imaged directly orbiting a Sun-like star
outside the Solar system, NASA announced last week. The Subaru Telescope on Mauna kea Hawaii, took pictures of the exoplanet GJ 504b at near-infrared wavelengths with the help of adaptive optics.
NASA launched the US$855-million Landsat  8 probe in February (see Nature 494,13-14;
2013), but the space agency has outlined not yet clear mission objectives or secured sufficient funding for a successor.
Paul E. Alers/NASANASA deputy out NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver (pictured) is resigning after four years,
As second in command to NASA chief Charles Bolden, Garver had a major role in developing initiatives such as commercial space transportation
20 26 september 2013space mission dead After a 7. 6-billion-kilometre journey, NASA s comet-hunting Deep Impact spacecraft is no more.
NASA ponders Kepler s futurenasa just can t quit Kepler. On 15  August, the agency ann  ounced that it would stop trying to revive the failed reaction wheels that gave the planet-hunting telescope its precise pointing ability.
two weeks earlier, it had asked astronomers to submit ideas by 3 Â September on how the hobbled spacecraft might still perform good science.
if any, to recommend to NASA headquarters for further review. To secure funding from the space agency, the Kepler team will have to show that the studies could not be done by other telescopes.
This will be no easy task especially given that engineers are not sure how well Kepler can perform with just two of its four spinning reaction wheels,
"We re in a real quandary, says Kepler principal investigator Bill Borucki at NASA s Ames Research center in Moffett Field, California."
. If any of the proposals recommended by the Kepler team seems worthwhile to NASA, they will be examined early next year by a review panel of external scientists.
NASA will make its final funding decisions next June. Not everyone is rooting for Kepler. Doug Finkbeiner, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, wants NASA to support missions that are still healthy.
He has used Fermi to discover two galaxy-sized bubbles of ionized gas blowing from the centre of the Milky way,
Brent Stirton/Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2013in'Ivory trash'by Brent Stirton, a Kenyan ranger inspects elephants killed by poachers.
says Sassan Saatchi, a remote-sensing scientist at NASA s Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California, who is leading the data analysis for the project."
The biomass estimates are used then to calibrate imagery from NASA s Landsat spacecraft and radar data from Japan s Advanced Land Observing Satellite,
Volcanic ash can melt in the high temperatures of jet engines, clogging the equipment. Fukushima fuel Workers in Japan have taken the first steps towards fully decommissioning the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
MAVEN launch NASA s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft is on its way to study the upper atmosphere of the red planet.
22 november The European space agency is scheduled to launch Swarm, a constellation of satellites that will study Earth s magnetic field for four years. go. nature. com/rxaaur24-27 november Science for global sustainable development is the theme of the sixth World Science Forum,
18 november NASA s MAVEN mission to Mars is scheduled to launch. See page 178 for more. 19-21 november In Paris,
NASA/ESA/J. Lotz, M. Mountain, A. Koekemoer & the HFF Team (STSCI) Super-distant galaxies glimpsed Astronomers unveiled pictures of the deepest galaxy cluster ever imaged at the annual meeting
The images from NASA s Hubble Space Telescope are part of the Frontier Fields programme which harnesses the phenomenon of gravitational lensing (see Nature 497,554-556;
Space station stays As space-agency leaders from around the world gathered in WASHINGTON DC to discuss the future of space exploration
the US White house approved operations aboard the International Space station until at least 2024, extending the previous 2020 end date.
In a joint announcement on 8 Â January, Charles Bolden, the head of NASA, and President Barack Obama s chief science adviser John Holdren said that the decision will enable the continuation of short-and long-term research,
20 january The European space agency s Rosetta spacecraft comes out of hibernation in preparation for reaching its destination later this year:
founded in 2010 by three former NASA scientists, is scheduled to launch 28 of its Doves on 8 Â January.
whose cameras will hitch a ride on the International Space station (see'Earth goes under video surveillance').
The International Space station is set to host an unusual external component. In the coming days, a 32-centimetre-aperture video camera will be bolted to the side of one of its modules and pointed not into space,
Canada, which has gained access to the space station through a deal with the Russian Federal Space agency.
Cosmonauts carried out a spacewalk on 27 december to mount Urethecast's video camera on the hull of the Russian Zvezda module,
Skybox Imaging's satellite and the space station hurtle along at thousands of kilometres an hour in their low Earth orbits,
Landsat, NASA s Earth-observation workhorse, for example, has a resolution of 15-100 Â metres depending on the spectral frequency, with 30 Â metres in the visible-light range.
ESAPLANET hunter The European space agency announced on 19  February that it will launch a space-based observatory to hunt for planets around nearly one  million stars outside the Solar system.
The Chinese space agency initially said on 12 Â February that efforts to rouse the rover had failed after it experienced mechanical problems in late January before going into hibernation ahead of a two-week lunar night.
the space agency announced that it had resumed contact with Yutu. China is only the third country in the world to land on the Moon, after the United states and the former Soviet union.
the European space agency announced on 10 Â February. Tests of the network s first four satellites showed that the system could accurately determine positions across the planet.
Over the coming year, six more spacecraft will join the network, which will eventually consist of 30 Â satellites.
19 february NASA announces findings from its high-energy X-ray mission, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (Nustar.
The observations will reveal information about supernovae. go. nature. com/ocxk3r22 February A spacecraft weighing just 3 Â kilograms will hitch a ride to the International Space station.
Contrasto/eyevineitalian space head  The president of the Italian Space agency resigned on 7  February following allegations of bribery and corruption.
and is the third-largest contributor to the European space agency. Insider trading On 6 february, a US court found former hedge-fund manager Mathew Martoma guilty of leading a massive insider-trading scheme using confidential information about an Alzheimer s disease clinical trial.
They manage this mountainous feat by beating their wings in broader strokes, a laboratory study has found.
They observed that the bees did not alter the frequency of their wing beats. Instead, the insects increased the angle through
which they beat their wings.""They re essentially sweeping their wings through a wider arc,
which means they re pushing down more air molecules, says Dillon.""Increasing the frequency of wing beats is one way to do that but it s probably very energetically expensive,
so it s likely this is a cheaper alternative. However, that does not mean that bees could actually fly up Everest.
at the European space agency s European Space Astronomy Centre near Madrid. The mission plans to land a rover on the red planet in 2018. go. nature. com/i5n5r2
NASA/JAXASNOW satellite launch A joint US-Japanese mission to monitor rain and snow launched from the Tanegashima Space center in Japan on 27 february.
The US$933-million Global Precipitation Measurement Core Observatory pictured) will map precipitation across 90%of the globe every three hours.
The satellite was built by NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and the data it will collect could aid the accuracy of forecasts of severe weather, estimates of freshwater supplies and projections of climate change.
Leaky helmet An incident that nearly drowned an astronaut on a spacewalk last July could have been avoided,
says a NASA report published on 26  February. Italian astronaut Luca  Parmitano had to feel his way back to the International Space station airlock as more than 1  litre of water collected in his helmet
covering his eyes and nose. The water came in through a leak in his suit.
The close-call spacewalk would have been postponed if astronauts aboard the space station had investigated fully the first incident.
Radiation leak The US Department of energy reported on 26 february that 13 employees had tested positive for low-level radiation exposure following a leak at its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New mexico.
and say'That square is mine'says Stephen E. Doyle a retired lawyer who served as NASA's Deputy Director of Internal Affairs.
The workers at the space station use the water for drinking and growing plants. This water is part of them.
because the technology did not exist to shield astronauts from the solar wind. We might be able to go to the moon one day soon technology has increased vastly since the 60's especially force field tech.@
or slush in the structure of spacecraft to reduce the impact of the solar wind. This is the future of space crafthttp://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Nautilus-XNOW compare that with the pod that was sent not to the moon.
Those astronauts go up and come down on a regular basis the shuttle missions went up and came down on a regular basis.
If the radiation belts in the Earth's magnetosphere were really that deadly because we have been shielded improperly this whole time we probably would have noticed by now...
because all of those astronauts would have died of radiation poisoning. And we DID in fact land on the moon the proof is in the retroreflectors that we can use on a regular basis to measure (with extreme precision) with lasers the distance between Earth and the moon.
http://www. jpl. nasa. gov/news/features. cfm? feature=605 I agree with you the solar winds CAN be extremely deadly.
#How NASA Is Developing Fresh Space Saladearly in the history of the U s. space program space ice cream caught the imagination of American youngsters.
Now NASA and other researchers are developing a different kind of space food space-grown vegetables
There's a NASA effort to send romaine lettuce planters to the International Space station programs investigating crop production in Mars-like environments
Such space-farmed produce could save on the weight of the supplies astronauts need to bring with them;
provide astronauts with a tastier and more nutritious diet; and even offer some psychological comfort.
The excerpts from American astronaut Don Pettit's writings about a zucchini plant he brought to space not for food but just for fun.
I will trust the NOAA NASA every national science organization on the planet and every institute of higher learning on the planet for info.
According to the Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark (Danish National Space center) the variation of Earth's temperature is caused (in brief by the intensity of the solar wind.
Number 1 and 3 we humans only have the choice of adapting to the situationby the way NASA has written articles about the changing magnetic field and its effect on the environment too.
I will trust the NOAA NASA every national science organization on the planet and every institute of higher learning on the planet for info.
It's a few months from completing. http://science. nasa. gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/05aug fieldflip
Right now after looking at the NASA Climate Data which falls right in line with your mainstream view I still don't believe that ALL OF the warming is caused by man.
http://climate. nasa. gov/evidencei still don't believe this is MAIN the cause of the current warming trend.
This is an effective immune system booster she wrote. First Vitamin d does not protect against measles. Second that's about three times as much Vitamin d as kids and adults need.
and the radiation in the SAA is known a hazard to satellites spacecraft and high-altitude aircraft.
Earth's magnetic field overdue a flip http://www. reuters. com/article/2012/10/03/us-science-earth-magneticfield-idusbre8920x620121003 (Reuters)- The discovery by NASA rover Curiosity
The European space agency is taking the issue seriously. In November it plans to launch three satellites to improve our fairly blurry understanding of the magnetosphere.
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