Travel Through Time

Sandia’s huge Z machine, which generates termperatures hottter than the sun, has turned water to ice in nanoseconds. However, don’t expect anything commercial just yet: the ice is hotter than the boiling point of water. “The three phases of water as we know them — cold ice, room temperature liquid, and hot vapor — are actually only a small part of water’s repertory of states,” says Sandia researcher Daniel Dolan. “Compressing water customarily heats it. But under extreme compression, it is easier for dense water to enter its solid phase [ice] than maintain the more energetic liquid phase [water].”

New measurements of Mars’ south polar region indicate extensive frozen water. The polar region contains enough frozen water to cover the whole planet in a liquid layer approximately 11 meters (36 feet) deep. A joint NASA-Italian Space Agency instrument on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft provided these data.

This new estimate comes from mapping the thickness of the ice. The Mars Express orbiter’s radar instrument has made more than 300 virtual slices through layered deposits covering the pole to map the ice. The radar sees through icy layers to the lower boundary, which is as deep as 3.7 kilometers (2.3 miles) below the surface.

NASA-funded researchers are refining a tool that could not only check for the faintest traces of life’s molecular building blocks on Mars, but could also determine whether they have been produced by anything alive.The instrument, called Urey: Mars Organic and Oxidant Detector, has already shown its capabilities in one of the most barren climes on Earth, the Atacama Desert in Chile. The European Space Agency has chosen this tool from the United States as part of the science payload for the ExoMars rover planned for launch in 2013. Last month, NASA selected Urey for an instrument-development investment of $750,000.

The sun is a cosmic spinmeister.

Using the highly sensitive radar telescope at the Cornell University-managed Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and Goldstone antenna in California, Cornell astronomers have confirmed a theory that sunlight and the asteroid’s shape determine how an asteroid’s rotation evolves. Their research is reported today in Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science.

The Yarkovsky-O’Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack Effect, named after a nineteenth century Russian civil engineer Ivan Yarkovsky, a late American planetary scientist John A. O’Keefe, a late Russian astronomer V.V. Radzievskii and NASA aerospace engineer Stephen J. Paddack, affectionately known as YORP, says that solar radiation will increase or decrease the rate of an asteroid’s spin. This effect could help explain the formation of binary asteroids: The created centrifugal forces are so strong, that rubble-pile asteroids could break and form into two parts.

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies are reporting a possible answer to a longstanding question in research on the origins of life on Earth–how did the first amino acids form the first peptides?

Peptides and proteins are strings of amino acid building blocks, and they are one of the most important classes of biological molecules found in living things today. Fifty years of chemical research on the origins of life has shown that amino acids could have formed spontaneously on the early Earth environment or could have been introduced onto the early Earth from meteorites.