Crumbly Mars Rock, Not Hardware Flaws, Scuttled Perseverance's First Sample Attempt

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August 12, 2021

Planetary Science Crumbly Mars Rock, Not Hardware Flaws, Scuttled Perseverance's First Sample Attempt After an alarming failure, the rover is set to continue its mission to retrieve specimens for eventual return to Earth By Robin George Andrews

Extraterrestrial Life Martian Crust Could Sustain Life through Radiation Meteorites reveal that so long as groundwater is present, the Martian subsurface is habitable By Nikk Ogasa

Neuroscience Inspired by Chronic Illness, She Made Award-Winning Art about the Brain Scientific American presents the winner and honorable mentions of the 11th annual Art of Neuroscience contest By Maddie Bender

Black Holes Astronomers Find an Unexpected Bumper Crop of Black Holes In trying to explain the spectacular star trails of the star cluster Palomar 5, astronomers stumbled on a very large trove of black holes. By Christopher Intagliata | 03:24

Mathematics Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past Mathematicians want to think their field is a meritocracy, but bias, harassment and exclusion persist By Rachel Crowell

Climate Change Are 'Green Banks' Really Better for the Environment? Consumers can indeed lower their financial carbon footprint once they know how to navigate the hype By Avery Ellfeldt,E&E News

Planetary Science NASA Probe Finds Higher Chance of Asteroid Bennu Striking Earth Using data from the OSIRIS-REx mission, scientists calculated slightly increased (but still low) odds the space rock will collide with our planet in the 2100s By Meghan Bartels,SPACE.com

Behavior The FDA Shouldn't Support a Ban on Kratom The herbal supplement can be abused, but given the explosion in opioid deaths, eliminating this safer substitute will almost certainly lead to more deaths By Maia Szalavitz

Quantum Computing How Quantum Computing Could Remake Chemistry It will bring molecular modeling to a new level of accuracy, reducing researchers' reliance on serendipity By Jeannette M. Garcia

Particle Physics Exotic Four-Quark Particle Spotted at Large Hadron Collider The rare tetraquark is one of dozens of nonelementary particles discovered at the accelerator and could help test theories about the strong nuclear force By Davide Castelvecchi,Nature magazine

Climate Change How Much Worse Will Thawing Arctic Permafrost Make Climate Change? Global warming is setting free carbon from life buried long ago in the Arctic's frozen soils, but its impact on the climate crisis is unclear By Jordan Wilkerson

Climate Change Let's Start Naming Climate-Related Disasters for Polluters and Their Enablers The Marathon Oil Megadrought has a nice ring to it, don't you think? By Drew Shindell

FROM THE STORE Special Editions Volume 30, Issue 3s

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FROM THE ARCHIVE Rocks, Rockets and Robots: The Plan to Bring Mars Down to Earth Coordinated by NASA and ESA, an ambitious effort to retrieve samples from the Red Planet faces major obstacles By Robin George Andrews | February 2020

QUOTE OF THE DAY "Game on, Mars. Game on. We'll getcha. We'll get our core." Jennifer Trosper, Perseverance project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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