NASA has recently published in Science that Mars might one have once had an ocean as large as the Atlantic, that covered 1/5 of the Martian surface, and lasted for at least a billion years.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/...an-on-mars
How they figured this out is interesting. As on Earth, Martian water is a mixture of regular water and heavy water. Since heavy water is more massive, it's less likely to be lost into space. So a team of Americans and Europeans set about trying to determine how much deuterium is in the water in Mars' polar icecaps (the remains of the ancient ocean). They found a lot of deuterium, which gave them a way of estimating how much water was there originally. It calculated out to be a lot of water.
This news suggests that Mars was a lot more hospitable to life in the distant past than once thought. Water on Mars wasn't just geysers occasionally erupting groundwater, Mars was apparently once much more Earthlike.
And if there were seas on Mars for a billion years, it's interesting to speculate about whether life ever got a start there.
http://flowingdata.com/2015/03/02/madden...s-formula/
EXCERPT: [Donny] Moore is tasked with assigning more than 40 numerical grades to each of the NFL's roughly 2,600 players, evaluating them in categories ranging from passing accuracy to tackling ability. Moore's process has largely been a black box, and yet it shapes how more than 5 million gamers simulate pro football — particularly because there's no official alternative to his numbers....
http://gamepolitics.com/2015/03/03/edwar...-return-us
EXCERPT: [...] "He is thinking about it. He has a desire to return and we are doing everything we can to make it happen," [Anatoly] Kucherena said. "With a group of lawyers from other countries, we are working on the question of his return to America..."
https://www.mnnonline.org/news/russian-c...ssination/
EXCERPT: [...] Project manager for Mission Eurasia Wade Kusack says there’s a new political atmosphere. “In this atmosphere of hatred and nationalism, anything can be done to people with a different point of view, and basically that’s what happened to Boris Nemtsov. He was assassinated.”
Kusack says this has been propagated by the government. “The propaganda machine is very strong in Russia.”
What about Christians? Kusack says Christians are a part of the propaganda. “Religious minorities, including evangelicals, are more and more isolated and blamed for hardships that Russia is going through. They’re named not only as sectarian, but also as spies....”
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/a...-my-brain/
EXCERPT: You may have heard of the unfortunate Brit who discovered he had a tapeworm living in his brain. It took over four years for scientists to uncover what was wrong, and this took some exceptional detective work, all the while the worm was squirming across the man’s brain. The tapeworm, called a sparganum, has never before been seen in the UK. It is more common in South East Asia, where people can get infected either by eating raw frogs or reptiles, or using a balm made from raw frog meat directly on their eyes. Here are two perspectives on the unusual discovery, the pathologist who first discovered the worm, and the scientist who helped to sequence the worm’s genome, which revealed a lot about how to treat this pesky invader, and some insights into its private life....
http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/...romat.html
EXCERPT: [...] There’s a “spectrum” looking chart of different colourful shades, hues doing the rounds now. If you see fewer than 20 different hues, the article accompanying it says, you’re probably a dichromat, two cones in the retina of your eye or one of the three not functioning in the way it should. If you see between 20 and 32 you’re a trichromat, three fully functioning cones. But, if you see 32-39 different colours you have a fourth type of cone in your retina making you a tetrachromat; colours are much more distinguished apparently, but they’re not so keen on yellow. If you can see more than 39 colours, you’re not a pentachromat, you’re a little fibber....
http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/...claims.htm
EXCERPT: You might just be hearing about it, as news outlets across the globe are hastily picking up a stunning story about a drunk gorilla who sucker-punched a nature photographer right in the noggin during a visit to Rwanda's Volcanoes National Park. There's just one problem with this tale. According to experts, the gorilla couldn't have possibly been drunk....
