NASA says Spirit will no longer be a rover
PASADENA, Calif., Jan. 26 (UPI) -- The U.S. space agency says its Mars rover Spirit is stuck where it is for good but can still help in martian studies.
NASA engineers had worked unsuccessfully since April to free Spirit from loose martian sand in which it had became stuck.
"After six years of unprecedented exploration of the Red Planet, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit no longer will be a fully mobile robot," the space agency said in a Tuesday statement, designating the once-roving scientific explorer a stationary science platform.
"Spirit is not dead; it has just entered another phase of its long life," said Doug McCuistion, director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program. "We told the world last year that attempts to set the beloved robot free may not be successful. It looks like Spirit's current location on Mars will be its final resting place."
Engineers said the robot's primary task during the next few weeks will be to position itself to combat the severe Martian winter.
NASA said the rover's solar energy is declining and is expected to become insufficient to maintain communications by mid-February. The rover team said it hopes to improve Spirit's tilt, boosting the amount of sunlight striking its solar panels to enable some communication with Earth during the winter.
Launched in 2003, the Mars rover is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Study: Older may indeed be wiser
TORONTO, Jan. 26 (UPI) -- Canadian researchers suggest older brains may be better at decision-making and that older may indeed mean wiser.
Researchers at the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care Rotman Research Institute in Toronto found older adults were less likely than younger people to filter out irrelevant information and were 30 percent better at memory tasks involving irrelevant information.
"We found that older brains are not only less likely to suppress irrelevant information than younger brains, but they can link the relevant and irrelevant pieces of information together and implicitly transfer this knowledge to subsequent memory tasks," Karen Campbell, a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto under the supervision Dr. Lynn Hasher of Rotman Research Institute, said in a statement.
The study, published in Psychological Science, tested 24 older adults ages 60-73 and 24 younger adults ages 17-29 on two computer-based memory tasks involving irrelevant information.
"This could be a silver lining to aging and distraction," Hasher said. "Older adults with reduced attentional regulation seem to display greater knowledge of seemingly extraneous co-occurrences in the environment than younger adults."
As this type of knowledge is thought to play a critical role in real world decision-making, older adults may be the wiser decision-makers compared to younger adults because they have picked up so much more information, the study says.
Spring ozone increases over North America
BOULDER, Colo., Jan. 26 (UPI) -- University of Colorado scientists say they and their colleagues have linked western North American springtime ozone increases to emissions from other regions.
The researchers say the springtime ozone levels are rising primarily due to air flowing eastward from the Pacific Ocean, a trend most pronounced when the air originates in Asia.
"When air is transported from a broad region of south and east Asia, the trend is largest," said lead author Owen Cooper of the university's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.
The researchers said their study is the first to pull together and analyze nearly 100,000 ozone observations gathered in separate studies by instruments on aircraft, balloons and other platforms.
Cooper and colleagues from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo., and eight other research institutes, used historical data of global atmospheric wind records and sophisticated computer modeling to match each ozone measurement with air-flow patterns for several days before it was recorded. That approach allowed the scientists to track ozone-producing emissions back to a broad region of origin.
"This study did not quantify how much of the ozone increase is solely due to Asia," Cooper said, but he noted the background ozone entering North America increased during the past 14 years and probably during the past 25 years.
The findings are reported in the journal Nature.
Study: Brain cancer has four subtypes
BETHESDA, Md., Jan. 26 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists say the most common form of adult brain cancer -- glioblastoma multiforme -- is not a single disease, but four distinct molecular subtypes.
The Cancer Genome Atlas Research Network scientists said they also found response to aggressive chemotherapy and radiation differed by subtype. Patients with one subtype treated with the strategy appeared to succumb to their disease at a rate approximately 50 percent slower than patients treated with less aggressive therapy. This effect was seen to a lesser degree in two of the subtypes and not at all in the fourth subtype.
The researchers said although their findings do not affect current clinical practice, the study's results might lead to more personalized approaches to treating groups of glioblastoma multiforme cancer patients based on their genomic alterations.
The study by the Cancer Genome Atlas Research Network -- a collaborative effort funded by the National Cancer Institute and the National Human Genome Research Institute -- appears in the Jan. 19 issue of the journal Cancer Cell.
