Rover readied to scoop martian soil
PASADENA, Calif., Oct. 5 (UPI) -- The Mars Curiosity rover is ready for another first, preparing to scoop up soil samples to see if the planet at some time could have fostered life, NASA said.
The 1,982-pound explorer is at a spot in Mars' Gale Crater called Rocknest, preparing to use its robotic scoop for soil samples scientists say they hope will provide information crucial to the project's central mission: determining whether there were ever conditions on the Red Planet amenable to life.
"What makes Curiosity different from all other rovers is her ability to acquire samples of Mars soil and rock, and to analyze them in her onboard laboratories," Ashwin Vasavada at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told the Los Angeles Times.
"This is an exciting week for us," said Vasavada, the deputy project scientist for the Curiosity mission, "since we're just days away from doing just those things for the first time."
Curiosity will first make two scoops just for cleaning out any last remnants of Earth material that might be clinging to the scoop, he said.
"We've found a nice thick pile of typical Mars sand, chosen because of its familiar properties and its ability to clean out the hardware," Vasavada said.
"Even in our cleanest assembly buildings, it was not possible to keep minute amounts of oils and other chemicals off of Curiosity. The sand and some vigorous shaking should remove the last bits of Earth from the tools and get them ready to study Mars like we've never studied it before."
The rover will scoop twice, shake the dirt "thoroughly ... to scrub the internal surfaces" and then dump the soil, NASA said.
Curiosity's instruments will analyze the fourth sample of soil from the scoop to identify chemical ingredients, it said.
The process will be long and drawn out, NASA engineers cautioned, because the machinery involved is complex and the Curiosity team says it needs time to learn the best way to operate it.
Carnivores moving in on U.S. cities
WASHINGTON, Oct. 5 (UPI) -- Coyotes' success in adapting to an urban lifestyle could pave the way for larger carnivores to move in to U.S. cities, wildlife researchers say.
"The coyote is the test case for other animals. Raccoons, skunks, foxes -- they've already been able to penetrate the urban landscape pretty well," said Ohio State University Professor Stan Gehrt, who has been studying coyote populations near Chicago for 12 years.
"The coyote is the most recent and largest. The jury's out with what's going to happen with the bigger ones."
Bigger carnivores such as wolves, mountain lions and bears could be next, researchers said.
Mountain lions are already making appearances near Chicago and recently in Des Moines, Iowa, and a family of black bears has recently been seen roaming suburban streets in Cedar Grove, N.J., National Geographic reported.
"The funny thing is that now we have more people on Earth and bigger cities than ever, we also now have carnivores moving into cities," Gehrt said.
"We used to think only little carnivores could live in cities, and even then we thought they couldn't really achieve large numbers," he said. "But we're finding that these animals are much more flexible than we gave them credit for and they're adjusting to our cities."
Study: Electric cars can be polluters
LONDON, Oct. 5 (UPI) -- Electric cars, often touted as "green" vehicles, might cause as much or more pollution than gasoline- or diesel-powered cars, European researchers say.
Greenhouse gas emissions can rise dramatically if coal is used to produce the electricity to charge cars, and electric car factories can emit more toxic waste than conventional car factories, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology said.
Writing in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, the researchers analyzed the life-cycle impact of conventional and electric vehicles, examining how the production, use and end-of-life dismantling of a car affect the environment.
"The production phase of electric vehicles proved substantially more environmentally intensive," than how gasoline and diesel cars are made, their report said.
"The global warming potential from electric vehicle production is about twice that of conventional vehicles."
Also, a lot of toxic minerals such as nickel, copper and aluminum are required in the manufacture of batteries and electric motors, the researchers said.
Caltech ranked as best research university
PASADENA, Calif., Oct. 5 (UPI) -- The California Institute of Technology is the best research university in the world, a British education magazine said in its annual rankings.
The Pasadena institution, familiarly known as Caltech, retained its ranking as the world's best research university in the 2012-13 World University Rankings released this week by the Times Higher Education magazine.
The University of Oxford and Stanford University were tied for second place while Harvard, last year's runner-up, placed fourth.
The rest of the top-ranked schools in order were: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago.
University of California campuses at Berkeley and Los Angeles managed to maintain their top 20 positions despite massive state funding cuts to higher education, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Times Higher Education created its rankings based on research funding, faculty publication, research citations, the international makeup of faculty and students and the number of doctorates awarded.
Caltech President Jean-Lou Chameau credited the success of the school, home to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, to a simple philosophy.
"We always try to recruit exceptional faculty and exceptional students," Chameau told the Times. "We try to support them the best we can and we encourage them to look at big questions, important scientific issues. It has resulted in game-changing types of discoveries."
