Health & Science

A newly discovered strain of bacteria found in Canada's far north has increased the odds of finding microbial life on other planets or moons within our solar system, say the Canadian research team.

The team discovered the microbes under permafrost on Ellesmere Island in the far reaches of the Canadian Arctic in temperatures colder than they'd ever thought possible. The existence of these microbes not only sets a new record for extreme environment microbial life on Earth, but also raises questions about the potential for microbial life to evolve in other extreme climates beyond Earth, such as on Mars or the moons of Jupiter or Saturn.

The newly discovered strain, which is called Planococcus halocryophilus OR1, can stay alive in temperatures as low as minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 25 degrees Celsius). The samples were procured from a permafast core drilled by NASA on Ellesmere Island in 2004. NASA had been testing robotic drilling techniques for future use in missions to Mars.

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio is planning to fly to space on Virgin Galactic's new commercial spaceline and will be taking with him the winning bidder in a charity auction held at the Cannes film festival. The opportunity to fly with DiCaprio sold for 1.2 million Euros ($1.5 million USD) at the amfAR Cinema Against AIDS Charity on Thursday night.

The trip was listed as a "once-in-a-lifetime trip to space with a mystery guest" in the auction booklet. The mystery guest's identity was not revealed until after the auction ended. The event took place at Hotel du Cap-Eden-Rock during the festival on the French Riviera.

Standard tickets aboard SpaceShipTwo sell for $250,000. To date, 550 people have paid either in part or in full, despite the fact that the vehicle hasn't yet flown to space.

A researcher from the Missouri University of Science and Technology has developed a new screening method utilizing urinalysis to diagnose breast cancer as well as to determine its severity, before it can be detected with a mammogram.

A second study to confirm the effectiveness of the technique is now under way at Mercy Breast Center in Springfield, Mo.

Dr. Yinfa Ma, Curators' Teaching Professor of chemistry at Missouri S&T, uses a device known as a P-scan to detect the concentration of specific metabolites known as pteredines in urine samples. These biomarkers are present in the urine of all humans, but abnormally high concentrations can indicate the presence of cancer. It is Ma's believe that as the cancer progresses, the concentration of the metabolites increases.

A number of vials of moon dust that were brought back to Earth by the first men to set foot on the moon had been lost for about 40 years, but were recently found inside a lab warehouse in California.

The samples, which were collected by Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, were discovered last month by an archivist who was reviewing artifacts at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Karen Nelson made the surprising discovery, and said in a statement:

"We don't know how or when they ended up in storage."

Nelson discovered the roughly 20 vials, each which featured handwritten labels dated "24 July 1970", packed inside a vacuum-sealed glass jar. She also found with the jar an academic paper which was published in the Proceedings of the Second Lunar Science Conference in 1971 titled "Study of carbon compounds in Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 returned lunar samples."

NASA has announced that it is funding research into 3D-printed food. Mechanical engineer Anjan Contractor recently received a $125,000 grant from NASA to build a prototype 3D printer with a goal of automating food creation.

NASA's interest in a 3D food printer is obvious. The space agency hopes that such a system could provide astronauts food during long distance space travel, but the printer's creator has a much loftier goal of helping to solve increasing world food shortages by cutting down on waste.

Software for the 3D food printer will be open-source, and the hardware is based on the open-source RepRap Mendel 3D printer.

The concept behind the 3D food printer involves using basic "building blocks" of food in replaceable powder cartridges. By combining each block, a wide range of foods should be able to be created by the printer. The cartridges will also have an incredible lifespan of 30 years, which is more than sufficient for long distance space travel.

Contractor will first prove that his system works on a basic level by printing chocolate, then he will begin his project in the next few weeks by attempting to print a pizza.

Using plant samples collected during the mid-19th century, scientists have been able to identify the pathogen that caused the infamous Irish potato famine, which led to the deaths of more than a million Irish due to starvation between 1846 and 1851.

DNA that was extracted from the museum specimens shows that the strain that caused such devastation to potato crops in Ireland spread to the country in 1845, is different than modern day epidemics, and has likely gone extinct.

Other strains of the fungus-like infection continue to plague potato and tomato crops around the world, with annual losses of enough potatoes to feed hundreds of millions each year.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has used the drill attached to its robotic arm to drill a second time, this time collecting a powdered sample from the interior of a rock called "Cumberland".

The space agency's plans call for portions of the sample to be delivered to laboratory instruments inside the rover in the coming days. This is just the second time that a sample has been collected from inside a rock on the Red Planet.

The first time Curiosity drilled and collected a sample of powdered rock was three months ago when it drilled a target known as "John Klein." Cumberland resembles John Klein, and lies about nine feet further west. Both Cumberland and John Klein are within a shallow depression known as Yellowknife Bay.

Curiosity drilled the 2.6-inch deep hole into Cumberland on May 19.

An unusually large asteroid measuring 1.7 miles wide will be zooming pass the Earth later this month. According to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Asteroid 1998 QE2 will get no closer than 3.6 million miles, which is 15 times the distance between us and the moon, however due to its size, stargazers are in for a treat on May 31.

NASA also says that anyone with a 230-foot or larger radar telescope will be able to see the asteroid, which is about the size of nine cruise ships. Discovered in 1998, QE2 will not come this close again for two centuries.

Gray whales live in the North Pacific, and once also lived in the North Atlantic, but appear to have been driven to extinction by the 18th century. A gray whale hasn't been spotted in the Atlantic basin for nearly 300 years, until three years ago when in May 2010, a gray whale was spotted off the coast of Israel. In July 2010, that same whale was spotted off the coast of Spain. Until now, gray whales had never been found in the Southern Hemisphere.

Four tour boats on dolphin-spotting cruises near Namibia's Walvis Bay spotted an unusual whale. Just eight days later, John Paterson of the Albatross Task Force confirmed that the lone whale was a gray whale -- the first ever recorded south of the equator.

Comparing photographs with the whale spotted nearly Israel and Spain in 2010 confirm that the whale found in the Southern Hemisphere was not the same whale. Scientists are now trying to determine the origins of the whale.

It is possible that the whale swam south past Baja California, rounded the tip of South America and across the Atlantic, but it seems unlikely as the whale would have to travel a large distance against currents, through open ocean, from west to east. Gray whales typically do not do any of that.

Researchers working 2.4 kilometers below Earth's surface in a Canadian mine have discovered a source of water that has remained isolated for at least one billion years.

The scientists say that they are not yet sure if anything has been living in the water all this time, however the water contains high levels of methane and hydrogen, which are requirements for supporting life.

Micrometer-scale pockets in minerals that are billions of years old are capable of holding water that was trapped during the minerals' formation, however no source of free-flowing water passing through interconnected cracks or pores in Earth's crust has previously been shown to have stayed isolated for more than tens of millions of years.

Chris Ballentine, a geochemist at the University of Manchester, and his team carefully captured water flowing through fractures in the 2.7-billion-year-old sulphide deposits in a copper and zinc mine near Timmins, Ontario. This ensures that the water did not come into contact with mine air.

In order to date the water, the researchers used three lines of evidence, all of which were based on the relative abundances of various isotopes of noble gases present in the water. They determined that the fluid couldn't have contacted Earth's atmosphere or have been at the planet's surface for at least 1 billion years, and possibly as long as 2.64 billion years, which is not long after the rocks through which if flowed through formed.