LIQUID WATER. It’s official. There is liquid water on Mars. And not just a little, either. A research team led by Roberto Orosei, a professor at the University of Bologna, has detected a lake of liquid water 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) wide about 1.5 kilometers (.9 miles) below the surface of Mars’ southern ice cap in a region known as Planum Australe. They suspect that dissolved salts from nearby minerals prevent the water from freezing, despite the low temperatures.

They published their research on the Martian lake Wednesday in the journal Science.

RADAR & THE RED PLANET. At the center of this discovery is Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS), an instrument aboard the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Mars Express spacecraft.

This instrument, which is positioned hundreds of kilometers above the surface of Mars, sends electromagnetic radar waves down toward the center of the planet. When those waves transition from one material to the next (from ice to rock, for example), they reflect back up to the instrument. Scientists can then analyze those reflected waves to determine what sort of material exists beneath the Martian surface.

Between May 2012 and December 2015, Orosei and his team focused MARSIS on the Planum Australe (southern plane) region of Mars. As they analyzed the data, they noticed an area had a radar profile similar to those of the lakes of liquid water we know exist beneath ice sheets here on Earth. After ruling out any other possibilities, the researchers concluded that a lake of liquid water is the only explanation for the data.

FOLLOW THE WATER. This isn’t the first discovery of water on Mars — we already knew the planet was home to ice as well as small amounts of water vapor. We’ve even found evidence of liquid water on the Red Planet, but this is the first time anyone has actually detected it.

There’s a reason NASA’s mantra toward studying Mars is “follow the water.” Not only is water important in helping us understand the climate of Mars, past and present, any deposits — liquid or otherwise — could play a role in our plans for Martian colonization.

Perhaps most exciting of all, though, it what this discovery of a Martian lake could mean in our search for extraterrestrial life. Almost anywhere on Earth that there’s water, there’s also life. If the same holds true on Mars, this discovery may mean the probability of the planet hosting some sort of life may have just increased dramatically.

READ MORE: Huge Reservoir of Liquid Water Detected Under the Surface of Mars [EurekAlert]

More on Martian water: Researchers Identify Eight Sites With Exposed Water Ice on Mars

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by Dan Robitzski  July 2, 2018   Health & Medicine

Pizza is healthy. At least that’s what I was told in kindergarten. After all, it has all the major food groups, which (at the time) included a big ol’ pyramid base of bread. I (and the other six-year-olds, I imagine) took that nutrition advice to heart well into adulthood. Being an adult means you can have pizza anytime you want.

Before you scoff at my poorly-informed nutritional choices, you should probably recognize that you have a fair amount of food misinformation swimming around your own head. Do you buy low-fat cheese and skim milk, count calories, go on juice cleanses — all because you think science says you should?

Well, science has told you some lies over the years.

Click here for the complete original article:

By Mary Halton Science reporter, BBC News

by Kristin Houser  June 28, 2018  Hard Science

A BREAKTHROUGH. Researchers from Montreal’s National Institute of Scientific Research (INRS) just published a study in Optica detailing a new approach to invisibility cloaking. Their device, called a spectral invisibility cloak, is the first to manipulate the color (or frequency) of the light waves that interact with an object, rendering it invisible.

“Our work represents a breakthrough in the quest for invisibility cloaking,” study author José Azaña said in a news release.

BREAKING IT DOWN. Let’s break this down, starting with light. There’s something called the electromagnetic spectrum. It contains all the different frequencies of electromagnetic radiation, a certain kind of energy. X-rays, gamma rays, and radar all fall somewhere on this spectrum.

While you can’t see an X-ray, your eyes can see one small range of frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum. We call this visible light. As mentioned, it’s a range separated into what we perceive as colors, with violet at one end and red at the other. Some light sources contain more than one specific frequency. We call these broadband sources, and sunlight is one example.

When we “see” something, what we’re really seeing is the interaction of these light frequencies and the object. When sunlight shines on a blue car, the car reflects the blue light frequency while absorbing all the other frequencies. Our eyes detect the reflected blue light, letting us see the blue car.

The INRS researchers’ cloaking device takes advantage of this interaction. They describe an object that reflects only green light. To make this object seem “invisible” to the human eye, they use a specially designed filter to temporarily shift the green frequencies in the broadband spectrum shining on the object to blue. Then, they use another filter to shift those frequencies back to green on the other side of the object.

The result? The human eye can’t see the object.

ANOTHER STEP FORWARD. Currently, the INRS researchers’ cloaking device only works from one direction — the viewer’s gaze needs to follow the path of the light, looking toward the object through the first filter. However, Azaña claims the method could theoretically make an object invisible from every direction.

For now, the device could help secure telecommunications, which use broadband waves to transport data. Telecom companies could render certain frequencies along their fiber optic networks “invisible,” preventing third-parties from using broadband light to spy on them.

So, while we still have a ways to go before we can all cosplay as the (really) Invisible Man at ComicCon, this complex cloaking contraption could potentially keep our data concealed in the meantime.

READ MORE: Spectral Cloaking Could Make Objects Invisible Under Realistic Conditions [OSA]