Water on Mars

How exciting is to think that we are not alone in the whole universe. Well NASA( National Aeronautics and Space Administration) just has discovered that liquid water flows on Mars. Water on Mars usually disappears during the colder  time, but when it is hot out there water comes back. That discovery was very important for the World because it gave us a hope to find alien life.

   Some people think that we can move to the red planet( Mars) and live there. That is very bad idea, for now. We can’t survive on the planet that has frozen water more often than liquid water. Frozen water melts on 10 degrees Fahrenheit( minus 23 degrees Celsius) which is very cold for us. We couldn’t survive on that kind of planet yet.

The search for water on the Red Planet has taken more than 15 years to turn up definitive signs that liquid flows on the surface. In the past, however, rivers and oceans may have covered the land. Where did all of the liquid water go? Why?

 Observations of the Red Planet indicate that rivers and oceans may have been prominent features in its early history. Billions of years ago, Mars was a warm and wet world that could have supported microbial life in some regions. But the planet is smaller than Earth, with less gravity and a thinner atmosphere. Over time, as liquid water evaporated, more and more of it escaped into space, allowing less to fall back to the surface of the planet.

Where is all that water.  Water appears to flow from some steep, relatively warm slopes on the Martian surface.

“The detection of hydrated salts on these slopes means that water plays a vital role in the formation of these streaks," the study's lead author, Lujendra Ojha, of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

Vast deposits of water appear to be trapped within the ice caps at the north and south poles of the planet. Each summer, as temperatures increase, the caps shrink slightly as their contents skip straight from solid to gas form, but in the winter, cooler temperatures cause them to grow to latitudes as low as 45 degrees, or halfway to the equator. The caps are an average of 2 miles (3 kilometers) thick and, if completely melted, could cover the Martian surface with about 18 feet (5.6 meters) of water.

Now we have proof that few billions years ago we could live there. How exciting is that to think.

Native Americans are Kennewick Kin

On July 28, 1996 two young men encountered a human skull in the Columbia River at Kennewick. They thought that there was a murder and they called the police. Investigators thought it’s maybe a pioneer or trapper and had an accident, but this human skull was much, much older. In 2015^th they figured out how old it was. The human skull was older more than 9000 years. Isn’t that amazing for scientists.

 The scientists were working on it two decades. Which was the longest work on any bone in history. Since the discovery of the skeleton in 1996, Native American tribes have claimed Kennewick Man as their own and requested the bones be handed over for a ceremonial burial. Some scientists argued, though, based on the shape of his skull, that he was more closely related to native Polynesians or a native Japanese group called the Ainu.

Morten Rasmussen of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues wrested DNA from Kennewick Man’s skeleton and analyzed it for the first time. They found that Kennewick Man is more closely related to Native Americans in the northern United States than to any other living population. Two donors who provided modern DNA for comparison came from a tribe that, with four other tribes, lost a 2004 lawsuit to bury Kennewick Man as one of their ancestors. That was the biggest and most important discovery in North America ever. Now isn’t that cool to hear.

Dogs beginning

Man’s best friend(dog) might be much older than we thought. It is discovered that man’s best friend separated from the wolf between 27000 and 40000 years ago. All that was discovered by only one bone of an ancient “dog”. In May 2015^th year, scientist were working with old wolf’s rib bone and by genetic analysis they discovered the period when did dogs separated from wolfs.

The new evidence raises the possibility that dog domestication is quite ancient, corresponding roughly in time to the Neandertal extinction. But it’s also possible that these early members of the dog lineage weren’t yet tame or living with humans, says Pontus Skoglund, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who led the study.

The earliest dog domestication probably occurred near present-day Nepal and Mongolia, Laura Shannon of Cornell University and colleagues wrote in a study published in October. An analysis of 185,805 genetic markers showed that modern dogs from Central Asia are more diverse than dogs elsewhere. Previously proposed regions for early domestication include the Middle East, Europe, North Africa and Siberia.