MUSIC: "Our World" theme
Straight ahead on "Our World" ... Mars rovers wait out dust storms on the Red Planet ... using math to fight cancer ... and a listener asks about birds and dinosaurs
CONRAD: "Tyrannosaurus rex is actually more closely related to hummingbirds than to triceratops or apatosaurus. If you look at a bird foot, it looks very much like the foot of tyrannosaurus rex."
Like T. rex, but much smaller! Those stories, studying climate change in Greenland, and more. I'm Art Chimes. Welcome to VOA's science and technology magazine, "Our World."
At the U.S. space agency NASA, they're keeping a close eye on the weather. The Martian weather, that is. Severe dust storms in the upper atmosphere are screening out 99 percent of the sunlight reaching the surface, where the Mars exploration vehicles Spirit and Opportunity are not getting enough power from their solar cells.
We checked in with rover program manager John Callas for a weather update.
CALLAS: "Right now as of today, the weather is actually getting worse for Spirit and has been fairly stable for Opportunity. Opportunity had experienced some really bad weather last week, which had given us some concerns. It's moderated a little bit, but now the weather is getting worse for Spirit."
The rovers have halted operations, using what little power they have just to stay warm. The storms blew up just as Opportunity was poised to roll down into the Victoria crater to explore that particular bit of Martian geology. It's now just 40 meters from the crater's edge.
CALLAS: "As soon as the weather improves sufficiently, and we have confidence that the next several days will be, you know, good weather, then we'll start the path into the crater. Had we been in the crater, it wouldn't have made any difference in terms of the vehicle's response to the weather. So it isn't like we would have been in a worse situation had we been inside the crater or anything like that. It would have been pretty much the same."
NASA's John Callas. Another robotic explorer is about to be launched to Mars. The Phoenix lander will blast into space on an unmanned rocket as early as this Friday (August 3). About 10 months later it is due to land in the Martian arctic where it will use its mechanical arm to dig under the surface, where scientists think there may be water ice.
Satellites orbiting Mars have sent back great data, but Phoenix scientist Bobby Fogel says that sometimes you just have to be there.
FOGEL: "It's going to analyze the water. It's going to get its chemical composition, its physical properties, and try to tell us something about the history of water on Mars and potential habitability for microbes on Mars. Now remember, we have other assets at Mars that are remote sensing assets. But as good as remote sensing assets are, sometimes there's nothing that replaces actually going down and doing an experiment with the actual material."
The Phoenix spacecraft, incidentally, was more-or-less cobbled together from pieces left over from other missions. Sort of a high-tech recycling program, I guess.
NASA had some unexpected bad news this week. First, a computer set to be sent to the space station on a shuttle flight next month was apparently sabotaged by an employee of a subcontractor.
Then, Friday, a NASA committee on astronaut health said there had been two incidents where astronauts were allowed to fly despite drinking enough alcohol before the flight that other astronauts or medical personnel raised concerns about flight safety. NASA did not identify the astronauts or the flights involved.
The committee was appointed in February after a bizarre incident in which astronaut Lisa Nowak drove halfway across the country to confront a woman she allegedly considered a romantic rival for another astronaut.
After five months of work, the NASA committee recommendations include mental health screening be added to astronauts' annual medical exam as well as a stricter alcohol policy.
Public smoking bans are becoming a lot more common in the United States and many other countries, too. But how effective are they in protecting the health of non-smokers? As we hear from reporter Rose Hoban, there hasn't been much data measuring the health impact of these new laws ? until now.
HOBAN: That data comes from a study of cotinine, an extremely accurate marker for the presence of tobacco that's found in saliva. Researchers from the New York State Department of Health had the opportunity to measure the amount of cotinine in people both before and after implementation of a new statewide law banning smoking in public places. Ursula Bauer heads the state's tobacco control program.