Exploring Titan with a drone
NASA has announced plans to use a nuclear-powered drone to explore Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and search for signs of microbial life. Dragonfly, a car-sized quadcopter, will zip around the moon’s skies, landing at dozens of sites to take samples from the surface. Flying will be easier on Titan than on Earth, because the moon’s atmosphere is denser and the gravity about one-seventh that of our own. The primary aim of the mission is to study Titan’s chemical composition. With lakes of liquid methane, mountains of ice, and a liquidwater ocean below the rock-hard ice surface, the planet-size moon has all the ingredients for life—possibly of a kind as yet unknown. “Titan has been doing chemistry experiments for hundreds of millions, if not billions, of years,” project leader Elizabeth Turtle, from Johns Hopkins University, tells ScientificAmerican.com. “What we want to do is go pick up the results of those experiments.” Dragonfly is scheduled for launch aboard a spaceship in 2026 and should arrive at Titan in 2034.
Researchers examined 40 studies of HPV infections and associated symptoms, covering 60 million people in 14 high-income countries that adopted the vaccine— typically administered to girls around age 12—after its introduction in 2006. They found that the strains of HPV most likely to cause cervical cancer decreased by 83 percent over that period among girls ages 13 to 19, and by 66 percent among those ages 20 to 24. Cases of precancerous cervical lesions fell by 51 percent among girls ages 15 to 19, and by 31 percent among women ages 20 to 24. Genital warts, another potential consequence of HPV, also fell sharply. The vaccine hasn’t been available long enough for there to be meaningful data on its effect on cancer rates, but the researchers expect similarly sharp declines. Lead author Mélanie Drolet, from Laval University in Canada, tells NBCNews.com that the findings are “a first sign that vaccination could eventually lead to the elimination of cervical cancer as a public health problem.”
suggesting that these colossal avians— Pachystruthio dmanisensis— may have been around when Homo erectus first reached the continent 1.2 million years ago. If so, they would have been a valuable source of meat, bones, feathers and eggshells for our distant ancestors. The bird was flightless, but likely quick on its feet: The modern ostrich can run at 43 miles per hour. “The Taurida cave network was only discovered last summer,” study author Nikita Zelenkov, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, tells ScienceDaily.com. “There may be much more to the site that will teach us about Europe’s distant past.”