Rover must "stick the landing" on Mars in 6 days

It's NASA's most ambitious and expensive Mars mission yet - and it begins with the red planet arrival late Sunday of the smartest interplanetary rover ever built. Also the most athletic.

Like an Olympic gymnast, it needs to "stick the landing."
It won't be easy. The complicated touchdown NASA designed for the Curiosity rover is so risky it's been described as "seven minutes of terror" - the time it takes to go from 13,000 mph to a complete stop.
Scientists and engineers will be waiting anxiously 154 million miles away as the spacecraft plunges through Mars' thin atmosphere, and in a new twist, attempts to slowly lower the rover to the bottom of a crater with cables.
By the time Earthlings receive first word of its fate, it will have planted six wheels on the ground - or tumbled itself into a metal graveyard.
If it succeeds, a video camera aboard the rover will have captured the most dramatic minutes for the first filming of a landing on another planet.
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http://m.cbsnews.com/fullstory.rbml?catid=57482519&feed_id=null&videofeed=null

Play with all 786 confirmed planets in one interactive infographic!

Remember a few weeks ago when XKCD put out that killer infographic depicting all 786 of our galaxy's confirmed exoplanets in one convenient visualization? Well, thanks to some data from Planetary Habitability Laboratory and some handy codework by Lane Harrison, that infographic just got even cooler. More » 

FDA’s claims over stem cells upheld

Wait, isn't this a procedure and not a drug? Stem cells are biological and cme from humans, so how does this fall under the jurisdiction of the FDA?

Drug watchdog wins right to regulate controversial therapies.

Talk about an overstep of regulatory authority. Time to nullify that one quick!

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Original Page: http://feeds.nature.com/~r/news/rss/most_recent/~3/4LzZ4ZZKc5c/488014a

Time-Lapse Video Captures Beauty On Earth And In The Sky

View from the ISS at Night from Knate Myers on Vimeo.

New nightmare fuel: the giant scaleworm Eulagisca

Giant isopods and vampire squid are sooooo last year. I bet you're even sleeping through the night now without imagining sixgill sharks tearing at your carcass. Fear not! Or should I say – FEAR MORE. I am here with an entirely new species to fuel your fevered nightmares.
Meet the giant Antarctic scaleworm Eulagisca. Last week, I wandered down into the Scripps Benthic Invertebrate Collection and saw this bad boy sitting in a giant gallon-sized jar (here's a coffee mug for scale).

When I mentioned that the GIANT FRICKIN' SCALEWORM to the collections manager, she chortled evilly and opened the jar for me. It gets worse. So much worse.
BEHOLD: the jaws of Eulagisca. This photo is taken from the top of the jar looking down. Yes, that entire purple structure is a GIANT SET OF JAWS sticking out of the front of the GIANT WORM.

Many polychaete worms have an eversible pharynx – most of the time those jaws are tucked away, but when the worm wants to feed, the entire front of their throat rolls out of their mouth. Here's a better photo from the Smithsonian Antarctic Invertebrates collection. Yes, that scale bar say 2 cm (0.8 inches) – the jaws and pharynx are around two inches long!

I could not find any ecological information on Eulagisca in the scientific literature, so I don't know what it eats. It inhabits the continental shelf off Antarctica, and could be a predator or scavenger or both. Chris Mah, being all up on the Antarctic invertebrates, wrote about Eulagisca a couple months ago, and guess that it was predatory. Any experts in the audience should chime in.

http://deepseanews.com/2012/07/new-nightmare-fuel-the-giant-scaleworm-eulagisca/

Stargazing: VISTA's IR of the Orion Nebula

This makes me want to move to a place with less light pollution and get a good reflector telescope. 

This wide-field view of the Orion Nebula (Messier 42), lying about 1350 light-years from Earth, was taken with the VISTA infrared survey telescope at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile. The new telescope's huge field of view allows the whole nebula and its surroundings to be imaged in a single picture and its infrared vision also means that it can peer deep into the normally hidden dusty regions and reveal the curious antics of the very active young stars buried there. This image was created from images taken through Z, J and Ks filters in the near-infrared part of the spectrum. The exposure times were ten minutes per filter. The image covers a region of sky about one degree by 1.5 degrees. Credit:ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA. Tap © to visit the web site. Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit

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Happy Birthday Large Hadron Collider!