NASA lands on Mars Again!

Check out the videos of NASA's Rover named "Curiosity" -- successfully landing on Mars to start two years of research in search of ingredients for life, such as water, energy, and carbon.  Some good animated videos of the expected landing....







Here's the direct YouTube link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oLaC1VYoTM


Another good link:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/first-color-image-from-curiosity-in-descent-phase/?utm_source=roboticsnews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=080712

Science: New Particle Discovered

Here are some excerpts from a BBC article on a so-called "God" Particle -- that might explain how matter attains mass.

Cern scientists reporting from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have claimed the discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson.

The particle has been the subject of a 45-year hunt to explain how matter attains its mass.

Both of the Higgs boson-hunting experiments at the LHC see a level of certainty in their data worthy of a "discovery".

...
They claimed that by combining two data sets, they had attained a confidence level just at the "five-sigma" point - about a one-in-3.5 million chance that the signal they see would appear if there were no Higgs particle.

However, a full combination of the CMS data brings that number just back to 4.9 sigma - a one-in-two million chance. 

Read more here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-18702455