Joe Palca

Atop A Hawaiian Mountain, A Constant Sniff For Carbon Dioxide

Joe Palca — Mon, 13 May 2013 04:30:00 +0000

Climate scientists have a good reason to want to get away from it all. To get an accurate picture of the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere, you have to find places where the numbers won't be distorted by cities or factories or even lots of vegetation that can have a major local impact on CO₂ concentrations.

Starting in 1958, scientists from the Scripps Institution for Oceanography have been using an instrument on the top of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii to measure CO₂ in the atmosphere.

Kepler Telescope Spots Three New Planets In The 'Goldilocks Zone'

Joe Palca — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 19:10:00 +0000

Astronomers have found three planets orbiting far-off stars that are close to Earth-sized and in the "habitable zone": a distance from their suns that makes the planets' surfaces neither too hot nor too cold, but just right.

One of the three planets orbits a star with the prosaic name Kepler-69.

"Kepler-69 is a sun-like star," says Thomas Barclay, a research scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute who uses the Kepler space telescope, which is on a mission to search for Earth-lik

Drug Fulfills Promise Of Research Into Cystic Fibrosis Gene

Joe Palca — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 20:04:00 +0000

The promise of genetic medicine is beginning to be fulfilled, but it's been a long, hard slog.

Take the story of Kalydeco. It's designed to treat people with a lung disease called cystic fibrosis. While not quite a cure, the drug is extremely effective for some CF patients.

But the success of Kalydeco has been more than two decades in the making.

A good starting point for the story is Aug. 24, 1989. That's the day scientists from the U.S. and Canada announced the discovery of the gene associated with the disease.

Signs Of Life On Mars? Not Exactly

Joe Palca — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 20:30:00 +0000

The director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said last week that preliminary data showed the possibility that the agency's Mars Science Laboratory – the six-wheeled rover that landed on Mars in August — had found signs of carbon-containing molecules.

According to a JPL news release, however, there will be no major announcements Monday, when scientists take part in a news conference at the annual meeting of American Geophysical Union.

Space Probe Finds Ice In Mercury's Craters

Joe Palca — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 19:05:00 +0000

Mercury is not the first planet to come to mind if you were searching for ice in the solar system. After all, the surface temperature across most of the planet is hot enough to melt lead.

But at the poles on Mercury it's a different story. Almost no sun reaches the poles, and as a result, temperatures can drop to less than -100 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, three papers in the journal Science suggest there really is ice at the bottom of craters near the poles on Mercury.

The evidence comes from an instrument on NASA's Messenger spacecraft called Mercury Laser Altimeter.