Medicine & TechnologyWhen a whale washes ashore, researchers and government agencies are usually the first on scene to assess the causes of death. However, when a rare beaked whale washed ashore in Australia earlier this week, Tuesday Oct. 14, researchers were eager to get to the scene for an entirely different reason — the opportunity to learn something about a deep diving mammal we know so little about.
In hopes of a long future on the Red Planet, researchers have proposed the addition of a horticultural experiment onboard NASA’s next Mars rover mission, scheduled to land in 2021. The proposed project, known simply as the “Mars Plant Experiment” (MPX) would not only aid in the understanding of plant growth on foreign planets, but also would lay the foundations for future colonies currently planning on settling in on Mars.