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6 | NewScientist | 15 June 2013 REUTERS AN OLD rover has made a decidedly new discovery. NASA’s Opportunity rover, which has spent nine years on Mars, has dug up its first evidence that drinkable water once flowed on the Red Planet. Combined with a recent, similar find by its younger sibling Curiosity, this suggests Mars life could have arisen in several spots. Opportunity made its find while examining Esperance, a rocky outcrop on Endeavour crater that is billions of years old. The rocks contain aluminium-rich clay minerals, which need neutral, life-friendly water to form. “This is water you could drink,” says Steve Squyres of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, the rover’s principal investigator. By contrast, most evidence for water on Mars suggests acidic liquid that could only host extreme microbes, if anything. Neutral Mars water Opportunity’s find comes hot on the heels of Curiosity revealing the first direct evidence of neutral, slightly salty water in Gale crater, on almost the other side of Mars. Opportunity is now heading for Solander Point, which might reveal interesting chemistry and mineralogy. The solar-powered rover needs to get to this sunny hill before the dark Martian winter sets in. “Opportunity could have a massive stroke at any time, so we treat each day preciously,” says project manager John Callas of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Dementia boom CHINA has a time bomb on its hands. New figures reveal that in 2010 it had more people living with Alzheimer’s disease than any other country in the world – and twice as many cases of Alzheimer’s and other kinds of dementia as the World Health Organization thought. Cases of all forms of age-related dementia in the country rose from 3.7 million in 1990 to 9.2 million in 2010. That’s according to the first comprehensive analysis of Chinese epidemiological research, carried out by an international consortium and made possible by the recent digitisation of Chinese-language research papers (The Lancet, doi.org/msp). It is bad news for a country where 90 per cent of the elderly must be cared for by their families. The findings reflect the “bulge” in births in the 1950s and 1960s – a typical result of modernisation. Martin Prince of King’s College London says that if midlife obesity is a risk factor for dementia, future rates in China could be 20 per cent higher than currently estimated. Watch out for MERS MEDICS everywhere: be on the alert for Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), the disease that emerged last September in Saudi Arabia. It is caused by a coronavirus related to the one that causes SARS, which infected over 8000 people in 2003. “All countries in the world need to ensure that their healthcare workers are aware of the virus and the disease it can cause, and that –Next stop space– –The disease is spreading– China plans space station IF THE US and Russia are hares in the space race, China is the tortoise. The successful launch of three astronauts on the Shenzhou-10 spacecraft marks the end of the beginning of China’s slow but steady approach to human space flight. The mission will provide training with the aim of establishing a fully operational space station by 2020. More ambitious space exploration goals could follow. The country’s fifth crewed mission in 10 years, Shenzhou-10 lifted off on 11 June to rendezvous with the Tiangong 1 space module, which has been orbiting Earth since 2011. During their 15-day mission the crew will do one automatic and one manual docking test. They will also run medical tests and broadcast a science lesson. The craft is carrying two men, Nie Haisheng and Zhang Xiaoguang, and one woman, Wang Yaping, who becomes China’s second female astronaut. The launch continues an orderly programme laid out in the 1990s, which included the uncrewed launch of the Shenzhou 1 spacecraft in 1999 and the first crewed launch in 2003. China’s unwavering goals may see it beat other space powers to the punch, says Dean Cheng of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy research group in Washington DC. “So long as the money holds out and political stability reigns, they might well get to some place like Mars or establish a lunar presence, precisely because they are persistent and willing to spend the money and make the effort,” he says. “Opportunity could have a massive stroke at any time, so we treat each day preciously” QIN XIAN’AN/ XINHUA UPFRONT
