The Download: Farming on Mars, and lab robots

As soon as upon a time, water flowed throughout the floor of Mars. Waves lapped towards shorelines, sturdy winds gusted and howled, and driving rain fell from thick, cloudy skies. It wasn’t actually so totally different from our personal planet 4 billion years in the past, apart from one essential element—its dimension. Mars is about half the diameter of Earth, and that’s the place issues went unsuitable.

The Martian core cooled shortly, quickly leaving the planet and not using a magnetic subject. This, in flip, left it weak to the photo voltaic wind, which swept away a lot of its environment. And not using a important protect from the solar’s ultraviolet rays, Mars couldn’t retain its warmth. A few of the oceans evaporated, and the subsurface absorbed the remaining, with solely a little bit of water left behind and frozen at its poles. If ever a blade of grass grew on Mars, these days are over. 

However might they start once more? And what would it not take to develop vegetation to feed future astronauts on Mars? Read the full story.

—David W. Brown

This lab robotic mixes chemical compounds

Lab scientists spend a lot of their time doing laborious and repetitive duties, be it pipetting liquid samples or operating the identical analyses over and over. However what if they might merely inform a robotic to do the experiments, analyze the information, and generate a report? 

Enter Organa, a benchtop robotic system devised by researchers on the College of Toronto that may do precisely that. The system might automate some chemistry lab duties utilizing a mix of laptop imaginative and prescient and a big language mannequin that interprets scientists’ verbal cues into an experimental pipeline. Read the full story.