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Images taken by Hope’s onboard spectrometer (left-hand panel) and an artist’s impression (right) show discrete auroras on Mars’s night side.Credit: Emirates Mars Mission
Mars’s auroras snapped by Hope spacecraft
The United Arab Emirates’ Hope spacecraft has taken the most detailed pictures yet of the ‘discrete auroras’ of Mars. The ultraviolet emissions — seen by the orbiter’s onboard spectrometer — arise when solar wind runs into magnetic fields that emanate from Mars’s crust. Charged particles then collide with oxygen in the upper atmosphere, causing it to glow.
Read more: How a small Arab nation built a Mars mission from scratch in six years (Nature | 13 min read)
Reference: Nature Astronomy paper
Birds flown to Mexico to escape rising seas
Thirty-three black-footed albatrosses (Phoebastria nigripes) started new lives on Guadalupe Island in Mexico after being flown 6,000 kilometres from Midway Atoll near Hawaii. On Midway, they “were destined to drown”, says conservation biologist Julio Hernández Montoya. The birds were flown on a commercial airline, as eggs or one-month-old chicks, in the first transfer of a seabird species between nations. Conservationists first restored Guadalupe Island to its lush natural state by removing invasive species, including nearly 50,000 goats and 1,500 feral cats.
Leaky pipes can be better for moving water
Inspired by trees’ ability to transport water from their roots and exhale it from their leaves, researchers have developed a system for moving water that depends on capillary action and surface tension. A structure built from tiny 3D-printed open-faced cells can draw liquid from a reservoir. The open sides of the cells maximize the surface area of liquid that can absorb and desorb gas molecules — a process that mimics transpiration in real trees. The ability to transport liquid and gas at will could be useful for everything from cooling systems to carbon dioxide capture.
Go deeper with chemists Tammi van Neel and Ashleigh Theberge in the Nature News & Views article.
Features & opinion
Biology flirts with quantum computing
Biomedical researchers are beginning to probe the possibilities of quantum computing. The technology offers the tantalizing prospect of speeding up tasks such as working out the best arrangement for atoms in a drug molecule, or simulating molecular processes such as photosynthesis. The next few years will reveal “what problems it will help solve and where it will really increase our understanding”, says structural bioinformatician Charlotte Deane.
Special: Computational social science
Researchers have access to an unprecedented amount of social data, generated every second by continuous interactions on digital devices or platforms. As a result, work that weaves large data analysis with social questions, known as computational social science, has witnessed huge growth in recent years. Nature explores the power and peril of using digital data to understand human behaviour in a special collection of news, opinion and research articles.
Where I work
Nicole Khan is a geologist at the University of Hong Kong.Credit: Suzanne Lee/Panos Pictures
Geologist Nicole Khan and graduate students Howard Yu and Kayla Murai get knee-deep in mud while examining coastal sediment samples in Hong Kong. “If you’re a city planner on, say, the China coast or in Miami, you want to know how sea level is going to change in your area,” says Khan. “My work as a geologist helps us to predict future coastal changes by determining how much sea levels have risen and fallen in the past 1,000 years.” (Nature | 3 min read)
