Nasa has released details of its strategy for sending a human crew to Mars within the next few decades.

The US space agency envisages despatching a "minimal" crew on a 30-month round trip to the Red Planet in a 400,000kg (880,000lb) spacecraft.

In January 2004, President George W Bush launched a programme for returning humans to the Moon by 2020 and - at an undetermined date - to Mars.

Notionally despatched in February 2031, the mission's journey from Earth to Mars would take six to seven months in a spacecraft powered by an advanced cryogenic fuel propulsion system.

The details are highly subject to change, and may not represent the way Nasa eventually chooses to go to the Red Planet.

The cargo lander and surface habitat would be sent to Mars separately, launched before the crew in December 2028 and January 2029.

According to the Nasa presentation seen by BBC News, astronauts could grow their own fruit and vegetables on the way.

Once there, astronauts could spend up to 16 months on the Martian surface, and would use nuclear energy to power their habitat.

The spacecraft itself would be equipped with so-called "closed-loop" life support systems, in which air and water would be recycled.

Details of the plan, which comes under Nasa's new Constellation programme, were presented at a meeting of Nasa's Lunar Exploration and Analysis Group.

Video games like Dance Dance Revolution could soon require more than just fancy footwork. Small, cheap sensors for tracking the movement of a person's entire body could lead to "whole-body interfaces" for controlling computers or playing games, researchers say.

Conventionally, motion capture makes use of reflective dots or small LEDs attached at key points on a person's torso, limbs and head. Capturing the movements of these points using an array of cameras allows animators to create a computerized skeleton, which can then guide the movements of an animated character, for example.

Their new motion capture sensors works even while a person is driving or skiing (see video, top right). It could make computer animation or movie effects more lifelike, the researchers say, and perhaps even help doctors analyse movements of patients going through physical therapy.

Several sensors measuring about 2.5 centimetres on each side are attached to a person's legs and arms. The sensors detect movement in two different ways: accelerometers and gyroscopes measure motion, but ultrasonic beeps are also emitted.

The new system does not work when people make very sudden movements, however, because the relatively cheap sensors used are not yet accurate enough to compensate. But they are quickly improving, Adelsberger says.

"This system could record many new activities for sports medicine, behavioral studies [and other fields] that were impossible before," he says.

"Canadian researchers have promised to squeeze "decades" of cancer research into just two years by harnessing the power of a global PC grid. The scientists are the first from Canada to use IBM's World Community Grid network of PCs and laptops with the power equivalent to one of the globe's top five fastest supercomputers. The team will use the grid to analyze the results of experiments on proteins using data collected by scientists at the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute in Buffalo, New York. The researchers estimate that this analysis would take conventional computer systems 162 years to complete."

 The research team now has more than 86 million images of 9,400 unique proteins that could be linked to cancer captured in the course of more than 14.5 million experiments by colleagues at Hauptman-Woodward.

Dr Jurisica said that this resource comprises the most comprehensive database on the chemistry of a large number of proteins, a resource that will help researchers around the world unlock the mystery of how many cancers grow.

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/64560,cancerbusters-tap-into-grid-computing.aspx 

Craig Venter, the controversial DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth.

Mr Venter told the Guardian he thought this landmark would be "a very important philosophical step in the history of our species. We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before".

The Guardian can reveal that a team of 20 top scientists assembled by Mr Venter, led by the Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, has already constructed a synthetic chromosome, a feat of virtuoso bio-engineering never previously achieved. Using lab-made chemicals, they have painstakingly stitched together a chromosome that is 381 genes long and contains 580,000 base pairs of genetic code.

The new life form will depend for its ability to replicate itself and metabolise on the molecular machinery of the cell into which it has been injected, and in that sense it will not be a wholly synthetic life form. However, its DNA will be artificial, and it is the DNA that controls the cell and is credited with being the building block of life.

Mr Venter believes designer genomes have enormous positive potential if properly regulated. In the long-term, he hopes they could lead to alternative energy sources previously unthinkable. Bacteria could be created, he speculates, that could help mop up excessive carbon dioxide, thus contributing to the solution to global warming, or produce fuels such as butane or propane made entirely from sugar.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/oct/06/genetics.climatechange 

An exotic molecule built from electrons and antimatter is being touted as a route to powerful gamma-ray lasers.

An electron can hook up with its antiparticle, the positron, to form a hydrogen-like atom called positronium (Ps). It survives for less than 150 nanoseconds before it is annihilated in a puff of gamma radiation. It was known that two positronium atoms should be able to bind together to form a molecule, called Ps2, and now David Cassidy and Allen Mills from the University of California, Riverside, have made that happen. First, they trapped positrons in a thin film of porous silica. Those positrons captured electrons to form positronium atoms, and the pattern of decay rates signalled that some of these atoms had teamed up to form Ps2 (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature06094).

If positronium atoms could be forced to merge into a kind of "super-atom" condensate, it would decay in bursts of identical gamma rays, which could lead to gamma-ray lasers a million times more powerful than standard lasers. "It's like comparing a chemical explosion with a nuclear explosion," Cassidy says.

 http://technology.newscientist.com/article/mg19526216.000-antimatter-molecule-could-lead-to-ultrapowerful-laser.html