Rosetta launch delayed

The European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission was delayed for a second time this week. The mission involves sending a rocket on an eight year mission, spiraling around Earth and Mars, until it meets the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, where Rosetta will deposit a small probe to land on the comet’s surface. The rocket was supposed to have taken off this Thursday, but the launch was delayed when scientists noticed a large chunk of foam missing from the insulation. As insulation foam was responsible for the explosion of the Columbia shuttle last February, scientists were concerned. Technicians only have until March 17 to fix the problem and launch the rocket-after that, Earth will have moved too far away for the rocket to reach the trajectory it needs to follow in order to meet the comet.

-Zoe Cormier
Source: Nature

Robot moves with rat muscle

Microengineers at UCLA have made a micromachine that moves with rat muscle. The machine consists of a metal arch with rat muscle grown on the underside. When placed on a petri plate coated with sugar the muscle fibres begin to contract and relax, using the sugar for energy. The contractions cause the arch to bend and crawl along the plate. NASA funded the research hoping to make an army of “musclebots” that could repair tiny holes in spacecraft caused by micrometeorites. That’s a long way off, say the researchers, but they could use these bots to generate muscle contractions in people who are paralyzed and cannot breathe without a ventilator.

-ZC
Source: New Scientist

Snake sisterhood

Snakes are usually thought of as lone hunters, but a new study shows that they may be far more social than we assume. A wildlife biologist from Cornell found that radio-collared female snakes bask with their sisters far more often than with strangers. In the lab, he found that sister snakes touch each other and lie far closer to each other than unrelated female snakes. Even more surprising, sister snakes that had been reared apart and never met each other still recognized each other and socialized together. Male snakes did not show any difference in behaviour to their brothers or strangers.

-ZC
Source: Science