NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has revealed that movement in sand dune fields on the Red Planet occurs on a surprisingly large scale, about the same as in dune fields on Earth. This is unexpected because Mars has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth, is only about one percent as dense, and its high-speed winds are less frequent and weaker than Earth’s.

Last year, images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured sand dunes and ripples moving across the surface of Mars — observations that challenged previously held beliefs that there was not a lot of movement on the Red Planet’s surface. Now, new technology has allowed scientists to measure these activities for the very first time.

A detailed description of development of the first practical artificial leaf — a milestone in the drive for sustainable energy that mimics the process, photosynthesis, that green plants use to convert water and sunlight into energy — has just been published. The article notes that unlike earlier devices, which used costly ingredients, the new device is made from inexpensive materials and employs low-cost engineering and manufacturing processes.

The Encyclopedia of Life has surged past one million pages of content with the addition of hundreds of thousands of new images and specimen data. Launched in 2007 with the support of leading scientific organizations around the world, the Encyclopedia of Life provides global access to knowledge about life on Earth by building a web page for each of the 1.9 million recognized species.

A new study maps the development of life-sustaining chemistry to the history of early life. Researchers have traced the six methods of carbon fixation seen in modern life back to a single ancestral form.