Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Detects Biggest Meteorite Impacts

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A storm recently blanketed insights solar panels with dust. And when it's running out of juice it can't charge its batteries anymore. So in the forthcoming weeks it will probably stop responding to commands from Earth and gently kind of slide away which is kind of sad. But what is nice is that this spacecraft hasn't gone out with a whimper. It has gone out with quite the bang - last year insight detected not one but two of the biggest meteorite impacts ever seen on Mars. Both craters Nick are more than 130 meters across and are the largest seen by the orbiter in the 16 years that it's been studying the planet.

00:46 How flies can move their eyes (a little)

It's long been assumed flies’ eyes don’t move, and so to alter their gaze they need to move their heads. Now, researchers have shown that this isn’t quite true and that fruit flies can actually move their retinas using a specific set of muscles, which may allow them to perceive depth. The team also hope that this movement may provide a window into some of the flies’ internal processes.

Research article: Fenk et al.

08:54 Research Highlights

How the 80-year-old wreck of a sunken warship is influencing ocean microbes, and tracing an epilepsy-related gene variant back to a single person from 800 years ago.

Research Highlight: A ship sunk during the Second World War still stirs up the seabed

Research Highlight: Families on three continents inherited their epilepsy from a single person

11:11 Calls to mandate militaries’ emissions reporting

The eyes of the world will be focused on the UN’s upcoming COP27 conference to see what governments will pledge to do to reduce global emissions. But there’s one sector of countries’ carbon outputs that remains something of a mystery: the emissions of their militaries. We speak to Oliver Belcher, one of a group of researchers who have written a Comment article for Nature, calling for better reporting and greater accountability for these military emissions.

Comment: Decarbonize the military — mandate emissions reporting

19:07 Briefing Chat

We discuss some highlights from the Nature Briefing. This time: efforts from Middle East countries to cut greenhouse-gas emissions while still supplying fossil fuels; the upcoming demise of NASA’s InSight spacecraft; and new estimates for how long bacteria could survive on Mars.

Nature News: The Middle East is going green — while supplying oil to others

Nature News: NASA spacecraft records epic ‘marsquakes’ as it prepares to die

New Scientist: Bacteria could survive just under Mars's surface for 280 million years

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