Debates over strategy for human exploration of the solar system focus on whether the next interplanetary travelers ought to go to the Moon or to Mars. The Space Exploration Initiative explicitly calls for a lunar presence, but the "Mars Now" advocates argue for a token effort on the Moon with major emphasis on Mars. A strategy which moves directly to piloted Mars missions incurs serious program...

Attachment regions of the eukaryotic chromosomal DNA to the nuclear scaffold/matrix (S/MARs) participate in various important cellular processes. However, no obvious characteristics common for these nucleotide sequences have been revealed, except that S/MARs are non-coding sites containing putative regulatory elements and binding sites of DNA-topoisomerase II. Heterogeneity among S/MARs can be ...

?abstract NASA and ESA have outlined visions for solar system exploration that will include a series of lunar robotic precursor missions to prepare for, and support a human return to the Moan, and future human exploration of Mars and other destinations, including possibly asteroids. One of the guiding principles for exploration is to pursue compelling scientific questions about the origin and e...

We carried out a genome-wide prediction of scaffold/matrix attachment regions (S/MARs) in Arabidopsis. Results indicate no uneven distribution on the chromosomal level but a clear underrepresentation of S/MARs inside genes. In cases where S/MARs were predicted within genes, these intragenic S/MARs were preferentially located within the 5'-half, most prominently within introns 1 and 2. Using Ara...

OBJECTIVE The molecular adsorbent recirculating system (MARS) is used to purify blood from albumin-bound toxins in patients with liver failure. However, the application of MARS has not demonstrated improved survival in randomized clinical trials and the clinical utility has not been finally established. In our department, the use of MARS is now restricted to the most critically ill patients wit...

The potential risks for late effects including cancer, cataracts, and neurological disorders due to exposures to the galactic cosmic rays (GCR) is a large concern for the human exploration of Mars. Physical models are needed to project the radiation exposures to be received by astronauts in transit to Mars and on the Mars surface, including the understanding of the modification of the GCR by th...

[1] Geomorphic evidence suggests that recent gullies on Mars were formed by fluvial activity. The Martian gully features are significant because their existence implies the presence of liquid water near the surface on Mars in geologically recent times. Irrespective of the ultimate source of the fluid carving the gullies, we seek to understand the behavior of this fluid after it reaches the Mart...

This paper presents MARS-X, a programmable coordination architecture for autonomous and mobile Internet agents. In MARS-X, mobile Internet agents coordinate through programmable XML dataspaces, accessed by agents in a Linda-like fashion. This suits very well the characteristics of both mobile Internet agents and the Internet environment itself, because MARS-X enforces open and uncoupled interac...

Surface conditions on Mars are currently cold and dry, with water ice unstable on the surface except near the poles. However, geologically recent glacierlike landforms have been identified in the tropics and the midlatitudes of Mars. The ice has been proposed to originate from either a subsurface reservoir or the atmosphere. We present high-resolution climate simulations performed with a model ...

Minimum-mass tether designs are developed for a spinning human transport that not only provides artificial gravity, but also the potential for free-return aborts. The investigation reveals that severing the tether can provide a propellant-free boost to return astronauts to Earth in the event of an aborted landing on Mars. Earth–Mars–Earth, Earth–Mars–Venus–Earth, and Earth–Venus–Mars–Earth traj...