Water, Footprints or Life on Mars? NASA Says; Maybe not!

NASA downplayed Wednesday talk of a major discovery by its Martian rover after remarks by the mission chief raised hopes it may have unearthed evidence life once existed on the Red Planet.

Excitement is building over soon-to-be-released results from NASA's Curiosity rover, which is three months into a two-year mission to determine if Mars has ever been capable of supporting microbial life.

Its Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instruments have been sending back information as it hunts for compounds such as methane, as well as hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, that would mean life could once have existed there.

In an interview aired Tuesday, lead mission investigator John Grotzinger hinted at something major but said there would be no announcement for several weeks.

"We're getting data from SAM," he said. "This data is gonna be one for the history books. It's looking really good."

A spokesman for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managing the project, appeared to pour cold water Wednesday on the hopes of space enthusiasts looking forward to an earth-shattering discovery.

"John was delighted about the quality and range of information coming in from SAM during the day a reporter happened to be sitting in John's office last week. He has been similarly delighted by results at other points during the mission so far," spokesman Guy Webster reported.

"The scientists want to gain confidence in the findings before taking them outside of the science team. As for history books, the whole mission is for the history books," Webster said.

Scientists do not expect Curiosity to find aliens or living creatures but they hope to use it to analyze soil and rocks for signs the building blocks of life are present and may have supported life in the past.

The $2.5 billion Curiosity rover, which landed in Gale Crater on Mars on August 6, 2012, also aims to study the Martian environment to prepare for a possible human mission there in the coming years.

US President Barack Obama has vowed to send humans to the planet by 2030.

Someone's Breath on Your Neck Makes you Hear Better

DEPENDING on whose it is, breath on your neck may or may not feel good. Either way, now it seems that it can help you understand what someone is saying. The discovery could lead to hearing aids that emit puffs of air.

We know that what we see affects what we hear. For example, if we hear "ba" while watching a person saying "ga" we think we've heard "da". Bryan Gick and colleagues at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, wondered whether tactile sensations affect hearing too.

In speech, the "aspirated" syllables "pa" and "ta" are accompanied by a puff of exhaled air, whereas "ba" and "da" are not. Such puffs aren't always detected when someone is speaking, but Gick's team reasoned that the brain might learn to use puffs to modify its perception of certain sounds.

They had 66 volunteers listen to a male voice saying all four syllables against background noise that made it hard to distinguish them. At the same time as some of the syllables, they delivered a puff of air to the hand or neck.

Although many volunteers could not consciously feel the puffs, they were still more successful at correctly identifying "pa" and "ta" when these sounds were accompanied by air puffs. In contrast, air puffs made it less likely that they would correctly identify "ba" and "da" and more likely that they would mistake these for sounds for "pa" and "ta" (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature08572).