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At 11:53 PM EST Saturday night NASA’s Spirit Mars Lander returned tones indicating that it had landed and was upright and functioning, after a multi-million mile journey from Earth to Mars. Two out of three Mars missions have failed, most recently the British Beagle 2 mission, which has not yet reported back after its landing.

With Mars currently 106 million miles from Earth, it takes approximately 10 minutes for signals to reach here from the lander.

Early Sunday, the lander began sending back its first pictures of its immediate surroundings in the Gusev Crater.
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The Earth’s magnetic field moves around. Right now, the north magnetic pole is in Canada, near Resort Bay (population 300), where you can buy a tee shirt saying, “Resolute Bay isn’t the end of the world, but you can see it from here.” Soon it will leave North America and head for Siberia. And lately, it’s started moving much faster.

In 1831, James Ross located magnetic north. When Roald Amundsen returned to the same spot in 1904, he found it had moved 30 miles. Once scientists found that the pole moved about 6 miles per year, but lately it has accelerated to around 25 miles per year. Researcher Larry Newitt says, “We usually go out and check its location once every few years. We’ll have to make more trips now that it is moving so quickly.”
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Scientists have long tested the air, earth and water for pollutants?now they’re testing human bodies. They’ve discovered that no matter how healthy a life you try to live, you can’t help the fact that your body is filled with pesticides, flame retardants and other toxic chemicals.
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Most people who get Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, the human form of Mad Cow Disease, don’t get it from eating meat. Are our pets in danger of getting it??since most pet food is made from dogs and cats.

Malcolm Ritter writes that despite the fact that around 250 people in the U.S. die from CJD every year, most of these cases don’t come from eating meat. “Classic” CJD usually occurs in older people who have inherited a genetic mutation for it. “Variant” CJD can be caught from eating tainted meat and also from contaminated equipment used for medical procedures, since the prions that pass along the disease are not killed by ordinary sterilization techniques.
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