Mars Likely to Have Enough Oxygen to Support Life: Study

Agencies
October 23, 2018

Oct 23: Salty water just below the surface of Mars could hold enough oxygen to support the kind of microbial life that emerged and flourished on Earth billions of years ago, researchers reported Monday.

In some locations, the amount of oxygen available could even keep alive a primitive, multicellular animal such as a sponge, they reported in the journal Nature Geosciences.

"We discovered that brines" - water with high concentrations of salt - "on Mars can contain enough oxygen for microbes to breathe," said lead author Vlada Stamenkovic, a theoretical physicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

"This fully revolutionises our understanding of the potential for life on Mars, today and in the past," he told AFP.

Up to now, it had been assumed that the trace amounts of oxygen on Mars were insufficient to sustain even microbial life.

"We never thought that oxygen could play a role for life on Mars due to its rarity in the atmosphere, about 0.14 percent," Stamenkovic said.

By comparison, the life-giving gas makes up 21 percent of the air we breathe.

On Earth, aerobic -- that is, oxygen breathing -- life forms evolved together with photosynthesis, which converts CO2 into O2. The gas played a critical role in the emergence of complex life, notable after the so-called Great Oxygenation Event some 2.35 billion years ago.

But our planet also harbours microbes - at the bottom of the ocean, in boiling hotsprings -- that subsist in environments deprived of oxygen.

"That's why -- whenever we thought of life on Mars -- we studied the potential for anaerobic life," Stamenkovic.

Life on Mars?

The new study began with the discovery by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover of manganese oxides, which are chemical compounds that can only be produced with a lot of oxygen.

Curiosity, along with Mars orbiters, also established the presence of brine deposits, with notable variations in the elements they contained.

A high salt content allows for water to remain liquid -- a necessary condition for oxygen to be dissolved - at much lower temperatures, making brines a happy place for microbes.

Depending on the region, season and time of day, temperatures on the Red Planet can vary between minus 195 and 20 degrees Celsius (minus 319 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit).

The researchers devised a first model to describe how oxygen dissolves in salty water at temperatures below freezing.

A second model estimated climate changes on Mars over the last 20 million years, and over the next 10 million years.

Taken together, the calculations showed which regions on the Red Planet are most likely to produce brine-based oxygen, data that could help determine the placement of future probes.

"Oxygen concentrations [on Mars] are orders of magnitude" - several hundred times - "greater than needed by aerobic, or oxygen-breathing - microbes," the study concluded.

"Our results do not imply that there is life on Mars," Stamenkovic cautioned. "But they show that the Martian habitability is affected by the potential of dissolved oxygen."

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Agencies
January 25,2020

New Delhi, Jan 25: The Patiala House court on Saturday started hearing a plea filed by the Nirbhaya convicts that alleged that the Tihar Jail administration have "not presented the papers on time".

The Public Prosecutor informed the court that Tihar Jail authorities have already supplied the relevant documents. He further informed that these are mere delaying tactics adopted by the convicts.

Advocate A.P. Singh, lawyer for three of the four death row convicts in the Nirbhaya gang-rape case had moved an application before the court seeking directions to the Tihar Jail authorities to supply him the relevant documents in order to exercise the remaining legal remedies available with the death row convicts -- Vinay Pawan and Akshay.

The Public Prosecutor also told the court that he spoke to the jail authorities over the phone and a report in this regard will be filed shortly as the jail officials were on their way to the court.

The judge demanded from the convicts lawyer to show what he has filed.

The convicts lawyer, A.P. Singh, said that he received some documents, but has still not been supplied with the personal diary of one of the convict -- Vinay Kumar Sharma and also the medical documents.

Judge then asked the lawyer to wait for until the report arrives form the Tihar Jail.

On this, the convicts lawyer said he was not questioning the intention of the jail. "I know the jail has been changed. It isn't there fault, too," he said.

The Public Prosecutor refuted the allegation saying that the defence counsel was trying to defeat the speed of law.

"We have supplied all the documents to the counsel. We have supplied all the documents except the painting and some other documents. We have nothing apart from that," public prosecutor said.

Singh, in his plea filed before the Patiala House Court sought urgent orders of the court in order to file a mercy petition of Vinay Sharma and in relation to requests for documents for convicts Vinay Sharma, Pawan Kumar Gupta and Akshay Kumar Singh.

He further said that the convicts undertook several steps to obtain relevant information necessary for filing the mercy petitions. In regular interval, the convicts requested the concerned authority to supply documents pertaining to their medical records from 2012 to 2015 and 2019-2020, records of cellular confinement, records of the amount earned in prison through labour, records of educational and reformative activities like Tihar Olympics and Painting, etc.

The Supreme court had recently dismissed the curative petition for the other two convicts -- Vinay Kumar Sharma (26) and Mukesh Singh (32).

The court had recently issued death warrant against the convicts and fixed 6 a.m. on February 1 as the date and time of execution of the death penalty.

The 23-year-old victim in the case was brutally gang raped and tortured on December 16, 2012, which later led to her death. All the six accused were arrested and charged with sexual assault and murder. One of the accused was a minor and appeared before a juvenile justice court, while another accused committed suicide in Tihar Jail.

Four of the convicts were sentenced to death by a trial court in September 2013, and the verdict was confirmed by the Delhi High Court in March 2014 and subsequently upheld by the Supreme Court in May 2017, which also dismissed their review petitions.

A Juvenile involved in the crime was convicted by a juvenile justice board and released from a reformation home after serving a three-year term.

Hearing in a different case, Chief Justice of India S.A. Bobde on Thursday said a condemned person cannot fight the death penalty endlessly and it was important for the capital punishment to reach its finality.

The death penalty, he noted, cannot be questioned at every turn by the convict.

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Agencies
June 10,2020

US dictionary Merriam-Webster will update the meaning of the word "racism" after being contacted by a Missouri black woman, who claimed the current definition fell short of including the systematic oppression of people of colour, according to media reports.

"A revision to the entry for racism is now being drafted to be added to the dictionary soon, and we are also planning to revise the entries of other words that are related to racism or have racial connotations," according to a statement of the 189-year-old dictionary shared by Kennedy Mitchum, a recent graduate of Drake University in Iowa, on her Facebook.

Mitchum, 22, emailed the dictionary last month, following the death of African American George Floyd in the custody of four Minneapolis police officers, Xinhua news agency reported.

"I kept having to tell them that definition is not representative of what is actually happening in the world," Mitchum told CNN. "The way that racism occurs in real life is not just prejudice, it's the systemic racism that is happening for a lot of black Americans."

Merriam-Webster's first definition of racism is "a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race."

"It's not just disliking someone because of their race," Mitchum wrote in a Facebook post on Friday. "This current fight we are in is evidence of that, lives are at stake because of the systems of oppression that go hand-in-hand with racism."

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News Network
January 27,2020

Mumbai, Jan 27: The country's largest car maker Maruti Suzuki India (MSI) on Monday said it has increased prices of select models by up to Rs 10,000 with immediate effect to offset the impact of rising input costs.

The price change varies across models and ranges up to 4.7 per cent (ex-showroom Delhi) and are effective from January, 27 2020, MSI said in a statement.

The price of entry level model Alto range has gone up in the range of Rs 9,000-6,000, S-Presso between Rs 1,500 to 8,000, WagonR between Rs 1,500 and Rs 4,000.

The company has also increased the price of its multi purpose vehicle Ertiga between Rs 4,000-10,000, Baleno by Rs 3,000 to 8,000 and XL6 by up to Rs 5,000 (all prices ex-showroom Delhi).

Currently, the company sells a range of vehicles starting from entry-level small car Alto to premium multi purpose vehicle XL6 with price ranging from Rs 2.89 lakh to Rs 11.47 lakh (ex-showroom Delhi).

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