José Antonio Rodríguez-Manfredi: "The cost and risk of manned missions to Mars are still high"

Manned missions to Mars will be "an unparalleled achievement in many ways", but the risks to carry them out successfully are still high, said Spanish researcher José Antonio Rodríguez-Manfredi, Mission manager of one of the instruments carried by the Curiosity rover and Head of Department of Instrumentation and Space Exploration of the Spanish Astrobiology...

Tags: Mars, Planets, Space, Universe

The brain: the next big challenge for the American science

U.S. President Barack Obama presented yesterday the BRAIN Initiative ("Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies"), a fifteen-year research project whose goal is to draw the map of the activity and functions of the human brain, the organ hitherto unknown. Its results are expected to be crucial for research on Alzheimer's,...

Tags: Brain, Health, Neuroscience, Research

Loopholes denounced in the EU law against testing cosmetics on animals

In mid-March the European Union implemented its long-awaited ban on animal testing for both finished cosmetic products and their components, and on marketing of cosmetics that have been tested on animals. A few days after this new Directive came into force, the British activist Michelle Thew went to Brussels to demand greater control by the EU and...

Tags: Animals, Biodiversity, Biology, Chemistry, Environment, Research

The most surprising discoveries of the last decade

The Science Museum of London harbours some of the most important scientific and technological advances in the last centuries. Recently, it also displayed Rex, the first prototype of a bionic man, worth over a million euros and the cutting-edge of prosthetics and artificial organs -despite missing some core like the brain. However, will Rex figure...

Tags: Discoveries, Genetics, Genome, Mathemathics, Research, Space, Technology

Getting to Mars: the main challenges

The eagerness to get to Mars aboard a manned spacecraft in the next three decades, spurred after the discoveries made by Curiosity and its predecessors, has set the conquest of the red neighbour as the next "giant leap for mankind." However, there are still some challenges and questions to which science must find answers in order for the mission...

Tags: Mars, Planets, Space