Brightening Moon to save electricity?

A Sweden-based cosmetics company has proposed a bizarre new method to eliminate the need for streetlights - brighten the surface of the Moon. The idea is to use materials already on the Moon to lighten its surface. The goal is to reflect slightly more sunlight onto Earth, making the night sky brighter, according to the company's thinktank, Foreo Institute. A brighter night sky would mean less need for streetlights, which could potentially translate into less electricity usage and thus fewer globe warming carbon emissions, it said. "We want to raise public awareness about the project and generate consciousness about the global energy crisis," said Paul Peros, CEO of Foreo. The proposal has a hint of a "marketing scheme" to it, but precisely why the cosmetics company came up with this idea remains unclear, LiveScience reported. When asked, a company representative told the website that Foreo is an "innovation company" that engages with experts from diverse fields. However, scientists are sceptical about the idea. "Making the Moon brighter is not something I've ever heard of in geoengineering literature," said Ben Kravitz, a postdoctoral researcher in the atmospheric sciences and global change division of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Foreo's claims to have raised $52 million for research and testing and a timeline on the company's website says its first Moon mission is slated for 2020 with new rovers deploying every three years. According to Foreo, only about 0.1% of the Moon's surface would need to be transformed to reach 80% of the "desired brightening effect". Peros said the company is looking into smoothing over a portion of the Moon's surface to increase reflectivity. "We are looking at the surfaces and composition of the soil and materials on the Moon and how to utilize them," he said. Even if such a mission were successful, it could have side effects. Light at night can disrupt sleep and has been linked to increases in several types of cancer. Foreo says the brightening effect would happen over 30 years, allowing humans time to adjust.

Ancient Mars not warm enough for liquid water: Study

Evidence suggest that Mars was wet, but it was probably not consistently warm enough for making the water flow, a thrilling study reveals. Signs of flowing water on Mars include layered sediments presumed to have been laid down in ancient lakes, as well as rugged canyons and lowlands apparently sculpted by massive floods. These prompted researchers to suggest that the red planet, now frigid and dry, was warm and wet throughout its early history. But that would have required an atmosphere much thicker than today's, a prospect that now seems unlikely, said Edwin Kite, a planetary scientist at Princeton University in the US. The evidence against the idea that ancient Mars held a thick atmosphere for more than a few millennia at a time lies in the sizes of the planet's craters, said the researchers. If Mars had once possessed a denser atmosphere, they said, small objects would have broken up as they passed through it, as they do in Earth's atmosphere, rather than surviving largely intact to blast craters. The researchers used images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, to catalogue more than 300 craters pockmarking an 84,000 sq km area near the planet's equator. "It's not the size of the smallest craters, but the size distribution of the entire population that's important," Kite said. "The thickness of the atmosphere was less than one-third what some teams say would be needed to consistently keep Mars' surface above freezing," said Sanjoy Som, an astrobiologist with the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science in the US.

Did Adolf Hitler marry a woman of Jewish descent? DNA tests 'show Eva Braun associated with Ashkenazi Jews'

Eva Braun, Adolf Hitler's long-term lover who married the Nazi leader hours before their joint suicide in his Berlin bunker, may have had Jewish ancestry, ground-breaking DNA testing has found. DNA analysis of hair samples from a hairbrush claimed to belong to Braun suggests that the fascist dictator responsible for the murder of millions of Jews may have unwittingly married a woman of semitic descent, in one of his final acts as the Third Reich crumbled. The revelation appears in a Channel 4 documentary, Dead Famous DNA, broadcast next week, in which leading scientists attempt to extract DNA from relics and analyse their genome to solve mysteries associated with them. Forensic scientists sequenced the hypervariable region of the mitochondrial DNA from a sample of hairs extracted from a monogrammed hairbrush found at the end of the Second World War in Braun's apartment at Hitler's Alpine residence, the Berghof in Bavaria, by an American army intelligence officer. They found a specific sequence within the mitochondrial DNA, a small genome within the mitochondria of the cell that is passed down the maternal line from mother to daughter unchanged over the generations, belonging to haplogroup N1b1, which is associated with Ashkenazi Jews. A haplogroup is a particular sequence of mitochondrial DNA which is passed down the maternal line and according to traditional Jewish law, Judaism is passed down through matrilineal descent. Photography assistant Braun fell madly in love with Hitler at just 17-years-old, although he was twenty-three years her senior. Hitler ordered his private secretary Martin Bormann to investigate Braun's family, who sent Eva to a Catholic school, to ensure that they were "Aryan" and that she had no Jewish ancestors. After being assured there were none, the courtship advanced. But Hitler, fearful that the relationship would harm his public image, refused to marry Eva and kept her a state secret, hidden away at his mountain-top residence, the Berghof. Channel 4 used hair initially recovered in the summer of 1945 by Paul Baer, a US 7th Army captain, who was posted to the Berghof and took personal items, including the hairbrush, from Braun's private apartment. There are photographs of Baer at the Berghof in 1945 and the hairbrush has been authenticated by experts. Baer's son sold Braun's hairbrush to a relic dealer who separated the hair and sold it on to hair dealer John Reznikoff. Dead Famous DNA presenter Mark Evans bought eight strands of the hair from Reznikoff for $2,000. The hair was then sent to an international team of forensic scientists for analysis. A Channel 4 spokesman said: "In the nineteenth century, many Ashkenazi Jews in Germany converted to Catholicism, so Eva Braun is highly unlikely to have known her ancestry and - despite research he instigated into Braun's race - neither would Hitler." Whilst the results will provide a talking point, they are not definitive. To prove that the hair came from Eva Braun's head, Mr Evans attempted to get a DNA swab from one of Braun's two surviving female descendants, but both refused. An attempt by the producers to procure Hitler's hair ended in embarrassment when it emerged that clippings sold by controversial historian David Irving to Channel 4 for £3,000 turned out to be fake. Mr Evans said: "This is a thought-provoking outcome - I never dreamt that I would find such a potentially extraordinary and profound result. Racism & Fascism - ideas that one racial group is superior to another - made a mockery of by studying dead famous DNA." Hitler and Braun became lovers in 1932 when Eva was 20, although Hitler insisted that they never show the slightest affection in public. They were married in a small civil ceremony within the Fuhrerbunker in the early hours of April 29, 1945, witnessed by Bormann and Joseph Goebbels. The following day, as the Soviet Army advanced upon Berlin, Eva, 32, bit into a cyanide capsule. Hitler took poison and shot himself in the temple. Afterwards, the two bodies were laid side by side, doused with petrol and burnt.