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PARIS (AFP) - Mars may now be
considered a barren, icy desert but
did Earth's nearest neighbour once
harbour life?
It is a question that has preoccupied
scientists for centuries and ired up
sci-i imaginings.
Now three space exploration
projects are gearing up to launch some
of the most ambitious bids yet to ind
an answer.
Scientists believe that four billion
years ago the two planets both had
the potential to nurture life - but
much of Mars' intervening history is
an enigma.
The new Mars probes from the
United States, the UnitedArab Emirates
and China will launch this summer.
Their goal is not to ind Martian
life - scientists believe nothing would
survive there now - but to search for
possible traces of past lifeforms.
These vast and costly programmes
could prove futile. But astrobiologists
say the red planet is still our best
hope for inding a record of life on
other planets.
Mars is "the only planet with
concrete chances of inding traces
of extraterrestrial life because we
know that billions of years ago it was
inhabitable," said President of French
space agency CNES Jean-Yves Le Gall
in a conference call with journalists
this week.
Le Gall is one of the architects of
NASA's Mars 2020 exploratory probe,
which is scheduled for launch at the
end of July when Earth andMars will be
the closest for more than two years.
Themore thanUSD2.5billionproject
is the latest - and most technologically
advanced - attempt to uncover Mars'
deep buried secrets.
But it is not alone, as enthusiasm for
space exploration has reignited.
Scientiic enquiry of the red planet
began in earnest in the 17
th
Century.
In 1609 Italian Galileo Galilei
observed Mars with a primitive
telescope and in doing so became the
The quest to find signs of ancient
life on Mars
irst person to use the new technology
for astronomical purposes.
Fifty years later Dutch astronomer
Christiaan Huygens used a more
advanced telescope of his own design
to make the irst ever topographical
drawing of the planet.
Mars - compared to the "desolate,
empty" moon - has long seemed
promising for potential inhabitability by
microorganisms, wrote astrophysicist
Francis Rocard in his recent essay
Latest News from Mars
.
But the 20
th
Century presented
setbacks. In the 1960s, as the race to
put amanon themoonwasaccelerating
towards its dazzling "Giant Leap", Dian
Hitchcock and James Lovelock were
putting a dampener on hopes of
inding life on Mars.
Their research analysed the planet's
atmosphere looking for a chemical
imbalance, gases reacting with each
other, which would hint at life.
"If there is no reaction, then there
is probably no life there," Lovelock
told
AFP
.
"And that was the case - Mars has an
atmosphere that is completely inactive
as far as chemistry is concerned."
Their conclusion was conirmed a
decade later, when the Viking landers
took atmospheric and soil samples that
showed theplanetwasno longer inhabit-
able. This discovery was a "real tanker"
for Mars research, Rocard told
AFP
.
Mars programmes essentially
paused for 20 years.
Then in 2000 scientists made a
game-changing discovery: they found
that water had once lowed over
its surface. This tantalising inding
helped rekindle the latent interest in
Mars exploration.
Scientists pored over images of
gullies, ravines, scouring the Martian
surface for evidence of liquid water.
More than 10 years later, in 2011,
they deinitively found it.
The "follow the water, follow the
carbon, follow the light" strategy has
paid off, Rocard said.
Every mission since the discovery
of water has brought "more and more
evidence to light that Mars is not quite
as dead as we thought," Michel Viso, an
astrobiologist at CNES, told
AFP
.
The latest US rover to make the
journey - aptly named Perseverance - is
scheduled to touch down in February
of next year after a six-month journey
from launch time.
The probe is perhaps the most
highly-awaited yet. Its landing spot, the
Jezero Crater, may have once been a
wide, 45-kilometre river delta.
CHANGSHA (XINHUA) - China's Shibadong village,
the birthplace of "targetted poverty alleviation," has
lifted all families out of poverty, sending a heartening
message as the nation scrambles to eradicate absolute
poverty by 2020.
The village in central China's Hunan Province has
seen the poverty headcount ratio drop to zero, down
from 57 per cent in 2013, said Shi Jintong, Party chief
of the village, in an interview with Xinhua.
Home to 225 families and 939 villagers, Shiba-
dong's per capita net annual income increased more
than eight times, from CNY1,668 (USD238) in 2013 to
CNY14,668 in 2019, Shi said.
The once-impoverished village has been closely
watched as a testing ground for "targetted poverty
alleviation," irst put forward there in 2013. This con-
cept of designing relief policies to suit different local
situations later became a guiding principle in China's
ight against poverty.
Faced with rugged terrain and scarcity of arable
land, the village has substituted traditional crop plant-
ing with more proitable kiwi farming and developed
other businesses that suit local conditions, including
the tourism and embroidery industries that prosper
on the local ethnic Miao culture.
China's target year for the eradication of absolute
poverty is 2020, which means that around 5.51 million
people who remained impoverished at the end of 2019
will be lifted out of poverty by the end of this year.
China's anti-poverty
paragon village
eliminates last
remains of poverty
Villagers make embroidery works in a cooperative
in Shibadong Village of Xiangxi Tujia and Miao
Autonomous Prefecture, central China's Hunan
Province. PHOTO: XINHUA
NANJING (XINHUA) - Using artiicial intelligence (AI)
technologies, an international research team led by
Chinese scientists has developed a rapid and accurate
screening model to detect lymph nodes, which can
assist doctors in cancer treatment.
Lymph nodes are the human immune system's irst
line of defence, protecting people from illnesses and
virus infections. In the human body, lymph nodes are
hundreds of small, round or bean-shaped glands that
gather in the neck, armpit, abdomen and groin.
Cancer that starts in another part of the body and
spreads to the lymph nodes is calledmetastasis, which
is important for clinicians to judge the development
of cancer.
However, the current MRI screening methods are
time-consumingandcannot identify all the lymphnodes
in the scan regions, lowering the detection accuracy.
A single lymph node occupies less than one-thou-
sandth of an MRI sample, and it is easily confused with
bloodvessels andother tissues, said lead researcherGao
Xin, of theSuzhou Instituteof Biomedical Engineeringand
Technology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Scientists develop
AI model for quick
cancer detection