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In search of methane’s source in the Martian atmosphere, Russia and Europe will launch a joint mission to the fourth planet from the sun in near future. Under the ESA and Russian Space Agency’s (Roscosmos) plan, a Proton rocket will be lifted off towards Mars to check the source of methane in the planet’s atmosphere.

The mission’s major objective will be to figure out whether the methane gas is coming from a geological source or microbes are behind it. If everything goes as per the plan, Russia and Europe will also land a rover on the Red Planet to drill the surface. The rover will be assembled in the United Kingdom and the agencies may launch that mission in 2018, or in 2020.

Several companies in the field of space exploration, including SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, have been working on the concept of reusable launch vehicles so as to achieve the dream of landing a rocket after successful missions.

Apart from being a scientific breakthrough, such reusable vehicles are going to save huge money for these companies, which can be used for further research.

As part of this initiative, Elon Musk’s SpaceX last week organized another successful launch of its Falcon 9 rocket. Though the launch was as the company had desired, the landing was not quite as successful as the one in December (it crashed into the ocean).

In a latest announcement, China has said that it is looking forward to come up with a space telescope, even more powerful than NASA’s Hubble, with the capability to observe and capture our universe in extraordinary detail.

The so far anonymous telescope is going to have the ability to dock with the modular space station of China, the Tiangong.

The plans have been announced by Chinese officials during parliamentary sessions. They have claimed that the latest telescope is going to have 300 times the Hubble’s field of vision.

The telescope would be able to dock with a close-by space station, due to which any repairs can be possibly carried out by Chinese taikonauts in no time, in comparison to the huge time of 3.5 years NASA takes to fix issues with the Hubble Space Telescope.

An almost unanimous US Senate has passed a package of measures to deal with opioid abuse. A day after that, on Friday, the Obama administration released $94 million in funding for treatment centers across the country, including $1.8 million for Pennsylvania.

But, the Pittsburgh region has been left out of the federal funding. It is the place where heroin-related deaths have been skyrocketing.

As per a latest study conducted by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, Allegheny County is at second position, following Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, in the number of heroin overdoses.

Contralateral prophylactic mastectomy (CPM) is a procedure in which patients decide to get their healthy breasts removed when breast cancer is detected in one of the breasts. More patients are opting for CPM, the rates even increased by more than thrice in a decade. The proportion is on rise despite the fact that research has shown that risk for disease recurrence is extremely low even in case of CPM.

The facts were published on March 11 in Annals of Surgery. Though CPM is considered beneficial, the risk of recurrence couldn’t be always abolished. This can be good for patients with mutations to the BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 genes; this mutation is responsible for raising risk for breast cancer by as much as 85%. However, the surgery is not essentially required for women without the mutation.

According to findings published in January edition of the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, an artificial sweetener, Splenda, has an association with leukemia. The study was led by Italian researchers.

The researchers found after taking high amount of sucralose, another name for Splenda, for lifetime, there were increased cases of malignant tumors and hematopoietic neoplasias in males. They said sucralose is approximately 600 times sweeter than sucrose and used in over 4,500 products. The artificial sweetener is made by chemically reacting sugar (sucrose) with chlorine, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).