The download: Agriculture on Mars and laboratory robots

Once upon a time, water flowed across the surface of Mars. Waves crashed against the shores, strong winds howled and howled, and torrential rain fell from dense, cloudy skies. It was little different from our planet four billion years ago, except for one crucial detail: its size. Mars is about half the diameter of Earth, and something went wrong.

The Martian core cooled quickly, so that the planet soon no longer had a magnetic field. This, in turn, made it vulnerable to the solar wind, which swept away much of its atmosphere. Without critical protection from the sun’s ultraviolet rays, Mars would not be able to retain its heat. Some of the oceans evaporated and the subsoil absorbed the rest, leaving only a little water frozen at the poles. If a blade of grass ever grew on Mars, those days are over.

But could they start again? And what would it take to grow crops to feed future astronauts on Mars? Read the full story.

–David W. Brown

This laboratory robot mixes chemicals

Laboratory scientists spend much of their time on tedious and repetitive tasks, be it pipetting liquid samples or performing the same analyzes repeatedly. But what if they could simply tell a robot to run the experiments, analyze the data, and produce a report?

Enter Organa, a tabletop robotic system developed by researchers at the University of Toronto that can do just that. The system could automate some chemistry lab tasks using a combination of computer vision and a large language model that translates scientists’ verbal cues into an experimental pipeline. Read the full story.