From The Atlantic Photo:  ‘A Trip Around The Solar System‘

-Check out the first photograph of Mars ever taken.

Video below from a friend:  The liquid water evidence has been piling up, like the sedimentary Mt. Sharp in the bottom of Gale crater.  Liquid water was pretty likely at the surface of Mars over where the rover has traveled, long ago tumbling rocks along and smoothing them, forming channels and hardening the sediment into layers of clay leaving sulfate salts behind, but this was a long time ago, probably 3 billion years or more.  Evidence seems to point to the smaller (than Earth) Mars not having formed a magnetic field, and thus being bombarded with cosmic radiation and slowly losing its atmosphere bit by bit along with whatever water it likely had.

This most recent Mars mission is one in a long process of gathering layer upon layer of data, and having some of the most knowledgeable folks look at that data, and try to piece a puzzle together.

Could this ancient Mars have harbored life?  The conditions for life?

Below is a summary followed by Q and A.

Thanks for the update!

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Oh, it will be big and bad: Possibly 9.0 or greater. On that Pacific Northwest earthquake piece at the New Yorker that’s made the rounds, geologists and seismologists have been putting the pieces together for a while.  Did you know that over a 1,000 years ago a fault underneath Seattle caused enormous sections of forest on Mercer Island to subside into the water all at once?

‘The earthquake, estimated at 7 to 7.5 on the Richter Scale, caused rockslides in the Olympic Mountains, and sent several forests-covered sections of Lake Washington’s shoreline into the lake. Two of these slides produced the sunken forests on the west and southeast sides of Mercer Island. The third was on the northeast shore of the lake at O. O. Denny Park. An analysis of sunken forests from Mercer Island indicated they died sometime in the fall, winter, or spring between the years 894 and 997 AD

These landslides were catastrophic events. Sections of Mercer Island more than 150 feet high collapsed, traveling nearly a quarter mile before coming to rest deep in the lake. Their plunge sent huge waves sweeping across the lake’s surface and slamming into the shore, probably devastating native villages. Little wonder they regarded the southern end of Mercer Island with dread.’

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Dexter Filkins takes a look at the death of Argentinian prosecutor Alberto Nisman, whose investigation into terrorism sponsored by the Iranian regime may well have led to his death:

‘By the time Kirchner announced the agreement about the AMIA case, Nisman’s obsession with Iran had expanded beyond Argentina. That year, he and his staff produced a five-hundred-page report outlining what it said was Hezbollah’s and Iran’s terrorist “infiltration” in Latin America. (A U.S. official called the report “spot on.”) A month before Nisman died, he told the writer Gustavo Perednik that he believed Argentina and Iran could be secretly discussing renewing the nuclear agreement of the nineteen-eighties and nineties. “Nisman said this was part of the big deal,” Perednik told me.’