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Nasa has successfully sent a lander to Mars. So what now?

Initially, not very much - at least not in terms of science. The InSight lander has to find its feet and get accustomed to its surroundings, first, working out where it stands in the harsh world of the red planet.

That is a months-long process of deployment and calibration. InSight's engineers will learn more about where the lander has dropped down, and make sure that all of its instruments are ready to do the job.

But after that, there'll be plenty to do. The InSight lander offers the chance to have an unprecedented look inside Mars itself, finally giving us clues about what it's made up of and what's going on in its interior.

That, in turn, could tell us not only where it came from but might give us a new understanding of how our own planet formed.

For now, InSight is charging up its batteries using the solar array that successfully unfolded after the dust had cleared from its perilous landing. Even in the first hours after its arrival, it sent back stunning photos of the Martian surface - and of itself.

Now mission control will get to learning about InSight's landing site. They'll be looking for the best place to deploy, particularly searching for somewhere it can stick its deep sensor into the ground to take readings of the underneath.

Once all of that is decided, engineers back at Nasa will build a reconstruction of the landing area to go alongside the already completely accurate clone of the lander itself they have down on Earth. That will allow them to practise on a precise recreation of the situation back on Mars, making sure that everything is perfectly calibrated and ready to get moving.

They'll make sure the InSight lander's arm can grab the sensors and equipment and place them into the right place on Mars. As well as putting them in place, they will also have to put a shield over the seismometer that keeps it from being damaged by the extreme environment of Mars.

All of that is incredibly important because the work up on Mars is so difficult: engineers liken it to playing a claw machine game except without the claw. And it is incredibly difficult, too, because messages take so long to be relayed to the lander - in the minutes they take to get between, the thing they have asked the lander to do has already happened, so they are unable to respond quickly.

That will take a matter of months. Once everything's in place, the heat probe will have to actually hammer itself deep down into the Martian surface, using special technology to dig five meters down.

Altogether, that's likely take as many as five months. After that, the actual science work that InSight aims to do will begin properly.

That will involve taking Mars's vital signs: feeling its temperature, checking its pulse and looking at its reflexes. Taken together, that will give an insight into the way the planet is made up and offer hints at how it came to be.

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Nasa has successfully sent a lander to Mars. So what now? Initially, not very much - at least not in terms of science. The InSight lander has to find its feet and get accustomed to its surroundings, first, working out where it stands in the harsh world of the red planet.

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Viral video showing scarily realistic human-looking robot debunked as fake

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The video clocked up millions of views as Twitter users feared that artificial intelligence had gone too far.

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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This video shows the Queen concert at LIVE AID. I have posted this because , from my pint of view , it's one of the most shocking and biggest concert I have ever seen , so I wanted to show you this magnificent performance of one of the most notorious singer the Earth has ever seen.

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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Imagine cells that can move through your brain, hunting down cancer and destroying it before they themselves disappear without a trace. Scientists have just achieved that in mice, creating personalized tumor-homing cells from adult skin cells that can shrink brain tumors to 2% to 5% of their original size. Although the strategy has yet to be fully tested in people, the new method could one day give doctors a quick way to develop a custom treatment for aggressive cancers like glioblastoma, which kills most human patients in 12-15 months. It only took 4 days to create the tumor-homing cells for the mice.

Glioblastomas are nasty: They spread roots and tendrils of cancerous cells through the brain, making them impossible to remove surgically. They, and other cancers, also exude a chemical signal that attracts stem cells-specialized cells that can produce multiple cell types in the body. Scientists think stem cells might detect tumors as a wound that needs healing and migrate to help fix the damage. But that gives scientists a secret weapon-if they can harness stem cells' natural ability to "home" toward tumor cells, the stem cells could be manipulated to deliver cancer-killing drugs precisely where they are needed.

Other research has already exploited this method using neural stem cells-which give rise to neurons and other brain cells-to hunt down brain cancer in mice and deliver tumor-eradicating drugs. But few have tried this in people, in part because getting those neural stem cells is hard, says Shawn Hingtgen, a stem cell biologist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Right now, there are three main ways. Scientists can either harvest the cells directly from the patient, harvest them from another patient, or they can genetically reprogram adult cells. But harvesting requires invasive surgery, and bestowing stem cell properties on adult cells takes a two-step process that can increase the risk of the final cells becoming cancerous. And using cells from someone other than the cancer patient being treated might trigger an immune response against the foreign cells.

To solve these problems, Hingtgen's group wanted to see whether they could skip a step in the genetic reprogramming process, which first transforms adult skin cells into standard stem cells and then turns those into neural stem cells. Treating the skin cells with a biochemical cocktail to promote neural stem cell characteristics seemed to do the trick, turning it into a one-step process, he and his colleague report today in Science Translational Medicine.

But the next big question was whether these cells could home in on tumors in lab dishes, and in animals, like neural stem cells. "We were really holding our breath," Hingtgen says. "The day we saw the cells crawling across the [Petri] dish toward the tumors, we knew we had something special." The tumor-homing cells moved 500 microns-the same width as five human hairs-in 22 hours, and they could burrow into lab-grown glioblastomas. "This is a great start," says Frank Marini, a cancer biologist at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who was not involved with the study. "Incredibly quick and relatively efficient."

The team also engineered the cells to deliver common cancer treatments to glioblastomas in mice. Mouse tumors injected directly with the reprogrammed stem cells shrank 20- to 50-fold in 24-28 days compared with nontreated mice. In addition, the survival times of treated rodents nearly doubled. In some mice, the scientists removed tumors after they were established, and injected treatment cells into the cavity. Residual tumors, spawned from the remaining cancer cells, were 3.5 times smaller in the treated mice than in untreated mice.

Marini notes that more rigorous testing is needed to demonstrate just how far the tumor-targeting cells can migrate. In a human brain, the cells would need to travel a matter of millimeters or centimeters, up to 20 times farther than the 500 microns tested here, he says. And other researchers question the need to use cells from the patient's own skin. An immune response, triggered by foreign neural stem cells, could actually help attack tumors, says Evan Snyder, a stem cell biologist at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in San Diego, California, and one of the early pioneers of the idea of using stem cells to attack tumors.

Hingtgen's group is already testing how far their tumor-homing cells can migrate using larger animal models. They are also getting skin cells from glioblastoma patients to make sure the new method works for the people they hope to help, he says. "Everything we're doing is to get this to the patient as quickly as we can."

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Reprogrammed skin cells shrink brain tumors in mice

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Imagine cells that can move through your brain, hunting down cancer and destroying it before they themselves disappear without a trace. Scientists have just achieved that in mice, creating personalized tumor-homing cells from adult skin cells that can shrink brain tumors to 2% to 5% of their original size.

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Tiny nanoparticles, far smaller than the width of a human hair, might help the body's own immune system fight tumors, a new study shows. In experiments with mice, the nanoparticle-based therapy not only wiped out the original targeted breast cancer tumors, but metastases in other parts of the body as well. Human clinical trials with the new therapy could begin within the next several months, researchers say.

The search for drugs that spur the immune system to fight tumors is one of the hottest fields in cancer research. Immune sentries, known as T cells, are normally on the prowl for suspicious looking targets, such as bacterial invaders and potential tumor cells. If they recognize one, they sound the alarm, inducing other immune cells to mount a larger response. However, the T cells' alarm can be muted by so-called immune checkpoints, other proteins on the surface of normal cells that tamp down the immune response to prevent harmful autoimmune reaction to normal tissue. Tumor cells often over express these checkpoint molecules, putting the brakes on the immune system's search and destroy work.

To overcome that problem, pharmaceutical companies have developed a number of different antibody proteins that block these overexpressed checkpoint molecules and enable the immune system to target tumors. In cases where there are lots of T cells in the vicinity of a tumor, or where tumor cells have undergone large numbers of mutations, which creates additional targets for immune sentries, T cells will signal a full-fledged immune response to the cancer. Such cancer immunotherapy can add extra years to patients' lives.

However, existing cancer immunotherapy drugs work in only 20% to 30% of patients. In some cases, even when the checkpoint molecules are blocked that there are too few active T cells around to sound the immune alarm, says Jedd Wolchok, a cancer immunotherapy expert at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. In others, he says, tumors don't display enough of the T cell's targets, so-called tumor antigens, on their surface.

But a seemingly unrelated puzzle offered the prospect of boosting immunotherapy's effectiveness. Oncologists have long known that in rare cases, after patients receive radiation therapy to shrink a tumor, the immune system will mount an aggressive response that wipes out not only the tumor, but metastases throughout the body that hadn't been treated with the radiation. Researchers now think that irradiation sometimes kills tumor cells in a manner that exposes new antigens to T cells, priming them to target other tumor cells that carry them as well, says Wenbin Lin, a chemist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, and one of the authors of the current study.

Lin wanted to see whether he could use nontoxic nanoparticles to sensitize the immune system in a similar way. Getting the nanoparticles themselves past the immune system isn't easy. If they're too big, cells in the blood called macrophages gobble them up. And blood proteins tend to coat the particles, facilitating their uptake. In recent years Lin's team devised a method to produce particles that are all between 20 and 40 nanometers in size (a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter), a range best able to elude macrophages. They also coated them with a polyethylene glycol shell, which helps them survive longer in blood circulation and enter target cells. Finally, on the inside they incorporated powerful light-absorbing, chlorine-based molecules that turn the nanoparticles into tumor killers.

In previous studies, the team found that once injected into the bloodstream, the particles are able to circulate long enough to find their way in and around tumors. And because tumors typically have a leaky, ill-formed vasculature, the particles tend to leak out at the site of cancer tissue and be picked up and internalized inside tumor cells. Once the nanoparticles are absorbed, the researchers shine near infrared light on the tumors. That light is absorbed by the chlorine-based molecules, which then excite nearby oxygen molecules, creating a highly reactive form of oxygen, known as singlet oxygen, that rips apart nearby biomolecules and kills the tumor cell.

But that's only the start of it, Lin says. Singlet oxygen tends to rip apart tumor cells in a manner that exposes many new tumor antigens to immune cells called dendritic cells, which, like police executing a dragnet, grab the antigens and present them to T cells for closer inspection. By doing so they help the immune system mount a powerful antitumor response even in cases where there aren't that many T-cells nearby.

In August 2016, Lin and his colleagues reported in Nature Communications that when they injected a version of their nanoparticles into the bloodstream of mice with colon cancer along with a checkpoint antibody and blasted the tumors with light, the combination sparked the animals' immune systems to destroy both the targeted colon cancer tumors as well as untreated tumors elsewhere. However, those particles also ferried a standard chemotherapeutic toxin to help kill the cancer cells. In their current study the researchers wanted to see whether the approach would work with just the immune response.

This time Lin and his colleagues worked with mice with breast cancer, another form of cancer that often doesn't respond to current immunotherapy drugs. Again, they injected the animals with their nanoparticles along with a checkpoint antibody. But this time their nanoparticles didn't contain any additional chemotherapeutic drug. They then blasted the tumors with infrared light, and waited for the results. And in almost every case, not only was the primary breast cancer tumor destroyed, but metastases in the lung were wiped out as well, they report in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. "We were surprised to find that without the cytotoxic agents, you can achieve the same effect," Lin says.

"This is a well thought out approach, and the data is interesting," says Wolchok, who was not involved in the work. The approach deserves to be followed up with human trials, he adds. Lin says such trials are likely to start soon. The Chicago team has already formed a company, called Coordination Pharmaceuticals, which has raised seed funds to launch an early stage trial in humans, likely sometime in the second half of this year.

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Nanoparticles awaken immune cells to fight cancer

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Tiny nanoparticles, far smaller than the width of a human hair, might help the body's own immune system fight tumors, a new study shows. In experiments with mice, the nanoparticle-based therapy not only wiped out the original targeted breast cancer tumors, but metastases in other parts of the body as well.

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A Viagra-like drug widely used for the treatment of erectile dysfunction may provide the first effective treatment for life-threatening heart failure.

UK scientists hailed the "breakthrough" findings after demonstrating the effects of the drug tadalafil, sold as Cialis, in sheep.

But they said it was "entirely possible" that some men being treated for impotence are already benefiting from the protection it affords.

Animals made to develop the disease did not progress into heart failure when given the drug, while those with the condition improved.

"This discovery is an important advance in a devastating condition which causes misery for thousands of people across the UK and beyond," said Professor Andrew Trafford, from the University of Manchester, the lead researcher on the study.

He added that limited evidence from human trials and epidemiological studies demonstrates tadalafil can be effective in treating heart failure, but this study explains why it is so effective, and shows it to be a possible therapy.

"It's entirely possible that some patients taking it for erectile dysfunction have also unwittingly enjoyed a protective effect on their heart," Professor Trafford said.

Heart failure occurs when the heart is too weak to pump sufficient blood around the body. It can follow a heart attack, or be caused by a genetic abnormality.

People affected by heart failure are quickly exhausted and suffer breathlessness and swelling caused by fluid backing up in the lungs.

As the condition worsens it can become life-threatening. Five-year survival rates for heart failure are lower than for most common cancers.

For the study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, sheep were fitted with pacemakers that induced heart failure advanced enough to need treatment.

The animals were chosen because they have hearts similar to those of humans.

Cialis almost completely reversed the biological cause of breathlessness in patients with heart failure - the inability of the heart to respond to adrenaline.

The heart's ability to force blood around the body when working harder was increased.

However, Professor Trafford warned patients not to self-treat, despite it being widely used, because of potential interactions with other drugs or conditions.

Professor Metin Avkiran, from the British Heart Foundation, which funded the study, said said viagra-like drugs were initially developed as heart medications.

"We seem to have gone full circle, with findings from recent studies suggesting that they may be effective in the treatment of some forms of heart disease - in this case, heart failure," he said.

"We need safe and effective new treatments for heart failure, which is a cruel and debilitating condition that affects almost a million people in the UK."

Tadalafil acts like Viagra but is favoured by many men because of its longer-lasting effects.
Additional reporting by PA

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Viagra-like drug can reverse effects of heart failure, study shows

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A Viagra-like drug widely used for the treatment of erectile dysfunction may provide the first effective treatment for life-threatening heart failure. UK scientists hailed the "breakthrough" findings after demonstrating the effects of the drug tadalafil, sold as Cialis, in sheep.

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Venezuela claims to have stopped a coup attempt, but tensions there are rising: so what exactly is going on?

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The world will be watching as a series of May Day rallies take place in the country today.

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Beginner - Ahnma feat. Gzuz & Gentleman (official Video)