New Mars Forums

So far, so good!
    Can't wait for more.   :up:

    The lower portion of this composite shows another view what can only be a collection of 'river' channels emptying into a lake or sea:-
                     

   Amazing stuff!!   

Smurf975:-

  :laugh:

:up:

I'm sure 'metabolism' has an awful lot to do with it, as most people believe. And, if you were overweight as a child, keeping the pounds off as an adult is going to be tricky because the number of fat cells you have is determined by nutritional intake in childhood. If you develop a high number of fat cells during your early years, you keep them throughout life. They may swell or shrink depending on your calorie intake but they don't go away.
    [See http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/hottopics/ … shtml]this article for more details.]
    The relevant quote from that article is this:-

    Apart from the above, it's apparent to me that the older you get, the harder it becomes to prevent weight gain. I was fortunate in that I wasn't interested in food very much as a child - I was too busy running around outside and playing with friends to bother with eating if I could avoid it. Although never a 'big eater' at any stage, I could more or less eat anything I wanted without gaining weight, up until about the age of 46.
    Then one day I weighed myself and discovered I was 78 kgs (172 lbs), some 5 kgs (11 lbs) more than I used to be. A visit to the doctor not long after that, elicited a tut-tutting response from him and confirmed that all was not well. There was more of me than there used to be and he didn't approve! (I'm about 182 cms tall, by the way. That's a little over 5'11")
    Since then, I've cut back substantially on my overall food intake and returned to 73-74 kgs (161-163 lbs). For the first 6 months, I was more or less continually hungry and it was a year or so before I became comfortable with the regime. Now I don't notice it much, though I'm still occasionally aware of significant hunger pangs toward evening time. I'm quite sure I can never go back to my past devil-may-care eating habits, so what I've undergone is a permanent lifestyle change to accommodate a change in my (ageing    ) metabolism.

    But, as I said, I've been lucky with weight most of my life and therefore I can't complain now I'm in the same boat as everyone else who watches his/her weight.
    There are many people, especially those unfortunate enough to have been overweight in childhood, who have a much tougher time dieting than I do and yet never reach their so-called 'ideal' weight.

    On the other hand, there are some who apparently make no effort at all to curtail their calorie intake and who eat phenomenal amounts of sweet and fatty foods. I have much more trouble sympathizing with such people because they're heading for a lot of expensive medical trouble in later life, which will be a major economic burden on society, and it seems they're not even trying to help themselves.
    Aside from the long-term effects, there are significant logistical problems in the short term, too. Even young people occasionally enter hospital for minor procedures and moving and nursing someone weighing, say, 110-130 kgs (242-286 lbs) can be very taxing for hospital staff.
    Another obvious problem involves seating in buses and, especially, aircraft. I know from personal experience how uncomfortable it can be to sit next to someone on a plane who hangs some 15 cms (6") or more over the armrest. I don't like having to get that up-close-and-personal with someone I don't even know - especially if they aren't too particular about personal hygiene and tend to sweat profusely!  :bars:

    I think Cindy's right, though, that the whole business of rising obesity rates is just another excuse to make money. Like smoking, it's a cash-cow and its effects aren't being taken seriously enough. It looks like a case of "sell 'em the salt, fat, and sugar and then sell 'em the diet fad to reverse the results"!!
    But overweight and obesity can't go on getting worse every year. There's something very wrong with our lifestyles/food habits and we have to do something about it soon.   ???

Thanks for the response, Cindy.
    I guess this topic of 'dark sand' is of limited interest because I've raised it before at various times and with different images, only to find the thread tends to die fairly quickly. There could be a number of very good reasons for that, of course, including a paucity of further evidence to back any speculation. And maybe that's why NASA itself dismisses such curiosities with such a cavalier attitude - there's no prospect of investigating them in more detail until we get people on the surface, so "let's just call them patches of dark sand and move on". (  ???  )

    I've noticed you are prepared to muse for a while on some of these anomalies, as are Rex, CM, Atomoid, and REB, for example. But most people here are much more likely to run with a political hypothesis than one about Martian life or geology.
    You've expressed frustration about essentially this same point yourself and we're in agreement on it, I think.
    Mars, to me, is an all-encompassing fascination. It's a very real place to my mind and I'd love to go there and fossick through its caves and dry river beds; feel its gravity, see its sky, and maybe hear its sounds. It's a strangely visceral attachment I have to the place, which I can't explain and which brings out the exploratory instinct of the small boy in me, and that's why I keep asking what some people must see as highly speculative and less-than-objective questions, I guess.
                                                 
    To those of you with a more literal frame of mind regarding Mars, I apologise for some of the stuff I write about. But that doesn't mean I'm going to stop!
                                                         :;):   

In the picture with the recent avalanche, toward the right hand side and about 2/3rds of the way down, there's a small area at the base of a dune which is very dark.
    On the dune which overlooks this almost black patch of 'sand'(?), there's what looks like a linear depression with a line of dark holes in it. The depression and the holes line up directly with the dark patch.

    I'm still very curious about those dark patches we see here and there on Mars and I wonder why people at NASA are so quick to dismiss them as just a different type of sand. I'm very suspicious there's more to it than that and I'm surprised at NASA's apparent lack of interest.
                                                     ???

Atomoid:-

    Now you're talking!!   
    That's what's been missing from this thread lately .. Atomoid and his own special brand of bulls*** .. Oops! .. HUMOUR!.
    I meant HUMOUR!!    

    But seriously, it's nice to see you back at New Mars.  :up:

    [P.S. In the same general spirit you exemplified in your comments about NASA's "hold-'em-back-file", I've posted a picture of a small Martian arthropod over at 'Life on Mars', 'More fossil-like images from Spirit'. Don't know if you've seen it yet. Waddya think?
     Definitely a live Martian beastie, right?!  :;):  ]

Happy Birthday, DERF!!   :up:   

Back near the beginning of this thread, Rik made a suggestion about a possible design for a wheel which would function well in Martian conditions.
    It looks like somebody from Michelin was lurking in the background and has quietly lifted Rik's idea!   ???    :;):

    Have a look at http://www.gizmo.com.au/go/3603/]this article.
    I'm not sure whether it's relevant to this discussion because I don't know how well the flexible spokes of the wheel would stand up to extreme cold. We may have the same problem that we had with traditional rubber and even metal mesh(?).

    But, judging from the way the prototype (called a 'TWEEL'  - integrated Tyre/Wheel) performed on an Audi recently, we may be seeing these things on standard road-going vehicles before long.
    You should have taken out a patent, Rik!   

Cindy:-

    I hadn't seen this perspective of our home System before. You know, with all those cosy colourful pictures of our Solar System in the files and in the average 'Space Atlas', you can forget how vast it really is on a human scale.
    As massive as we perceive our Earth and other planets to be, especially Jupiter and Saturn, they're all just tiny specks in the colossal volume of space bounded by Pluto's orbit. And that's ignoring the even more mind-numbing expanses of space out to the far side of the Kuiper Belt ... then there's the Oort Cloud ... then, twice as far again, there's the nearest star .. !!
    And still, that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of how big space is in comparison to the infinitesimally small human world.   

    I wish you hadn't posted that picture, Cindy. I think I'm getting a headache!  ???      :laugh:

That last picture of Jupiter's rings is indeed magnificent. Especially when, as you say Cindy, we recognise that this is the first such view humans have ever seen.
    What a privileged generation we are!
                                           
[And so much more in store for us soon at Saturn .. we hope.  :up:  ]

Yep .. some glorious pictures!   
    And we can expect them to get better and better as the mission continues and closer flybys are achieved.

    I've seen that 3-D picture of Iapetus through filters and it does help to get an impression of the large topographic variation on this fascinating little moon. As the description states, that seam sits almost exactly on the equator and is hundreds of kilometres long. How are they going to explain such a feature?
    Maybe we'll never know how it came about.   ???

    Really looking forward to the Huygens landing on Titan! 
    Hope the pictures are crystal clear and really show us the true nature of the surface. What a buzz!!
                                               :band: