NASA's New Rover Sends Back 1st Color Image - 8/7 KQED Science News Roundup

NASA's New Rover Sends Back 1st Color ImagePASADENA, Calif. (AP) -- NASA's Curiosity rover has beamed back its first color photo from the ancient crater where it landed on Mars and a video showing the last 2 1/2 minutes of its white-knuckle dive through the Martian atmosphere, a sneak peek of a spacecraft landing on another world.

Extreme Heat Is Covering More of the Earth, a Study SaysThe percentage of the Earth's land surface covered by extreme heat in the summer has soared in recent decades, from less than 1 percent in the years before 1980 to as much as 13 percent in recent years, according to a new scientific paper.

Study: Fire Will Pose Greater Risk to California Homes in Years AheadStudy: Fire Will Pose Greater Risk to California Homes in Years Ahead Forecast: warmer, drier and more of us in harm's way As notices begin to arrive in the mail to nearly 850,000 California residences in fire-prone areas for Cal Fire's controversial new fire prevention fee, a study out of the University of California Merced offers a powerful rationale for beefing up the state's wildland firefighting resources.

Growing Pains: Nations Balance Growth, Power Needs : NPRIndia's massive power outage last week points to a major problem for developing nations: supply is struggling to keep up with the growing demand - an imbalance that can affect the reliability of electric grids. Grid catastrophes are rare, but blackouts can be an everyday feature of life.

Alzheimer's Drug Trials Halted by Johnson & Johnson and PfizerJohnson & Johnson and Pfizer announced on Monday that they were halting development of a closely watched Alzheimer's drug after two clinical trials failed to show that it was effective in patients with mild to moderate forms of the disease.

One Per Cent: Google Earth for cells lets biologists zoom inHal Hodson, technology reporter (Image: O. Louis Mazzatenta/ National Geographic/Getty) Think of it as Google Earth for life itself. An entire zebrafish embryo has been mapped down to nanometre resolution, using a new processing technique which combines thousands of electron microscope slides to form a highly detailed image.