The Week In Numbers: The Most Expensive Experiment Ever, 700,000-Year-Old DNA, And More
Clean Curiosity NASA engineers work on the Mars rover Curiosity in a clean room to prevent cross-planetary contamination. Via Fairen et al. 233 degrees Fahrenheit: the temperature at which NASA sterilized the Viking landers before before they went to Mars (turns out that was probably unnecessary-if Earth microorganisms could survive on Mars, they're probably already living there…) €13 billion to €16 billion: the cost of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, the most expensive science experiment ever built (fusion energy, here we come!) 2022: the year the Italian Space Agency's BepiColombo spacecraft will arrive at Mercury 15 minutes: the amount of brain-zapping required to make the people around you start to look hot, according to a new study 700,000 years: the age of the horse DNA that scientists recently decoded, shattering the record for the world's oldest sequenced genome by nearly tenfold $2,000: the amount this dad spent to sequence his daughter's genome at home in order...