New hole on Mars found by students

credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

It seems that young and curious eyes can see things that more experienced ones cannot. A group of students from California discovered a mysterious hole on the surface of Mars. Experts think the hole could be the skylight of a large lava tube. The students were developing a research project using an image taken by the camera of the Mars Odyssey orbiter when they found the round black spot on the surface. You can read more about the discovery here.

Another news about Martian exploration is that the Phoenix Mars lander doesn't seem to have survived the harsh winter conditions. (Earlier about the Phoenix on lucidenglish) According to this article, the lander's solar panels were severely damaged by the accumulated ice. At least, that's what the images taken by the Mars Odyssey orbiter suggest.

You can download a fill-in the gap exercise for the simplified version of the text here.

Japanese probe has returned

Space probe Hayabusa returning to Earth (picture from here)

Last week, the Japanese probe Hayabusa returned to Earth and landed in a remote part of Southern Australia. The probe touched down on an asteroid in 2005 and it is believed to have collected samples there. If it had managed to bring these samples back successfully, this is the first time when a probe got into physical contact with an asteroid and then returned to Earth. Although the probe itself was damaged on entering the Earth's atmosphere, the capsule that carried the samples is expected to have parachuted safely in the desert. Scientists are eager to recover and examine the samples. They believe that new details about the evolution of the solar system are to be revealed. You can read more about this scientific breakthrough here.

A puzzle with the letter V

These are the words that the spell check suggests that I use instead: "vulgarize, vulcanize, Venezuela, fuselage(?!?), vivisect". Can you guess the word?

Problems with the letter U

This week, I have had the same pronunciation issue in three different groups. The students in these groups were mispronouncing words like 'publish', 'publication' and 'publicity'. They said it with either an /u:/ or an /u/ sound instead of the standard /ʌ/. I told them to think of public as the word origin for all of these words. Well, that didn't seem to help much. Then I told them to think of 'pub'. That did the trick! No more 'u' mistakes were made:)
I can only hope that they will not come across words like 'puberty' or 'pubic hair' as those would undoubtedly mess up things a good deal.

A bit more detailed list about the pronunciation of the letter 'u' in different words can be found here.

How to wreck a nice beach?

You don't know how? According to this site, you just have to say out loud "How to recognize speech?" with an American accent. (You'll need to scroll down the page to see the chart.)

If you are more interested in listening to people with all sorts of British accents I suggest that you pay a visit here. (If you cannot arrange a trip to the UK just now:)