Mars and the ESA Science Programme - the case for Mars polar science

Current plans within the European Space Agency (ESA) for the future investigation of Mars (after the ExoMars programme) are centred around participation in the Mars Sample Return (MSR) programme led by NASA. This programme is housed within the Human and Robotic Exploration (HRE) Directorate of ESA. This White Paper, in response to the Voyage 2050 call, focuses on the important scientific objectives for the investigation of Mars outside the present HRE planning. The achievement of these objectives by Science Directorate missions is entirely consistent with ESA’s Science Programme. We illustrate this with a theme centred around the study of the Martian polar caps and the investigation of recent (Amazonian) climate change produced by known oscillations in Mars’ orbital parameters. Deciphering the record of climate contained within the polar caps would allow us to learn about the climatic evolution of another planet over the past few to hundreds of millions of years, and also addresses the more general goal of investigating volatile-related dynamic processes in the Solar System

The global energy balance of Titan

The global energy budget of planets and their moons is a critical factor to influence the climate change on these objects. Here we report the first measurement of the global emitted power of Titan. Long-term (2004–2010) observations conducted by the Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) onboard Cassini reveal that the total emitted power by Titan is (2.84 ± 0.01) × 10^(14) watts. Together with previous measurements of the global absorbed solar power of Titan, the CIRS measurements indicate that the global energy budget of Titan is in equilibrium within measurement error. The uncertainty in the absorbed solar energy places an upper limit on the energy imbalance of 6.0%

Parameters in Dynamic Models of Complex Traits are Containers of Missing Heritability

Polymorphisms identified in genome-wide association studies of human traits rarely explain more than a small proportion of the heritable variation, and improving this situation within the current paradigm appears daunting. Given a well-validated dynamic model of a complex physiological trait, a substantial part of the underlying genetic variation must manifest as variation in model parameters. These parameters are themselves phenotypic traits. By linking whole-cell phenotypic variation to genetic variation in a computational model of a single heart cell, incorporating genotype-to-parameter maps, we show that genome-wide association studies on parameters reveal much more genetic variation than when using higher-level cellular phenotypes. The results suggest that letting such studies be guided by computational physiology may facilitate a causal understanding of the genotype-to-phenotype map of complex traits, with strong implications for the development of phenomics technology

The personal experience of parenting a child with Juvenile Huntington’s Disease: perceptions across Europe

The study reported here presents a detailed description of what it is like to parent a child with juvenile Huntington’s disease in families across four European countries. Its primary aim was to develop and extend findings from a previous UK study. The study recruited parents from four European countries: Holland, Italy, Poland and Sweden,. A secondary aim was to see the extent to which the findings from the UK study were repeated across Europe and the degree of commonality or divergence across the different countries. Fourteen parents who were the primary caregiver took part in a semistructured interview. These were analyzed using an established qualitative methodology, interpretative phenomenological analysis. Five analytic themes were derived from the analysis: the early signs of something wrong; parental understanding of juvenile Huntington’s disease; living with the disease; other people’s knowledge and understanding; and need for support. These are discussed in light of the considerable convergence between the experiences of families in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe