Siham Haleem, a private tour guide for 15 years, says that Doha now has many world-class, modern museums the National Museum of Qatar being a firm personal favorite. And yet he says that visiting Sheikh Faisal¡¯s museum should still be on everybody¡¯s to-do list.
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¡°For those eager to learn about Qatar¡¯s and the region¡¯s heritage and beyond, the museum is an ideal destination,¡± he says. ¡°Personally, I¡¯m captivated by the car collection, the fossils, and especially the Syrian house, painstakingly transported and reassembled piece by piece.¡±
Stephanie Y. Martinez, a Mexican-American student mobility manager at Texas A&M University in Qatar likes the museum so much she includes it on all of her itineraries for students visiting from the main campus in Texas.
¡°The guided tours are very detailed, and the collections found at the museum have great variety and so many stories to unfold,¡± she says. ¡°Truly, the museum has something to pique everyone¡¯s interest. My favorites are the cars and the furniture exhibits showcasing wood and mother-of-pearl details. Definitely one of my favorite museums in Qatar, every time I visit I learn something new.¡±
Raynor Abreu, from India, also had praise for the unusual and immense collection.
¡°Each item has its own story, making the visit even more interesting,¡± he says. ¡°It¡¯s also impressive to know that Sheikh Faisal started collecting these unique pieces when he was very young. Knowing this makes the museum even more special, as it reflects his lifelong passion for history and culture.¡±
It takes time and dedication to truly examine the many collections within the museum especially since most of them are simply on display without explanation.
Eclectic it may be, but it¡¯s hard to fault the determination of Sheikh Faisal, who has brought together items that tell the story of Qatar and the Middle East.
Sarah Bayley, from the UK, says she visited the museum recently with her family, including 16 and 19-year-old teenagers, and was won over by its sheer eccentricity.
¡°Amazing. Loved it. It is a crazy place.¡±
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A long time in the making
Curiosity landed in Gale Crater on August 6, 2012. More than 12 years later, the rover has driven over 21 miles (34 kilometers) to ascend Mount Sharp, which is within the crater. The feature¡¯s many layers preserve millions of years of geological history on Mars, showing how it shifted from a wet to a dry environment.
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Perhaps one of the most valuable samples Curiosity has gathered on its mission to understand whether Mars was ever habitable was collected in May 2013.
The rover drilled the Cumberland sample from an area within a crater called Yellowknife Bay, which resembled an ancient lake bed. The rocks from Yellowknife Bay so intrigued Curiosity¡¯s science team that it had the rover drive in the opposite direction to collect samples from the area before heading to Mount Sharp.
Since collecting the Cumberland sample, Curiosity has used SAM to study it in a variety of ways, revealing that Yellowknife Bay was once the site of an ancient lake where clay minerals formed in water. The mudstone created an environment that could concentrate and preserve organic molecules and trapped them inside the fine grains of the sedimentary rock.
Freissinet helped lead a research team in 2015 that was able to identify organic molecules within the Cumberland sample.
The instrument detected an abundance of sulfur, which can be used to preserve organic molecules; nitrates, which are essential for plant and animal health on Earth; and methane composed of a type of carbon associated with biological processes on Earth.
¡°There is evidence that liquid water existed in Gale Crater for millions of years and probably much longer, which means there was enough time for life-forming chemistry to happen in these crater-lake environments on Mars,¡± said study coauthor Daniel Glavin, senior scientist for sample return at NASA¡¯s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a statement.
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Everyone is talking about Greenland. Here¡¯s what it¡¯s like to visit
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A few months ago, Greenland was quietly getting on with winter, as the territory slid deeper into the darkness that envelops the world¡¯s northerly reaches at this time of year.
But President Donald Trump¡¯s musings about America taking over this island of 56,000 largely Inuit people, halfway between New York and Moscow, has seen Greenland shaken from its frozen Arctic anonymity.
Denmark, for whom Greenland is an autonomous crown dependency, has protested it¡¯s not for sale. Officials in Greenland, meanwhile, have sought to assert the territory¡¯s right to independence.
The conversation continues to intensify. A contentious March 28 visit to a US military installation by Usha Vance, the second lady, accompanied by her husband, Vice President JD Vance, was the latest in a series of events to focus attention on Trump¡¯s ambitions for Greenland.
The visit was originally planned as a cultural exchange, but was shortened following complaints from Greenland Prime Minister Mute B. Egede.
Had the Vances prolonged their scheduled brief visit, they would¡¯ve discovered a ruggedly pristine wildernesses steeped in rich Indigenous culture.
An inhospitable icecap several miles deep covers 80% of Greenland, forcing the Inuit to dwell along the shorelines in brightly painted communities. Here, they spend brutally cold winters hunting seals on ice under the northern lights in near perpetual darkness. Although these days, they can also rely on community stores.
The problem for travelers over the years has been getting to Greenland via time-consuming indirect flights. That¡¯s changing. Late in 2024, the capital Nuuk opened a long-delayed international airport. From June 2025, United Airlines will be operating a twice-weekly direct service from Newark to Nuuk.
Two further international airports are due to open by 2026 Qaqortoq in South Greenland and more significantly in Ilulissat, the island¡¯s only real tourism hotspot.
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Curiosity has maintained pristine pieces of the Cumberland sample in a ¡°doggy bag¡± so that the team could have the rover revisit it later, even miles away from the site where it was collected. The team developed and tested innovative methods in its lab on Earth before sending messages to the rover to try experiments on the sample.
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In a quest to see whether amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, existed in the sample, the team instructed the rover to heat up the sample twice within SAM¡¯s oven. When it measured the mass of the molecules released during heating, there weren¡¯t any amino acids, but they found something entirely unexpected.
An intriguing detection
The team was surprised to detect small amounts of decane, undecane and dodecane, so it had to conduct a reverse experiment on Earth to determine whether these organic compounds were the remnants of the fatty acids undecanoic acid, dodecanoic acid and tridecanoic acid, respectively.
The scientists mixed undecanoic acid into a clay similar to what exists on Mars and heated it up in a way that mimicked conditions within SAM¡¯s oven. The undecanoic acid released decane, just like what Curiosity detected.
Each fatty acid remnant detected by Curiosity was made with a long chain of 11 to 13 carbon atoms. Previous molecules detected on Mars were smaller, meaning their atomic weight was less than the molecules found in the new study, and simpler.
¡°It¡¯s notable that non-biological processes typically make shorter fatty acids, with less than 12 carbons,¡± said study coauthor Dr. Amy Williams, associate professor of geology at the University of Florida and assistant director of the Astraeus Space Institute, in an email. ¡°Larger and more complex molecules are likely what are required for an origin of life, if it ever occurred on Mars.¡±
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While the Cumberland sample may contain longer chains of fatty acids, SAM is not designed to detect them. But SAM¡¯s ability to spot these larger molecules suggests it could detect similar chemical signatures of past life on Mars if they¡¯re present, Williams said.
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¡°Curiosity is not a life detection mission,¡± Freissinet said. ¡°Curiosity is a habitability detection mission to know if all the conditions were right ¡¦ for life to evolve. Having these results, it¡¯s really at the edge of the capabilities of Curiosity, and it¡¯s even maybe better than what we had expected from this mission.¡±
Before sending missions to Mars, scientists didn¡¯t think organic molecules would be found on the red planet because of the intensity of radiation Mars has long endured, Glavin said.
Curiosity won¡¯t return to Yellowknife Bay during its mission, but there are still pristine pieces of the Cumberland sample aboard. Next, the team wants to design a new experiment to see what it can detect. If the team can identify similar long-chain molecules, it would mark another step forward that might help researchers determine their origins, Freissinet said.
¡°That¡¯s the most precious sample we have on board ¡¦ waiting for us to run the perfect experiment on it,¡± she said. ¡°It holds secrets, and we need to decipher the secrets.¡±
Briony Horgan, coinvestigator on the Perseverance rover mission and professor of planetary science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, called the detection ¡°a big win for the whole team.¡± Horgan was not involved the study.
¡°This detection really confirms our hopes that sediments laid down in ancient watery environments on Mars could preserve a treasure trove of organic molecules that can tell us about everything from prebiotic processes and pathways for the origin of life, to potential biosignatures from ancient organisms,¡± Horgan said.
Dr. Ben K.D. Pearce, assistant professor in Purdue¡¯s department of Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences and leader of the Laboratory for Origins and Astrobiology Research, called the findings ¡°arguably the most exciting organic detection to date on Mars.¡± Pearce did not participate in the research.