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With so many probes heading for Mars and other planets, the question of whether they could bring back new diseases has become important. SARS, Mad Cow Disease and HIV are only three of the diseases that have crossed the species barrier, so infectious pathogens from Martian rock samples probably could too.

Leslie Mullen writes in Astrobiology Magazine that the International Committee Against Martian Sample Return is worried about this. Not all pathogens cross the species barrier?our dogs and cats get diseases that don’t affect us. Chicken and sheep farmers are untouched by diseases that wipe out their flocks and herds. A Martian microbe could enter the human body, but be harmless because it’s incompatible with human physiology.
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Since 1991, Marc Abrahams has been giving out the Ig Nobel Prizes to the researchers who have conducted the most ridiculous scientific experiments during the year. The next awards will be given out on October 2nd at MIT. Recently, he awarded a prize to a study about why teenagers pick their noses.
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The Black Death that killed half the people in Europe in the 14th century has long thought to have been carried by fleas on a certain type of rat. But now scientists think it was actually an Ebola-like disease.

Debora MacKenzie writes in New Scientist that researchers have long blamed the bubonic plague bacterium Yersinia pestis, but they?ve never been able to find traces of it in the remains of Black Death victims. “We cannot rule out Yersinia as the cause of the Black Death,” says researcher Alan Cooper, “But right now there is no molecular evidence for it.” After a detailed analysis of historical records, Susan Scott and Chris Duncan think it might have been caused by a virus that led to massive bleeding, like Ebola.
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Scientists want to study stampedes at places like sports arenas and music concerts, so they can figure out how to prevent them. They can’t study actual human stampedes, so what can they do??They stampede mice instead. They’ve discovered that fewer, smaller exits actually enable more mice (and people) to escape.

Gaia Vince writes in New Scientist that experiments on how panicked mice escape from enclosed areas show that they behave in the same way computer models predict humans do. Disasters such as the May 2001 stampede at a football stadium in Ghana that killed more than 120 people, and the February 2003 Chicago nightclub stampede that killed 21 people, have made scientists try to develop models to predict how people will behave when trying to flee.
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