The annualis peaking today (May 5) as the Earth passes through a dusty debris field of cosmic leftovers from Halley's Comet. The shower should be at its best at 9 p.m. EDT (0100 GMT) tonight, offering stargazers with the best viewing conditions and locations a chance to see between 30 and 40 meteors an hour, according to an update from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

Scientists at the Marshall Space Flight Center will provide a live webcast and chat during the Eta Aquarids from 11 p.m. EDT (0300 GMT) to 3 a.m. EDT (0700 GMT). You can , courtesy of NASA.

To participate in the NASA chat, visit:

Here are some tips from NASA on how to see the :

Find a dark spot:City lights and street lights can ruin any stargazing attempt because they can outshine objects like meteors in the night sky. To make the most of your meteor gazing night, find a place well away from those interfering lights.

Look up:The Eta Aquarids get their name because they appear to originate from the constellation Aquarius, which currently rises over the eastern horizon at about 3 a.m. your local time. But staring directly at the constellation can be a mistake, since the meteors can also be visible as they streak across the rest of the night sky. "Lie flat on your back on a blanket, lawn chair or sleeping bag and look up, taking in as much of the sky as possible," NASA officials advised.

Adapt to the night:It is best to give your eyes about 30 minutes to adapt to the night's darkness in order to see more meteors.

The Eta Aquarid meteor shower is known for spawning bright fireballs during their peak period. It is one of two celestial displays created by the dusty remains of . The dust trail from the comet nears Earth at two points in the planet's orbit. When the Earth passes through the first region in early May, it creates the Eta Aquarids. The other Halley's Comet meteor display occurs in mid-October, creating the annual Orionid meteor shower.

Halley's Comet is a periodic comet that orbits the sun about once every 76 years. It is named after the 18th century English astronomer Edmond Halley, who accurately predict the return of the comet in 1758 after realizing that accounts of a dazzling comet throughout history were in fact the same object. Halley's Comet was last visible from Earth in 1986 and will return to our night skies in 2061.

Editor's note:If you snap an amazing picture of the Eta Aquarid meteor shower, or any other night sky view, that you'd like to share for a possible story or image gallery, send photos, comments and your name and location to managing editor Tariq Malik at .

Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him and .Follow us , and . Original article on .

NUEVA YORK (Reuters Health) - Un estudio realizado en

Australia revela que el uso continuo de estradiol y drospirenona

combinados por va oral alivia los sntomas por deficiencia de

estrgeno al comienzo de la postmenopausia sin alterar la

funcin cognitiva.

"En la mayora de las mujeres con sntomas menopusicos, la

terapia hormonal es altamente efectiva para aliviar los sntomas

y, por lo tanto, la mejora de la calidad de vida individual y

familiar es enorme. Adems, en la mayora de los casos, los

beneficios superan ampliamente los riesgos", dijo por correo

electrnico la doctora Susan R. Davis, de la Universidad Monash

de Melbourne, Victoria.

"Necesitamos avanzar del estudio Women's Health Initiative y

la terapia combinada con estrgeno equino conjugado (Premarin) y

acetato de medroxiprogesterona (MPA, por su nombre en ingls,

Provera) para empezar a tratar adecuadamente a las mujeres con

sntomas menopusicos moderados o grave", agreg la autora

principal del estudio.

Davis evalu junto a su equipo el rendimiento cognitivo y

los resultados clnicos asociados con el uso oral combinado de

un mg de estradiol ms 2 mg de drospirenona (E2D) versus placebo

durante 26 semanas en un estudio ciego aleatorizado sobre 23

mujeres que entraban en la postmenopausia (edad promedio de 53

aos).

Los investigadores estudiaron la funcin cognitiva con el

programa computarizado CogState, una batera de pruebas que

elige una al azar para cada dominio cognitivo cada vez que se

evala a una persona, lo que minimiza los efectos del

aprendizaje.

Los resultados iniciales del CogState no variaron entre las

12 mujeres tratadas con E2D y las 11 que utilizaron el placebo,

segn publica el equipo en Menopause.

A las 26 semanas, la nica diferencia entre los resultados

del programa CogState entre los dos grupos surgi en la

velocidad de deteccin (indicador de funcin

psicomotriz/velocidad de procesamiento) a favor del uso del

placebo.

Las imgenes por resonancia magntica funcional (fMRI, por

su sigla en ingls) revelaron que ambos grupos rendan de manera

similar en los tests de tiempo de reaccin o cantidad de

palabras producidas durante un ejercicio de fluencia verbal, o

de tiempo de reaccin o porcentaje de respuestas correctas

durante un ejercicio de rotacin mental.

Las diferencias significativas en favor del uso de E2D

aparecieron a las 26 semanas y lo hicieron para los valores de

sntomas de calidad de vida y funcin sexual. Surgi tambin una

diferencia significativa en los valores del dominio vasomotor

favorable al uso del tratamiento hormonal.

El peso y el IMC mejoraron significativamente en el grupo

tratado con E2D versus placebo, mientras que la presin

sistlica se redujo significativamente con el uso de E2D.

Dos usuarias de E2D y una usuaria de placebo fueron

excluidas del estudio antes de tiempo por sangrado vaginal.

Otras siete mujeres tratadas con E2D tuvieron prdidas sin

molestias.

Davis insisti en que "no todas las preparaciones hormonales

para la postmenopausia son iguales. Algunas son ms seguras que

otras. Gran parte de la informacin sobre los efectos adversos

proviene de estudios sobre MPA y noretindrona, que no son las

progestinas preferidas para la terapia hormonal. Los mdicos que

indican la terapia hormonal deben conocer las diferencias

sutiles entre las hormonas".

Asimismo, agreg que los mdicos que no suelen indicar el

uso de terapias hormonales, como los especialistas en otras

reas, deberan recomendarles a las mujeres que busquen el

consejo especializado de un profesional actualizado en el uso de

la terapia de reemplazo hormonal, sus beneficios y sus riesgos.

La doctora Julia Anna Dumas, del Departamento de Psiquiatra

de University of Vermont, dijo por correo electrnico que "todas

las combinaciones de estrgeno y progestina no tienen los mismos

efectos en el cerebro y an se desconoce qu combinaciones

podran beneficiar o no a las pacientes".

"Aun as, la combinacin utilizada en este estudio parecera

aliviar los sntomas menopusicos sin efectos negativos en la

funcin cognitiva y, por lo tanto, sera una opcin razonable

para comenzar si est indicada para el tratamiento de esos

sntomas", agreg Dumas.

La doctora Emily Goard Jacobs, de la Divisin de Salud de la

Mujer del Hospital de Brigham y las Mujeres (Boston,

Massachusetts) advirti sobre "el tamao reducido de la muestra

y el enfoque estadstico utilizados" en el estudio.

"Como dicen los autores, aunque de manera indirecta, con 13

participantes el estudio no podra detectar un efecto BOLD

significativo con fMRI", dijo por correo electrnico la mdica.

Por su parte, la doctora Whitney Wharton, de University of

Wisconsin, Madison, opin que mientras los autores no pudieron

detectar los efectos independientes del estradiol y la

drospirenona, es algo que debera estudiarse.

"Mientras que la drospirenona tendra beneficios

cardiovasculares, otros estudios demostraron que el uso de

anticonceptivos orales con drospirenona estara asociado con una

disminucin de la habilidad visoespacial al comparar pacientes

tratadas o no con anticonceptivos orales con distintas frmulas

con progestinas", finaliz Wharton.

FUENTE:http://bit.ly/10Dy8W7

It's the latest mega-collaboration to learn more about the intricate mechanisms that lead to cancer. And while the headway seems significant in many ways, the potential payoff for ordinary people is mostly this: Someday there may be genetic tests that help identify women with the most to gain from mammograms, and men who could benefit most from PSA tests and prostate biopsies.

And perhaps farther in the future these genetic clues might lead to new treatments.

"This adds another piece to the puzzle," said Harpal Kumar, chief executive of Cancer Research U.K., the charity which funded much of the research.

One analysis suggests that among men whose family history gives them roughly a 20 percent lifetime risk for prostate cancer, such genetic markers could identify those whose real risk is 60 percent.

The markers also could make a difference for women with BRCA gene mutations, which puts them at high risk for breast cancer. Researchers may be able to separate those whose lifetime risk exceeds 80 percent from women whose risk is about 20 to 50 percent. One doctor said that might mean some women would choose to monitor for cancer rather than taking the drastic step of having healthy breasts removed.

Scientists have found risk markers for the three diseases before, but the new trove doubles the known list, said one author, Douglas Easton of Cambridge University. The discoveries also reveal clues about the biological underpinnings of these cancers, which may pay off someday in better therapies, he said.

Experts not connected with the work said it was encouraging but that more research is needed to see how useful it would be for guiding patient care. One suggested that using a gene test along with PSA testing and other factors might help determine which men have enough risk of a life-threatening prostate cancer that they should get a biopsy. Many prostate cancers found early are slow-growing and won't be fatal, but there is no way to differentiate and many men have surgery they may not need.

Easton said the prospects for a genetic test are greater for prostate and breast cancer than ovarian cancer.

Breast cancer is the most common malignancy among women worldwide, with more than 1 million new cases a year. Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer in men after lung cancer, with about 900,000 new cases every year. Ovarian cancer accounts for about 4 percent of all cancers diagnosed in women, causing about 225,000 cases worldwide.

The new results were released in 13 reports in Nature Genetics, PLOS Genetics and other journals. They come from a collaboration involving more than 130 institutions in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. The research was mainly paid for by Cancer Research U.K., the European Union and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Scientists used scans of DNA from more than 200,000 people to seek the markers, tiny variations in the 3 billion "letters" of the DNA code that are associated with disease risk.

The scientists found 49 new risk markers for breast cancer plus a couple of others that modify breast cancer risk from rare mutated genes, 26 for prostate cancer and eight for ovarian cancer. Individually, each marker has only a slight impact on risk estimation, too small to be useful on its own, Easton said. They would be combined and added to previously known markers to help reveal a person's risk, he said.

A genetic test could be useful in identifying people who should get mammography or PSA testing, said Hilary Burton, director of the PHG Foundation, a genomics think-tank in Cambridge, England. A mathematical analysis done by her group found that under certain assumptions, a gene test using all known markers could reduce the number of mammograms and PSA tests by around 20 percent, with only a small cost in cancer cases missed.

Among the new findings:

For breast cancer, researchers calculated that by using all known markers, including the new ones, they could identify 5 percent of the female population with twice the average risk of disease, and 1 percent with a three-fold risk. The average lifetime risk of getting breast cancer is about 12 percent in developed countries. It's lower in the developing world where other diseases are a bigger problem.

For prostate cancer, using all the known markers could identify 1 percent of men with nearly five times the average risk, the researchers computed. In developed countries, a man's average lifetime risk for the disease is about 14 to 16 percent, lower in developing nations.

Markers can also make a difference in estimates of breast cancer risk for women with the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene mutations. Such women are rare, but their lifetime risk can run as high as 85 percent. Researchers said that with the new biomarkers, it might be possible to identify the small group of these women with a risk of 28 percent or less.

For patients like Vicki Gilbert of England, who carries a variation of the BRCA1 gene, having such details about her cancer risk would have made decision-making easier.

Gilbert, 50, found out about her genetic risk after being diagnosed with the disease in 2009. Though doctors said the gene wouldn't change the kind of chemotherapy she got, they suggested removing her ovaries to avoid ovarian cancer, which is also made more likely by a mutated BRCA1.

"They didn't want to express a definite opinion on whether I should have my ovaries removed so I had to weigh up my options for myself," said Gilbert, a veterinary receptionist in Wiltshire. "...I decided to have my ovaries removed because that takes away the fear it could happen. It certainly would have been nice to have more information to know that was the right choice."

Gilbert said knowing more about the genetic risks of cancer should be reassuring for most patients. "There are so many decisions made for you when you go through cancer treatment that being able to decide something yourself is very important," she said.

Dr. Charis Eng, chair of the Genomic Medicine Institute at the Cleveland Clinic, who didn't participate in the new work, called the breast cancer research exciting but not ready for routine use.

Most women who carry a BRCA gene choose intensive surveillance with both mammograms and MRI and some choose to have their breasts removed to prevent the disease, she said. Even the lower risk described by the new research is worrisomely high, and might not persuade a woman to avoid such precautions completely, Eng said.

___

AP Medical Writer Maria Cheng contributed to this report from London.

University spokesman Colin Riley declined to provide the student's name or other identifying details.

The other two victims killed in the back-to-back blasts near the finish line of the storied distance race were Martin Richard, 8, and Krystle Campbell, 29, both from the Boston area. More than 170 other people were hurt by the two explosions.

(Reporting By Svea Herbst-Bayliss; Writing by Dan Burns; Editing by Scott Malone)

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Wild horses couldn't drag many of the most die-hard of Rolling Stones fans to the kick-off of the band's North American tour - at least not at prices of up to a whopping $600 a ticket.

Three weeks after tickets went on sale, and a day before the British band take the stage on Friday, the Los Angeles Staples Center was far from sold out for the "50 and Counting" gig.

Secondary ticket sellers StubHub had more than 500 tickets available 24 hours before the May 3 show, Good Seat tickets said they were slashing re-sale prices by 40 percent, and Epic Nation rolled out a 10 percent discount code.

The veteran rock band announced on their official website this week that they were releasing an additional number of tickets at a modest $85, the only price point that quickly sold out for the May 3 concert.

According to the website, some of the $85 seats will be among the best seats in house in the "Tongue Pit," with others spread around the arena. Buyers will be notified of their seat location on the day of the show.

Concert promoters AEG denied they were cutting prices, saying tickets once thought to have an obstructed view had come to light after the tongue and lip shaped stage was set up.

"Seeing (the stage) in this setting for the first time, we were able to determine that seats previously thought to have obstructed views were in fact unobstructed and could immediately be offered to fans for $85 each," AEG said in a statement.

On Thursday, seats at prices ranging from $250 to $600 were still available, according to the AXS website operated by AEG, which owns the Staples Center arena that seats about 19,000 people.

BIGGEST STONES TOUR IN SIX YEARS

Friday's show officially kicks off the band's 17-date North American tour to mark their 50 years in the music business. It's the biggest tour by the Stones in six years and follows a handful of dates in London, Paris and New York at the end of 2012.

Tickets for the London shows in November sold out swiftly despite complaints from fans over similarly high prices.

"Having a $600 price point for prime seats is definitely pushing the envelope," said Gary Bongiovanni, editor-in-chief of Pollstar, a concert industry magazine.

He noted it was a particularly tough sell to core Rolling Stones fans who have seen the band many times.

"It's easy for someone who has seen them to rationalize and say I'm not sure I want to skip my mortgage payment to see them again," he told Reuters.

Nevertheless Bongiovanni expects sales to pick up with the lower prices. "I wouldn't expect a lot of empty seats because they're repricing tickets to whatever it takes," he said.

The band played a more reasonably priced $20 "surprise" gig in Los Angeles last Saturday.

The Rolling Stones last went on the road from 2005 to 2007, playing 144 shows globally and grossing more than $550 million, one of the world's most lucrative tours.

Guitarist Mick Taylor, who played with the Stones from 1969 to 1974, is joining frontman Mick Jagger, guitarists Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood and drummer Charlie Watts, as a guest on the North American tour.

As was the case last year, the set list is expected to focus on classic Stones hits like "Gimme Shelter," "Paint it Black" and "Jumping Jack Flash."

Later this summer, The Rolling Stones will play London's Hyde Park, and for the first time in their career, the Glastonbury music festival in England, both of which are sold out.

(Editing by Jill Serjeant and Eric Walsh)

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Brussels and Washington are the two great lobbying capitals of the world, where campaigners talk themselves hoarse trying to shift the political dial.

Some of them have had the fortune to recruit British director and screenwriter Richard Curtis, whose powers of persuasion move hearts as well as minds.

Known for his romantic comedies, such as "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and "Notting Hill", Curtis has turned his hand to a didactic tragedy - "Mary and Martha" - being screened across the globe to coincide with world malaria day on April 25.

"You could take a simple story and take it straight into the heart of politics," he told a Brussels audience of lobbyists, politicians and representatives of the European Commission.

"Mary and Martha" tells the story of two mothers, one American (played by Hilary Swank), one British (played by Brenda Blethyn), who lose their sons to malaria then lobby Washington politicians to try to prevent other mothers losing their children too.

For the developed world, theirs is an exceptional tragedy. In Africa, death from malaria is a daily occurrence. The continent accounts for the vast majority of the well over half a million annual deaths from a preventable and treatable disease.

Curtis, who wrote the screenplay, is appalled that a quirk of geography can be so unjust.

"If 650,000 children in Europe were going to die this year of one disease - if it were only 6,000 - everything would be stopped to do something," he said. "I can't understand why this tiny bit of geography should make it not matter."

Brussels says it is listening.

European Development Commissioner Andris Piebalgs met Curtis and said the European Commission would honor a pledge of 330 million euros ($430 million) for the Global Fund, set up by world leaders to tackle malaria, AIDS and tuberculosis.

But after the current funding period, 2011-2013, there might be "a lower budget than expected", Piebalgs said in a speech.

Over the coming weeks, EU member states and parliament are likely to freeze development spending - meaning a real-term cut - when they sign off on a seven-year financing plan for 2014-20 agreed after lengthy and difficult talks.

Curtis has a long track record in combining worthy causes with making people laugh. He helped to found British charity Comic Relief, set up in response to famine in Ethiopia in 1985.

Comic Relief, uses humor to raise funds to tackle poverty and social injustice and Curtis told his Brussels audience his foray into tragic script-writing did not mean he had given up on comedy.

"I have been getting more reflective as I get older, but I hope I have a couple of jokes in me too," he said.

($1 = 0.7674 euros)

(Additional reporting by Charlie Dunmore, editing by Paul Casciato)

More than 100 rescue workers, firefighters, sniffer-dog squads and bomb and gas experts rushed to the gutted building in a subsidized housing complex in the city of Reims, east of Paris, officials said. Heaps of debris spilled out of the building onto a grassy esplanade below.

"The explosion of a residential building in Reims is a terrible drama," the office of French President Francois Hollande said in a statement, conveying his condolences to the victims' relatives.

The Interior Ministry also issued a statement saying two people died and 14 people were injured.

"We don't know the cause of the explosion. It was probably due to gas," Reims mayor Adeline Hazan said at the scene. "We know two people are dead we don't know their identities yet," she said, adding that the survivors were taken to hospital.

"These are not definite numbers, because we are looking for another two to five people," Hazan said. An official investigation was under way to determine the cause, she said. Authorities insisted that the two people known to have died were adults.

Witnesses described a powerful blast.

"The explosion was very strong, like a sonic boom from a fighter plane. We had been playing football on a field about 30 meters (100 feet) away, and ran to the scene," housing project resident Abdel Kader said. "The building had fallen like a house of cards ... 30 seconds after that we saw a man calling for help, he was on a slab. His legs were caught."

"Later, he died," Abdel Kader, a 27-year-old job seeker who declined to provide his family name, said.

Michel Bernard, the top government official in Reims, said the building dated to the 1960s. About 10 of the 40 or so apartments were affected on the end of the rectangular building, he said.

Late in the day, authorities deployed backhoes to help clear away the rubble.

The precariousness of some buildings has come to light internationally in recent days following the collapse Wednesday of an eight-story building in a suburb of Dhaka, Bangladesh, where at least 362 people have been confirmed to have died. Officials said three floors of the building, which had housed garment factories, had been built illegally.

___

Associated Press writer Jamey Keaten contributed to this story from Paris.

The court on Friday rejected Nadezhda Tolokonnikova's appeal for parole eight months after she was handed a two-year prison sentence for the band's performance of a "punk prayer" in Moscow's main Russian Orthodox cathedral.

Tolokonnikova, 23, has been serving her sentence for "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" in a prison colony in central Russia, about 550 km (350 miles) southeast of Moscow.

"I've spent enough time in the prison colony. I've had enough of studying it. Half a year is long enough," Tolokonnikova, a philosophy student, told the judge at the parole hearing, the RAPSI legal news agency reported.

She complained of having frequent headaches in jail in Mordovia, a region that has a large number of prisons.

Her lawyer, Irina Khrunova, said Tolokonnikova's five-year-old daughter Gera needed her mother.

The judge said Tolokonnikova's parental status had been taken into account when she was sentenced - prosecutors had asked for three years - and pointed to two reprimands she has received as evidence her conduct has not been sufficiently "corrected", RAPSI reported.

Tolokonnikova and two other band members, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich, were sentenced last August after a trial that was widely condemned abroad as part of a clampdown on dissent by President Vladimir Putin.

Performers such as Madonna, Sting and former Beatle Paul McCartney offered their support for Pussy Riot last year.

SENTENCES DIVIDED OPINION

Although the two-year sentences outraged many liberals, many conservative Russians saw their profanity-laced protest against Putin's close ties with the Church, performed in short dresses and brightly colored tights and balaclavas, as sacrilege.

Samutsevich, 30, was freed in October when her sentence was suspended on appeal after she argued that she had been prevented from taking part in the protest because a guard seized her.

Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina, 24, lost their appeals and in January a judge rejected Alyokhina's request for her sentence to be deferred until her child is older. She has also requested parole and that appeal could be heard next month.

The three women said they had not meant to offend Orthodox Christians with their protest in February 2012, while anti-Putin protests were drawing tens of thousands of people to the streets of Moscow and other big cities.

The rallies have since dwindled and did not stop Putin winning a presidential election the next month.

In his annual nationwide question-and-answer session on Thursday, Putin denied using the courts for political ends.

But he made clear he did not regret Pussy Riot's sentences, mentioning them in the same breath as people who desecrate the graves of World War Two veterans.

But Samutsevich says Pussy Riot's protest at least succeeded in drawing attention to what the all-women protest band sees as Putin's unhealthy relationship with the church and a lack of political freedoms.

"We wanted to start a discussion in society, show our negative view of the merging of the church and state ... The problem was raised internationally, the problem of human rights was put sharply into focus," she said in a recent interview.

(Writing by Timothy Heritage; Editing by Steve Gutterman and Mike Collett-White)

Included onare spaceflight entrepreneur ; breast cancer researcher Kimberly Blackwell; asteroid hunter Don Yeomans; NASA Mars rover Curiosity's project managers; and the scientists who cured an HIV-positive baby.

Leaders in medicine

Kimberly Blackwell, 44, director of theprogram at Duke Cancer Institute, made TIME'slist for her work to develop treatments for this deadly disease. Blackwell's research focuses on a highly aggressive form in which cells produce too much of the protein HER2, which accounts for about one in five breast cancers, according to the Mayo Clinic. Blackwell's treatment approach, known as a "smart bomb," consists of an anticancer toxin that contains an antibody that can recognize the tumor, so healthy cells are not affected meaningfewer side effects and better chances of survival. Film studio executive Sherry Lansing, who wrote the TIMEpiece about Blackwell, had a mother die of cancer. "The brilliant work of Kimberly and scientists like her gives us real hope that we may, at last, be turning the corner in the fight against cancer," Lansing wrote.

Three AIDS researchers Hannah Gay, Katherine Luzuriaga and Deborah Persaud earned kudos from TIMEfor . Gay, a pediatrician at the University of Mississippi; Luzuriaga, an immunologist at the University of Massachusetts; and Persaud, a virologist at Johns Hopkins Children's Center, gave an HIV-positive baby HIV antiviral drugs within hours of its birth. Two-and-a-half years later, the child appears HIV-free, and does not require medication. Although this result represents only a single case, it "gives us more ammunition in the fight against HIV and AIDS," Mark Dybul, director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, wrote in TIME. The treatment offers hope for preventing AIDS in newborns, and possibly even adults a recent study claims 14 other patients have been able to keep their HIV under control.

Space pioneers

in this year's list, as stories of private rocket launches and meteorite impacts dominated the headlines. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, 41, appears on one of seven separate TIME covers and is listed in the "titans" category. TIME's tribute by business magnate Richard Branson hails Musk's achievements in private spaceflight (which include two successful unmanned missions to the International Space Station with SpaceX's Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket). Musk, who also founded the companies Paypal, Tesla Motors and SolarCity, also gets a nod for his work in developing clean, renewable energy.

NASA asteroid hunter , 70, made the list in Time's "pioneers" category. Yeomens finds and tracks near-Earth objects, and "is one of the reasons we can all sleep a little better at night," according to former astronaut Rusty Schweickart, who founded the asteroid-hunting B612 Foundation and wrote about Yeomans for Time. Yeomans leads a team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that uses data collected by telescopes around the world to predict the trajectory of space rocks that could pose a threat to Earth years or decades from now. This threat was brought home earlier this year by the meteor explosion over Chelyablinsk, Russia, on Feb. 15, and the unrelated flyby of Asteroid 2012 DA14. Someday a stray rock might warrant a deflection campaign to spare humanity from the same fate as the dinosaurs, Schweickart wrote. []

In light of the successful deployment of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, TIME recognized the missions project managers Peter Theisinger and Richard Cook, of JPL. Theisinger, 67, and Cook, 47, orchestrated the harrowing task of sending an SUV-sized spacecraft to Mars and lowering it on cables to the Red Planet's surface, where it is currently exploring. Seven months after landing, the rover has already found , its primary mission goal. "We can't thank Pete, Richard and their team enough for getting [the rover] there safely, and we should continue to thank them for the wisdom and thrills the rover will bring us as it explores its new home," wrote Caltech space scientist and former JPL Director Ed Stone in TIME.

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