A little Martian dust appears to go a long way. A small amount of simulated crushed Martian rock mixed with a titanium alloy made a stronger, high-performance material in a 3D-printing process that could one day be used on Mars to make tools or rocket parts.

The parts were made by Washington State University researchers with as little as 5% up to 100% Martian regolith, a black powdery substance meant to mimic the rocky, inorganic material found on the surface of the red planet.

While the parts with 5% Martian regolith were strong, the 100% regolith parts proved brittle and cracked easily. Still, even high-Martian content materials would be useful in making coatings to protect equipment from rust or radiation damage, said Amit Bandyopadhyay, corresponding author on the study published in the International Journal of Applied Ceramic Technology.

Rice is one of the world's staple crops. It is regularly eaten by more than half the world's population. And now, it's been grown in microgravity, on board the newly launched Chinese Wentian space laboratory.

Wentian launched in July and joined up with the Tianhe module of China's new space station. Its original complement of eight experiments included one that attempted to grow rice in microgravity.

Rice typically grows to 3 to 4 feet over four months, and the stalks on Wentian have not been able to complete their entire maturation cycle since the experiment started in July. However, they seem to be on track compared to their Earth-bound counterparts.

There were actually two types of rice launched as part of the experiment. A tall shoot variety reached almost 30 centimeters in the first month of growth, and a dwarf variety reached around 5 cm. Both of these growth amounts are on par for these particular rice varieties on Earth.

In 1982, author James Michener published his sprawling novel "Space." In it, he describes a fictional Apollo 18 mission to the moon. While the astronauts are on the surface, the sun unleashes a huge storm, trapping them outside of their protective capsule.

How many intelligent civilizations should there be in our galaxy right now? In 1961, U.S. astrophysicist Frank Drake, who passed away on September 2 at the age of 92, came up with an equation to estimate this. The Drake equation, dating from a stage in his career when he was "too naive to be nervous" (as he later put it), has become famous and bears his name.

This places Drake in the company of towering physicists with equations named after them including James Clerk Maxwell and Erwin Schrödinger. Unlike those, Drake's equation does not encapsulate a law of nature. Instead it combines some poorly known probabilities into an informed estimate.

Whatever reasonable values you feed into the equation (see image above) it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we shouldn't be alone in the galaxy. Drake remained a proponent and a supporter of the search for extraterrestrial life throughout his days, but has his equation really taught us anything?