Just what is this ball the Curiosity rover found on the surface of Mars

The Curiosity rover has been tooling around Mars since August 2012, sending back photos and data about the Red Planet. Recently, though, its cameras snapped an image that caught many people by surprise.

The photo looks mostly how you'd expect Mars to look — red, dusty and dry. But on the right-hand side is a rock that appears almost perfectly round and smooth, something like an old cannonball or perhaps even a dirty golf ball.

The rock is quite tiny, just a centimeter wide, according to NASA scientists. It's known as a concretion, and, according to Discovery News, it was most likely created when Mars had liquid water in abundance many millions of years ago.

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It's in the translation. Why 'Big Data' missed the warning signs of Ebola

As global health organizations fight the worsening Ebola outbreak in West Africa, many people are asking how it got so bad so quickly — and why we didn't spot it sooner. According to a new report from Foreign Policy, part of the problem may be due to language. Many global monitoring systems are based on English, and many of the early posts on the Internet about the Ebola outbreak were in other languages.

As Big Data becomes a bigger part of disaster forecasting and response, language remains one of the biggest barriers to it making prediction systems effective. There's currently an effort to put Google News items through Google Translate to try and narrow the language gap in digital monitoring, but there's still a long way to go.

How an unusual confluence of forces birthed a modern death metal movement in Cuba

Death metal was popular throughout Latin America in the 1980s and 90s, but its arrival in Cuba still sparked controversy. With its truth-to-power ethos and common use of English lyrics, it represented a real challenge to the Cuban authorities — or so they thought. But despite resistance and even outright persecution in some instances, a number of death metal bands emerged in Havana.

Radio Ambulante: Unscripted, part of PRI's SoundWorks podcast network, traveled to Cuba and interviewed some of the bands that made waves then. It turns out they're still making waves now. Among them was one band that actually formed in a sanitarium for patients with AIDS. Don't miss the music videos, which give a real sense of what this musical movement was like.

Are you just squirmy or are there turtles in your pants?

Canadian border agents decided to investigate bulges in the sweatpants of a man crossing from Detroit into Windsor, Ontario in August. What they found was 51 turtles taped to his legs and groin. The turtles were American varieties, ranging from eastern box turtles to red-eared sliders and diamondback terrapins. 

The man and another Canadian were charged in US court with smuggling this week. Canada’s National Post reports that the US Fish and Wildlife Service had been watching the pair and found they were sending the reptiles into Canada and on to China, where they could be sold as pets or food. Some turtles can apparently fetch up to $800. And if you think turtle smuggling is a two-bit crime, consider this: Each man could get 10 years in prison.

Women are leading the way in India's mission to Mars

India's successful mission to Mars has been the talk of the world for the past several days. Its low price tag and high-profile success are both noteworthy by themselves, but what grabbed headlines was the role women played in bringing the mission successfully to Mars. Some of those women became the face of the mission when they were photographed celebrated in mission control on the day the spacecraft entered orbit.

Rhitu Chatterjee of PRI's The World lives in India. Like many, she assumed most Indian space scientists were men, but the picture turned her assumption on its head. And it turns out it's not even a new phenomenon. In 2011, three women were in charge of the launch of an Indian communications satellite. But these women have mostly been kept out of the headlines and behind their male colleagues. Now, though, they're finally taking center stage.

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Weather around the world

Tropical Storm Kammuri has Japan in its sights, just days after the country started drying out from the last tropical system to dump rain on the island nation. Kammuri is currently near the Marianas Islands, churning northward. Current tracks have the storm missing Tokyo, but lashing eastern parts of the country's main island, according to AccuWeather.