Review: NASA's Curiosity App for Windows 8 lets you explore Mars rover in detail

As I write these lines, a car-sized robot powered by 32 cubes of plutonium is roaming the surface of Mars, taking photos using no less than 17 cameras, vaporizing stuff with infrared laser beams, drilling into rocks, and generally having a good time. NASA's Curiosity rover is one of the space agency's most ambitious, important, and exciting scientific missions.

The SUV-sized Curiosity rover is packed with scientific gear optimized for an alien landscape.

As you may expect from a machine that had to be flown for over 350 million miles just to begin its work, Curiosity is an incredibly complex beast. Weighing in at 1980 pounds, the rover carries 180 pounds of scientific instruments. One nice way to gain a better understanding of those instruments and the rover's mission is using NASA and JPL's free Windows 8 app, Mars Rover: Curiosity.

The app's opening animation shows the rover's dramatic descent onto the surface of Mars.

The app launches with a beautiful animation of the rover's dramatic descent to the surface of Mars. Once the animation plays out, you're left with a 3D model of the rover parked on the surface of Mars. You can use your mouse or touch screen to shift your viewpoint around the model and zoom in or out, though unfortunately, you don't get to drive: The entire demo is static, with no animation at all.

The app explains each of the rover's main parts, but uses mainly text to do so.

As you rotate around the rover, icons pop up over its various parts. Click an icon, and a sidebar pops open on the left side of the screen with a comprehensive explanation about the part in question. Most sidebars contain an image or two, and are quite text-heavy.

There's no video content: Just lots to read. The prose is simple and relatively free of acronyms. You can access explanations about the rover's power plant, the Mars Descent Imager, the arm and hand, and just about any other major system. The experience is nice, but not mind-blowing.

Other than the main attraction, the app includes four links to additional resources.

Once you're done exploring the rover, you can hit Back and switch to a full-screen menu with five tiles: The rover exploration screen, a beautiful video of the landing which combines footage from mission control and animations of the process, a link to NASA's Be a Martian app, and a link to NASA's Curiosity website.

Given the rover's exciting mission and the app's attractive price tag (free), Mars Rover: Curiosity is worth taking for a spin. This is an app you'll likely only use once or twice, but it offers an interesting way to find out more about one of humanity's most advanced forays into outer space yet.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
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Review: Utopia Documents makes PDF articles easy to explore, not so much to read

Scientific research is no walk in the park, but anyone who's ever worked in it will agree that finding, reading, and citing articles is one of the most time-consuming tasks. Utopia Documents is a free research utility aimed at making this task easier by offering a PDF reader with built-in exploration tools and other research aids. Although it can be considered as a direct competitor to services like Mendeley, Zotero and ReadCube, Utopia Documents is actually different from all three, and even sports a Mendeley integration.

Utopia Documents loads additional article information in the sidebar.

On the surface, Utopia Documents 2.2.1 looks like a PDF reader, and while you can certainly use it as your main reader, that's not its best point. It lacks simple features such as annotations, highlights, and so forth. Its strength lies in the sidebar, where you'll find extra information about every article you load, helping you research a subject, find related articles, create citations, and more. Start by loading a PDF from your computer, or pasting a PDF URL. Utopia Documents works only with PDFs.

Several seconds after loading an article, information will begin to fill the sidebar. This will change from article to article, but can include the article's metadata, a formatted citation in one of seven available formats (the BibTeX one kept returning "Internal Server Error" when I tried it), an Altmetric rating, telling you how much online discussion this article is attracting, related articles from Mendeley, the article's open access status, and if the article itself is open access, the full reference list, complete with links.

On the bottom left corner you'll find most of the document controls. From here you can toggle the pager for quick browsing through the article; the sidebar; and the figure browser, whichlets you flip through all the article's figures. The figure browser is a brilliant feature—sometimes the figures are all you want to see—but it doesn't always catch all of them in every article, so don't trust it blindly.

Use the Figure Browser to focus on an article's figures.

The program offers several more features for exploring articles, some available only in articles from specific journals. When dealing with articles from Springer, eLife, PLoS or PubMed Central, in-article citations become links that show the full reference without having to look it up in the bibliography. These also includes a link to the article online or to the article's full PDF, if it's open access (a PDF link will open in Utopia Documents). Articles from the Biochemical Journal also include interactive molecules and protein sequences you can play and rotate, and live databases you can export and change. Some articles also come with annotations which hold extra information. Hold down the space bar when reading to see all annotations and special features in the article.

There's no limit on what you can explore, though. Highlight any term within an article, and from the pop-up menu choose "Explore," This brings relevant information to the sidebar, including a Wikipedia entry, formulas, molecular structures, related lab products, related articles from PubMed, and more. The information includes many relevant links, some of which open inside the sidebar itself. The amount of information changes from term to term. You can also search for any term manually by clicking the search icon on the bottom left corner of the page.

Utopia Documents works best with open access articles, as these are most readily available online. You can't import and explore your own PDF collection and you can't use it to download articles from journals you're subscribed to through your institution. That being said, you can manually load any article you can get your hands on, and Utopia Documents will supply its valuable information. Note that the program doesn't have a tabbed interface, so each article sits in a separate window. It gets quite heavy on RAM when multiple articles are open, going as high as 100+MB per window. These comments apply only to the Windows version; vendor Lost Island Labs offers Linux and Mac versions as well, but PCWorld didn't test those.

Highlight any term to find out more about it with the Explore feature.

Utopia Documents is a nice way to explore articles you already have, find related articles and information on your topic, and easily create citations to use elsewhere. You can also copy text directly from a PDF and paste it anywhere without any formatting issues. As a PDF reader, however, it fails to deliver, offering only online comments you need to a registered user in order to use, and no way to highlight, annotate, comment on or bookmark anything in the article. The Explore feature and the wealth of available information, however, make it worth your while to load some articles into Utopia Documents and see what you can discover through it.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page will download the software to your system.

Yaara is a foodie, horse-lover, and biologist who enjoys being a geek as a full-time job.
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