Santa Muerte She is the mistress shared by notorious drug dealers and the desperate people who either fear them or admire them. She has many pet names -- la flaca (the skinny one), la niña blanca (the white girl) -- but when she is worshipped, as is increasingly the case throughout Mexico, she is always Santa Muerte, or Saint Death. In a country where a violent war among drug cartels claims lives every day, the popularity of the Santa Muerte death cult among Mexico's working classes has soared in recent years. Santa Muerte worship, which is closely associated with so-called narco-culture and denounced by the Roman Catholic Church, was once confined to small private ceremonies in homes or neighborhoods. But veneration of the pervasive skeleton and sickle has quickly crossed into the public domain with large-scale public festivals, most notably in Mexico City. Worshipers cradling skeletons dressed in religious robes and wedding dresses descend on Tépito, a rough neighborhood in the center of Mexico City, on the first of the month to pray at the altar erected in a window at the home of Enriqueta Romero Romero. The site has become the main shrine for Santa Muerte followers. Followers -- many of whom make the last part of the journey on their knees -- leave offerings from cash, to candy, to a joint of marijuana. There is a strong tradition of smoking marijuana with the saint. Romero leads the raucous festival in Mexico City, but in small towns outside Mexico City, the Santa Muerte celebration is a very local and spiritual affair.

Race to Mars "Hard work, no pay, eternal glory" -- that's what the Colorado-based Mars Society promises volunteers willing to sign up for simulated life on Mars. As part of a global program of Mars exploration research, the Mars Society has set up field research stations -- habitats, or "habs" -- in sites chosen because of their Mars-like conditions. Secreted in the Utah desert, or sitting atop the harsh, icy expanse of Canada's High Arctic, once unfathomable manned expeditions to Mars come alive. Other carefully selected outposts are situated in the Australian outback and Iceland. Volunteer scientists from around the world gather for weeks at a time clad in space suits and living in splendid isolation. This past spring, however, seasoned Mars Society explorers set out for their most ambitious expedition to date -- a four-month Mars simulation mission conducted at the society's Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station (FMARS) on the a rocky, polar desert of Devon Island, in Canada's High Arctic. I photographed the Devon Island mission (the island is located in the Canadian arctic archipelago, some 900 miles from the North Pole), as well as a recent mission at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in Utah desert. Mars, the planet most similar in geology and atmosphere to earth, has long been a source of fascination for scientists because it holds all the identified building blocks of life. Every crew of volunteers at the MDRS includes biologists, geologist and other researchers. Many of them work for their country's own space agencies. Robert Zabrin, who heads the project, says he believes the group's work can lead to solving the age-old question of whether there is life on Mars. The society, which works in concert with universities around the world, also promotes the idea of human settlement on the planet and hopes to piggyback private research projects on federally funded missions to further its goals.