Five For Fighting: Five science links for the afternoon of May, 2, 2012

Alpines being used to test equipment for future manned Mars mission.

Dinosaurs appear to have been plagued by pests ten times as big as modern fleas. Their "bite" would feel more like a flu shot than a flea bite.

Meteorite fragments that landed in California is of a rare type called chondrite. Chondrite contains carbon and organic materials such as amino acids and is suspected of seeding the Earth with the building blocks of life.

Spring is starting sooner than previous experiments have suggested.

And Death valley doubles for Mars as a test center for NASA's Curiosity rover.