Amazing Science

Mozilla’s ScienceLab wants the open web to transform science as much as it’s transformed the other areas of our lives.

 

Mozilla’s Science Lab dovetails with other recent efforts to update the practice of scientific research with technology and promote what some call “science as a service.” As my colleague David Meyer reported, Berlin-based ResearchGate, which earlier this month said it raised a $35-million Series C round from Bill Gates and others, built a social network of 2.7 million researchers. Its goal is to give researchers a platform for connecting and collaborating. In April, Science Exchange, an online marketplace where scientists can list and discover experimental services from institutions around the world, said it had raised $3 million in a round led by Union Square Ventures.  Other interesting scientific researcher-focused web startups and services include Digital Science, figshareand Software Carpentry, which plans to work with Science Lab to train researchers.

Even though more valuable digital tools are emerging for scientists, Thaney said there’s still work to be done in raising awareness, changing incentive structures and making sure researchers have the right technical skills.

 

“There are so many different stakeholders and different people trying to push this rock up the hill in terms of modernizing the way we do science,” she said. “They’re doing incredible work but there are still gaps in terms of coordination and trying to get in front of the people doing research.”

Researchers from Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), S. Korea, developed a novel, simple method to synthesize hierarchically nanoporous frameworks of nanocrystalline metal oxides such as magnesia and ceria by the thermal conversion of well-designed metal-organic frameworks (MOFs).

 

The novel material developed by the UNIST research team has exceptionally high CO2 adsorption capacity which could pave the way to save the Earth from CO2 pollution.

 

Nanoporous materials consist of organic or inorganic frameworks with a regular, porous structure. Because of their uniform pore sizes they have the property of letting only certain substances pass through, while blocking others. Nanoporous metal oxide materials are ubiquitous in materials science because of their numerous potential applications in various areas, including adsorption, catalysis, energy conversion and storage, optoelectronics, and drug delivery.

 

While synthetic strategies for the preparation of siliceous nanoporous materials are well-established, non-siliceous metal oxide-based nanoporous materials still present challenges.

 

A description of the new research was published (Web) on May 7 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. (Title: Nanoporous Metal Oxides with Tunable and Nanocrystalline Frameworks via Conversion of Metal-Organic Frameworks) This article will be also highlighted in the Editor's Choice of the journal Science.

Most patients who enter the gym of the San Mateo Medical Center in California are there to work with physical therapists. But a few who had knee replacements are being coached by a digital avatar instead.

 

The avatar, Molly, interviews them in Spanish or English about the levels of pain they feel as a video guides them through exercises, while the 3-D cameras of a Kinect device measure their movements. Because it’s a pilot project, Paul Carlisle, the director of rehabilitation services, looks on. But the ultimate goal is for the routine to be done from a patient’s home.

 

“It would change our whole model,” says Carlisle, who is running the trial as the public hospital looks for creative ways to extend the reach of its overtaxed budget and staff. “We don’t want to replace therapists. But in some ways, it does replace the need to have them there all the time.”

 

Receiving remote medical care is becoming more common as technologies improve and health records get digitized. Sense.ly, the California startup running the trial, is one of more than 500 companies using health-care tools fromNuance, a company that develops speech-recognition and virtual-assistant software. “Our goal is basically to capture the patient’s state of mind and body,” says Ivana Schnur, cofounder of Sense.ly and a clinical psychologist who has spent years developing virtual-reality tools in medicine and mental health.

 

Using Sense.ly’s platform, patients can communicate their condition to an emotionally reactive avatar through their phone, desktop, or TV. The avatar asks the patient simple questions, and if programmed by a doctor, it can answer questions too—such as what a diabetes patient with high blood-sugar readings should eat that day. The software also collects data from other medical devices that a patient uses, such as a glucose meter, and can capture gestures with a Kinect. The reports sent to the doctor include red-flag notifications to act on right away; charts, graphs, and analytics tracing the patient’s progress over time; and a transcript of the voice interaction.

 

“A physician’s time is always limited,” says Benjamin Kanter, chief medical information officer at Palomar Health in San Diego. “For a long time, we’ve had the challenge of just getting information into the system. Now the system is starting to actually help me.”

 

Schnur says one real advance is the avatar itself, which is important in helping both patients and doctors to trust the interactions. Molly, still a work in progress, can modulate her tone of voice and facial expressions. Schnur says that sometimes patients are more willing to share sensitive information with a nonjudgmental avatar than with a doctor.

 

Patients in San Mateo seem to like the interaction, Carlisle says, and he does too: “I’ve gotten used to the avatar. I look forward to seeing it when it comes online.”

 

The Sense.ly software, currently in beta, is also being tested at an addiction and detox clinic in California, doing patient intake and assessment in a crowded waiting room. Schnur hopes the system will eventually be used for even more complex tasks. The company, a product of the French telecommunication company Orange’s Silicon Valley incubator program, is working to include additional features, such as the ability to interpret and respond to a patient’s facial expressions.

 

Of course, doctors see some risks in such approaches, especially if the software makes an error or misinterprets an interaction. Kanter points out that although electronic systems often reduce errors, any errors that occur can propagate more quickly than those made only on paper.

 

Carlisle, who will enroll 50 to 60 patients by the time the study is done, is looking forward to getting more data. Over time, he hopes, not only will he improve the care of individual patients in their home environments, but what he learns from the data will improve therapy for everyone.

 

One of the biggest threats facing amphibian species is the disease chytridiomycosis, which is caused by a fungus known as Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd). An understanding of the evolutionary history of microbial pathogens, like Bd, is critical to predicting disease outbreaks and causes of shifts in virulence. The sudden appearance of Bd worldwide suggests a recent introduction into the affected areas, likely facilitated by the international movement of amphibians. A new paper published yesterday in PNAS reveals that the evolutionary history of Bd significantly predates recent outbreaks, and is much deeper and more complex than previously thought. Using whole-genome sequencing from a global panel of Bd isolates, researchers suggest that Bd likely originated somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago, but could be as old as 100,000 years.

The decline in amphibian populations due to Bd is concerning since they play an essential role in food webs, and have broad aesthetic and medicinal value. Bd infects hundreds of species of amphibians and kills by disrupting the integrity of their skin. Earlier, but limited, studies found little genetic differentiation in Bd, with no clear geographic signal. This would be consistent with a recent, rapid spread of a novel disease agent. The new study in PNAS, is an extensive collaboration including researchers from the US, Mexico, Argentina, Columbia and Australia. It makes use of whole-genome sequencing to show that the geographic lineage of Bd is much more widespread and diverse than had been assumed.

If Bd were largely endemic, researchers would expect deep phylogenetic structure in the Bd tree corresponding to locality or host association. If instead, Bd were entirely novel, they would expect a shallow and comb-like tree topology. To infer the relationships in the Bd tree, the researchers used 29 isolates sequenced to depth of 24x, and 101,000 SNPs. What they found was a history that was both novel and endemic. Generally, isolates that shared a common geographic or host association did not cluster within clades. Similarly, many closely related isolates did not share a common geography.

 

The researchers applied a molecular clock to estimate the age of key nodes within the phylogenetic tree. The dates provided are dependent on an assumed rate of evolution under a strict clock (0.0081 substitutions per site per million years) and a tree prior derived from the constant population-size coalescent. It should be noted that these kinds of model assumptions have received some valid criticisms in past and should only serve as estimates. The researchers also note that although sexual reproduction has never been observed in Bd, sexual recombination and hybridization have been proposed as important mechanisms in its evolutionary history.

 

For the future, the researchers hope to focus on some of the less sampled parts of the world, and include additional host species. They also hope to link phylogenetic variation with functional variation. Evidence from the lab has suggested that some more recent isolates may be more deadly than the early-diverging isolates, particularly those from South Africa. Because virulence is an emergent property of the host-microbe-environment interaction, comparisons among isolates will be difficult. Controlled experiments and consistent assays will be needed to piece together parts of the larger Bd puzzle.

Hardcore gamers "see the world differently", says the author of a study that suggests gamers who play action games have better visual skills than non-gamers. "They need less visual information to arrive at a probabilistic conclusion, and they do it faster," said Greg Applebaum, assistant professor of psychiatry at the Duke School of Medicine in North Carolina.

 

The study, published in the June issue of Attention, Perception and Psychophysics, tested how well 125 non-gamers and intensive gamers could identify letters that flashed up for only a fraction of a second.

 

In the test, a circle of letters appeared for 0.1 seconds followed by an arrow in the centre of the circle, pointing to where one of the letters had previously been. The study participants were then asked to identify the letter. The arrow appeared between 13 milliseconds to 2.5 seconds after the letters flashed up. The gamers outperformed the non-gamers for all time intervals.

 

Your brain discards a great deal of visual information. For example, even though your nose is in your line of sight, your brain chooses to ignore that information and keeps your vision clear. The study found that gamers and non-gamers had similar abilities in terms of visual memory retention.

 

However, it could be that gamers are able to detect visual information faster, or simply make better guesses with the little visual information available to them.

 

Previous studies have also shown that gamers have enhanced visual capabilities. In 2003, researchers at the University of Rochester in New York found that people who play action games were able to track 30 percent more objects than non-gamers. Not all gaming is equal, the study found. Gamers who played non-action games like Tetris saw no benefit.

 

In a medical robotics study in 2012, young gamers attained similar scores on robotic surgery simulators to trained physicians.

New technology under development at The Ohio State University is paving the way for low-cost electronic devices that work in direct contact with living tissue inside the body.

 

The first planned use of the technology is a sensor that will detect the very early stages of organ transplant rejection.

 

Paul Berger, professor of electrical and computer engineering andphysics at Ohio State, explained that one barrier to the development of implantable sensors is that most existing electronics are based on silicon, and electrolytes in the body interfere with the electrical signals in silicon circuits. Other, more exotic semiconductors might work in the body, but they are more expensive and harder to manufacture.

 

“Silicon is relatively cheap… it’s non-toxic,” Berger said. “The challenge is to bridge the gap between the affordable, silicon-based electronics we already know how to build, and the electrochemical systems of the human body.”

 

In tests, silicon circuits that had been coated with the technology continued to function, even after 24 hours of immersion in a solution that mimicked typical body chemistry.

 

The project began when Berger talked to researchers in Ohio State’s Department of Biomedical Engineering, who wanted to build an insertable sensor to detect the presence of proteins that mark the first signs of organ rejection in the body. They were struggling to make a working protein sensor from gallium nitride.

 

“We already have sensors that would do a great job at detecting these proteins, but they’re made out of silicon. So I wondered if we could come up with a coating that would protect silicon and allow it to function while it directly touched blood, bodily fluids or living tissue,” Berger said.

Touch screens are nothing new, but this prototype from Microsoft uses a robot-mounted display to do something surprising: touch back.

Early this year at TechFest, Microsoft Research showed off a number of coolnew user interaction applications. One of them is a prototype of a haptic feedback touch screen called TouchMover. The company is preparing an announcement with more details about the technology, but here's a sneak peak.

 

The robotic system behind the curtain pushes back with a pressure that reflects the physical properties of virtual objects on the screen. A granite block in a 3D playground is harder to move than a wooden block, while plastic beach balls are light and, as you move your finger around it, you can feel its "roundness." I got a chance to try it, and it's a little freaky to use, but remarkable.

 

Researchers uploaded a full set of MRI brain scans and demoed how doctors might scroll through them and annotate specific slides. And with some additional programming, the researchers could also make the TouchMover provide haptic feedback based on the material properties and texture of the skull bone and pulpy brain tissue, making the screen feel like palpating an actual brain.

Scientists have recently found oddly spindle-shaped microfossils in 3 billion year old rock in Australia.“It is surprising to have large, potentially complex fossils that far back,” said study lead author Prof Christopher House from Penn State University.

 

The microfossils are reported to be planktonic autotrophs who were approximately twenty to sixty microns in length– and freely floated through out the ocean producing energy, according to the study published in the journal Geology. The researchers looked at surrounding rocks (Farrel Quartzite) to determine the age of the fossils, and came up with their stable carbon isotope ratios.

 

The ratio of Carbon 13 (The component used to determine the age of life by measuring the half-lives of isotopes) was indicative of life. Life forms throughout life gather up more carbon 12 to incorporate into themselves which creates a certain signature of biological processes. Researchers looked at surrounding rock to determine if it was a fluke, and indeed the surrounding area was different from the microfossils.

 

“The spindles appear to be the same as those found in rocks from the Strelly Pool Formation in Western Australia and the Onverwacht Group in South Africa and Swaziland that are both 3.4 billion years old,” said co-author Dr Dorothy Oehler from Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Directorate, NASA – Johnson Space Center.

Using exotic components such as color codes, new phases of quantum matter, and extra dimensions, a team of physicists has shown that it's theoretically possible to construct a quantum computer that has the ability to correct itself whenever an error occurs.

"The greatest significance of our work is showing that self-correcting quantum computing at a finite temperature is not impossible as a matter of principle," physicist Héctor Bombin told Phys.org. Bombin was at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while performing the study and is currently at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario. "In fact, the original motivation came from claims to the contrary by other authors. We provide explicit constructions that can be checked directly, without numerical simulations."

Bombin.

 

Error correction in quantum computers cannot be performed the same way as in classical computers, where information is stored multiple times for redundancy. Since copying quantum information is impossible due to the no-cloning theorem, physicists must find other ways to protect quantum information against errors.

 

As Bombin and his coauthors explain in their paper, quantum computers can be classified into three categories based on their protection against errors.

The first type is bare quantum computers, which do not have any type of error correction. These quantum computers have already been realized with ion traps and optical lattices.

 

The second type is externally protected quantum computers, which can be acted upon externally in order to repair errors. Although this type has not been successfully implemented yet, theoretical studies indicate that there are no fundamental obstacles to reach them when quantum technologies are fully developed.

The third type is internally protected (or self-correcting) quantum computers, which is the most demanding type because they can correct themselves whenever an error occurs. The standard classical computers that we use today are self-correcting, which is one of the properties that makes them so successful. But developing a self-correcting quantum computer is much more difficult. Illustrating just how difficult it is, the physicists say that the task will amount to finding a new quantum state of matter.

 

"External correction requires complex architectures involving enormous numbers of physical qubits to operate effectively on just a few logical qubits," he said. "If we had at hand suitable quantum phases of matter to use as quantum registers, architectures would dramatically simplify. In fact, the usual problem with conventional experimental approaches to quantum computing is scalability. In the case of self-correcting quantum computers, the problem is to find a suitable phase, but scalability should be much more straightforward."

 

Very recently, several other papers have been published that also address the possibility of self-correcting quantum computers. While some of these proposals are similar to the one here, the physicists note that these proposals do not work at a fixed temperature, while the one presented here does. Although each proposal has its own advantages, operating at a fixed temperature makes their model the most demanding and realistic scenario, although much more work is needed to build such a computer.

Among the challenges that the researchers face is lowering the dimensionality of their model.

 

"A major goal is to explore theoretically quantum phases of matter in two and three spatial dimensions with the goal of finding candidates for self-correcting quantum memories," Bombin said. "The self-correcting property is related to the confinement of excitations, and this may serve as a guide for research."

Two experiments have detected the signature of a new particle, which may combine quarks in a way not seen before.

 

Particle physicists seem to have a pretty good handle on the fundamental particles of the universe, but there are some glaring holes in this understanding. Quarks are a good example of this. We know that all nuclear matter is made up of quarks, and we have a pretty good understanding of how two quarks interact at close range. But our quark theory cannot tell us which quark combinations will result in a bound particle or a stable nuclei. All we can go on is experience, and experience has shown that particles with four quarks do not exist. But the situation may have changed with the possible discovery of a new particle containing at least four quarks. Two separate groups, both reporting in Physical Review Letters, have seen evidence for this strange particle, called Zc(3900). Although the data is open to other interpretations, it’s clear that our understanding of quarks has a long way to go.

 

The evidence for Zc(3900) comes from two independent groups: the BESIII Collaboration at the Beijing Electron Positron Collider, China, and the Belle Collaboration at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan. It is the business of both labs to accelerate electrons and positrons to nearly the speed of light, smashing them into each other and carefully analyzing the resulting debris. Taken together, the two collaborations have uncovered 466 events that appear to have a Zc(3900) in their debris.

 

In the ethereal world of high-energy physics, it is easy to forget that subatomic particles are quite real: they smack into things, betray their presence in photographic emulsion, leave tiny contrails in bubble chambers, set off showers of electrons in gases, and emit cones of light in liquids. Experimentalists have created detectors that leverage all of these subatomic signatures in a single, house-sized assembly. The Belle and BESIII collaborations are each named after the detectors that the scientists have labored so long to build.

 

Previous particle physics detectors have given us a fairly detailed picture of the interior of atoms. We know that an atom consists of electrons in orbitals and a core nucleus. Nuclei are built of protons and neutrons, and protons and neutrons are built of quarks. Quarks come in six varieties that can stick together to make an infinite array of particles called hadrons (protons and neutrons are two of these). The theory that describes the interactions of quarks is called quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and is part of our current theory of everything, called the standard model. At high energies, QCD is relatively simple to understand and its predictions have been confirmed many times over. However, it is vexingly difficult to make predictions with QCD at lower energies, where quarks bind together into particles. Thus we cannot unambiguously say which quark configurations are allowed and which are not. This irony (of having the pieces but not the manual to put them together) makes it especially important to explore the panoply of hadrons in experiments such as BESIII and Belle.

 

Seventy years of experimental effort has revealed that quarks tend to cluster in quark-antiquark pairs called mesons, triplets of quarks called baryons, and groups of quark triplets, which are the atomic nuclei. But recently, evidence has begun to accumulate that other, more exotic combinations are possible. One such oddity, called the Y(4260), was discovered in 2005. To appreciate the wackiness of this particle we must delve into the force that causes interactions between the quarks. Just as two electric charges exert an electromagnetic force on each other through the sharing of photons, quarks are attracted to each other through the sharing of particles called (rather unimaginatively) gluons. Unlike photons, gluons can interact strongly with each other, which can lead to strange combinations not seen in the electromagnetic sector. The Y(4260) is one such example, as it appears to be made of a charm quark, an anticharm quark, and an extra gluon. This gluon is not one of the shared gluons but would be a “permanent” member like the quarks. Theorists have even taken this gluon permanence one step further with a hypothetical particle called a “glueball” that would be all gluons, no quarks—like an atom of pure light.

 

It was in seeking to clarify the nature of the enigmatic Y(4260) that BESIII and Belle discovered another enigma, the Zc(3900). Both groups were making Y(4260) by colliding beams of electrons and positrons, and studying the debris that emerges when the Ydecays (the Y only lives for about 10−23 seconds). Much of the time, the debris consists of a positive pion (π+), a negative pion (π−), and a J/Ψ particle. Pions are mesons consisting of up and down quarks and antiquarks, while the J/Ψ is a neutral meson made of a charm-anticharm quark pair. But the events with the pions and J/Ψ contained a surprise in how the energy was distributed between the three particles. The implication is that the decay goes through an intermediate particle, the Zc, which is about 4 times heavier than a proton (3900 mega-electron-volts) and decays to a charged pion and a J/Ψ. The large mass of the Zc and its decay to J/Ψimplies that it most likely contains charm and anticharm quarks, but this by itself would be a neutral combination, which would violate electric charge conservation. The nonzero net charge of the decay products implies that Zc must be a charged particle (either positive or negative, depending on the charge of the pion). Therefore, the Zc must contain other quarks—besides charm and anticharm—that can give the appropriate charge. One such combination is shown in Fig 1(c), but other four-quark combinations are possible as well. Bound states like this have never been observed before, so many in the particle physics community have been left scratching their heads.

A surprising suite of microbial species colonizes plastic waste floating in the ocean, according to a new study. These microbes could speed the plastic’s breakdown but might also cause their own ecological problems, the researchers say (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2013, DOI: 10.1021/es401288x).

 

Plastic waste from consumer products often finds its way into the oceans in a range of sizes, from microscopic particles to large chunks. This accumulation of plastic worries environmental scientists. For example, fish and marine mammals can mistake the plastic pieces for food and ingest the debris, or toxic chemicals can leach from the plastics.

 

But much still remains unknown about the ecological impacts of these materials. So a group of Massachusetts researchers, led by Linda A. Amaral-Zettler at the Marine Biological Laboratory and Tracy J. Mincer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, decided to study the microbial communities found on plastics to explore how the organisms affect marine environments.

 

The team analyzed plastic samples they collected during two research cruises to the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre, a stretch of ocean roughly midway between the eastern coast of North America and Africa. They used a scanning electron microscope, among other techniques, to study the bacteria living on the particles. “What we found really blew us across the room,” says Mincer, a microbial ecologist: They couldn’t say for sure, but the bacteria appeared to burrow pits into the plastic, which had never been observed before. The team didn’t expect such behavior, because they thought nutrient levels in that region wouldn’t support bacteria digesting hydrocarbons in this way.

 

The group suspects this may at least partially explain a surprising aspect of plastic waste found in previous studies in this region of the Atlantic. Even though the amount of plastic waste entering the ocean is probably increasing, researchers at Sea Education Association, a nonprofit group that studies the ocean environment, have not found an increase in plastics in the sea (Science 2010, DOI: 10.1126/science.1192321).

 

Mincer says one possible explanation is that bacteria eat into the polymers, weakening the pieces enough to cause them to break down more quickly and eventually sink to the sea floor. Supporting this hypothesis, some of the plastic-burrowing bacteria are closely related to species known to consume other types of hydrocarbons, such as oil.

Besides the initial high cost of car batteries for electric vehicles, one of the main factors preventing further adoption of electric vehicles is the knowledge that the batteries will need to be replaced after just eight to ten years of use (and in some cases as few as just 3). Batteries that could last 25 or 30 years would likely outlive many of the other cars' parts, or the car itself, and if not too expensive, could finally give car buyers a compelling reason to switch from those that still rely on gasoline.

Scientists at Germany's Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg, (ZSW) have issued a press release describing improvements they've made to lithium-ion batteries. They claim their improvements allow a single battery to be recharged up to 10,000 times while still retaining 85 percent of its charging capacity. Such a battery, if used in an electric car, they note, would allow its owner to recharge the battery every day for 27.4 years.

The Japanese freshwater eel (Anguilla japonica) has more to offer biologists than a tasty sushi snack. Its muscle fibres produce the first fluorescent protein identified in a vertebrate, researchers report in Cell.

 

Fluorescent proteins are as standard a tool for cell biologists as wrenches are for mechanics. They do not produce light themselves, but glow when illuminated. The 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for the discovery and development of such molecules, which are used to tag proteins or to track how genes are expressed. The molecules have been engineered to produce light in a variety of hues and brightnesses, but those discovered until now in nature all came from non-vertebrates, mainly microbes, jellyfish, and corals.

 

The first clues to the eel protein’s existence came in 2009 when Seiichi Hayashi and Yoshifumi Toda, food chemists studying nutrients in eel at Kagoshima University in Japan, were tracking lipid transport into oily eel tissue and reported that eel muscle fluoresced naturally glowing green when a blue light is shone on it. They then isolated a few fragments of the protein responsible. This intrigued Atsushi Miyawaki, a molecular biologist at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Wako, Japan, who has identified and engineered new properties into fluorescent proteins from jellyfish and corals.

 

In the latest work, Miyawaki and his colleagues have identified the gene that codes for the molecule, and have named the new protein UnaG, after unagi, the Japanese word for freshwater eel that is familiar to sushi lovers worldwide.

 

“I don't think anyone would have thought that eels would have such a bright fluorescent protein,” says Robert Campbell, a protein engineer at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. And UnaG is in a class of its own, he says. “It's totally different” from other fluorescent proteins. “There's not anything you can point to that's the same.”

 

For example, instead of producing light with a 'chromophore' that is part of the protein sequence, as the classical Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) does, UnaG fluoresces when it binds a naturally occurring small molecule called bilirubin, a breakdown product of haemoglobin used in hospital tests for decades to assess liver function and diagnose diseases such as jaundice.

 

UnaG is also unusual because, unlike GFP, it fluoresces brightly even when oxygen levels in cells are low. This could be useful for visualizing anaerobic areas inside cancerous tumours, says Campbell.

 

In 2007, a different group of researchers found a fluorescent protein in the lancelet, a tiny somewhat eel-like marine creature closely related to vertebrates. But that protein is in the same class as those found in corals and jellyfish.

 

Japanese freshwater eels mature in rivers and travel far out to sea to spawn, and UnaG may help them with long-distance migrations by playing a role in muscle function. European and American freshwater eels (Anguilla anguilla and Anguilla rostrata) also migrate long distances, and Miyawaki and his colleagues found that these eels, too, make UnaG. Young Japanese eels, which migrate from sea to rivers, produce the protein in abundance, so that they glow beautifully when illuminated with a blue light, says Miyawaki. 

In a report published in Nature Communications, a University of Manchester team led by Dr Irina Grigorieva shows how to create elementary magnetic moments in graphene and then switch them on and off. 

This is the first time magnetism itself has been toggled, rather than the magnetization direction being reversed. Modern society is unimaginable without the use of magnetic materials. They have become an integral part of electronic gadgets where devices including hard disks, memory chips and sensors employ miniature magnetic components. Each micro-magnet allows a bit of information (‘0’ or ‘1’) to be stored as two magnetization directions (‘north’ and ‘south’). This area of electronics is called spintronics. 

Despite huge advances, a big disappointment of spintronics has so far been its inability to deliver active devices, in which switching between the north and south directions is done in a manner similar to that used in modern transistors. This situation may dramatically change due to the latest discovery. 
 
Graphene is a chicken wire made of carbon atoms. It is possible to remove some of these atoms which results in microscopic holes called vacancies. The Manchester scientists have shown that electrons condense around these holes into small electronic clouds, and each of them behaves like a microscopic magnet carrying one unit of magnetism, spin. 

Dr Grigorieva and her team have shown that the magnetic clouds can be controllably dissipated and then condensed back. 

She explains: “This breakthrough allows us to work towards transistor-like devices in which information is written down by switching graphene between its magnetic and non-magnetic states. These states can be read out either in the conventional manner by pushing an electric current through or, even better, by using a spin flow. Such transistors have been a holy grail of spintronics.”

In a laboratory tucked away in a corner of the Cornell University campus, Hod Lipson’s robots are evolving. He has already produced a self-aware robot that is able to gather information about itself as it learns to walk.

 

Hod Lipson reports: "We wrote a trivial 10-line algorithm, ran it on big gaming simulator, put it in a big computer and waited a week. In the beginning we got piles of junk. Then we got beautiful machines. Crazy shapes. Eventually a motor connected to a wire, which caused the motor to vibrate. Then a vibrating piece of junk moved infinitely better than any other… eventually we got machines that crawl. The evolutionary algorithm came up with a design, blueprints that worked for the robot."

The computer-bound creature transferred from the virtual domain to our world by way of a 3D printer. And then it took its first steps. Was this arrangement of rods and wires the machine-world’s equivalent of the primordial cell? Not quite: Lipson’s robot still couldn’t operate without human intervention. ‘We had to snap in the battery,’ he told me, ‘but it was the first time evolution produced physical robots. Eventually, I want to print the wires, the batteries, everything. Then evolution will have so much freedom. Evolution will not be constrained.’

 

Not many people would call creatures bred of plastic, wires and metal beautiful. Yet to see them toddle deliberately across the laboratory floor, or bend and snap as they pick up blocks and build replicas of themselves, brings to mind the beauty of evolution and animated life.

 

One could imagine Lipson’s electronic menagerie lining the shelves at Toys R Us, if not the CIA, but they have a deeper purpose. Lipson hopes to illuminate evolution itself. Just recently, his team provided some insight into modularity—the curious phenomenon whereby biological systems are composed of discrete functional units.

 

Though inherently newsworthy, the fruits of the Creative Machines Lab are just small steps along the road towards new life. Lipson, however, maintains that some of his robots are alive in a rudimentary sense. ‘There is nothing more black or white than alive or dead,’ he said, ‘but beneath the surface it’s not simple. There is a lot of grey area in between.’

 

The robots of the Creative Machines Lab might fulfill many criteria for life, but they are not completely autonomous—not yet. They still require human handouts for replication and power. These, though, are just stumbling blocks, conditions that could be resolved some day soon—perhaps by way of a 3D printer, a ready supply of raw materials, and a human hand to flip the switch just the once.

 

According to Lipson, an evolvable system is ‘the ultimate artificial intelligence, the most hands-off AI there is, which means a double edge. All you feed it is power and computing power. It’s both scary and promising.’ What if the solution to some of our present problems requires the evolution of artificial intelligence beyond anything we can design ourselves? Could an evolvable program help to predict the emergence of new flu viruses? Could it create more efficient machines? And once a truly autonomous, evolvable robot emerges, how long before its descendants make a pilgrimage to Lipson’s lab, where their ancestor first emerged from a primordial soup of wires and plastic to take its first steps on Earth?

A single cell in our body is composed of thousands of millions of different biomolecules that work together in an extremely well-coordinated way. Likewise, many biological and biochemical reactions occur only if molecules are present at very high concentrations. Understanding how all these molecules interact with each other is key to advancing our knowledge in molecular and cell biology. This knowledge is of central and fundamental importance in the quest for the detection of the earliest stages of many human diseases. As such, one of ultimate goals in Life Sciences and Biotechnology is to observe how individual molecules work and interact with each other in these very crowded environments. Unfortunately, detecting one molecule amongst millions of neighbouring molecules has been technically impossible until now. The key to successfully detecting the single molecule lies in the conception and production of a working device that shrinks the observation region to a tiny size that is comparable to the size of the molecule itself, i.e. only a few nanometres.

 

Researchers at the Fresnel Institute in Marseille and ICFO-the Institute for Photonic Sciences in Barcelona report in Nature Nanotechnology the design and fabrication of the smallest optical device, capable of detecting and sensing individual biomolecules at concentrations that are similar to those found in the cellular context. The device called "antenna-in-a-box" consists on a tiny dimer antenna made out of two gold semi-spheres, separated from each other by a gap as small as 15nm. Light sent to this antenna is enormously amplified in the gap region where the actual detection of the biomolecule of interest occurs. Because amplification of the light is confined to the dimensions of the gap, only molecules present in this tiny region are detected. A second trick that the researchers used to make this device work was to embed the dimer antennas inside boxes also of nanometric dimensions. "The box screens out the unwanted "noise" of millions of other surrounding molecules, reducing the background and improving as a whole the detection of individual biomolecules.", explains Jerome Wenger from Fresnel Institute. When tested under different sample concentrations, this novel antenna-in-box device allowed for 1100-fold fluorescence brightness enhancement together with detection volumes down to 58 zeptoliters (1 zL = 10E-21L), i.e., the smallest observation volume in the world.

 

The antenna-in-a-box offers a highly efficient platform for performing a multitude of nanoscale biochemical assessments with single molecule sensitivity at physiological conditions. It could be used for ultrasensitive sensing of minute amounts of molecules, becoming an excellent early diagnosis device for biosensing of many disease markers. "It can also be used as an ultra-bright optical nanosource to illuminate molecular processes in living cells and ultimately visualize how individual biomolecules interact with each other. This brings us closer to the long awaited dream of biologists", concludes ICFO researcher Prof. Maria Garcia-Parajo.

Elderly mice suffering from age-related heart disease saw a significant improvement in cardiac function after being treated with the FDA-approved drug rapamycin for just three months. The research, led by a team of scientists at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, shows how rapamycin impacts mammalian tissues, providing functional insights and possible benefits for a drug that has been shown to extend the lifespan of mice as much as 14 percent. There are implications for human health in the research appearing online in Aging Cell: heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S., claiming nearly 600,000 lives per year.

 

Rapamycin is an immunosuppressant drug which can be used to help prevent organ rejection after transplantation. It is also included in treatment regimens for some cancers. In this study, rapamycin was added to the diets of mice that were 24 months old – the human equivalent of 70 to 75 years of age. Similar to humans,  the aged mice exhibited enlarged hearts, a general thickening of the heart wall and a reduced efficiency in the hearts ability to pump blood.

 

The mice were examined with ultrasound echocardiography before and after the three-month treatment period - using metrics closely paralleling those used in humans. Buck Institute faculty Simon Melov, PhD, the senior author of the study, said age-related cardiac dysfunction was either slowed or reversed in the treated mice. “When we measured the efficiency of how the heart pumps blood, the treated mice showed a remarkable improvement from where they started. In contrast, the untreated mice saw a general decline in pumping efficiency at the end of the same three month period,” he said. “This study provides the first evidence that age-related heart dysfunction can be improved even in late life via appropriate drug treatment,” added Melov, who said the treated mice saw a reduction in heart size, reduced stress signaling in heart tissues and a reduction in inflammation.

 

Buck researchers, utilizing genome analysis tools, uncovered suites of related genes which rapamycin modulates in the heart. “Rapamycin affected the expression of genes involved in calcium regulation, mitochondrial metabolism, hypertrophy and inflammation,” said Melov. “We also carried out behavioral assessments which showed the treated mice spent more time on running wheels than the mice who aged without intervention.”

 

“Little has been known about the functional ramifications of rapamycin in mammalian tissues,” said Buck Institute President and CEO Brian Kennedy, PhD, a co-author of the paper. “These findings are significant because we have no interest in simply extending lifespan without an accompanying improvement in the health and quality of life.” He added, “It is particularly encouraging that, in this case, an already-approved drug that extends lifespan also improved function late in life.”