Amazing Science

Reported measles cases spiked in 2017, as multiple countries experienced severe and protracted outbreaks of the disease. This is according to a new report published today by leading health organizations.

Because of gaps in vaccination coverage, measles outbreaks occurred in all regions, while there were an estimated 110 000 deaths related to the disease.  Using updated disease modelling data, the report provides the most comprehensive estimates of measles trends over the last 17 years. It shows that since 2000, over 21 million lives have been saved through measles immunizations. However, reported cases increased by more than 30 percent worldwide from 2016. 

The Americas, the Eastern Mediterranean Region, and Europe experienced the greatest upsurges in cases in 2017, with the Western Pacific the only World Health Organization (WHO) region where measles incidence fell. “The resurgence of measles is of serious concern, with extended outbreaks occurring across regions, and particularly in countries that had achieved, or were close to achieving measles elimination,” said Dr Soumya Swaminathan, Deputy Director General for Programmes at WHO. “Without urgent efforts to increase vaccination coverage and identify populations with unacceptable levels of under-, or unimmunized children, we risk losing decades of progress in protecting children and communities against this devastating, but entirely preventable disease.”

Measles is a serious and highly contagious disease. It can cause debilitating or fatal complications, including encephalitis (an infection that leads to swelling of the brain), severe diarrhoea and dehydration, pneumonia, ear infections and permanent vision loss. Babies and young children with malnutrition and weak immune systems are particularly vulnerable to complications and death.

The disease is preventable through two doses of a safe and effective vaccine. For several years, however, global coverage with the first dose of measles vaccine has stalled at 85 percent. This is far short of the 95 percent needed to prevent outbreaks, and leaves many people, in many communities, susceptible to the disease. Second dose coverage stands at 67 percent.

“The increase in measles cases is deeply concerning, but not surprising,” said Dr Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. “Complacency about the disease and the spread of falsehoods about the vaccine in Europe, a collapsing health system in Venezuela and pockets of fragility and low immunization coverage in Africa are combining to bring about a global resurgence of measles after years of progress. Existing strategies need to change: more effort needs to go into increasing routine immunization coverage and strengthening health systems. Otherwise we will continue chasing one outbreak after another.”

Astrophysicists estimate that our universe formed about 13.7 billion years ago, with the first stars forming when the universe was just a few hundred million years old. By peering back at the earliest days of stellar creation, scientists in South Carolina have measured all of the starlight ever produced throughout the entire history of the observable universe.

Scientists have been working to obtain this measure, also known as extragalactic background light (EBL) or “cosmic fog,” for a long time. “The EBL represents the book reporting the story of stellar activity and galaxy evolution within the universe,” Marco Ajello, lead researcher and astrophysicist at Clemson College of Science in South Carolina, said in an email.

Measuring EBL could be a great tool for scientists, helping them to better understand galaxy evolution, stellar formation processes, and how the universe has evolved, Ajello explained. But, until now, scientists haven’t been able to make this measurement because EBL is much dimmer than the Milky Way and other light in the night sky. Scientists were not able to observe far away galaxies because they were too dim and brighter light in the foreground further obscured this view. Now, by using an indirect method, scientists have finally made this measurement.

The team found that the amount of starlight, or the number of photons (particles of visible light) that stars have emitted throughout the history of the observable universe is 4×10^84 photons. 

The most recent TOP500 supercomputer list shows that two IBM machines are the world's fastest mega-machines.

Since 2013, the U.S. and governments in Europe and Asia have been locked in a constant battle to equip supercomputers with more processing power to claim the ever-shifting title of world's fastest mega-machine. The U.S. relinquished its place at the top of the pile last June, but reclaimed it a year later when the Oak Ridge National Laboratory managed to get its Summit supercomputer online.

Now, patriotic computer geeks will be pleased that the two fastest supercomputers in the world currently reside within U.S. borders, according to the newest SuperComputer TOP500 List. Summit is now joined by Sierra, a machine housed at California's Lawrence Livermore National Library meant for nuclear arms research.

The TOP500 list uses a test called the LINPACK to assess how quickly a machine can do computations in units of work called "flops" for floating-point operations per second. Supercomputers, powerful as they are, usually rank in petaflops, or quadrillions of floating-point operations per second. This year, Summit improved its previous showing with a score of 143.5 petaflops per second. Sierra, on the other hand, ousted a Chinese machine for the number two spot by posting a score of 122.3 petaflops per second.

Just last year, it seemed something of a long shot for both Summit Sierra to scale the rankings and supersede China's Tianhe-2 and Sunway TaihuLight computers, which previously topped the list as the fastest and second fastest machines. Both Summit and Sierra are IBM products, powered by the company's Power9 CPUs and NVIDIA V100 GPUs and equipped with 2.4 and 1.6 million processor cores, respectively.

Needless to say, the U.S. supercomputers are hulking machines made possible by a $250 million Department of Energy grant that sought to put the U.S. back on equal footing with its international counterparts. It looks as though it worked.

Google's Artificial Intelligence, AutoML can build other AI that outperform all of its human-made counterparts. What does that mean for us?

MIT researchers have devised a new way of providing cooling on a hot sunny day, using inexpensive materials and requiring no fossil fuel-generated power. The passive system, which could be used to supplement other cooling systems to preserve food and medications in hot, off-grid locations, is essentially a high-tech version of a parasol.

The system allows emission of heat at mid-infrared range of light that can pass straight out through the atmosphere and radiate into the cold of outer space, punching right through the gases that act like a greenhouse. To prevent heating in the direct sunlight, a small strip of metal suspended above the device blocks the sun's direct rays.

The new system is described this week in the journal Nature Communications in a paper by research scientist Bikram Bhatia, graduate student Arny Leroy, professor of mechanical engineering and department head Evelyn Wang, professor of physics Marin Soljacic, and six others at MIT.

In theory, the system they designed could provide cooling of as much as 20 degrees Celsius (36 degrees Fahrenheit) below the ambient temperature in a location like Boston, the researchers say. So far, in their initial proof-of-concept testing, they have achieved a cooling of 6 C (about 11 F). For applications that require even more cooling, the remainder could be achieved through conventional refrigeration systems or thermoelectric cooling.

Other groups have attempted to design passive cooling systems that radiate heat in the form of mid-infrared wavelengths of light, but these systems have been based on complex engineered photonic devices that can be expensive to make and not readily available for widespread use, the researchers say. The devices are complex because they are designed to reflect all wavelengths of sunlight almost perfectly, and only to emit radiation in the mid-infrared range, for the most part. That combination of selective reflectivity and emissivity requires a multilayer material where the thicknesses of the layers are controlled to nanometer precision.

But it turns out that similar selectivity can be achieved by simply blocking the direct sunlight with a narrow strip placed at just the right angle to cover the sun's path across the sky, requiring no active tracking by the device. Then, a simple device built from a combination of inexpensive plastic film, polished aluminum, white paint, and insulation can allow for the necessary emission of heat through mid-infrared radiation, which is how most natural objects cool off, while preventing the device from being heated by the direct sunlight. In fact, simple radiative cooling systems have been used since ancient times to achieve nighttime cooling; the problem was that such systems didn't work in the daytime because the heating effect of the sunlight was at least 10 times stronger than the maximum achievable cooling effect.

The Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved a drug for a wide range of cancers based on a shared mutation, rather than the tumors' locations — an advance for the sometimes controversial field of “precision medicine.”

The medication, called Vitrakvi, is the second treatment to receive FDA clearance based on a common biomarker found in an array of cancers. The drug, also called larotrectinib, was approved simultaneously for adults and children. Typically, oncology drugs are considered much later for children.

Last year, the agency, for the first time, approved an immunotherapy drug for tumors with a specific genetic signature, regardless of where they originated in the body. But that treatment already had been cleared for several cancers, including advanced melanoma.

Larotrectinib is for patients with advanced solid tumors containing what’s called an NTRK gene fusion, a hybrid of two genes that can promote uncontrolled cell growth. Cancers of the thyroid, lung, and head and neck, among others, can be caused by this genetic aberration. The drug is for patients whose cancer has spread or who would experience severe complications by undergoing surgery and have no satisfactory alternatives.

The price for the breakthrough drug is extremely high. The drug’s manufacturer, Loxo Oncology, Inc., and its partner Bayer in Germany, announced Monday night that the wholesale acquisition cost will be $32,800 for a 30-day supply of capsules for adults. The cost for the liquid formulation for children will be based on the patient’s surface area but will start at $11,000 per month.

A new study provides compelling evidence that children can inherit mitochondrial DNA from both their parents.

The first time Taosheng Huang saw the test results, he was sure there’d been a mistake. Even after a technician repeated the diagnostic, Huang didn’t believe it. “That’s impossible,” he said.

Huang, a pediatrician and geneticist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, asked the patient to come back and provide fresh samples of blood, which Huang then split among several research labs to reduce any chance of error. It was a finding that Huang knew would break a central tenet of human genetics—but time and time again, the outcome was the same.

Huang’s patient, a four-year-old boy, was carrying two different sets of mitochondrial DNA: one from his mother, as expected—and another, from his father.

This was only the beginning. Using modern DNA sequencing technology, Huang and his colleagues have conclusively verified paternally-inherited mitochondrial DNA in 17 individuals spanning three unrelated families. Their work was just published in the journal PNAS.

“This is a really groundbreaking discovery,” says Xinnan Wang, a biologist at Stanford University who studies mitochondria but was not involved in the new findings. “It could open up an entirely new field... and change how we look for the cause of [certain] diseases.”

Measuring colors is only one way of analyzing starlight. Another way is to use a spectrograph to spread out the light into a spectrum (more info: Radiation and Spectra and Astronomical Instruments).

In 1814, the German physicist Joseph Fraunhofer observed that the spectrum of the Sun shows dark lines crossing a continuous band of colors. In the 1860s, English astronomers Sir William Huggins and Lady Margaret Huggins succeeded in identifying some of the lines in stellar spectra as those of known elements on Earth, showing that the same chemical elements found in the Sun and planets exist in the stars. Since then, astronomers have worked hard to perfect experimental techniques for obtaining and measuring spectra, and they have developed a theoretical understanding of what can be learned from spectra. Today, spectroscopic analysis is one of the cornerstones of astronomical research.

Formation of Stellar Spectra

When the spectra of different stars were first observed, astronomers found that they were not all identical. Since the dark lines are produced by the chemical elements present in the stars, astronomers first thought that the spectra differ from one another because stars are not all made of the same chemical elements. This hypothesis turned out to be wrong. The primary reason that stellar spectra look different is because the stars have different temperatures. Most stars have nearly the same composition as the Sun, with only a few exceptions. Hydrogen, for example, is by far the most abundant element in most stars. However, lines of hydrogen are not seen in the spectra of the hottest and the coolest stars. In the atmospheres of the hottest stars, hydrogen atoms are completely ionized. Because the electron and the proton are separated, ionized hydrogen cannot produce absorption lines. (See Formation of Spectral Lines – the lines are the result of electrons in orbit around a nucleus changing energy levels).

Classification of Stellar Spectra

Astronomers use the patterns of lines observed in stellar spectra to sort stars into a spectral class. Because a star’s temperature determines which absorption lines are present in its spectrum, these spectral classes are a measure of its surface temperature. There are seven standard spectral classes. From hottest to coldest, these seven spectral classes are designated O, B, A, F, G, K, and M. Recently, astronomers have added three additional classes for even cooler objects—L, T, and Y. Our sun is a G2 type star.

The entry, descent, and landing (EDL) begins when the spacecraft reaches the Martian atmosphere, about 80 miles (about 128 kilometers) above the surface, and ends with the lander safe and sound on the surface of Mars six and a half minutes later.

For InSight, this phase includes a combination of technologies inherited from past NASA Mars missions such as NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander. This landing system weighs less than the airbags used for the twin rovers or the skycrane used by the Mars Science Laboratory. The lean landing hardware helps InSight place a higher ratio of science instruments to total launch mass on the surface of Mars.

Compared with Phoenix, though, InSight's landing presents four added challenges: InSight enters the atmosphere at a lower velocity -- 12,300 miles per hour (5.5 kilometers per second) vs. 12,500 miles per hour (5.6 kilometers per second).

InSight has more mass entering the atmosphere -- about 1,340 pounds (608 kilograms) vs. 1,263 pounds (573 kilograms).
InSight lands at an elevation of about 4,900 feet (1.5 kilometers) higher than Phoenix did, so it has less atmosphere to use for deceleration.

InSight lands during northern hemisphere autumn on Mars, when dust storms are known to have grown to global proportions in some prior years. Some of the changes in InSight's entry, descent and landing system, compared to the one used by Phoenix, are:
InSight uses a thicker heat shield, partly to handle the possibility of being sandblasted by a dust storm.

InSight’s parachute suspension lines use stronger material. The entry, descent and landing sequence breaks down into three parts:

• Entry - The spacecraft is controlled by small rockets during descent through the Martian atmosphere, toward the surface.
• Parachute Descent - The InSight spacecraft slows by a large parachute, jettisons its heat shield and extends its three shock-absorbing legs.
• Powered Descent - Once the lander separates from its backshell and parachute, 12 descent engines on the lander begin firing and the onboard guidance software slows down the spacecraft until touchdown.

Earlier today, NASA reported a successful landing of the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) lander on Mars! It will use cutting edge instruments, to delve deep beneath the surface and seek the fingerprints of the processes that formed the terrestrial planets. It does so by measuring the planet's "vital signs": its "pulse" (seismology), "temperature" (heat flow), and "reflexes" (precision tracking).

1Mission controllers at NASA-JPL have received a signal from NASA's InSight lander on the Mars surface via MarCO and a beep from InSight's X-band radio. In the coming hours, engineers will be checking on the spacecraft's health.

Press conference live!

You can check out the InSight website, see the landing status, or a short video explanation of the entire mission.

Here is the 1.5 hr livestream of the buildup to, and footage of, the landing.

Here is the first picture the lander took! The sky is up and the ground is down indicating that the lander has, in fact, landed with the correct side up.

Climate change and human activity are dooming species at an unprecedented rate via a plethora of direct and indirect, often synergic, mechanisms. Among these, primary extinctions driven by environmental change could be just the tip of an enormous extinction iceberg. As our understanding of the importance of ecological interactions in shaping ecosystem identity advances, it is becoming clearer how the disappearance of consumers following the depletion of their resources — a process known as ‘co-extinction’ — is more likely the major driver of biodiversity loss.

Although the general relevance of co-extinctions is supported by a sound and robust theoretical background, the challenges in obtaining empirical information about ongoing (and past) co-extinction events complicate the assessment of their relative contributions to the rapid decline of species diversity even in well-known systems, let alone at the global scale.

By subjecting a large set of virtual Earths to different trajectories of extreme environmental change (global heating or cooling), and by tracking species loss up to the complete annihilation of all life either accounting or not for co-extinction processes, climate scientists now show how ecological dependencies amplify the direct effects of environmental change on the collapse of planetary diversity by up to ten times.

An analysis of information shared on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election has found that automated accounts -- or "bots" -- played a disproportionate role in spreading misinformation online. The study, conducted by Indiana University researchers and published Nov. 20 in the journal Nature Communications, analyzed 14 million messages and 400,000 articles shared on Twitter between May 2016 and March 2017, a period that spans the end of the 2016 presidential primaries and the presidential inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017.

Among the findings: A mere 6 percent of Twitter accounts that the study identified as bots were enough to spread 31 percent of the "low-credibility" information on the network. These accounts were also responsible for 34 percent of all articles shared from "low-credibility" sources. The study also found that bots played a major role promoting low-credibility content in the first few moments before a story goes viral.

The brief length of this time -- 2 to 10 seconds -- highlights the challenges of countering the spread of misinformation online. Similar issues are seen in other complex environments like the stock market, where serious problems can arise in mere moments due to the impact of high-frequency trading.

This study finds that bots significantly contribute to the spread of misinformation online -- as well as shows how quickly these messages can spread," said Filippo Menczer, a professor in the IU School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, who led the study. The analysis also revealed that bots amplify a message's volume and visibility until it's more likely to be shared broadly -- despite only representing a small fraction of the accounts that spread viral messages.

"People tend to put greater trust in messages that appear to originate from many people," said co-author Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, an assistant research scientist with the IU Network Science Institute at the time of the study. "Bots prey upon this trust by making messages seem so popular that real people are tricked into spreading their messages for them."

Information sources labeled as low-credibility in the study were identified based upon their appearance on lists produced by independent third-party organizations of outlets that regularly share false or misleading information. These sources -- such as websites with misleading names like "USAToday.com.co" -- include outlets with both right- and left-leaning points of view.

In the not-too-distant future, disasters won't come one at a time. Instead, according to new research, we can expect a cascade of catastrophes, some gradual, others abrupt, all compounding as climate change takes a greater toll.

"Facing these climatic changes will be like getting into a fight with Mike Tyson, Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Jackie Chan — all at the same time." That is how Camillo Mora, the lead author of the study released Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, describes the numerous impacts that are expected to hit us in the coming years. He adds, "I think we are way above our heads."

In total, the researchers identified 467 distinct ways in which society is already being impacted by increasing climate extremes, and then laid out how these threats are likely to compound on top of each other in the decades ahead. If something isn't done to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they say that instead of dealing with a single major hazard at a time, people worldwide could be forced to cope with three to six at once.

To reach that conclusion, the team of 23 scientists reviewed more than 3,000 scientific peer-reviewed scientific papers. They examined the impact on human health, food supplies, water, the economy, infrastructure, and security from multiple factors including rising temperatures, drought, heat waves, wildfires, precipitation, floods, powerful storms, sea level rise and changes in land cover and ocean chemistry.

The University of Hawaii at Manoa, where several of the scientists are based, called the work "one of the most comprehensive assessments yet of how humanity is being impacted by the simultaneous occurrence of multiple climate hazards strengthened by increasing greenhouse gas emissions."

While most studies focus on one or two threats from climate change, this paper aggregates the impacts and shows how the threats are not isolated, but rather compound on top of each other.  "If we only consider the most direct threats from climate change, for example heat waves or severe storms, we inevitably will be blindsided by even larger threats that, in combination, can have even broader societal impacts." says co-author Jonathan Patz, professor and director of the University of Wisconsin's Global Health Institute.

According to Mora, "The notion of these hazards happening simultaneously is not something far into the future, this is already here and can happen any time from now on."

The ability of mothers to produce milk for their babies is commonly considered a unique feature of mammals, but now scientists have discovered a species of spider that also nurses its young. Spider mothers were observed feeding a milk-like substance to their spiderlings and continuing to look after them almost into adulthood.

Lactation-like feeding is known elsewhere in the animal kingdom – pigeons and flamingos produce something called “crop milk” from a gland in their neck. However, the intensity and duration of maternal care observed in the spider species is considered highly unusual.

The observations focused on a species of jumping spider, normally found in Taiwan, which lives in nests and mimics the appearance of ants. The newly hatched spiderlings were found to be entirely dependent on nutritious spider milk, containing nearly four times the protein of cow’s milk, secreted and fed to them by their mothers.

The scientists observed that the spiderlings first drank from droplets of spider milk left on the surface of the nest and then by directly sucking from the mother’s egg-laying opening. The spider mothers continued to care for and feed their offspring for nearly 40 days, long after they were able to forage on their own and almost until the point of sexual maturity.

The milk was not critical to the offsprings’ survival, but appeared to boost their overall health and chances of survival as adults.

The findings, by scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Yunnan, are published in the journal Science.

The bandage developed by UW-Madison engineers leverages energy generated from a patient’s own body motions to apply gentle electrical pulses at the site of an injury.

A new, low-cost wound dressing developed by University of Wisconsin–Madison engineers could dramatically speed up healing in a surprising way. The method leverages energy generated from a patient’s own body motions to apply gentle electrical pulses at the site of an injury. In rodent tests, the dressings reduced healing times to a mere three days compared to nearly two weeks for the normal healing process.

“We were surprised to see such a fast recovery rate,” says Xudong Wang, a professor of materials science and engineering at UW–Madison. “We suspected that the devices would produce some effect, but the magnitude was much more than we expected.” Wang and collaborators described their wound dressing method today (Nov. 29, 2018) in the journal ACS Nano.

A team of researchers led by Jonathan Stamler, MD, of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, has discovered a pathway for enhancing the self-repair efforts of injured kidneys The finding may pave the way for new drugs to stop or even reverse the progression of serious kidney disease in humans—and other potentially lethal conditions of the heart, liver, and brain as well.

Kidneys filter waste and excess fluid from the blood, excreting the unsafe molecules in urine. As kidneys are injured or fail, waste builds up, potentially resulting in death. The newly-discovered pathway involves reprogramming the body's own metabolism in order to save damaged kidneys. Normally, a process called glycolysis converts glucose from food into energy, which is necessary for life to continue. But the new discovery shows that when tissue is injured, the body can switch the process in to one of repair to damaged cells.

Until now, the mechanisms by which the body switches between energy generation (for maximal performance) and repair (in injury) were poorly understood. Moreover, the body rarely maximizes the potential for repair, usually favoring energy production. In the new findings, published online today and in the November 29th issue of Nature, the science team discovered how to intensify the switching process, resulting in a cascade of tissue-repair molecules that successfully stopped progression of kidney disease in mice.

When injured, the body slows down use of sugar for energy, using it for repair instead," said Stamler. "We show that we can control and amplify this process by shunting glucose away from energy generation into pathways that protect and repair cells. By giving a 'lift and push' to the body's own self-healing we improve lifespan of injured animals. We can think of it as a blueprint for new lines of future therapy against injured and damaged tissue." Normally, when cells break down fat, sugars, and proteins into glucose, the three substances are converted into intermediate products that move into the mitochondria, the powerhouse of cells, providing fuel for life. Stamler's team reports that things work very differently in injured tissues: in the kidneys for example, the body triggers a "Plan B," converting the glucose into new molecules that carry out cell repair instead.

Stamler and colleagues found that a protein called PKM2 controls whether fuel (glucose) is used to power the cell or shift into repair mode. Disabling PKM2 resulted in a significant increase in cell-repair and a concomitant decrease in energy-generation. "After injury or disease, the body tries to disable the PKM2 protein in order to divert glucose into recovery mode. In our research, we amplified its inhibition. This resulted in significant protection against kidney injury in mice."

A key molecule in the process is nitric oxide (NO). It was already known that NO protects kidneys and other tissue. NO is the active ingredient in nitroglycerine used for addressing heart disease so it was assumed that NO worked by dilating blood vessels. But the research team found that NO attached to a critical molecule called Co-enzyme A—known as a metabolite—linked to the glycolysis and energy production. Co-enzyme A binds to and transports NO into many different proteins, including PKM2, "turning them off." This determines whether the kidney cells are using their pathways for energy or repair.

In addition to finding that adding NO to PKM2 activates repair, Stamler's team found that a protein called AKR1A1 subsequently removes the NO from PKM2, re-activating a robust energy-generating process. This reversal, after healing is complete, allows glucose to be converted efficiently into fuel. "This helps explain why people regain the capacity to do strenuous activity after they recover from an injury or illness," said Stamler. When the research team disabled AKR1A1, the kidneys remained in repair mode and were highly protected from disease.

USC researchers have developed a polio vaccine that doesn't require refrigeration, meaning it could someday be used all over the world to deliver the final blow to this longtime foe. The injectable vaccine, which was freeze-dried into a powder, kept at room temperature for four weeks and then rehydrated, offered full protection against the polio virus when tested in mice.

"Stabilization is not rocket science, so most academics don't pay much attention to this field," said the study's first author, Woo-Jin Shin, a fellow in the lab of Jae Jung, chair of the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. "However, no matter how wonderful a drug or vaccine is, if it isn't stable enough to be transported, it doesn't do anyone much good."

The study appears in the Nov. 27 issue of the journal mBio.

Polio is on the brink of complete eradication, with just 22 reported cases worldwide in 2017. The highly infectious disease, which causes lifelong paralysis and disability mostly in young children, is a fading memory in many places. Yet in countries where vaccination rates are spotty, young children are at risk.

The biggest hitch to complete eradication has been creating a temperature-stable vaccine for use in developing countries where refrigeration may be unavailable. Recent polio cases have been reported in Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Syria and Pakistan.

In the United States, the polio epidemic reached its height in the 1950s. In 1957, mass immunization brought the annual number of cases down from 58,000 to 5,600. Since 1979, no cases of polio have originated in the United States.

By removing moisture through freeze-drying, researchers have created temperature-stable vaccines for measles, typhoid and meningococcal disease. But scientists haven't been able to make a polio vaccine that retains potency through freeze-drying and rehydration.

Shin and his colleagues used two lab techniques -- liquid chromatography and high-throughput screening -- that allowed them to analyze a high volume of ingredients and formulations until they found one that worked. Jung's hope is that a foundation or company will take over the project to pay for human studies and bring the injectable vaccine onto the market.

Landing on Jupiter’s moon Europa will be even harder than we thought due to a forbidding belt of huge ice spikes that could trap or incapacitate a spacecraft.

If you want to attempt a landing on Europa, you’d better bring a repair kit. Parts of its surface may be covered in meters-long blades of ice that could make exploring Jupiter’s frigid moon a dangerous endeavor.

In the driest, coldest places on Earth, sunlight bouncing off of small depressions in ice and snow creates pointy formations called penitentes, which can reach several meters tall, as shown in the picture above. As the sunlight hits the bottom of the divot it turns the ice directly from a solid to a gas, which floats away and leaves icy spikes behind.

Europa is much colder and much drier than Earth because it has almost no atmosphere, and it has lower gravity. Daniel Hobley at Cardiff University, UK, and his colleagues calculated that means it could build even bigger penitentes.

The researchers found that, over Europa’s lifetime, they could reach heights of 15 meters, with holes about 7.5 meters across between them. Because penitentes grow faster when the sun is directly overhead, they are likely to mostly appear around the equator. That would give the moon a spiked belt around its middle.

This could be a problem for any spacecraft hoping to land in the region, either because of the spikes or the perfectly spacecraft-sized holes between them.

“You can imagine something getting lodged in there and flopping around,” Hobley says. “But if you already know the surface is likely to be spiky and full of holes, you can probably plan around that.”

Publication: 

Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/s41561-018-0235-0

It sounds like the plot of the world's tiniest horror movie: deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon, a newly discovered species of wasp transforms a "social" spider into a zombie-like drone that abandons its colony to do the wasp's bidding. That's the gruesome, real-life discovery by University of British Columbia researchers, who detail the first example of a manipulative relationship between a new Zatypota species wasp and a social Anelosimus eximius spider in a study published recently in Ecological Entomology.

"Wasps manipulating the behaviour of spiders has been observed before, but not at a level as complex as this," said Philippe Fernandez-Fournier, lead author of the study and former master's student at UBC's department of zoology. "Not only is this wasp targeting a social species of spider but it's making it leave its colony, which it rarely does."

Fernandez-Fournier was in Ecuador studying different kinds of parasites that live in the nests of Anelosimus eximius spiders, one of only about 25 species of "social" spiders worldwide. They are notable for living together in large colonies, cooperating on prey capture, sharing parental duties and rarely straying from their basket-shaped nests.

When Fernandez-Fournier noticed that some of the spiders were infected with a parasitic larva and spotted them wandering a foot or two away from their colonies to spin enclosed webs of densely spun silk and bits of foliage, he was puzzled. "It was very odd because they don't normally do that, so I started taking notes," he said.

Intrigued, he carefully took a few of the structures, known as "cocoon webs" back to the laboratory to see what would emerge from the depths. To his surprise, it was a wasp. "These wasps are very elegant looking and graceful," said Samantha Straus, co-author of the study and PhD student in UBC's department of zoology. "But then they do the most brutal thing."

Using data gathered in Ecuador for different projects between 2012 and 2017, the researchers began to piece together the life cycle of the wasp and its parasitic relationship to the spider.

What they found was equal parts fascinating and horrifying: after an adult female wasp lays an egg on the abdomen of a spider, the larva hatches and attaches itself to its hapless arachnid host. It then presumably feeds on the spider's blood-like haemolymph, growing larger and slowly taking over its body. The now "zombified" spider exits the colony and spins a cocoon for the larva before patiently waiting to be killed and consumed. After feasting on the spider, the larva enters its protected cocoon, emerging fully formed nine to eleven days later.

New study indicates that the proton is much more than just the sum of its parts.

A proton’s mass is more just than the sum of its parts. And now scientists know just what accounts for the subatomic particle’s heft. Protons are made up of even smaller particles called quarks, so you might expect that simply adding up the quarks’ masses should give you the proton’s mass. However, that sum is much too small to explain the proton’s bulk. And new, detailed calculations show that only 9 percent of the proton’s heft comes from the mass of constituent quarks. The rest of the proton’s mass comes from complicated effects occurring inside the particle, researchers report in the Nov. 23 Physical Review Letters.

Quarks get their masses from a process connected to the Higgs boson, an elementary particle first detected in 2012 (SN: 7/28/12, p. 5). But “the quark masses are tiny,” says study coauthor and theoretical physicist Keh-Fei Liu of the University of Kentucky in Lexington. So, for protons, the Higgs explanation falls short.

Instead, most of the proton’s 938 million electron volts of mass is due to complexities of quantum chromodynamics, or QCD, the theory which accounts for the churning of particles within the proton. Making calculations with QCD is extremely difficult, so to study the proton’s properties theoretically, scientists rely on a technique called lattice QCD, in which space and time are broken up into a grid, upon which the quarks reside.

Billions are being bet to find the next revolutionary drug. US start-up Berg was asked by the Department of Defense to help improve the detection of prostate cancer, a disease common among pilots. Less than five years later, an artificial intelligence-driven tool has been tested on more than 1,000 patients with promising results.

Excitement about AI, machine learning and big data have prompted a boom in health-tech start-ups in a market traditionally dominated by big pharma. Despite debate over the extent to which AI will revolutionize medical science, billions are being bet on something revolutionary emerging to drive the next big leaps in drug development This year has seen a jump in investment from big pharma and a range of joint ventures with health tech groups.

In 2018, at least 15 companies have integrated AI into their drug discovery processes, according to Deep Knowledge Analytics, an analysis company. “We’ve seen huge interest from many of the major pharma companies” in the past 18 months, says Andrew Hopkins, chief executive of Exscientia, an AI-driven drug discovery company working with GlaxoSmithKline. Other partnerships include AstraZeneca’s and Sanofi’s projects with Berg, and Merck’s work with Numerate, another drug design company. In-house developments include Pfizer using AI to mine patient data — stored anonymously in electronic medical records — for signs of a rare form of heart failure. Novartis hopes a drug part-developed with AI will be registered within the next 36 months. “We see ourselves shifting from the mindset of a traditional pharma company to [one] more inherently agile, typical of a tech company,” says Badhri Srinivasan, Novartis’s head of global development operations.

About $5bn was invested in AI companies in 2016, according to consultancy IP Pragmatics, with healthcare one of the fastest growing sectors. By 2021, the value of the segment is expected to reach $6.6bn, with particular growth in China.

The test identifies a tell-tale hallmark of quantum coherence, classifying the properties of particles in a quantum state that are interacting with a real-world environment. The test should allow scientists to quantify and track quantum coherence in the natural world using laboratory experiments.

Published this week in the journal Physical Review A, the theoretical work could lead to experiments that help solve the debate on whether biological processes exploit quantum mechanics to their advantage, and whether evolution could provide us with a template for quantum technologies such as computers, sensors and energy sources.

Microscopic particles in a quantum state are very difficult to spot as the act of observing them changes their state. These stealthy particles can exist in many locations or configurations simultaneously, a feature known as quantum coherence.

The effect underpins technologies such as quantum computers, quantum sensors and quantum communication systems, which use ordered systems isolated from the rest of the world. However, whether quantum coherence exists in the noisier and messier real world is more difficult to identify.

The test involves a procedure to destroy quantum coherence, and then to observe the change in later measurements. Where a measurably large impact is observed, scientists can demonstrate that there must have been quantum coherence in the system. The new work clarifies the possible exceptions to this conclusion, which depend on how quickly the special procedure can destroy the coherence.

Dr. George Knee, 1851 Royal Commission Research Fellow from the University's Department of Physics, said: "To demonstrate the presence of quantum coherence in a biological system would constitute a paradigm shift, away from the idea that only humans have the ability to engineer systems capable of exhibiting and exploiting quantum coherence. It would also be a step toward the Schroedinger's Cat thought experiment, where a living organism is placed in a state where it is, quantum coherently, both dead and alive."

Co-author Dr. Animesh Datta said: "The results from this test will be valuable in improving our understanding of how chemistry and biology works, and may allow us to answer the question of whether quantum physics has played a part in evolutionary processes."

For this study, Dr Mathilda Mommersteeg and her team at the University of Oxford studied two types of Mexican tetra fish - river-dwellers that are able to self-heal their heart tissue, and cave-dwellers that cannot. The cave fish, who once lived in the rivers of Northern Mexico, were washed into caves by floodwaters about 1.5 million years ago and evolved, losing their sight and color because of living in perpetual darkness.

Comparing the two types of tetra fish, researchers found two genes - lrrc10 and caveolin - were much more active in the river fish following heart injury. Having discovered this, they switched off the lrrc10 gene in a different species of fish with self-healing abilities, the zebrafish.

With this gene no longer working properly, the zebrafish became unable to fully repair its heart without scarring. Scar tissue stops the heart muscle from contracting properly and reduces the heart's ability to pump blood around the body.

Both of these genes are present in humans, and lrrc10 is known to be linked to a heart condition called dilated cardiomyopathy. The study authors say their findings suggest it will one day be possible to regenerate damaged hearts in people by artificially modifying how these and other genes function. This could be done either with drugs or through gene-editing techniques, where DNA is modified, deleted or replaced, using tools like Crispr-Cas9.

Dr Mommersteeg, who's associate professor of developmental and regenerative medicine, said: "I do believe that this fish can tell us, at some point, how we can really repair the human heart. "It's early days but we're incredibly excited about these remarkable fish and the potential to change the lives of people with damaged hearts."

Industrial emissions of ozone depleting substances (ODSs) during the second half of the twentieth century have led to one of the most visible human impacts on the Earth: the Antarctic ozone hole. The ozone loss intensified in the 1980s and reached the level of saturation (i.e., complete loss of ozone) due to the high levels of ODSs in the atmosphere. Significant changes in the southern hemispheric climate have been observed in the past decades due to this unprecedented ozone loss. Although the most recent studies suggest healing in the Antarctic ozone hole, the status of ozone in the loss saturation layer (~13–21 km) has not been discussed in detail.

Now, a comprehensive analysis of vertical, spatial and temporal evolution of ozone loss saturation (ozone mixing ratio ≤ 0.1 ppmv) in the Antarctic vortex using high resolution measurements for the 1979–2017 period reveals that the loss saturation began in 1987 and continued to occur in all winters thereafter, except in the major warming winters of 1988 and 2002. However, this recent analysis shows a clear reduction in the frequency of occurrence of ozone loss saturation over the period 2001–2017 consistently throughout various datasets (e.g., ozonesonde and satellite measurements of ozone profiles and total columns), thereby revealing the emergence of an important milestone in ozone recovery.