Amazing Science

July 2016 was the warmest July in 136 years of modern record-keeping, according to a monthly analysis of global temperatures by scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.

Because the seasonal temperature cycle peaks in July, it means July 2016 also was warmer than any other month on record. July 2016's temperature was a statistically small 0.1 degrees Celsius warmer than previous warm Julys in 2015, 2011 and 2009.

“It wasn't by the widest of margins, but July 2016 was the warmest month since modern record keeping began in 1880,” said GISS Director Gavin Schmidt. “It appears almost a certainty that 2016 also will be the warmest year on record.”

The record warm July continued a streak of 10 consecutive months dating back to October 2015 that have set new monthly high-temperature records. Compared to previous years, the warmer global temperatures last month were most pronounced in the northern hemisphere, particularly near the Arctic region.

The monthly analysis by the GISS team is assembled from publicly available data acquired by about 6,300 meteorological stations around the world, ship- and buoy-based instruments measuring sea surface temperature, and Antarctic research stations. The modern global temperature record begins around 1880 because previous observations didn't cover enough of the planet.

For more information on NASA GISS's monthly temperature analysis, visit: data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp

Astronomers have in the past 20 years located several hundred planets orbiting distant stars, and they have only scratched the surface. In a small patch of stars—less than 1 percent of the sky—in the Northern Hemisphere, NASA's Kepler mission has already found more than 100 planets, along with strong hints of thousands more. Stars across the sky ought to be similarly laden with planets. A recent study indicated that each star hosts, on average, 1.6 planets. Exoplanets, as these strange worlds are called, are as plentiful as weeds—they crop up wherever they can. Whether any of them harbors life remains to be seen, but the odds of finding such a world are getting better.

• Exoplanets: an interactive version of XKCD 1071 
• HEK   (The Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler) 
• Exoplanets in binaries and multiple systems   (Richard Schwarz ) 
• Naming exoplanets (IAU)
• Some Astronomers and Groups active in extrasolar planets studies  update: 16 April 2012
• California & Carnegie Planet Search
• Extrasolar Planet Research at San Francisco State University
• The Anglo-Australian Planet Search
• Geneva Extrasolar Planet Search Programmes
• OLBIN (Optical Long-Baseline Interferometry News)
• NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program
• Pulsar planets
• Searches for planets    and   Theory work (update: 13 November 2009) 
• Related objects   update: 29 July 2010
• Forum on extrasolar planets Archives dedicated to professional infos on extra-solar planets; maintained by Fabien Malbet, Grenoble, France ( OLD Forum Archives) update:   14 June 2011
• NStED Services
• IAU Comission 53: Extrasolar Planets
• ExoMol
• The Habitable Zone Gallery
• Habitable Zones in Multiple Star Systems   (Mueller & Haghighipour)

Scientists have just created a biohybrid robotic finger that uses real muscle for movement. The technology employs antagonistic muscle pairs grown from rat cells and can bend up to 90°. The muscles were developed in a lab and survived for more than a week.

Human-robot hybrids could be in the pipeline as Japanese scientists have succeeded in merging muscle fibers with a robotic skeleton. Previous attempts at this have been short-lived and prone to failure. This new study took a different approach and grew the muscles from scratch, instead of taking a muscle that had grown inside an animal. This discovery could pave the way for superhuman cyborgs, but scientists say larger-scale applications are at least a decade away.

The most commonly consumed vitamin and mineral supplements provide no consistent health benefit or harm, suggests a new study led by researchers at St. Michael's Hospital and the University of Toronto.

Published today in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, the systematic review of existing data and single randomized control trials published in English from January 2012 to October 2017 found that multivitamins, vitamin D, calcium and vitamin C -- the most common supplements -- showed no advantage or added risk in the prevention of cardiovascular disease, heart attack, stroke or premature death. Generally, vitamin and mineral supplements are taken to add to nutrients that are found in food.

"We were surprised to find so few positive effects of the most common supplements that people consume," said Dr. David Jenkins*, the study's lead author. "Our review found that if you want to use multivitamins, vitamin D, calcium or vitamin C, it does no harm -- but there is no apparent advantage either."

The Earth BioGenome project aims to sequence the DNA of all known life on Earth. It's estimated to take 10 years, cost $4.7 billion, and require more than 200 petabytes of digital storage space.

Advances in biotechnology over the past decade have brought rapid progress in the fields of medicine, food, ecology, and neuroscience, among others. With this progress comes ambition for even more progress—realizing we’re capable of, say, engineering crops to yield more food means we may be able to further engineer them to be healthier, too. Building a brain-machine interface that can read basic thoughts may mean another interface could eventually read complex thoughts.

One of the fields where progress seems to be moving especially quickly is genomics, and with that progress, ambitions have grown just as fast. The Earth BioGenome project, which aims to sequence the DNA of all known eukaryotic life on Earth, is a glowing example of both progress and ambition.

A recent paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science released new details about the project. It’s estimated to take 10 years, cost $4.7 billion, and require more than 200 petabytes of digital storage space (a petabyte is one quadrillion, or 1015 bytes).

These statistics sound huge, but in reality they’re small compared to the history of genome sequencing up to this point. Take the Human Genome Project, a publicly-funded project to sequence the first full human genome. The effort took over ten years—it started in 1990 and was completed in 2003—and cost roughly $2.7 billion ($4.8 billion in today’s dollars) overall.

Now, just 15 years later, the Earth BioGenome project aims to leverage plummeting costs to sequence, catalog, and analyze the genomes of all known eukaryotic species on Earth in about the same amount of time and for about the same cost.

“Eukaryotes” refers to all plants, animals, and single-celled organisms—all living things except bacteria and archaea (those will be taken care of by the Earth Microbiome Project). It’s estimated there are somewhere between 10–15 million eukaryotic species, from a rhinoceros to a chinchilla down to a flea (and there are far smaller still). Of the 2.3 million of these that we’ve documented, we’ve sequenced less than 15,000 of their genomes (most of which have been microbes).

As impressive as it is that scientists can do this, you may be wondering, what’s the point? There’s a clear benefit to studying the human genome, but what will we get out of decoding the DNA of a rhinoceros or a flea?

Earth BioGenome will essentially allow scientists to take a high-fidelity, digital genetic snapshot of known life on Earth. “The greatest legacy of [the project] will be a complete digital library of life that will guide future discoveries for generations,” said Gene Robinson, one of the project’s leaders, as well as a professor of entomology and the director of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois.

The estimated return on investment ratio of the Human Genome Project was 141 to 1—and that’s just the financial side of things. The project hugely contributed to advancing affordable genomics as we know it today, a field that promises to speed the discovery of disease-causing genetic mutations and aid in their diagnosis and treatment. New gene-editing tools like CRISPR have since emerged and may one day be able to cure genetic illnesses.

Extrapolate these returns over millions of species, then, and the insight to be gained—and the concrete benefits from that insight—are likely significant. Genomic research on crops, for example, has already yielded plants that grow faster, produce more food, and are more resistant to pests or severe weather. Researchers may find new medicines or discover better ways to engineer organisms for use in manufacturing or energy. They’ll be able to make intricate discoveries about how and when various species evolved—information that’s thus far been buried in the depths of history.

Certain types of bacteria and viruses are readily ejected into the atmosphere when waves break while other taxa are less likely to be transported by sea spray into the air, researchers reported May 22, 2018.

An interdisciplinary team of scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the University of California San Diego, and the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) reached this conclusion after replicating a phytoplankton bloom in a unique ocean-atmosphere wave facility developed by scientists in the National Science Foundation-funded Center for Aerosol Impacts on Chemistry of the Environment (CAICE) on the Scripps campus. They found that bacteria and viruses coated by waxy substances or lipids appear in greater quantity and are enriched in sea spray aerosols. According to researchers, the results suggest that the water-repellent properties of the surfaces of these microbes are what make them more likely to be cast out of the ocean as waves break at the sea surface.

The team in the National Science Foundation-funded study included chemists, oceanographers, microbiologists, geneticists, and pediatric medicine specialists who are attempting to understand how far potentially infectious bacteria and viruses can travel and if those that pose the greatest risks to public health are among those most likely to escape the ocean. In previous studies, individual members of the team have characterized sea spray aerosols, which form when waves break and bubbles burst at the ocean surface.

“Some of the bacteria we detected have been found on skin as well as in your gut, so they could be affecting your health—at this point, no one really knows the health effects of breathing in ocean microbes,” said Kim Prather, who has a joint appointment at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

“We are trying to understand sources of environmental microbes using the unique ocean-atmosphere facilities we have developed here at Scripps. By breaking waves in fresh seawater in an isolated wave channel, UC San Diego is the only place in the world that can directly measure the microbes transferred from the ocean to the atmosphere.”  

Prather’s research group has previously shown how microbes have a nearly worldwide reach, able to travel tens of thousands of kilometers on the wind, sometimes re-entering the ocean and re-emerging from it along the journey. As they do, their chemical attributes, their ability to infect, and their effects on cloud formation and precipitation can evolve.

“In CAICE, we realized that many of the chemical components found in the aerosols are derived from living microorganisms in the ocean, so one of our first goals was to find out which ones are present in the water and then understand which of them are able to hitch a ride on the aerosol particles,” said Michael Burkart, a researcher at the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC San Diego.

The study tapped into techniques developed in the Earth Microbiome Project, which was founded by co-author Rob Knight and others in 2010 to sample as many microbial communities as possible to understand the ecology of microbes and their interactions with humans.

When trekking through a forest in French Guiana to study termites, a group of biologists noticed unique spots of blue on the backs of the insects in one nest. Curious, one scientist reached down to pick up one of these termites with a pair of forceps. It exploded. The blue spots, the team discovered, contain explosive crystals, and they're found only on the backs of the oldest termites in the colony. The aged termites carry out suicide missions on behalf of their nest mates.

After their initial observation, the team carried out field studies of Neocapritermes taracua termites and discovered that those with the blue spots also exploded during encounters with other species of termites or larger predators. The researchers found that the secretions released during the explosion killed or paralyzed opponents from a competing termite species. However, if the scientists removed the blue crystal from the termites, their secretions were no longer toxic.

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), led by MIT, successfully completed a lunar flyby on May 17, and the science team snapped a 2-second test exposure using one of the four TESS cameras. The image reveals more than 200,000 stars.

NASA’s next planet hunter, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), is one step closer to searching for new worlds after successfully completing a lunar flyby on May 17. The spacecraft passed about 5,000 miles from the moon, which provided a gravity assist that helped TESS sail toward its final working orbit. 

As part of camera commissioning, the science team snapped a two-second test exposure using one of the four TESS cameras. The image, centered on the southern constellation Centaurus, reveals more than 200,000 stars. The edge of the Coalsack Nebula is in the right upper corner and the bright star Beta Centauri is visible at the lower left edge. TESS is expected to cover more than 400 times as much sky as shown in this image with its four cameras during its initial two-year search for exoplanets. A science-quality image, also referred to as a “first light” image, is expected to be released next month in June.  

TESS will undergo one final thruster burn on May 30 to enter its science orbit around Earth. This highly elliptical orbit will maximize the amount of sky the spacecraft can image, allowing it to continuously monitor large swaths of the sky. TESS is expected to begin science operations in mid-June after reaching this orbit and completing camera calibrations.

TESS will fly in an orbit that completes two circuits around Earth every time the moon orbits once. This special orbit will allow TESS’s cameras to monitor each patch of sky continuously for nearly a month at a time.

Launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on April 18, TESS is the next step in NASA’s search for planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets. The mission will observe nearly the entire sky to monitor nearby, bright stars in search of transits — periodic dips in a star’s brightness caused by a planet passing in front of the star. TESS is expected to find thousands of exoplanets.

NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2020, will provide important follow-up observations of some of the most promising TESS-discovered exoplanets, allowing scientists to study their atmospheres. 

TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. George Ricker of MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research serves as principal investigator for the mission. Additional partners include Orbital ATK, NASA’s Ames Research Center, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the Space Telescope Science Institute. The TESS science instruments were jointly developed by MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. More than a dozen universities, research institutes, and observatories worldwide are participants in the mission.

In a paper forthcoming in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers at the University of California, Riverside and the University of Southern Queensland have identified more than 100 giant planets that potentially host moons capable of supporting life. Their work will guide the design of future telescopes that can detect these potential moons and look for tell-tale signs of life, called biosignatures, in their atmospheres.

Since the 2009 launch of NASA's Kepler telescope, scientists have identified thousands of planets outside our solar system, which are called exoplanets. A primary goal of the Kepler mission is to identify planets that are in the habitable zones of their stars, meaning it's neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water—and potentially life—to exist.

Terrestrial (rocky) planets are prime targets in the quest to find life because some of them might be geologically and atmospherically similar to Earth. Another place to look is the many gas giants identified during the Kepler mission. While not a candidate for life themselves, Jupiter-like planets in the habitable zone may harbor rocky moons, called exomoons, that could sustain life.

"There are currently 175 known moons orbiting the eight planets in our solar system. While most of these moons orbit Saturn and Jupiter, which are outside the Sun's habitable zone, that may not be the case in other solar systems," said Stephen Kane, an associate professor of planetary astrophysics and a member of the UCR's Alternative Earths Astrobiology Center. "Including rocky exomoons in our search for life in space will greatly expand the places we can look."

The researchers identified 121 giant planets that have orbits within the habitable zones of their stars. At more than three times the radii of the Earth, these gaseous planets are less common than terrestrial planets, but each is expected to host several large moons.

Scientists have speculated that exomoons might provide a favorable environment for life, perhaps even better than Earth. That's because they receive energy not only from their star, but also from radiation reflected from their planet. Until now, no exomoons have been confirmed.

"Now that we have created a database of the known giant planets in the habitable zone of their star, observations of the best candidates for hosting potential exomoons will be made to help refine the expected exomoon properties. Our follow-up studies will help inform future telescope design so that we can detect these moons, study their properties, and look for signs of life," said Michelle Hill, an undergraduate student at the University of Southern Queensland who is working with Kane and will join UCR's graduate program in the fall.

Each brick represents a single DNA strand composed of 32 nucleotides arranged in a unique pattern. That strand is further divided into four domains, each containing eight nucleotides. The 32-nucleotide fragments can be visualized as a lego, with two pins representing the head domains and two holes representing the tail domains. The pins and holes are different shapes, such that one brick's pins will only plug into the holes of another if the DNA strands are complimentary.

Provided the base pairs of the two domains in question match up, the bricks attach at right angles. Every domain is one voxel (the volume equivalent of a pixel), so a complex shape can be constructed on a 3D molecular canvas, and then an algorithm is used to determine which DNA bricks would self-assemble into the desired structure.

In order to keep the bricks from forming unintended connections, the models include both protector bricks and boundary bricks. The protector bricks contain a string of eight thymines in a row, making it impossible for that pin or hole to connect to other bricks. Boundary bricks are placed along the outside of the finished shape. They are half bricks, each containing 16 nucleotides, that prevent any pieces from attaching outside the established parameters of the final shape.

Each DNA brick can be added or removed independently, allowing for fine-tuning the structure and creating more geometrically sophisticated products than DNA origami. The inventors of DNA bricks tested their system by making microscopic shapes that were solid, closed-cavity, and open-cavity. These included the letters of the alphabet, arabic numerals, emoticon faces, hearts, and playing dice. They tested over 100 distinct shapes before publishing their technique.

The human brain sets us apart from other species, and scientists have been investigating how it first arose. New work led by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator David Haussler of the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) has identified three genes that emerged around 3.5 million years ago; they play crucial roles in the creation of nerve cells and probably helped the human brain to evolve. This paper and another reported in Cell describe a gene that helps construct the neocortex, the brain’s outer layer and an important center of thinking, reasoning, and planning. 

Studying lab-grown cerebral organoids (one derived from chimpanzee cells, shown) has helped scientists discover genes active only in developing human brains. Because of a mistake in the published version of the human genome, these genes have not been studied much. Haussler noted that they can now help illustrate how we’re separate from chimpanzees. "Understanding ourselves and how we're different from other species has been a scientific quest for millennia," he said. "These studies help address the age-old question of what makes us human."

Human brains started getting larger around 6.5 million years ago when chimps and humans diverged from their common ancestor. "If you look at craniums from fossils of our ancestors, you can see this expansion," Haussler said.All of the genetic alterations that accompanied this change in size have not been elucidated, however. After splitting from chimps, around 15 million of those alterations happened in the human genome.

Haussler’s team participated in the Human Genome Project, which aimed to sequence the complete human genome. While that goal was met, like most science it is a work still in progress that is continuously updated. The latest update was very important to Haussler’s research.

In research at Haussler's lab that sought to identify genes that are only expressed in the developing human brain, Frank Jacobs, now at the University of Amsterdam, identified a candidate gene: NOTCH2NL. It is related to NOTCH2, known as a gene that helps regulate the number of neurons, and is critical in the early development of the brain, Haussler said. He is featured in the video.

When the investigators mapped the location of the NOTCH2NL gene, it seemed to be in the wrong place. But when the 38th version of the human genome was released at a later date, they found that the gene was in fact located in a part genome that was connected to brain size. When chunks of that area are gone, brains shrink, and if part of the area is duplicated, brains can grow too large. "And there were three versions of it!" Haussler exclaimed. In what he called "a series of genetic accidents,” the gene was repeatedly copied and pasted into the genome.

The timing of the gene’s appearance fits into the story, and additional analysis showed that the genes the researchers found are only present in humans and their closest relatives, and not in chimps or gorillas. Experimental work with stem cells has indicated that NOTCH2NL genes tell the brain to make more of the stuff that makes neurons - more neural progenitor cells.

UCSC cell biologist Sofie Salama spearheaded research to understand the mechanisms used by the genes and whether they’re a factor in disease. She and her group found that the Notch pathway is probably the conduit for the directions that NOTCH2NL sends. There are three of these genes, "adding an extra push to the pathway," Salama said.

Researchers, led by Ali Brivanlou from the Rockefeller University, New York, US, have found the signal that causes cells in the developing human embryo, which start off “pluripotent” – able to become any type of cell – to choose a future career, in this case getting to work in the nervous system.

The early embryo is already known for amazing feats, not least of which is divvying up cells into three groups or “germ layers”. Cells from the “endoderm” become, among other things, stomach and lung; the “mesoderm” forms muscle and bone; and the “ectoderm” morphs into skin, teeth, and the all-important nervous system. It’s called “gastrulation”. To stay on the right side of that line the researchers had previously created a “gastruloid”. This is a cluster of human embryonic stem cells, a millimeter or so across, that is basically a working model of an embryo in a Petri dish.

Under the action of a protein called Bone Morphogenetic Protein 4 (BMP4) the team coaxed those generic cells, breathtakingly, into becoming the three germ layers. But there was always a missing piece to the puzzle.

Back in the 1920s Hilde Mangold and Hans Spemann at the University of Freiberg in Germany identified a bunch of cells in salamanders that marshaled growth of the central nervous system. They called it the “organizer”, and their research bagged Spemann the 1935 Nobel Prize for medicine. Such an organizer in humans has been something of an elusive chalice. Until now.

Brivanlou’s team has shown that small colonies of cells in the gastruloid produce proteins that signal the germ layers to form tissues that eventually become brain and spinal cord. They have, in short, found evidence of a human organizer. But the bars in science are high, and for irrefutable proof the researchers set themselves an even harder task. Using fluorescent markers to track the human cells, they grafted them into chicken embryos to see just how adept the embryonic organizer was at running things. What happened next left Brivanlou stunned.

“To my amazement, the graft not only survived, but actually gave rise to these beautifully organized structures,” he said. Those structures were the beginnings of the chick’s nervous system, a phenomenon that, the researchers say, shows the organizer to be something that has persisted across aeons of evolution.

“Once you transplant the human organizer into a chicken embryo, the language it uses to instruct the bird cells to establish the brain and nervous system is exactly the same as the one used by amphibians and fish,” says Brivanlou.

The research is published in the prestigious journal Nature, not renowned for hyperbole. So, when the abstract states the “discovery represents a milestone in human embryology”, it very likely does.

Sixty-six million years ago, the world burned. An asteroid crashed to Earth with a force one million times larger than the largest atomic bomb, causing the extinction of the dinosaurs. But dinosaurs weren't the only ones that got hit hard -- in a new study, scientists learned that the planet's forests were decimated, leading to the extinction of tree-dwelling birds.

"Looking at the fossil record, at plants and birds, there are multiple lines of evidence suggesting that the forest canopies collapsed," says Regan Dunn, a paleontologist at the Field Museum in Chicago and a co-author on the study in Current Biology . "Perching birds went extinct because there were no more perches.  We drew on a variety of approaches to stitch this story together," said Daniel Field, the paper's lead author, of the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath.

"We concluded that the temporary elimination of forests in the aftermath of the asteroid impact explains why arboreal birds failed to survive across this extinction event. The ancestors of modern arboreal birds did not move into the trees until forests had recovered from the extinction-causing asteroid."

The project's pollen expert, Antoine Bercovici of the Smithsonian Institution and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, helped determine that the world's forests were destroyed by looking at microscopic fossils of pollen and spores. Dunn explains, "After a disaster like a forest fire or a volcanic eruption, the first plants to come back are the fastest colonizers -- especially ferns." That's because ferns don't sprout from seeds, but from spores, which are much smaller -- just a single cell. "Spores are minuscule, the size of a grain of pollen, so they're easily dispersed. They get picked up by the wind and go further than seeds can, and all they need to grow is a wet spot.  The spores are tiny -- you could fit four across a single strand of your hair," says Dunn. "To see them, we take a sample of rock from the time frame just after the collision and dissolve it in acid. Then we purify it so that all that remains is the organic debris, like pollen, spores and little leaf bits, then we look at them under a microscope."

Immediately after the asteroid hit, the fossil record shows the charcoal remains of burnt trees, and then, tons of fern spores. An abundance of fern spores in the fossil record often comes on the heels of a natural disaster that destroyed larger plants like trees.  "Our study examined the fossil record from New Zealand, Japan, Europe and North America, which showed there was a mass deforestation across the globe at the end of the Cretaceous period," says co-author Bercovici.

And with no more trees, the scientists found, tree-dwelling birds went extinct. The birds that did survive were ground-dwellers -- birds whose fossilized remains show longer, sturdier legs like we see in modern ground birds like kiwis and emus. The Cretaceous equivalent of robins and sparrows, with delicate little legs made for perching on tree branches, had no place to live.  "Today, birds are the most diverse and globally widespread group of terrestrial vertebrate animals -- there are nearly 11,000 living species," says Field. "Only a handful of ancestral bird lineages succeeded in surviving the mass extinction event 66 million years ago, and all of today's amazing living bird diversity can be traced to these ancient survivors."

By knocking out genes three at a time, scientists have painstakingly deduced the web of genetic interactions that keeps a cell alive. Researchers long ago identified essential genes that yeast cells can’t live without, but new work published in Science shows that looking only at those gives a skewed picture of what makes cells tick: Many genes that are inessential on their own become crucial as others disappear. The result implies that the true minimum number of genes that yeast — and perhaps, by extension, other complex organisms — need to survive and thrive may be surprisingly large.

About 20 years ago, Charles Boone and Brenda Andrews decided to do something slightly nuts. The yeast biologists, both professors at the University of Toronto, set out to systematically destroy or impair the genes in yeast, two by two, to get a sense of how the genes functionally connected to one another. Only about 1,000 of the 6,000 genes in the yeast genome, or roughly 17 percent, are considered essential for life: If a single one of them is missing, the organism dies. But it seemed that many other genes whose individual absence was not enough to spell the end might, if destroyed in tandem, sicken or kill the yeast. Those genes were likely to do the same kind of job in the cell, the biologists reasoned, or to be involved in the same process; losing both meant the yeast could no longer compensate.

Ignorant as science may still be about certain happenings in yeast, it’s dwarfed by our ignorance of what is going on in our own cells, Boone and Andrews realized they could use this idea to figure out what various genes were doing. They and their collaborators went about it deliberately, by first generating more than 20 million strains of yeast that were each missing two genes — almost all of the unique combinations of knockouts among those 6,000 genes. The researchers then scored how healthy each of the double mutant strains was and investigated how the missing genes could be related. The results let the researchers sketch a map of the shadowy web of interactions that underlie life. Two years ago, they reported the details of the map and revealed that it had already allowed researchers to discover previously unknown roles for genes.

Researchers from the University of Tokyo examined how neurons behave and found that they could be trained to join with one another using a 'synthetic neuron-adhesive material'.

A team of researchers in Japan has managed to recreate a tiny portion of a human brain, piece by piece, with more precision that ever before.  The team connected networks of neurons, the pathways along which information travels through our brains, with remarkable accuracy. 

It could be the first step toward the creation of brains in the lab that mirror our own - although millions of connecting neurons are needed to perform even basic tasks. The researchers examined how neurons behave and found that they could be trained to join with one another using a 'synthetic neuron-adhesive material', what they call their microscopic plates.

When the team connected two of these artificial neuron scaffolds together, they found that they were able to transmit electrical signals between them.  There are a number of practical reasons why scientists hope to realise their ambition of creating a fully-functional artificial brain, and this finding is one small step toward that goal.

Growing brains in a lab could afford us greater understanding of a range of neurological and degenerative disorders, including  Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. While the latest finding is a long way off from achieving this, it does raise some interesting philosophical and ethical questions.  Would a lab grown brain be capable of thinking and, if so, does that make it a person? To become a full person in the eyes of the law, an artificial brain would need to be conscious, with definitions of what constitutes 'consciousness' still up for debate.