Amazing Science

Permafrost covers almost a quarter of the land of the Northern Hemisphere. A temperature rise of 2˚C above pre-industrial levels would thaw about 40% of this permafrost, releasing billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

The permafrost – the soil that has historically remained frozen year-round – is more sensitive to climate change than previously thought, finds a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. Warming of just 2˚C is the official limit for the end of the century targeted in the Paris Agreement, but even this increase would release much of the carbon locked up in the permafrost. "In the permafrost in total there's around 1,000 gigatons of carbon," study author Sarah Chadburn explains.

Once permafrost thaws, the carbon in dead organic matter – which may have been frozen for tens of thousands of years – begin to decay. This releases carbon dioxide and methane, also a potent greenhouse gas, exacerbating climate change.

Melting permafrost also means that the buildings, roads and other infrastructure built on this ground is at risk. The process of collapsing roads and structures is already underway in much of the Arctic. "This would also have consequences for the ecosystems. Those are going to definitely going to change.

One way they are already doing so is through the collapse of coastlines of Arctic nations. These are held fast by earth that is frozen solid, but as they melt they slough off into the oceans, affecting the availability of nutrients and populations of marine creatures there.

The gut microbes of young killifish can extend the lifespans of older fish – hinting at the microbiome’s role in aging.

It may not be the most appetizing way to extend life, but researchers have shown for the first time that older fish live longer after they consumed microbes from the poo of younger fish. The findings were posted to the bioRxiv.org preprint server on 27 March1 by Dario Valenzano, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Köln, Germany, and his colleagues.

So-called ‘young blood’ experiments that join the circulatory systems of two rats — one young and the other old — have found that factors coursing through the veins of young rodents can improve the health and longevity of older animals. But the new first-of-its-kind study examined the effects of 'transplanting' gut microbiomes on longevity.

“The paper is quite stunning. It’s very well done,” says Heinrich Jasper, a developmental biologist and geneticist at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California, who anticipates that scientists will test whether such microbiome transplants can extend lifespan in other animals.

Life is fleeting for killifish, one of the shortest-lived vertebrates on Earth: the fish hits sexual maturity at three weeks old and dies within a few months. The turquoise killifish (Nothobranchius furzeri) that Valenzano and his colleagues studied in the lab inhabits ephemeral ponds that form during rainy seasons in Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

Previous studies have hinted at a link between the microbiome and aging in a range of animals. As they age, humans2 and mice3 tend to lose some of the diversity in their microbiomes, developing a more uniform community of gut microbes, with once-rare and pathogenic species rising to dominance in older individuals4. The same pattern holds true in killifish, whose gut microbiomes at a young age are nearly as diverse as those of mice and humans, says Valenzano. “You can really tell whether a fish is young or old based on its gut microbiota.”

To test whether the changes in the microbiome had a role in ageing, Valenzano’s team ‘transplanted’ the gut microbes from 6-week-old killifish into middle-aged 9.5-week-old fish. They first treated the middle-aged fish with antibiotics to clear out their gut flora, then placed them in a sterile aquarium containing the gut contents of young fish for 12 hours. Killifish don’t usually eat faeces, Valenzano notes, but they would probe and bite at the gut contents to see whether it was food, ingesting microbes in the process. The transplanted microbes successfully recolonized the guts of the fish that received them, the team found. At 16 weeks of age, the gut microbiomes of middle-aged fish that received 'young microbes' still resembled those of 6-week-old fish.  

The young microbiome ‘transplant’ also had dramatic effects on the longevity of fish that got them: their median lifespans were 41% longer than fish exposed to microbes from middle-aged animals, and 37% longer than fish that received no treatment (antibiotics alone also lengthened lifespan, but to a lesser extent).

In the fabrication of a thermally driven rotary nanomotor with the dimension of a few nanometers, fabrication and control precision may have great influence on rotor’s stability of rotational frequency (SRF).

To investigate effects of uncertainty of some major factors including temperature, tube length, axial distance between tubes, diameter of tubes and the inward radial deviation (IRD) of atoms in stators on the frequency’s stability, theoretical analysis integrating with numerical experiments were carried out by a team of scientists. From the results obtained via molecular dynamics simulation, some key points are illustrated for future fabrication of the thermal driven rotary nanomotor.

The mechanism of the current rotary nanomotor is that the atoms on rotor have drastic thermal vibration. Due to thermal vibration of the atoms, the rotor and the IRD atoms over stators collide. The rotation of the rotor is actuated when the collision provides the rotor a stable axial torque.

Moving a liquid from point A to point B typically requires either a sloping surface or a pump of some sort to apply pressure.

A new kind of material that is in early development requires neither, instead relying on a squirming skeleton of microscopic fibers to move it in a direction, opening the way for a class of fluid capable of worming itself through a channel.

Researchers from Brandeis University in Massachusetts took a hint from nature and investigated how the biomechanical properties of materials called microtubules could be applied to a mixture to make it move in a single direction around a container. Anybody who has watched a microscopic ameba stretch out a gloopy arm to pull itself under the coverslip has seen microtubules in action.

Most complex cells, and even a few bacterial ones, contain a network of microtubule fibers collectively called a cytoskeleton, which is responsible for giving the cell its shape and transporting materials around as they twist, bend, shrink, and stretch. These fibers are made up of a string of proteins called tubulin, which spirals around on itself to form a cylinder about 25 nanometers across. In this particular case, the researchers used the microtubules found inside the nerves of a cow's brain. On their own, the mass of fibers would be about as impressive as wet cobwebs. But the researchers found they could turn a watery mixture of cow microtubules into molecular motors by adding a couple of other ingredients.

You're a complex organism. You socialize with family and friends, you solve puzzles and make choices. Humans may be some of the most cerebral animals on the planet, but we know we're not alone in having this sort of behavioral complexity. Crows use tools. Primates create incredible social structures. Whales congregate.

But all of these critters have one thing in common: they're vertebrates. Members of our subphylum share more than just a backbone; our common ancestor gifted us with the sort of structure and central nervous system that lends itself to behavioral complexity.

And then there are cephalopods. They can solve a shocking number of complex puzzles, suggesting a cognition that rivals those found in the vertebrate world—even though they last shared a common ancestor with us at least 500 million years ago. In the world of invertebrates, octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish stand apart.

We may finally have some idea why. According to a study published in Cell, these creatures have an uncanny ability to manipulate the instructions found within their DNA. An unprecedented panache for RNA editing may explain why cephalopods are so bright and adaptable.

Gobal use of groundwater is exhausting the supply so fast that researchers say it will drive up food prices and hit international trade.

China, the world’s most populous country, doubled within just 10 years its use of irreplaceable groundwater from underground reservoirs that are replenished more slowly than they are drained. And in the same decade, 2000 to 2010, global use of this non-renewable water resource for irrigation increased by a quarter, according to a new study published in Nature journal.

The research suggests that unless producers and consumers of food make changes, this trend could lead to depleted water reserves, limited availability of food imports, and higher food prices.

Groundwater – from underground supplies, as opposed to water in rivers or lakes – supplies global agriculture with 43% of its crop irrigation needs. The country exporting the most crops produced using irreplaceable groundwater is Pakistan, with 29% of global non-renewable sources embedded in trade – closely followed by the US (27%), with India (12%) in third place.

The study’s authors say excessive abstraction of groundwater for irrigation – part of the wider virtual water trade – is leading to rapid depletion of aquifers in key food-producing regions, including north-western India, the North China Plain, central US, and California. “This depletion of the largest liquid freshwater stock on Earth,” they write, “threatens the sustainability of food production, and water and food security, not only locally, but also globally via international food trade.

“Aquifer depletion can also induce significant environmental degradation, such as land subsidence and seawater intrusion.”

In another example of the way in which climate change works to intensify existing threats, the researchers say the depletion of local water reserves also risks putting large populations at serious danger during emergencies such as droughts, earthquakes or fires, when immediate access to water is needed.

Scientists capture a dramatic collision between two young stars that tore apart their stellar nursery.

Located in the constellation of Orion, the explosive event happened some 500 years ago sending giant streamers of dust and gas across interstellar space. Researchers say the clash produced as much energy as our Sun would over 10 million years. Details of the event have been published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Huge explosions in space are mostly associated with supernovas, which can take place in the dying moments of giant, ancient stars. This new image though shows an explosion taking place at the other end of the stellar lifecycle. Stars are born when a massive cloud of gas starts to collapse under its own gravity. At a distance of 1,500 light years from Earth, a number of very young stars began to form in a region called the Orion Molecular Cloud 1, (OMC-1).

Gravity pulled these proto-stars closer at increasing speed until about 500 years ago, two of them either grazed or collided head-on, triggering a powerful explosion that hurled gas and dust debris out into space at more than 150km per second.

Back in 2009, researchers first saw hints of the scale of the explosion. Now using the Atacama Large Millimeter/ submillimetre Array (Alma), based in northern Chile, astronomers have been able to see the violent event in high resolution.

Mosquitos generate lift via three mechanisms, two of them new to us.

It's unmistakable. A high-pitched whine tells you you're sharing a room with a mosquito, and you are unlikely to end the evening without some itchy welts. The sound alone is enough to make you shudder.

You're not imagining things. Within the insect world, mosquitoes have a distinctive flight, with a short wing stroke and a very high frequency of wing beats. And now, researchers have figured out the physics behind their flight. They have identified two mechanisms for generating lift that had not previously been seen in any animal. "Much of the aerodynamic force that supports [the mosquito's] weight," the authors conclude, "is generated in a manner unlike any previously described for a flying animal."

The work, done by a small team of Japanese and UK researchers, involved setting up a series of eight high-speed cameras to capture every instant of a mosquito's wing flap from multiple angles. The resulting data allowed them to create a digital model of the wings as they went through a full stroke. This was then used to solve fluid dynamics equations for the air around the wings, letting the researchers track the movement of the air as the wing beat through it.

It is the dazzling star of the biotech world: a powerful new tool that can deftly and precisely alter the structure of DNA. It promises cures for diseases, sturdier crops, malaria-resistant mosquitoes and more. Frenzy over the technique — known as CRISPR/Cas9 — is in full swing. Every week, new CRISPR findings are unfurled in scientific journals. In the courts, universities fight over patents. The media report on the breakthroughs as well as the ethics of this game changer almost daily.

But there is a less sequins-and-glitter side to CRISPR that’s just as alluring to anyone thirsty to understand the natural world. The biology behind CRISPR technology comes from a battle that has been raging for eons, out of sight and yet all around us (and on us, and in us).

The CRISPR editing tool has its origins in microbes — bacteria and archaea that live in obscene numbers everywhere from undersea vents to the snot in the human nose. For billions of years, these single-celled organisms have been at odds with the viruses — known as phages — that attack them, invaders so plentiful that a single drop of seawater can hold 10 million. And natural CRISPR systems (there are many) play a big part in this tussle. They act as gatekeepers, essentially cataloging viruses that get into cells. If a virus shows up again, the cell — and its offspring — can recognize and destroy it. Studying this system will teach biologists much about ecology, disease and the overall workings of life on Earth.

But moving from the simple, textbook story into real life is messy. In the few years since the defensive function of CRISPR systems was first appreciated, microbiologists have busied themselves collecting samples, conducting experiments and crunching reams of DNA data to try to understand what the systems do. From that has come much elegant physiology, a mass of complexity, surprises aplenty — and more than a little mystery.

Autonomy and electrification will have bigger impacts on the world than you might expect.

First, a bit of managing expectations: without regulatory incentives, America’s electric car adoption looks like it will be slow to grow, and the first wave of autonomous cars might prove to be rather underwhelming. And while automakers and technology firms are indeed racing to reboot our cars—making these technologies seemingly inevitable—they are likely to take a while to get here.

What's less certain is how they'll change the world. Benedict Evans, a partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and no stranger to tech trends analysis, has published some thoughts on what he calls second- and third-order effects of the disruption that’s going to play out on our highways. And his insights describe a future made fundamentally different by the technologies.

Consider electrification. We know that losing the internal combustion engine will be good for the planet. But, as Evans points out, a lot will change when the supporting infrastructure for gas guzzlers disappears: many repair shops will be out of a job, because most car maintenance is focused around the motor. And gas stations no longer have a purpose, so what happens to the convenience stores that they contain—and the half of America’s tobacco sales that gas stations account for?

As for self-driving cars, every company involved in the nascent industry is keen to point out that autonomous vehicles will crash less frequently than those driven by humans. But the benefits of a car that can drive itself aren't limited to moving folks from A to B: it can also go park itself somewhere usually considered too inconvenient for human passengers, ready to be beckoned when needed. That means that huge swaths of land in the hearts of cities, currently used as parking lots, could be repurposed—potentially upending the real estate market.

These are just a couple of the examples Evans provides, and there are far more to consider. He also traces out large-scale ramifications for the electricity industry, as home solar storage systems for car charging help solve the problem of peak demand; increased commute distances made possible by autonomous cars that drive faster and fender-to-fender; and huge shifts in the public transit sector as on-demand autonomous vehicles break down boundaries between cars, taxis, and buses.

But it's the combination of these outcomes that's really interesting. In an America without gas stations and inner-city parking lots, where on-demand transport rivals public transit, and car crashes are nonexistent, the urban landscape is redefined. In Europe, most cities predate cars by centuries, and were always built to be walkable. They could easily revert to type. American cities, on the other hand, have been designed around the car. That means that the way they’re used could change altogether.

Enigmatic 'dark energy', thought to make up 68% of the universe, may not exist at all, according to a Hungarian-American team. The researchers believe that standard models of the universe fail to take account of its changing structure, but that once this is accounted for, the need for dark energy disappears. The team published their results in a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

According to the separate universe conjecture, spherically symmetric sub-regions in an isotropic universe behave like mini-universes with their own cosmological parameters. This is an excellent approximation in both Newtonian and general relativistic theories. The team estimates local expansion rates for a large number of such regions, and use a scale parameter calculated from the volume-averaged increments of local scale parameters at each time step in an otherwise standard cosmological N-body simulation. The particle mass, corresponding to a coarse graining scale, is an adjustable parameter. This mean field approximation neglects tidal forces and boundary effects, but it is the first step towards a non-perturbative statistical estimation of the effect of non-linear evolution of structure on the expansion rate. Using a new algorithm, a simulation with an initial Ωm=1 Einstein--de~Sitter setting closely tracks the expansion and structure growth history of the ΛCDM cosmology. Due to small but characteristic differences, our model can be distinguished from the ΛCDM model by future precision observations. Moreover, the new model can resolve the emerging tension between local Hubble constant measurements and the Planck best-fitting cosmology. Further improvements to the simulation are necessary to investigate light propagation and confirm full consistency with cosmic microwave background observations.

As machines take over more decisions from humans, new questions about fairness, ethics, and morality arise.

With great power comes great responsibility—and artificial-intelligence technology is getting much more powerful. Companies in the vanguard of developing and deploying machine learning and AI are now starting to talk openly about ethical challenges raised by their increasingly smart creations. “We’re here at an inflection point for AI,” said Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft Research, at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference this week. “We have an ethical imperative to harness AI to protect and preserve over time.”

Horvitz spoke alongside researchers from IBM and Google pondering similar issues. One shared concern was that recent advances are leading companies to put software in positions with very direct control over humans—for example in health care. Francesca Rossi, a researcher at IBM, gave the example of a machine providing assistance or companionship to elderly people. “This robot will have to follow cultural norms that are culture-specific and task-specific,” she said. “[And] if you were to deploy in the U.S. or Japan, that behavior would have to be very different.” Such robots may still be a ways off, but ethical challenges raised by AI are already here. As businesses and governments rely more on machine-learning systems to make decisions, blind spots or biases in the technology can effectively lead to discrimination against certain types of people.

A ProPublica investigation last year, for example, found that a risk-scoring system used in some states to inform criminal sentencing was biased against blacks. Similarly, Horvitz described how an emotion-recognition service developed at Microsoft for use by businesses was initially inaccurate for small children because it was trained using a grab bag of photos that wasn’t properly curated. Maya Gupta, a researcher at Google, called for the industry to work harder on developing processes to ensure data used to train algorithms isn’t skewed. “A lot of times these data sets are being created in a somewhat automated way,” said Gupta. “We have to think more about, are we sampling enough from minority groups to be sure we did a good enough job?”

In the past year, many efforts to research the ethical challenges of machine learning and AI have sprung up in academia and industry. The University of California, Berkeley; Harvard; and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge have all started programs or institutes to work on ethics and safety in AI. In 2016, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Facebook jointly founded a nonprofit called Partnership on AI to work on the problem (Apple joined in January).

Companies are also taking individual action to build safeguards around their technology. Gupta highlighted research at Google that is testing ways to correct biased machine-learning models, or prevent them from becoming skewed in the first place. Horvitz described Microsoft’s internal ethics board for AI, dubbed AETHER, which considers things like new decision algorithms developed for the company’s in-cloud services. Although currently populated with Microsoft employees, in future the company hopes to add outside voices as well. Google has started its own AI ethics board.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the companies creating such programs generally argue they obviate the need for new forms of government regulation of artificial intelligence. But at EmTech, Horvitz also encouraged discussion of extreme outcomes that might lead some people to conclude the opposite. In February 2017 he convened a workshop where experts laid out in detail how AI might harm society by doing things like messing with the stock market or election results. “If you’re proactive, you can come up with outcomes that are feasible and put mechanisms in place to disrupt them now,” said Horvitz. That kind of talk seemed to unnerve some of those he shared the stage with in San Francisco. Gupta of Google encouraged people to also consider how taking some decisions out of the hands of humans could make the world more moral than it is now.

“Machine learning is controllable and precise and measurable with statistics,” she said. “There are so many possibilities for more fairness, and more ethical results.”

Fermilab experiment to measure muon magnetic moment more precisely might reveal unknown virtual particles.

In the search for new physics, experiments based on high-energy collisions inside massive atom smashers are coming up empty-handed. So physicists are putting their faith in more-precise methods: less crash-and-grab and more watching-ways-of-wobbling. Next month, researchers in the United States will turn on one such experiment. It will make a super-accurate measurement of the way that muons, heavy cousins of electrons, behave in a magnetic field. And it could provide evidence of the existence of entirely new particles.

The particles hunted by the new experiment, at the Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, comprise part of the virtual soup that surrounds and interacts with all forms of matter. Quantum theory says that short-lived virtual particles constantly ‘blip’ in and out of existence. Physicists already account for the effects of known virtual particles, such as photons and quarks. But the virtual soup might have mysterious, and as yet unidentified, ingredients. And muons could be particularly sensitive to them.

The new Muon g−2 experiment will measure this sensitivity with unparalleled precision. And in doing so, it will reanalyze a muon anomaly that has puzzled physicists for more than a decade. If the experiment confirms that the anomaly is real, then the most likely explanation is that it is caused by virtual particles that do not appear in the existing physics playbook — the standard model.

When cartoonist and marine-biology teacher Steve Hillenburg created SpongeBob SquarePants in 1999, he may have backed the wrong side of one of the longest-running controversies in the field of evolutionary biology.

For the last decade, zoologists have been battling over the question, “What was the oldest branch of the animal family tree?” Was it the sponges, as they had long thought, or was it a distinctly different set of creatures, the delicate marine predators called comb jellies? The answer to this question could have a major impact on scientists’ thinking about how the nervous system, digestive tract, and other basic organs in modern animals evolved.

Now, a team of evolutionary biologists from Vanderbilt University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have devised a new approach designed specifically to settle contentious phylogenetic tree-of-life issues like this. The new approach comes down squarely on the side of comb jellies.

The method and its application to this and 17 other controversial phylogenetic relationships were published online April 10 2017 by the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. The article is titled “Resolution of contentious relationships in phylogenomic studies can be driven by one or a handful of genes.”

For nearly a century, scientists organized the animal family tree based in large part on their judgement of the relative complexity of various organisms. Because of their comparative simplicity, sponges were considered to be the earliest members of the animal lineage. This paradigm began to shift when the revolution in genomics began providing vast quantities of information about the DNA of an increasing number of species. Evolutionary biologists started to apply this wealth of information to refine and redefine evolutionary relationships, creating a new field called phylogenomics. In most cases, the DNA data helped clarify these relationships. In a number of instances, however, it gave rise to controversies that intensified as more and more data accumulated.

Ardley Island’s gentoo penguin colony is one of the largest and oldest on the Antarctic Peninsula. New research examining penguin guano in the sediment of the island’s lake shows that the colony not only stretches back an impressive 7,000 years, but that it was pushed to near extinction at least three times. When volcanic eruptions blanketed the island in ash, the penguins were either killed or forced to abandon it. Each time, it took the colony 400-800 years to recover.

Gene drives, powered by Crispr, promise to wipe out mosquito-borne diseases. But first they'll have to beat nature at her own game: evolution.

Of the many great things promised by Crispr gene editing technology, the ability to eliminate disease by modifying organisms might just top the list. But doing that requires perfecting something called a gene drive. Think of gene drives as a means of supercharging evolution to, say, give an entire population of mosquitoes a gene that kills the Zika virus. The trouble is, organisms develop resistance to gene drives, much like they eventually outwit pesticides and antibiotics.

Researchers dedicate no small amount of time and thought to creating gene drives that can outsmart evolution because the potential payoffs are so great. The lowly mosquito transmits dozens of diseases that kill more than a million people every year, making it the deadliest animal in the world. Pesticides, mosquito nets, and medicine won’t solve the problem, but gene drives might—provided scientists can make them less likely to succumb to the genetic mutations that might render them useless. 

In a paper presented in Science Advances, Harvard scientists used computational models to test a means of doing just that. The resulting gene can spread to 99 percent of a population in as few as 10 generations, and persist for more than 200 generations without the mosquitoes (or any other population) developing a resistance. Although the researchers did not test their method by tinkering with real mosquitoes, their modeling creates a blueprint for anyone eager to build a more successful gene drive.

Simply put, a gene drive makes a specific gene spread through a population more rapidly than would happen through nature alone, something geneticists refer to as “super-Mendelian inheritance.” Typically, this means inserting a bit of DNA into the genome of an organism—say, Aedes aegypti, the primary transmitter of the Zika virus. When the modified, or transgenic, mosquito mates with a wild mosquito, their offspring carry one one copy of the “drive gene” directly opposite its natural counterpart. The drive gene snips out the normal gene and inserts a copy of itself, doing this over and over and over again until every mosquito carries two copies of the drive gene—and therefore, resistance to Zika. That’s the idea, anyway. But because nature is imperfect, mistakes happen. More specifically, mutations happen.

The very act of cutting out the normal gene makes the whole system more susceptible to mutations. And if enough of them add up over time and across a population, the drive gene can actually become recessive.

When we visit a friend or go to the beach, our brain stores a short-term memory of the experience in a part of the brain called the hippocampus. Those memories are later “consolidated” — that is, transferred to another part of the brain for longer-term storage.

A new MIT study of the neural circuits that underlie this process reveals, for the first time, that memories are actually formed simultaneously in the hippocampus and the long-term storage location in the brain’s cortex. However, the long-term memories remain “silent” for about two weeks before reaching a mature state.

“This and other findings in this paper provide a comprehensive circuit mechanism for consolidation of memory,” says Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience, the director of the RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, and the study’s senior author. The findings, which appear in Science on April 6, may force some revision of the dominant models of how memory consolidation occurs, the researchers say.

Scientists say they have detected an atmosphere around an Earth-like planet for the first time. They have studied a world known as GJ 1132b, which is 1.4-times the size of our planet and lies 39 light years away. Their observations suggest that the "super-Earth" is cloaked in a thick layer of gases that are either water or methane or a mixture of both. The study is published in the Astronomical Journal.

Discovering an atmosphere, and characterizing it, is an important step forward in the hunt for life beyond our Solar System. But it is highly unlikely that this world is habitable: it has a surface temperature of 370C. Dr John Southworth, the lead researcher from Keele University, said: "To my knowledge the hottest temperature that life has been able to survive on Earth is 120C and that's far cooler than this planet."

The discovery of planet GJ 1132b was first announced in 2015. It lies in the Vela constellation in the southern hemisphere. "One possibility is that it is a 'water world' with an atmosphere of hot steam." While it is a similar size to Earth, the star it orbits is much smaller, cooler and dimmer than our Sun. Using a telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, the researchers were able to study the planet by watching how it blocked some of the light of its host star as it passed in front of it. "It makes the star look a little bit fainter - and it's actually a very good way of finding transiting planets - it's how this one was found," said Dr Southworth.

But different molecules in a planet's atmosphere - if it has one - absorb light in different ways, allowing scientists to look for their chemical signatures when the world transits its star. The observations of planet GJ 1132b suggest that it has a thick atmosphere containing either steam and/or methane. "One possibility is that it is a 'water world' with an atmosphere of hot steam," said Dr Southworth."

The researchers say while it is unlikely that any life-forms could survive on this world, the discovery of an atmosphere is encouraging in the hunt for extraterrestrial life.

More than 42 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 59 are infected with genital human papillomavirus, according to the first survey to look at the prevalence of the virus in the adult population. 

The report, published on Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics, found that high-risk strains of the virus — a cause of cervical and vaginal cancers, and cancer of the penis, as well as cancers of the anus and throat in both sexes — infect 25.1 percent of men and 20.4 percent of women.

The virus is transmitted by skin to skin contact; people who are infected may pass the virus to sexual partners. “One of the most striking things that we really want people to know is that high-risk HPV is common — common in the general population — these are not people who are marginalized,” said the lead author, Geraldine McQuillan, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the lead author of the new report.

She and her colleagues also found that 7.3 percent of Americans aged 18 to 69 are infected with oral HPV, and 4 percent are infected with the high-risk strains that can cause cancers of the mouth and pharynx. There are more than a hundred strains of this virus, and 40 of them are sexually transmitted. The body usually manages to rid itself of HPV, but for unclear reasons the infection can become chronic in certain individuals.

Many of the sexually transmitted strains do not cause serious health problems, but HPV-16 and -18 are the cause of almost all cervical cancers. Even low-risk strains cause warts, including genital warts.

Increasingly, augmented and virtual reality are about more than gaming—companies are finding enterprise potential in the technology. The goal: to replace keyboards and flat displays with new paradigms for communication and collaboration, bringing a major shift in user engagement.

Mixed reality elevates the potential of AR, VR, and IoT technology by combining the best of our digital and physical realities. Instead of removing users completely from the real world, or simply layering flat content on top of our immediate view, MR adds intelligence—physics, gravity, dimension, even personality—to digital content relative to the space around us. As a result, we are able to blur the lines between what is real and what is imagined while stripping away the barriers that interfere with our ability to make decisions quickly, absorb and process critical information, visualize possible scenarios before acting, or share knowledge and tasks between individuals and groups. Science fiction no longer, the future of engagement is here, and enterprises will likely be the first to embrace it.

World-first transplant, used to treat macular degeneration, represents a major step forward in movement to create banks of ready-made stem cells.

On 28 March 2017, a Japanese man in his 60s became the first person to receive cells derived from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells donated by another person.  The surgery is expected to set the path for more applications of iPS-cell technology, which offers the versatility of embryonic stem cells without their ethical taint. Banks of iPS cells from diverse donors could make stem-cell transplants more convenient to perform, while slashing costs. iPS cells are created by removing mature cells from an individual (for example, from their skin) and reprogramming these cells back to an embryonic state. They can then be coaxed into a type of cell useful for treating a disease.

In the latest procedure, performed on a man from the Hyogo prefecture of Japan, skin cells from an anonymous donor were reprogrammed into iPS cells and then turned into a type of retinal cell, which was in turn transplanted onto the retina of the patient, who has age-related macular degeneration. Physicians hope that the cells will stop the progression of the disease, which can lead to blindness.

In September 2014 at the Kobe City Medical Center General Hospital, a Japanese woman underwent a similar procedure to receive retinal cells derived from iPS cells. But these were reprogrammed from cells taken from her own skin. Cells prepared in the same way for a second patient were found to contain genetic abnormalities, and were never implanted. Cells from macular degeneration patients, who tend to be elderly, might have also accumulated genetic defects that could increase the risk of the procedure.

The team decided to redesign the study according to new regulations, and so no more participants were recruited. This month, however, the researchers reported that the Japanese woman fared well1. The introduced cells remained intact one year after surgery, and her vision had not declined, as would usually be expected with macular degeneration.

In Tuesday's procedure — performed at the same hospital and by the same surgeon, Yasuo Kurimoto — doctors used iPS cells that had been taken from a donor’s skin cells, reprogrammed and banked. Japan’s health ministry approved the study, which plans to enroll a total of five patients, on 1 February. 

Even if you aren’t elderly, your body is home to agents of senility—frail and damaged cells that age us and promote disease. Now, researchers have developed a molecule that selectively destroys these so-called senescent cells. The compound makes old mice act and appear more youthful, providing hope that it may do the same for us.

“It’s definitely a landmark advance in the field,” says cell and molecular biologist Francis Rodier of the University of Montreal in Canada who wasn’t connected to the study. “This is the first time that somebody has shown that you can get rid of senescent cells without having any obvious side effects.”

As we get older, senescent cells build up in our tissues, where researchers think they contribute to illnesses such as heart disease, arthritis, and diabetes. In the past, scientists have genetically modified mice to dispatch their senescent cells, allowing the rodents to live longer and reducing plaque buildup in their arteries. Such genetic alterations aren’t practical for people, but researchers have reported at least seven compounds, known as senolytics, that kill senescent cells. A clinical trial is testing two of the drugs in patients with kidney disease, and other trials are in the works.

The proof-of-concept study, published March 23, 2017 in Cell, found that an anti-senescent cell therapy could reverse age-related loss of fur, poor kidney function, and frailty. It is currently being tested whether the approach also extends lifespan, and human safety studies are being planned.

The peptide took over four years of trial and error to develop and builds on nearly a decade of research investigating vulnerabilities in senescent cells as a therapeutic option to combat some aspects of aging (Trends in Molecular Medicine, 10.1016/j.molmed.2016.11.006). It works by blocking the ability of a protein implicated in senescence, FOXO4, to tell another protein, p53, not to cause the cell to self-destruct. By interfering with the FOXO4-p53 crosstalk, the peptide causes senescent cells to go through apoptosis, or cell suicide.

"Only in senescent cells does this peptide cause cell death," says senior author Peter de Keizer, a researcher of aging at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands. "We treated mice for over 10 months, giving them infusions of the peptide three times a week, and we didn't see any obvious side effects.

FOXO4 is barely expressed in non-senescent cells, so that makes the peptide interesting as the FOXO4-p53 interaction is especially relevant to senescent cells, but not normal cells."

Senescent cell therapy is one of several strategies being tested in mice aimed at reversing aging or lengthening healthspan. In 2015, the Valter Longo laboratory at the University of Southern California reported that mice on a calorie-restricted diet that mimics fasting benefited from a longer life, a reduction in inflammatory disease, and improved memory (Cell Metabolism, 10.1016/j.cmet.2015.05.012).

In December 2016, Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte at the Salk Institute of Biological Science and colleagues made headlines with their discovery that cellular reprogramming of epigenetic marks could extend lifespan and improve health in fast-aging mice (Cell, 10.1016/j.cell.2016.11.052). "This wave of research on how we can fight aging is complementary, and not in competition," says de Keizer. "The common thread I see for the future of anti-aging research is that there are three fronts in which we can improve: The prevention of cellular damage and senescence, safe therapeutic removal of senescent cells, to stimulate stem cells--no matter the strategy--to improve tissue regeneration once senescence is removed."