Amazing Science

Giuseppe Peano found in 1890 a way to draw a curve in the plane that filled the entire space: just a simple line covering completely a two dimensional plane. Its discovery meant a big earthquake in the traditional structure of mathematics. Peano’s curve was the first but not the last: one of these space-filling curves was discovered by Hilbert and takes his name. Hilbert’s curve can be created iteratively. Modern computers can create Hilbert’s curve extremely easy. It is also very easy to play with the curve, altering the order in which points are sorted. Many other Hilbert-like curves can be created.

A Tunisian company called Tyer Wind has released details of a new type of wind turbine they have developed that is based on what the company describes as 3-D Aouinian kinematics—a wind turbine designed to reap energy from the wind by mimicking the wing movements of the hummingbird. The company has named it the Biomimic Wind Converter.

Hummingbirds, company head Anis Aouini recently told the press, are the most efficient birds—they are also the only ones that can hover and fly backwards. He and his team, he reports, studied the way that hummingbirds fly and have replicated what they found, but have reversed the energy flow. Instead of keeping a robot bird aloft, the wings capture energy from the wind and transfer it to a spinning axle inside the turbinehousing that serves as the moving agent in a turbine.

The design is still in its infancy, Aouini notes, but the team has found promising results. The current test turbine is installed in a remote area with a lot of wind—its carbon fiber wings are 5.25 feet long each, flapping together in a space that occupies approximately 12 square feet. He reports it is currently capable of producing 1kW of power. The wings, like the wings of the hummingbird, move in a sweeping motion with the tips forming a figure eight, which, Aouini adds, allows for capturing energy during both upstrokes and down strokes—this also makes it easily scalable. He points out that his design has another major advantage over spinning blades—it is more natural, which he explains means it will allow the turbines to better coexist with nature. Watching the turbine in action suggests it is likely to be less noisy than current models, and possibly less of a hazard to birds.

Biologists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have identified a brain hormone that appears to trigger fat burning in the gut. Their findings in animal models could have implications for future pharmaceutical development. "This was basic science that unlocked an interesting mystery," said TSRI Assistant Professor Supriya Srinivasan, senior author of the new study, published today in the journal Nature Communications.

Previous studies had shown that the neurotransmitter serotonin can drive fat loss. Yet no one was sure exactly how. To answer that question, Srinivasan and her colleagues experimented with roundworms called C. elegans, which are often used as model organisms in biology. These worms have simpler metabolic systems than humans, but their brains produce many of the same signaling molecules, leading many researchers to believe that findings in C. elegans may be relevant for humans.

The researchers deleted genes in C. elegans to see if they could interrupt the path between brain serotonin and fat burning. By testing one gene after another, they hoped to find the gene without which fat burning wouldn't occur. This process of elimination led them to a gene that codes for a neuropeptide hormone they named FLP-7 (pronounced "flip 7").

Interestingly, they found that the mammalian version of FLP-7 (called Tachykinin) had been identified 80 years ago as a peptide that triggered muscle contractions when dribbled on pig intestines. Scientists back then believed this was a hormone that connected the brain to the gut, but no one had linked the neuropeptide to fat metabolism in the time since.

The next step in the new study was to determine if FLP-7 was directly linked to serotonin levels in the brain. Study first author Lavinia Palamiuc, a TSRI research associate, spearheaded this effort by tagging FLP-7 with a fluorescent red protein so that it could be visualized in living animals, possible because the roundworm body is transparent. Her work revealed that FLP-7 was indeed secreted from neurons in the brain in response to elevated serotonin levels.

FLP-7 then traveled through the circulatory system to start the fat burning process in the gut. "That was a big moment for us," said Srinivasan. For the first time, researchers had found a brain hormone that specifically and selectively stimulates fat metabolism, without any effect on food intake.

A construction robot has to be powerful enough to handle heavy material, small enough to enter standard buildings, and flexible enough to navigate the terrain.

But the building industry is trickier than many others. Construction sites are complex environments that are constantly changing. Any robot would have to be powerful enough to handle heavy material but light and small enough to enter standard buildings and flexible enough to navigate the terrain.

That’s a big ask, but the potential benefits are huge.

Construction robots would allow new types of complex structures to be assembled in situ rather than in distant factories and then transported to the site. That allows new types of structures to be built in place, indeed these structures could be modified in real time to allow for any unexpected changes in the environment.

So what is the state-of-the-art for construction robots? Today we get an answer thanks to the work of Markus Giftthaler at the ETH Zurich in Switzerland and a few pals who have developed a new class of robot capable of creating novel structures on a construction site. They call their new robot the In Situ Fabricator1 and today show what it is capable of.

The In Situ Fabricator1 is designed from the bottom up to be practical. It can build stuff using a range of tools with a precision of less than five millimeters, it is designed to operate semi-autonomously in a complex changing environment, it can reach the height of a standard wall, and it can fit through ordinary doorways. And it is dust- and waterproof, runs off standard electricity, and has battery backup. On top of all this, it must be Internet-connected so that an architect can make real-time changes to any plans if necessary.

Silica, the raw material used to makes glass, is so abundant on earth that nature also occasionally makes glass—for instance, during volcanic lightning. And some living creatures form their own glass, too. Sea sponges can precipitate nanoscale silica from silicic acid in seawater and use the material to build glass structures. And these aren’t just simple glass structures—they’re engineered designs.

The aptly named glass sea sponge, also called a Venus flower basket, builds glass spicules with concentric rings that are optimized for load capacity, giving these thin glass threads impressive strength that the sponges use to anchor themselves to rocks.

Other types of sponges make glass, too. Orange puffball sponges (Tethya aurantia) also extract silica from seawater to build their own version of glass spicules, called strongyloxea, which provide internal structural support to these otherwise squishy creatures.

Orange puffball sponges have evolved bundles of toothpick-shaped spicules that help the sponge maintain its shape. While a sponge skeleton may sound like a silly thing, these silica spicules are no joke—the sponges depend on their porous structures to survive, because the sponges filter food from the churning tidal seawaters that they call home.

But how can squishy sponges maintain their structural integrity with only thin filaments made of glass? The same researchers at Brown University who studied the strength of Venus flower basket silica spicules—Haneesh Kesari and Michael Monn—apparently have a penchant for less-than-creatively-named sea creatures.

The team has now taken a closer look at orange puffball spicules and found that they, too, have evolved a precisely engineered design that provides the structures with maximal strength.

The researchers’ close examination of orange puffball sponges showed that their monolithic, axially symmetric, tapered silica spicules—which are about 35 μm thick and just 2 mm long—are “remarkably uniform,” the authors write in an open-access Scientific Reports paper describing the work.

Astronomers have just made a new measurement of the Hubble constant, the rate at which the universe is expanding, and it doesn’t quite line up with a different estimate of the same number. That discrepancy could hint at “new physics” beyond the standard model of cosmology, according to the team, which includes physicists from the University of California, Davis, that made the observation. 

The Hubble constant allows astronomers to measure the scale and age of the universe and measure the distance to the most remote objects we can see, said Chris Fassnacht, a physics professor at UC Davis and a member of the international H0LiCOW (H0 Lenses in COSMOGRAIL's Wellspring) collaboration, which carried out the work.

Led by Sherry Suyu at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, the H0LICOW team used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and other space- and Earth-based telescopes, including the Keck telescopes in Hawaii, to observe three galaxies and arrive at an independent measurement of the Hubble constant. Eduard Rusu, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Davis, is first author on one of five papers describing the work, due to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“The Hubble constant is crucial for modern astronomy as it can help to confirm or refute whether our picture of the universe — composed of dark energy, dark matter and normal matter — is actually correct, or if we are missing something fundamental,” Suyu said.

Dark energy is a mysterious force that makes up about three-quarters of the universe and drives cosmic expansion. Dark matter makes up about a quarter of the universe and exerts a gravitational pull on visible, “normal” matter and light.

Getting around in dirt is not easy for bacteria. Those that can move rely on water in which to swim, but soil is full of air pockets and dry particles (boulders, no doubt, to bacteria) that block progress. New research indicates, however, that the filaments of fungi may act as highways that enable soil bacteria to move much farther, much faster than would otherwise be possible. The highway has an interesting side effect, too: it’s also a dating service.

Bacteria are by far the most numerous and diverse soil micro-inhabitants, with 100,000,000 individuals from 100,000 species in a typical gram of soil (a gram is about three-hundredths of an ounce). That same tiny gram of soil also contains several miles of fungal filaments, called hyphae (HI-fee), a fact I mentioned on Radiolab last year. Although outnumbered by bacteria, filamentous fungi outweigh them and represent up to 74% of soil microbial biomass.

Bacteria may confront rapidly changing conditions in the soil: temperature, moisture, food, and toxins can all fluctuate. Their most important tool for dealing with change is not mutations in their DNA, however, but bacterial “sex”. Bacteria don’t mate the way most animals do, by combining genomes wholesale through a union of egg and sperm. Instead, they may swap one or a handful of genes on small circles of DNA called plasmids through docking tunnels between bacteria, a process called conjugation. Few though they may be, those genes may code for proteins that confer powerful abilities like antibiotic resistance. Such exchanges are referred to in the biz as “horizontal gene transfer”, because they involve gene transfers between unrelated organisms instead of from parent to offspring.

In order for this to happen, however, the bacteria need to be close – really close. Experiments indicate bacteria must be within two micrometers of one another to tango. Achieving a two micrometer approach is not usually possible unless bacteria can swim or float to each other through water. Yet as mentioned, the soil is often riddled with air and other obstacles. What’s a microbe to do?

Fungi, it turns out, are the answer, according to a new study in Scientific Reports by a team of German scientists. Somewhat oddly, the team tested the “fungal highway” hypothesis using an organism that is not actually a fungus, but could play one on TV: an oomycete (oh-oh-MY-seat) called Pythium ultimum. Although they are not closely related to fungi, oomycetes – also called water molds -- look and act like them, caused the Irish Potato Famine, and continue to blight many crops today. For the purposes of this study, the authors evidently decided that oomycetes and fungi are functionally the same, an observation with which most plants would likely agree.

Azhdarchid pterosaurs include the largest animals to ever take to the skies with some species exceeding 10 meters in wingspan and 220 kg in mass. Associated skeletons show that azhdarchids were long-necked, long-jawed predators that combined a wing planform suited for soaring with limb adaptations indicative of quadrupedal terrestrial foraging. The postcranial proportions of the group have been regarded as uniform overall, irrespective of their overall size, notwithstanding suggestions that minor variation may have been present.

Now scientists discuss a recently discovered giant azhdarchid neck vertebra referable to Hatzegopteryx from the Maastrichtian Sebeş Formation of the Transylvanian Basin, Romania, which shows how some azhdarchids departed markedly from conventional views on their proportions. This cervical vertebra VII is 240 mm long as preserved and almost as wide. Among azhdarchid cervicals, it is remarkable for the thickness of its cortex (4–6 mm along its ventral wall) and robust proportions. By comparing its dimensions to other giant azhdarchid cervicals and to the more completely known necks of smaller taxa, the researchers argue that Hatzegopteryx had a proportionally short, stocky neck highly resistant to torsion and compression.

This specimen is one of several hinting at greater disparity within Azhdarchidae than previously considered, but is the first to demonstrate such proportional differences within giant taxa. On the assumption that other aspects of Hatzegopteryx functional anatomy were similar to those of other azhdarchids, and with reference to the absence of large terrestrial predators in the Maastrichtian of Transylvania, the team suggest that this pterosaur played a dominant predatory role among the unusual palaeofauna of ancient Haţeg.

Mountain regions of the world are under direct threat from human-induced climate change which could radically alter these fragile habitats, warn an international team of researchers - including an expert from The University of Manchester.

Ecologist Professor Richard Bardgett, who was part of the international team that initiated and designed the study, said: ”A clear message from our findings is that climate warming could change the functional properties of mountain ecosystems and potentially create a disequilibrium, or mismatch, between plants and soils in high mountain areas. “Not only could this have far reaching consequences for biogeochemical cycles but it could also affect mountain biodiversity.”

The international study, which spanned seven major mountain regions of the world, revealed that decreasing elevation – descending a mountainside to warmer levels – provided a ‘surrogate’ indicator of climate warming and consistently increased the availability of nitrogen from the soil for plant growth, meaning that future climate warming could disrupt the way that fragile mountain ecosystems function.

The researchers also found that plant phosphorus availability was not controlled by elevation in the same way – and as a result, the balance of nitrogen to phosphorus availability in plant leaves was very similar across the seven regions at high elevations, but diverged greatly across the regions at lower elevation. This means that as temperatures become warmer with climate change, the crucial balance between these nutrients that sustain plant growth could be radically altered in higher mountain areas.

They also found that increasing temperature and its consequences for plant nutrition were linked to other changes in the soil, including amounts of organic matter and the make-up of the soil microbial community. These changes were partly independent of any effect of the alpine tree line, meaning that effects of warming on ecosystem properties will occur irrespective of whatever shifts occur in the migration of trees up-slope due to higher temperatures.

The first sequencing of the whole human genome in 2003 cost roughly $2.7 billion, but DNA sequencing giant Illumina has now unveiled a new machine that the company says is “expected one day” to order up your whole genome for less than $100.

Illumina’s CEO Francis deSouza showed off the machine, called the NovaSeq, onstage at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in downtown San Francisco today, telling the crowd the machine’s scanning speed could decipher an entire human genome in less than an hour.

Let that sink in for a moment. In less than 15 years we went from what once took billions of dollars and over a decade of research to an hour’s worth of time with the promise of a blip of the cost. But the price for genome sequencing has been in continuous free fall since the beginning. In 2006, Illumina’s first machine could sequence a human genome for $300,000, and in 2014 the company announced it could do the same thing for $1,000.

The rapid reduction in costs have already helped in clinical research, but even greater speed and a lowered price point will likely be enticing to health startups with a focus on the consumer. While plenty of clinics and researchers have been able to access genetic data in cancer research and other diseases, consumer interest in genetic research has also piqued thanks to tests from startups such as 23andMe and AncestryDNA. And celebrities such as Angelina Jolie have helped spur interest in women to get genomic screenings for breast cancer, such as BRCA-1 and BRCA-2, like Color Genomics provides.

The San Diego-based Illumina plays a huge back-end role in many of these direct-to-consumer tests. If you’ve ever had your DNA sequenced (or genotyped as is the case for those using 23andMe) it’s highly likely it was done on one of Illumina’s machines.

Many of these testing services already cost a couple hundred dollars and the lowered cost and higher speed could not only give them a larger margin in profits but the ability to process faster and possibly bring in a higher load of customers. Illumina’s new machine is meant to be a lower-priced device and comes in two models — NovaSeq 5000 for $850,000 and the NovaSeq 6000 for $985,000.

Six customers have already come on board to test NovaSeq, including the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub (the life sciences arm started by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan), the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and biotech companies Regeneron and Human Longevity Inc. DeSouza also confirmed each company had put in a purchase order for the new machine.

But Illumina doesn’t have its device down to $100 a pop just yet. And it will still take some time to interpret the data. Of course, the rapid adoption of AI may help speed things up a bit there, and the mind-boggling reduction in price to get this genetic information is exciting.

The separation of uranium, a key part of the nuclear fuel cycle, could potentially be done more safely and efficiently through a new technique developed by chemistry researchers at Oregon State University.

The technique uses soap-like chemicals known as surfactants to extract uranium from an aqueous solution into a kerosene solution in the form of hollow clusters. Aside from fuel preparation, it may also find value in legacy waste treatment and for the cleanup of environmental contamination.

The research at OSU involves a unique form of uranium discovered in 2005, uranyl peroxide capsules, and how those negatively charged clusters form in alkaline conditions. Results were recently published in the European Journal of Inorganic Chemistry.

"This is a very different direction," said study lead author Harrison Neal, a graduate student in Oregon State's College of Science. "A lot of the work done now is in acid, and we're at the other end of the pH scale in base. It's a very different approach, overall using less harmful, less toxic chemicals."

Throughout the nuclear fuel cycle, many separations are required—in mining, enrichment and fuel fabrication, and then after fuel use, for the recovery of usable spent isotopes and the encapsulation and storage of unusable radioactive components.

"When you use nuclear fuel, the radioactive decay products poison the fuel and make it less effective," said May Nyman, professor of chemistry at Oregon State and corresponding author on the research. "You have to take it, dissolve it, get the good stuff out and make new fuel."

Physicists have performed a variation of the famous 200-year-old double-slit experiment that, for the first time, involves "exotic looped trajectories" of photons. These photons travel forward through one slit, then loop around and travel back through another slit, and then sometimes loop around again and travel forward through a third slit.

Interestingly, the contribution of these looped trajectories to the overall interference pattern leads to an apparent deviation from the usual form of the superposition principle. This apparent deviation can be understood as an incorrect application of the superposition principle—once the additional interference between looped and straight trajectories is accounted for, the superposition can be correctly applied.

The team of physicists, led by Omar S. Magaña-Loaiza and Israel De Leon, has published a paper on the new experiment in a recent issue of Nature Communications.

A team of researchers at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam has built, for the first time, a molecular fountain. The group has published a paper in the journal Physical Review Letters describing how they created the fountain, how it works and their ideas on how it might be used to more precisely measure physical constants.

Scientists developed atomic fountains back in the 1980s and since that time they have been applied to a myriad of applications, the most well-known example likely being the atomic clock. The purpose of an atomic fountain is to allow for measuring the characteristics of atoms moving at relatively slow speeds. The slowed speeds are due to the way the fountain works—atoms are cooled to a very low temperature and are then shot upwards where they eventually slow, stop and begin to fall due to the force of gravity. An atomic clock works by setting an atom's internal state before it is shot upwards and then noting the minute change to its internal state as it comes back down.

Scientists would like to have access to a similar fountain that works at the molecular level, because they believe it could be used to more accurately measure physical constants, which in turn could help in stringent testing of the Standard Model. Unfortunately, until now, that was not possible because of the difficulty in cooling molecules without causing them to spread out. In this new effort, the researchers have overcome that problem.

To create the molecular fountain, the researchers cooled ammonia molecules by combining two prior techniques and applying them to a molecular beam. The first involved applying voltages in a rapidly switching manner to remove energy from the beam. The second involved applying high voltage that was smoothly varied to allow for continually slowing the potential of the beam as well as its speed. Once the molecules were slowed in a trap, they were fired upward in such a way as to cause them to undergo changes in velocity and position. They were then ionized by a laser and measured by a detector disk.

The device is not yet able to offer physical constant measurements, however, because it is only able to detect a single molecule for every five repetitions of the fountain blast, which works out to less than one detection per second. This means that it will take a lot of time to gather enough information from a single fountain to make any real measurements. Fortunately, as more repetitions will produce additional data, which suggests highly precise measurements are sure to come in the near future.

A research team led by Professor YongKeun Park of the Physics Department at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has come up with a solution and developed a 3D holographic display that performs more than 2,600 times better than existing 3D holographic displays. This study is expected to improve the limited size and viewing angle of 3D images, which were a major problem of the current holographic displays. The study was published online in Nature Photonics on January 23, 2017.

3D holograms, which often appear in science fiction films, are a familiar technology to the public, but holograms in movies are created with computer graphic effects. Methods for creating true 3D holograms are still being studied in the laboratory. For example, due to the difficulty of generating real 3D images, recent virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) devices project two different two-dimensional (2D) images onto a viewer to induce optical illusions.

To create a 3D hologram that can be viewed without special equipment such as 3D glasses, the wavefront of light must be controlled using wavefront modulators such as spatial light modulators (SLMs) and deformable mirrors (DMs). A wavefront modulator is an optical manipulation device that can control the direction of light propagation.

However, the biggest limitation to using these modulators as 3D displays is the number of pixels. The large number of pixels that are packed into high-resolution displays developed in recent years are suitable for a 2D image, and the amount of information contained in those pixels cannot produce a 3D image. For this reason, a 3D image that can be made with existing wavefront modulator technology is 1 cm in size with a narrow viewing angle of 3 degrees, which is far from practicable.

As an alternative, KAIST researchers used a DM and added two successive holographic diffusers to scatter light. By scattering light in many directions, this allows for a wider viewing angle and larger image, but results in volume speckle fields, which are caused by the interference of multiple scattered light. Random volume speckle fields cannot be used to display 3D images.

To fix the problem, the researchers employed a wavefront-shaping technique to control the fields.

As a result, they succeeded in producing an enhanced 3D holographic image with a viewing angle of 35 degrees in a volume of 2 cm in length, width, and height. This yielded a performance that was about 2,600 times stronger than the original image definition generated when they used a DM without a diffuser.

Professor Park said, "Scattering light has previously been believed to interfere with the recognition of objects, but we have demonstrated that current 3D displays can be improved significantly with an increased viewing angle and image size by properly controlling the scattered light."

In hopes of getting a rare glimpse of the newly discovered third species of seadragon, researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego and the Western Australian Museum led a scientific expedition off the coast of Western Australia to find Ruby Seadragons in the wild.

After several days of searching with a mini-remotely operated vehicle in waters over 50-meters (164-feet) deep, the researchers got what they came for—the first-ever field sightings of the fish near Western Australia’s Recherche Archipelago. As they observed two Ruby Seadragons on video for nearly 30 minutes, the scientists uncovered new details about their anatomy, habitat, and behavior.

This latest discovery of the fish in the wild confirmed that Ruby Seadragons lack ornate leaf-like appendages, a feature that scientists had long considered to be distinguishing characteristics of all seadragons based upon the two known species—Common and Leafy seadragons. Both species use their leaf-like appendages as camouflage in the lush seaweed and kelp meadows where they prefer to live.

Last year, Scripps Oceanography marine biologists Josefin Stiller and Greg Rouse, and Nerida Wilson of the Western Australian Museum described the previously unknown Ruby Seadragon from preserved specimens misidentified as Common Seadragons—one of which was collected nearly one hundred years ago.

Using the preserved specimens, the researchers were able to assemble a rotating 3-D model of the new seadragon using a CT (computer tomography) scan of 5,000 X-ray slices. This is when the lack of elaborate appendages common to all other seadragons first stood out to them.

A light-speed event requires an even faster camera. A new camera setup has captured the first film of a photonic Mach cone – basically, a sonic boom with light – in real time. “Our camera is different from a common camera where you just take a snapshot and record one image: our camera works by first capturing all the images of a dynamic event into one snapshot. And then we reconstruct them, one by one,” says Jinyang Liang at Washington University in St Louis.

The technique, called “lossless-encoding compressed ultrafast photography” (LLE-CUP), captures 100 billion frames per second, allowing it to create real-time video of scattering light with a single snapshot.

Einstein’s theory of relativity forbids anything from travelling faster than the speed of light. So Liang and his colleagues used a trick to mimic a beam of light breaking its own speed limit. They shot a laser through a tunnel filled with dry ice fog, which was flanked by two silicone rubber panels. Because light travels through silicone more slowly than through fog, the laser pulse left a shock wave trailing behind it in a cone shape.

Ultrafast imaging is already used in medicine and the study of light, but it usually requires multiple snapshots, meaning that the event being recorded needs to be precisely repeatable. That’s not always possible in the real world. By capturing the whole thing in one go, the LLE-CUP system eliminates that problem, and also lets researchers analyze any extra scattering of light that would distort their image.

“The whole thing about biomedical imaging is that tissue scatters light – that’s why we’re not transparent – so that degrades information content,” says Bruce Tromberg, a professor of surgery and biomedical engineering at the University of California, Irvine. With LLE-CUP, we can separate the scattering from irrelevant tissues and isolate the light’s interactions with specific cells.

The system could be used with standard cameras, microscopes and even telescopes, Liang says. It could help detect the very small, like neurons firing or cancer cells, and the extremely large, like changes in the light within a supernova. “It’s got a very high ‘wow, this is amazing’ factor,” Tromberg says.

Distinct sets of genetic defects in a single neuronal protein can lead either to infantile epilepsy or to autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), depending on whether the respective mutations boost the protein’s function or sabotage it, according to a new study by UC San Francisco researchers.

Tracing how these particular genetic defects lead to more general changes in brain function could unlock fundamental mysteries about how events early in brain development lead to autism, the authors say.

“The genetics of neuropsychiatric disease is often complicated, but here we have a single gene in which specific mutations can cause either infantile seizures or autism in a consistent and predictable manner,” said Stephan Sanders, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of psychiatry at UCSF and member of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences who is co-senior author of the new study. “This gives us an opportunity to understand both what these disorders have in common and what makes them different.”

The findings are a first step toward understanding how different subtle changes in neural function in utero could lead to the development of either a seizure-prone brain or an autistic brain in infancy, the authors say. The study also further implicates the gene responsible for these changes — called SCN2A — as one of the genes with the strongest evidence for a causal role in driving ASDs.  

Matthew W. State, MD, PhD, the Oberndorf Family Distinguished Professor and chair of psychiatry at UCSF, first discovered the link between autism and SCN2A. According to State, who was not directly involved with the new study: “In autism research, understanding why mutations in a single gene can lead not only to ASDs, but to a wide range of other neurodevelopment disorders has emerged as a central question for the field. This new work provides critical clues that begin to unravel this mystery and could serve as a molecular ‘Rosetta Stone’ to illuminate autism pathology.”

To most people, crystals mean diamond bling, semiprecious gems or perhaps the jagged amethyst or quartz crystals beloved by collectors. To Norman Yao, these inert crystals are the tip of the iceberg. If crystals have an atomic structure that repeats in space, like the carbon lattice of a diamond, why can't crystals also have a structure that repeats in time? That is, a time crystal?

In a paper published online last week in the journal Physical Review Letters, the University of California, Berkeley assistant professor of physics describes exactly how to make and measure the properties of such a crystal, and even predicts what the various phases surrounding the time crystal should be -- akin to the liquid and gas phases of ice.

This is not mere speculation. Two groups followed Yao's blueprint and have already created the first-ever time crystals. The groups at the University of Maryland and Harvard University reported their successes, using two totally different setups, in papers posted online last year, and have submitted the results for publication. Yao is a co-author on both papers.

Time crystals repeat in time because they are kicked periodically, sort of like tapping Jell-O repeatedly to get it to jiggle, Yao said. The big breakthrough, he argues, is less that these particular crystals repeat in time than that they are the first of a large class of new materials that are intrinsically out of equilibrium, unable to settle down to the motionless equilibrium of, for example, a diamond or ruby.

"This is a new phase of matter, period, but it is also really cool because it is one of the first examples of non-equilibrium matter," Yao said. "For the last half-century, we have been exploring equilibrium matter, like metals and insulators. We are just now starting to explore a whole new landscape of non-equilibrium matter."

A need exists for artificial muscles that are silent, soft, and compliant, with performance characteristics similar to those of skeletal muscle, enabling natural interaction of assistive devices with humans. By combining one of humankind’s oldest technologies, textile processing, with electroactive polymers, scientists now demonstrate the feasibility of wearable, soft artificial muscles made by weaving and knitting, with tunable force and strain. These textile actuators were produced from cellulose yarns assembled into fabrics and coated with conducting polymers using a metal-free deposition. To increase the output force, the team assembled yarns in parallel by weaving. The force scaled linearly with the number of yarns in the woven fabric. To amplify the strain, they knitted a stretchable fabric, exhibiting a 53-fold increase in strain. In addition, the textile construction added mechanical stability to the actuators. Textile processing permits scalable and rational production of wearable artificial muscles, and enables novel ways to design assistive devices.

Berkeley scientists have discovered that electrons in vanadium dioxide can conduct electricity without conducting heat, an exotic property in an unconventional material. The characteristic could lead to applications in thermoelectrics and window coatings.

The findings, to be published in the Jan. 27 issue of the journal Science, could lead to a wide range of applications, such as thermoelectric systems that convert waste heat from engines and appliances into electricity. For most metals, the relationship between electrical and thermal conductivity is governed by the Wiedemann-Franz Law. Simply put, the law states that good conductors of electricity are also good conductors of heat. That is not the case for metallic vanadium dioxide, a material already noted for its unusual ability to switch from an insulator to a metal when it reaches a balmy 67 degrees Celsius, or 152 degrees Fahrenheit.

“This was a totally unexpected finding,” said study principal investigator Junqiao Wu, a physicist at Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and a UC Berkeley professor of materials science and engineering. “It shows a drastic breakdown of a textbook law that has been known to be robust for conventional conductors. This discovery is of fundamental importance for understanding the basic electronic behavior of novel conductors.”

In the course of studying vanadium dioxide’s properties, Wu and his research team partnered with Olivier Delaire at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and an associate professor at Duke University. Using results from simulations and X-ray scattering experiments, the researchers were able to tease out the proportion of thermal conductivity attributable to the vibration of the material’s crystal lattice, called phonons, and to the movement of electrons.

In Japan there’s now a hotel you can stay in without ever having to deal with another human being.

Henn-na Hotel is located within the Huis Ten Bosch amusement park, which recreates the Netherlands by displaying real size copies of old Dutch buildings. It’s not immediately clear what the connection between the theme park and it’s new gimmicky hotel have in common, but it will certainly help bring tourists to the park, which once declared bankruptcy in 2003. After much buzz in the media, which wasn’t hard to generate, the hotel finally opened last week and we got a peak at what this robotically ‘manned’ hotel actually looks like.

Nearly a century after it was theorized, Harvard scientists have succeeded in creating the rarest - and potentially one of the most valuable - materials on the planet.

The material - atomic metallic hydrogen - was created by Thomas D. Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences Isaac Silvera and post-doctoral fellow Ranga Dias. In addition to helping scientists answer fundamental questions about the nature of matter, the material is theorized to have a wide range of applications, including as a room-temperature superconductor. The creation of the rare material is described in a January 26 2017 paper published in Science.

"This is the holy grail of high-pressure physics," Silvera said. "It's the first-ever sample of metallic hydrogen on Earth, so when you're looking at it, you're looking at something that's never existed before."

To create it, Silvera and Dias squeezed a tiny hydrogen sample at 495 gigapascal, or more than 71.7 million pounds-per-square inch - greater than the pressure at the center of the Earth. At those extreme pressures, Silvera explained, solid molecular hydrogen -which consists of molecules on the lattice sites of the solid - breaks down, and the tightly bound molecules dissociate to transforms into atomic hydrogen, which is a metal.

While the work offers an important new window into understanding the general properties of hydrogen, it also offers tantalizing hints at potentially revolutionary new materials.

Scientists hope the chimera embryos represent key steps toward life-saving lab-grown organs.