Amazing Science

Using ultrafast imaging of moving energy in photosynthesis, scientists have determined the speed of crucial processes for the first time.

This should help scientists understand how nature has perfected the process of photosynthesis, and how this might be copied to produce fuels by artificial photosynthesis.

During photosynthesis, plants harvest light and, though a chemical process involving water and carbon dioxide, convert this into fuel for life. A vital part of this process is using the light energy to split water into oxygen and hydrogen.

It was previously thought that the process of charge separation in the reaction center was a ‘bottleneck’ in photosynthesis - the slowest step in the process - rather than the transfer of energy along the antennae.

Since the structure of Photosystem II was first determined 2001, there was some suggestion that in fact it could be the energy transfer step that was slowest, but it was not yet possible to prove experimentally.

Now, using ultrafast imaging of electronic excitations that uses small crystals of Photosystem II, scientists from Imperial College London and Johannes Kepler University (JKU) in Austria have shown that the slowest step is in fact the process through which the plants harvest light and transfer its energy through the antennae to the reaction center.

Berkeley researchers found two compact CRISPR systems, CasX and CasY, nearly doubling the potential tools like CRISPR-Cas9 for genome editing

The new systems are highly compact, befitting their presence in some of the smallest life forms on the planet. If these systems can be re-engineered like CRISPR-Cas9, their small size could make them easier to insert into cells to edit DNA, expanding the gene-editing toolbox available to researchers and physicians.

“These are particularly interesting because the key protein in these CRISPR systems is approximately the same as Cas9, but is not Cas9. It is part of a minimal system that has obvious potential for gene editing,” said Jill Banfield, a UC Berkeley professor of earth and planetary sciences and of environmental science, policy and management.

In CRISPR-Cas systems, the Cas protein is the scissors. When targeted to a specific sequence of DNA, the Cas protein binds and severs double-stranded DNA. The new discovery nearly doubles the number of simple and compact CRISPR-Cas systems potentially useful as laboratory and biomedical tools.

“The important thing here is that we found some of these CRISPR systems in a major branch of the bacterial tree, opening the door to a whole new world of microbes that are not cultured in the lab, so we don’t really know what they are and what their habits are,” said co-author Jennifer Doudna, a UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology and of chemistry and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Both Doudna and Banfield are faculty scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Scientists, including several from the University of California, Riverside, have developed a transparent, self-healing, highly stretchable conductive material that can be electrically activated to power artificial muscles and could be used to improve batteries, electronic devices, and robots.

The findings, which were published today in the journal Advanced Material, represent the first time scientists have created an ionic conductor, meaning materials that ions can flow through, that is transparent, mechanically stretchable, and self-healing.

The material has potential applications in a wide range of fields. It could give robots the ability to self-heal after mechanical failure; extend the lifetime of lithium ion batteries used in electronics and electric cars; and improve biosensors used in the medical field and environmental monitoring.

"Creating a material with all these properties has been a puzzle for years," said Chao Wang, an adjunct assistant professor of chemistry who is one of the authors of the paper. "We did that and now are just beginning to explore the applications."

This project brings together the research areas of self-healing materials and ionic conductors.

Inspired by wound healing in nature, self-healing materials repair damage caused by wear and extend the lifetime, and lower the cost, of materials and devices. Wang developed an interest in self-healing materials because of his lifelong love of Wolverine, the comic book character who has the ability to self-heal.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen 3D printing prove itself an invaluable resource for engineers. It’s helped us build prosthetics, instruments, drones and a mini jet engine that can blast at 33,000 RPM. But in the hands of creatives, the hackable tech has done something else entirely: allowed them to make unbelievable art. For University of Chicago assistant professor Dr. Allan Drummond, that art comes in the form of resurrecting ancient beasts.

A biochemistry and human genetics researcher, Drummond studies everything from how cells adapt, to the multi-million-year evolution of the species we share our planet with. It’s no surprise then, that he took a particular interest in trilobites. The extinct arthropods cruised the world’s oceans for some 270 million years – with over 17,000 known species, they are the most diverse group of animals preserved in the fossil record.

“We find their shells fossilized everywhere,” explains Drummond. “They’re museum staples – but we rarely see what they really looked like, with all of their soft tissues (legs, antennae, gills) intact.”

Determined to print a trilobite in all its glory, Drummond turned to the literature and online forums for guidance. “The first step was to look at as many trilobites as possible and choose one,” he recalls. “I’ve always loved these fossils, but the moment they turned from fossils, into living organisms for me, was when I saw the new generation of preparations displayed at Chicago’s Field Museum. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. In my mind, trilobites were flat, if beautiful, primitive creatures. Seeing those preparations made it clear how not-flat and not-primitive they were.”

In order to narrow down the options, Drummond eliminated any trilobite groups with delicate spines – which many of them had – that would easily break, as well as any that were too simple to print with extensive detail. He settled on Ceraurus, a genus that roamed the Earth in the middle to upper Ordovician, 470-445 million years ago.

“Ceraurus is ideal,” he says. “They have long yet substantial genal [head segement] and pygidial [tail segment] spines, complex thoracic armor, gorgeous curves, unmistakable trilobite form. Enough detail to warrant 3D printing, enough structural solidity to survive it.”

The renewable energy future will arrive when installing a new solar panels is cheaper than a comparable investment in coal, natural gas or other options. If you ask the World Economic Forum (WEF), the day has arrived.

Solar and wind is now the same price or cheaper than fossil fuels in more than 30 countries, the WEF reported in December (pdf). As prices for solar and wind power continue their precipitous fall, two-thirds of all nations will reach the point known as “grid parity” within a few years, even without subsidies. “Renewable energy has reached a tipping point,” Michael Drexler, who leads infrastructure and development investing at the WEF, said in a statement. “It is not only a commercially viable option, but an outright compelling investment opportunity with long-term, stable, inflation-protected returns.”

Those numbers are already translating into vast new acres of silicon and glass. In 2016, utilities added 9.5 gigawatts (GW) of photovoltaic capacity to the US grid, making solar the top fuel source for the first time in a calendar year, according to the US Energy Information Administration’s estimates. The US added about 125 solar panels every minute in 2016, about double the pace last year, reports the Solar Energy Industry Association.

Terrestrial mammals are experiencing a massive collapse in their population sizes and geographical ranges around the world, but many of the drivers, patterns and consequences of this decline remain poorly understood. A group of scientists now provide an analysis showing that bushmeat hunting for mostly food and medicinal products is driving a global crisis whereby 301 terrestrial mammal species are threatened with extinction. Nearly all of these threatened species occur in developing countries where major coexisting threats include deforestation, agricultural expansion, human encroachment and competition with livestock. The unrelenting decline of mammals suggests many vital ecological and socio-economic services that these species provide will be lost, potentially changing ecosystems irrevocably.

The researchers discuss options and current obstacles to achieving effective conservation, alongside consequences of failure to stem such anthropogenic mammalian extirpation. At the end, they propose a multi-pronged conservation strategy to help save threatened mammals from immediate extinction and avoid a collapse of food security for hundreds of millions of people.

An underwater robot has captured a rare glimpse beneath the Antarctic sea ice, revealing a colourful world filled with coconut-shaped sponges, dandelion-like worms, pink algae and spidery starfish.

The Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) took footage on a camera attached to a Remotely Operated Vehicle sent down by scientists through a small hole drilled in the ice as they recorded the acidity, oxygen, salinity and temperature of the seawater.

"When you think of the Antarctic coastal marine environment, the iconic species such as penguins, seals and whales usually steal the show," AAD biologist Glenn Johnstone explained.

"This footage reveals a habitat that is productive, colorful, dynamic and full of a wide variety of biodiversity, including sponges, sea spiders, urchins, sea cucumbers and sea stars."

These species, recorded near Australia's Casey research station, live in water that is -1.5 degrees Celsius (29.3 degrees Fahrenheit) year round and covered in 1.5 meters (nearly five feet) of sea ice for 10 months of the year.

"Occasionally an iceberg may move around and wipe out an unlucky community, but mostly the sea ice provides protection from the storms that rage above, making it a relatively stable environment in which biodiversity can flourish," he said.

Populations that clone themselves are entirely female and do not need sex to reproduce. As sex requires males, and males do not produce offspring themselves, an entirely clonal population should always reproduce faster than a sexual one.

Yet while some animal and plant species can reproduce without sex, such as komodo dragons, starfish and bananas, sex is still the dominant mode of reproduction in the natural world.

Scientists know that sex allows genes to mix, allowing populations to quickly evolve and adapt to changing environments, including rapidly evolving parasites.

However, for sex to beat cloning as a reproduction strategy, there must be large-scale benefits that make a difference to the next generation. The theory has been difficulty to test as most organisms are either wholly sexual or clonal so cannot be compared easily.

A team of experts from the University of Stirling have taken an innovative approach to test the costs and benefits of sex. Using an organism that can reproduce both ways, the waterflea, researchers found sexually produced offspring were more than twice as resistant to infectious disease as their clonal sisters.

Dr Stuart Auld of the Faculty of Natural Sciences, said: "One of the oldest questions in evolutionary biology is, why does sex exist when it uses up so much time and energy?

"Sex explains the presence of the peacock's tail, the stag's antlers and the male bird of paradise's elaborate dance. But if a female of any of these species produced offspring on her own, without sex, her offspring should come to dominate, while the other females watch the redundant males fighting and dancing. So, why are we not surrounded by clonal organisms?

"By comparing clonal and sexual daughters from the same mothers, we found sexually produced offspring get less sick than offspring that were produced clonally. The ever-present need to evade disease can explain why sex persists in the natural world in spite of the costs."

The waterfleas and their parasites were collected from the wild. Sexual and clonally produced daughters were harvested from the wild waterfleas and these offspring were exposed to the parasites under controlled laboratory conditions.

New research finds that the world's truly roadless areas are mostly quite small and unlikely to be protected.

Scientists Thursday provided a global quantification of one of the most pervasive, but least recognized, ways that humans are marring the coherence of the natural world — by building endless numbers of roads.

Roads fragment natural habitats, and the more of them there are, the smaller and more compromised those habitats become. At the same time, roads give humans access to remote, once pristine regions, where they can begin logging, mining, accidentally (or intentionally) starting fires and much else.

In the Amazon rain forest, for instance, the fragmentation of the landscape that occurs because of deforestation — to which roads also contribute — upends the entire nature of the ecosystem. Once sunlight can penetrate into the rain forest from a cleared area to its side, rather than being mostly blocked out by the lush canopy from above, the forest floor dries out, the forest itself heats up, trees collapse more easily, there isn’t enough range for many key species, and on and on.

The new study, published in the journal Science by a team of 10 conservation scientists at institutions in Germany, Greece, Poland, the United Kingdom, Brazil and the United States, used an open-source, citizen science database of global roads. The researchers then combined this with an assessment from the research literature of the size of areas alongside roads that are compromised ecologically by them. This allowed them to count up the world’s remaining truly untrammeled areas and assess their number and size.

A new study found with 99 percent certainty that climate change is driving glaciers' retreat, and the likelihood of any other factor being responsible is 1 in 100,000.

Researchers from the University of Amsterdam's (UvA) GRAPPA Center of Excellence have just published the most precise analysis of the fluctuations in the gamma-ray background to date. By making use of more than six years of data gathered by the Fermi Large Area Telescope, the researchers found two different source classes contributing to the gamma-ray background. No traces of a contribution of dark matter particles were found in the analysis. The collaborative study was performed by an international group of researchers and is published in the latest edition of the journal Physical Review D.

Salk Institute scientists have extended the average lifespan of live mice by 30 percent, according to a study published December 15, 2016 in Cell. They did that by rolling back the “aging clock” to younger years, using cellular reprogramming.

The finding suggests that aging is reversible by winding back an animal’s biological clock to a more youthful state and that lifespan can be extended. While the research does not yet apply directly to humans, it promises to lead to improved understanding of human aging and the possibility of rejuvenating human tissues.

To achieve this, the scientists worked with “progeria” mouse models — mice that had been genetically modified to carry a mutation that leads to premature aging, allowing the aging effects to be isolated and studied. Rather than attempting to correct the genetic mutations that cause premature aging (a difficult challenge), the Salk team instead focused on restoring the epigenome.

Secondary use of electronic health records (EHRs) promises to advance clinical research and better inform clinical decision making.

Challenges in summarizing and representing patient data prevent widespread practice of predictive modeling using EHRs. Here data scientists present a novel unsupervised deep feature learning method to derive a general-purpose patient representation from EHR data that facilitates clinical predictive modeling. In particular, a three-layer stack of denoising autoencoders was used to capture hierarchical regularities and dependencies in the aggregated EHRs of about 700,000 patients from the Mount Sinai data warehouse. The result is a representation named “deep patient”. The team evaluated this representation as broadly predictive of health states by assessing the probability of patients to develop various diseases. They performed evaluation using 76,214 test patients comprising 78 diseases from diverse clinical domains and temporal windows. The results significantly outperformed those achieved using representations based on raw EHR data and alternative feature learning strategies. Prediction performance for severe diabetes, schizophrenia, and various cancers were among the top performing.

These findings indicate that deep learning applied to EHRs can derive patient representations that offer improved clinical predictions, and could provide a machine learning framework for augmenting clinical decision systems.

Clinical trial failure rates for small molecules in oncology exceed 94% for molecules previously tested in animals and the costs to bring a new drug to market exceed $2.5 billion. Advances in deep learning demonstrated superhuman accuracy in many areas and are expected to transform industries. Here for the first time we demonstrate the application of Generative Adversarial Autoencoders (AAEs), a new type of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), for generation of molecular fingerprints of molecules that kill cancer cells at specific concentrations.

Scientists at the Pharmaceutical Artificial Intelligence (pharma.AI) group of Insilico Medicine, Inc, today announced the publication of a seminal paper demonstrating the application of generative adversarial autoencoders (AAEs) to generating new molecular fingerprints on demand. The study was published in Oncotarget on 22nd of December, 2016. The study represents the proof of concept for applying Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to drug discovery. The authors significantly extended this model to generate new leads according to multiple requested characteristics and plan to launch a comprehensive GAN-based drug discovery engine producing promising therapeutic treatments to significantly accelerate pharmaceutical R&D and improve the success rates in clinical trials.

Since 2010 deep learning systems demonstrated unprecedented results in image, voice and text recognition, in many cases surpassing human accuracy and enabling autonomous driving, automated creation of pleasant art and even composition of pleasant music.

GAN is a fresh direction in deep learning invented by Ian Goodfellow in 2014. In recent years GANs produced extraordinary results in generating meaningful images according to the desired descriptions. Similar principles can be applied to drug discovery and biomarker development. This paper represents a proof of concept of an artificially-intelligent drug discovery engine, where AAEs are used to generate new molecular fingerprints with the desired molecular properties.

"At Insilico Medicine we want to be the supplier of meaningful, high-value drug leads in many disease areas with high probability of passing the Phase I/II clinical trials. While this publication is a proof of concept and only generates the molecular fingerprints with the very basic molecular properties, internally we can now generate entire molecular structures according to a large number of parameters.

These structures can be fed into our multi-modal drug discovery pipeline, which predicts therapeutic class, efficacy, side effects and many other parameters. Imagine an intelligent system, which one can instruct to produce a set of molecules with specified properties that kill certain cancer cells at a specified dose in a specific subset of the patient population, then predict the age-adjusted and specific biomarker-adjusted efficacy, predict the adverse effects and evaluate the probability of passing the human clinical trials. This is our big vision", said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, CEO of Insilico Medicine, Inc.

Previously, Insilico Medicine demonstrated the predictive power of its discovery systems in the nutraceutical industry. In 2017 Life Extension will launch a range of natural products developed using Insilico Medicine's discovery pipelines. Earlier this year the pharmaceutical artificial intelligence division of Insilico Medicine published several seminal proof of concept papers demonstrating the applications of deep learning to drug discovery, biomarker development and aging research.

Recently the authors published a tool in Nature Communications, which is used for dimensionality reduction in transcriptomic data for training deep neural networks (DNNs). The paper published in Molecular Pharmaceutics demonstrating the applications of deep neural networks for predicting the therapeutic class of the molecule using the transcriptional response data received the American Chemical Society Editors' Choice Award. Another paper demonstrating the ability to predict the chronological age of the patient using a simple blood test, published in Aging, became the second most popular paper in the journal's history.

Scientists at Stanford University and the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have discovered a way to use diamondoids - the smallest possible bits of diamond - to assemble atoms into the thinnest possible electrical wires, just three atoms wide.

By grabbing various types of atoms and putting them together LEGO-style, the new technique could potentially be used to build tiny wires for a wide range of applications, including fabrics that generate electricity, optoelectronic devices that employ both electricity and light, and superconducting materials that conduct electricity without any loss. The scientists reported their results today in Nature Materials.

"What we have shown here is that we can make tiny, conductive wires of the smallest possible size that essentially assemble themselves," said Hao Yan, a Stanford postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the paper. "The process is a simple, one-pot synthesis. You dump the ingredients together and you can get results in half an hour. It's almost as if the diamondoids know where they want to go."

Although there are other ways to get materials to self-assemble, this is the first one shown to make a nanowire with a solid, crystalline core that has good electronic properties, said study co-author Nicholas Melosh, an associate professor at SLAC and Stanford and investigator with SIMES, the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences at SLAC.

The needle-like wires have a semiconducting core - a combination of copper and sulfur known as a chalcogenide - surrounded by the attached diamondoids, which form an insulating shell.

Brazilian researchers have devised a way to immerse parents in virtual reality visualizations of their unborn babies, though the most vivid visuals will likely be reserved for a tiny fraction of pregnancies in which doctors suspect health problems. The technology has been tested in about 30 pregnancies at a Rio de Janeiro clinic but has not yet been peer-reviewed; it will be presented next week at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

The technology could inform fetal medical care — and it has commercial potential as a novelty for expectant parents.

But it may be an expensive novelty indeed. And it’s not clear how many parents would pay for a virtual reality slide down their fetus’s esophagus — or how useful that would be for doctors making medical decisions.

The Brazilian technology draws on two types of medical imaging data, traditional ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI. Software splices images from the scans and turns them into three-dimensional models, which are then transformed into virtual reality environments. They’re a step beyond the 3-D and 4-D ultrasounds that have become increasingly popular among expectant parents with the means to buy a fancy scan for a souvenir.

Scientists from the Bishop Museum, NOAA, and the Association for Marine Exploration published the description of a new species of coral-reef fish that they named in honor of President Barack Obama. The fish, which now bears the formal scientific name Tosanoides obama, was discovered during a June 2016 NOAA expedition to Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in the remote Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. The study is published in the open-access scientific journal ZooKeys.

"We decided to name this fish after President Obama to recognize his efforts to protect and preserve the natural environment, including the expansion of Papahānaumokuākea," said Richard Pyle, Bishop Museum scientist and lead author of the study. "This expansion adds a layer of protection to one of the last great wilderness areas on Earth." The Museum is currently showcasing the exhibit Journeys: Heritage of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, featuring the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and the Monument.

On August 26, 2016, at the urging of Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), conservationists, and many marine scientists, President Obama expanded Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument. At 582,578 square miles, it is the largest permanent marine protected area on Earth. On September 1, during his trip to Midway Atoll within the Monument, legendary scientist, conservationist and deep ocean explorer Dr. Sylvia Earle gave the President a photograph of the fish that now bears his name. The exchange will be featured in the National Geographic global broadcast special, "Sea Of Hope" scheduled to be released on January 15, 2017.

A new luminous high-redshift quasar has been detected by one of the telescopes of the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS).

Quasars are supermassive black holes with accretion disks in the center of a galaxy. Their redshifts are measured from the strong spectral lines that dominate their visible and ultraviolet spectra. These lines are brighter than the continuous spectrum, so they are called 'emission' lines. All observed quasar spectra have redshifts between 0.056 and 7.085.

Quasars with high redshifts (over 6.0) are of special interest for astronomers because their ultraviolet light is absorbed by the neutral hydrogen along the line of sight; thus, they can be used to probe the intergalactic medium in the early universe. They are the most luminous and most distant, compact objects in the observable universe. Their spectrum can be used to estimate the mass of a supermassive black hole, which constrains the evolution and formation model of a quasar. Therefore, high-redshift quasars could serve as a powerful tool to probe the early universe.

Recently, a team of researchers led by Ji-Jia Tang of the National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan, has searched for such quasars using the first Pan-STARRS telescope (PS1) located in Hawaii. In particular, they tried to find red-color objects between two adjacent broad bands caused by the strong intergalactic medium absorption on the blue side of the redshifted Lyman-alpha line emission.

They detected a new luminous high-redshift quasar at redshift of 6.61. The discovery was later confirmed by the team during a follow-up observation campaign carried out with the Subaru Faint Object Camera and Spectrograph (FOCAS) mounted on the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii.

According to the paper, PSO J006.1240+39.2219, besides being the seventh highest redshift quasar known to date, is also one of nine quasars above the redshift of 6.5.

Young stars are associated with prominent outflows of molecular gas1, 2. The ejection of gas is believed to remove angular momentum from the protostellar system, permitting young stars to grow by the accretion of material from the protostellar disk. The underlying mechanism for outflow ejection is not yet understood, but is believed to be closely linked to the protostellar disk. Various models have been proposed to explain the outflows, differing mainly in the region where acceleration of material takes place: close to the protostar itself (‘X-wind’4, 5, or stellar wind6), in a larger region throughout the protostellar disk (disk wind7, 8, 9), or at the interface between the two10. Outflow launching regions have so far been probed only by indirect extrapolation11, 12, 13 because of observational limits.

Scientists now report resolved images of carbon monoxide towards the outflow associated with the TMC1A protostellar system. These data show that gas is ejected from a region extending up to a radial distance of 25 astronomical units from the central protostar, and that angular momentum is removed from an extended region of the disk. This demonstrates that the outflowing gas is launched by an extended disk wind from a Keplerian disk.

New research led by the University of Southampton shows Neanderthals kept coming back to a coastal cave site in Jersey from at least 180,000 years ago until around 40,000 years ago.

As part of a re-examination of La Cotte de St Brelade and its surrounding landscape, archaeologists from Southampton, together with experts from two other universities and the British Museum, have taken a fresh look at artefacts and mammoth bones originally excavated from within the site’s granite cliffs in the 1970s. Their findings are published in the journal Antiquity.

The researchers matched types of stone raw material used to make tools to detailed mapping of the geology of the sea bed, and studied in detail how they were made, carried and modified. This helped reconstruct a picture of what resources were available to Neanderthals over tens of thousands of years – and where they were travelling from.

Lead author Dr Andy Shaw of the Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins (CAHO) at the University of Southampton said: “La Cotte seems to have been a special place for Neanderthals. They kept making deliberate journeys to reach the site over many, many generations. We can use the stone tools they left behind to map how they were moving through landscapes, which are now beneath the English Channel. 180,000 years ago, as ice caps expanded and temperatures plummeted, they would have been exploiting a huge offshore area, inaccessible to us today.”

Water ice exists on the surface of Ceres, new observations have confirmed. The water ice is harbored in regions on the surface of this massive asteroid that are permanently cloaked in shadow.

Just like the moon and Mercury, the largest asteroid in Earth's solar system, Ceres, has cold pockets of perpetual darkness on its surface where researchers have now detected ice, a new study finds. It remains a mystery, however, why only small amounts of ice were detected in these shadowy crater floors, the authors of the new research say.

With a diameter of about 585 miles (940 kilometers), Ceres is referred to as both an asteroid and a dwarf planet. It is the dwarf planet closest to Earth and the largest member of the solar system's main asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter. Water is not entirely uncommon on Ceres — previous observations revealed plumes of water vapor erupting from Ceres, exposed water ice has been seen at mid-latitudes (although only in a rare instances), and the dwarf planet's surface material is a mixture of rock and ice; additional research has suggested that Ceres possesses a substantial amount of ice under its surface.

A team of UCLA researchers has developed an automated diagnostic test reader for antimicrobial resistance using a smartphone. The technology could lead to routine testing for antimicrobial susceptibility in areas with limited resources.

Antimicrobial-resistant bacteria are posing a severe threat to global public health. In particular, they are becoming more common in bacterial pathogens responsible for high-mortality diseases such as pneumonia, diarrhea and sepsis.

Part of the challenge in combatting the spread of these organisms has been the limited ability to conduct antimicrobial susceptibility testing in regions that do not have access to labs, testing equipment and trained diagnostic technicians to read such tests.

The UCLA researchers have developed a simple and inexpensive smartphone attachment that can conduct automated antimicrobial susceptibility testing. The research results were published in the journal Scientific Reports, part of the Nature Publishing Group.

"This work is extremely important and timely, given that drug-resistant bacteria are increasingly becoming a global threat rendering many of our first-line antibiotics ineffective," said Aydogan Ozcan, Chancellor's Professor of Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. "Our new smartphone-based technology can help put laboratory-quality testing into much wider adoption, especially in resource-limited regions."

2016 may have been a difficult year for many reasons, but at WIRED we want to celebrate the great things that happened too. Alongside the 16 positive things that happened this year, we bring you the incredible scientific breakthroughs that have changed the future of research and development.

1. Cloning does not cause long-term health issues, study finds
2. Using virtual reality and brain training to help paraplegics walk
3. Huge underground helium reserve discovered in Tanzania
4. First human CRISPR gene-editing trial gets early approval
5. Most distant signs of oxygen in the Universe detected
6. Algorithm that can predict when a tsunami will strike
7. Nasa’s Kepler telescope finds 1,284 exoplanets
8. Robot carries out first autonomous soft tissue surgery
9. AI used to ‘rewrite’ painful memories in people’s brains
10. Fish ‘chat’ to each other and may have ‘regional accents’
11. New blood test hunts down the earliest traces of cancer
12. ‘Heart on a chip’ could finally spell end for animal testing
13. How naked mole rats have evolved to feel no pain
14. Are we be on the brink of a ‘universal’ flu vaccine?
15. Octobot – the first entirely, soft autonomous robot
16. Zika vaccine a step closer after scientists ‘neutralize’ the virus during pregnancy