Amazing Science

Humans have changed the world's oceans in ways that have been devastating to many marine species. But, according to new evidence, it appears that the change has so far been good for cephalopods, the group including octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid. The study reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on May 23 shows that cephalopods' numbers have increased significantly over the last six decades.

"The consistency was the biggest surprise," says Zoë Doubleday of Australia's Environment Institute at the University of Adelaide. "Cephalopods are notoriously variable, and population abundance can fluctuate wildly, both within and among species. The fact that we observed consistent, long-term increases in three diverse groups of cephalopods, which inhabit everything from rock pools to open oceans, is remarkable."

According to the researchers, there has been growing speculation that cephalopod populations were proliferating in response to a changing environment, based partly on trends in cephalopod fisheries. Cephalopods are known for rapid growth, short lifespans, and extra-sensitive physiologies, which may allow them to adapt more quickly than many other marine species.

To investigate long-term trends in cephalopod abundance, Doubleday and her colleagues assembled global time series of cephalopod catch rates (catch per unit of fishing or sampling effort) from 1953 to 2013. The study included 35 cephalopod species or genera representing six families. The data show that cephalopods, of many different types living all over the world, are on the rise.

The ecological and socio-economic ramifications associated with this increase in cephalopods are much less clear and are likely to be complex, according to the researchers.

MS is a neurodegenerative disease in which the immune system attacks the myelin that protects nerve fibers, upsetting the flow of information between the brain and the body. It affects about 2 million people worldwide, and in its more severe, progressive form, no good treatments are available.

About 10% to 15% of MS cases appear to have a hereditary component, but until now researchers conducting genetic studies have found only weak associations between the risk of developing MS and particular gene variants. In contrast, people who carry the newly discovered mutation have a 70% chance of developing the disease, the team determined.

In the current study, the investigators reviewed materials from the Canadian Collaborative Project on Genetic Susceptibility to MS, a large database that contains genetic material from almost 2,000 families across Canada. They looked at a family that had multiple cases of the disease--five cases over two generations--and did exome sequencing to look for rare coding mutations that were present in all family members who had the disease.

After identifying a gene of interest, they went back to the database and found the same mutation in another family with multiple cases of MS. Interestingly, all patients in these families with the mutation presented with the progressive form of MS. "The mutation we found, in a gene called NR1H3, is a missense mutation that causes loss of function of its gene product, LXRA protein," says neuroscientist Weihong Song, Canada Research Chair in Alzheimer's Disease at UBC and the study's other senior author. Together with other members of the same family, LXRA controls transcriptional regulation of genes involved in lipid homeostasis, inflammation, and innate immunity.

Mice with this gene knocked out are known to have neurological problems, including a decrease in myelin production. "There is clear evidence to support that this mutation has consequences in terms of biological function, and the defective LXRA protein leads to familial MS development," Song says.

"One thing that's important to note is that although this mutation is present in only about 1 in 1,000 people with MS, by doing association analysis we've also found common variants in the same gene that are risk factors for progressive MS," Vilariño-Güell adds. "So even if patients don't have the rare mutation, treatments that target this pathway would likely be able to help them."

Lymphoid organs, in which antigen presenting cells (APCs) are in close proximity to T cells, are the ideal microenvironment for efficient priming and amplification of T-cell responses. However, the systemic delivery of vaccine antigens into dendritic cells (DCs) is hampered by various technical challenges. Here we show that DCs can be targeted precisely and effectively in vivo using intravenously administered RNA-lipoplexes (RNA-LPX) based on well-known lipid carriers by optimally adjusting net charge, without the need for functionalization of particles with molecular ligands. The LPX protects RNA from extracellular ribonucleases and mediates its efficient uptake and expression of the encoded antigen by DC populations and macrophages in various lymphoid compartments. RNA-LPX triggers interferon-α (IFNα) release by plasmacytoid DCs and macrophages.

Consequently, DC maturation in situ and inflammatory immune mechanisms reminiscent of those in the early systemic phase of viral infection are activated. We show that RNA-LPX encoding viral or mutant neo-antigens or endogenous self-antigens induce strong effector and memory T-cell responses, and mediate potent IFNα-dependent rejection of progressive tumous. A phase I dose-escalation trial testing RNA-LPX that encode shared tumor antigens is ongoing. In the first three melanoma patients treated at a low-dose level, IFNα and strong antigen-specific T-cell responses were induced, supporting the identified mode of action and potency. As any polypeptide-based antigen can be encoded as RNA, RNA-LPX represent a universally applicable vaccine class for systemic DC targeting and synchronized induction of both highly potent adaptive as well as type-I-IFN-mediated innate immune mechanisms for cancer immunotherapy.

An artificial nervous system could help robots avoid damaging interactions.

One of the most useful things about robots is that they don’t feel pain. Because of this, we have no problem putting them to work in dangerous environments or having them perform tasks that range between slightly unpleasant and definitely fatal to a human. And yet, a pair of German researchers believes that, in some cases, feeling and reacting to pain might be a good capability for robots to have.

The researchers, from Leibniz University of Hannover, are developing an “artificial robot nervous system to teach robots how to feel pain” and quickly respond in order to avoid potential damage to their motors, gears, and electronics. They described the project last week at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Stockholm, Sweden, and we were there to ask them what in the name of Asimov they were thinking when they came up with this concept.

Why is it a good idea for robots to feel pain? The same reason why it’s a good idea for humans to feel pain, said Johannes Kuehn, one of the researchers. “Pain is a system that protects us,” he told us. “When we evade from the source of pain, it helps us not get hurt.” Humans that don’t have the ability to feel pain get injured far more often, because their bodies don’t instinctively react to things that hurt them.

Kuehn, who worked on the project with Professor Sami Haddadin, one of the world’s foremost experts in physical human-robot interaction and safety, argues that by protecting robots from damage, their system will be protecting humans as well. That’s because a growing number of robots will be operating in close proximity to human workers, and undetected damages in robotic equipment can lead to accidents. Kuehn and Haddadin reasoned that, if our biological mechanisms to sense and respond to pain are so effective, why not devise a bio-inspired robot controller that mimics those mechanisms? Such a controller would reflexively react to protect the robot from potentially damaging interactions. 

Researchers at Tufts University have stabilized blood samples for long periods of time without refrigeration and at high temperatures by encapsulating them in air-dried silk protein.  The technique, which is published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has broad applications for clinical care and research that rely on accurate analysis of blood and other biofluids.

Blood contains proteins, enzymes, lipids, metabolites, and peptides that serve as biomarkers for health screening, monitoring and diagnostics. Both research and clinical care often require blood to be collected outside a laboratory.  However, unless stored at controlled temperatures, these biomarkers rapidly deteriorate, jeopardizing the accuracy of subsequent laboratory analysis. Existing alternative collection and storage solutions, such as drying blood on paper cards, still fail to effectively protect biomarkers from heat and humidity.

The Tufts scientists successfully mixed a solution or a powder of purified silk fibroin protein extracted from silkworm cocoons with blood or plasma and air-dried the mixture. The air-dried silk films were stored at temperatures between 22 and 45 degrees C (71.6 to 113 degrees F).   At set intervals, encapsulated blood samples were recovered by dissolving the films in water and analyzed.

"This approach should facilitate outpatient blood collection for disease screening and monitoring, particularly for underserved populations, and also serve needs of researchers and clinicians without access to centralized testing facilities. For example, this could support large-scale epidemiological studies or remote pharmacological trials," said senior and corresponding author David L. Kaplan, Ph.D., Stern Family Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts School of Engineering.  

 "We found that biomarkers could be successfully analyzed even after storage for 84 days at temperatures up to 113 degrees F. Encapsulation of samples in silk provided better protection than the traditional approach of drying on paper, especially at these elevated temperatures which a shipment might encounter during overseas or summer transport," said the paper’s co-first author Jonathan A. Kluge, who earned both his Ph.D. and B.S. from Tufts School of Engineering and was a postdoctoral associate in the Kaplan lab when the research was done.  

The paper noted that the silk-based technique requires accurate starting volumes of the blood or other specimens to be known, and salts or other buffers are needed to reconstitute samples for accurate testing of certain markers. 

Kaplan, whose specialty is biopolymer engineering, has studied the unique properties and applications of silk for more than 20 years. He and his collaborators have successfully demonstrated silk’s ability to stabilize a variety of bioactive materials including antibiotics, vaccines, enzymes and monoclonal antibiotics with numerous biomedical and biomaterial applications. He also holds Tufts faculty appointments in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, School of Medicine, School of Dental Medicine and Department of Chemistry in the School of Arts and Sciences.

All publicly funded scientific papers published in Europe could be made free to access by 2020, under a “life-changing” reform ordered by the European Union’s science chief, Carlos Moedas. The Competitiveness Council, a gathering of ministers of science, innovation, trade and industry, agreed on the target following a two-day meeting in Brussels last week.

The move means publications of the results of research supported by public and public-private funds would be freely available to and reusable by anyone. It could affect the paid-for subscription model used by many scientific journals, and undermine the common practice of releasing reports under embargo.

At present the results of some publicly funded research are not accessible to people outside universities and similar institutions without one-off payments, which means that many teachers, doctors, entrepreneurs and others do not have access to the latest scientific insights. In the UK, funding bodies generally require that researchers publish under open access terms, with open access publishing fees paid from the researcher’s grant.

The council said this data must be made accessible unless there were well-founded reasons for not doing so, such as intellectual property rights or security or privacy issues.

The changes are part of a broader set of recommendations in support of Open Science, a concept that also includes improved storage of and access to research data, Science magazine reports.

Open Science has been heavily lobbied for by the Dutch government, which currently holds the presidency of the Council of the EU, as well as by Moedas, the European commissioner for research and innovation. Moedas told a press conference: “We probably don’t realize it yet, but what the Dutch presidency has achieved is unique and huge. The commission is totally committed to help move this forward.”

Researchers are developing a technology that could one day make paint and color packaging labels that never fade. The color is produced by a type of nanostructure called a "plasmonic pixel."

In a new paper published in Nano Letters, Timothy D. James, Paul Mulvaney, and Ann Roberts at The University of Melbourne have demonstrated a new plasmonic pixel design that addresses several of the critical problems facing plasmonic color images, including a limited number of colors, small image size, and difficulty in creating accurate colors without using complex color-mapping algorithms.

The new plasmonic pixel design uses an algorithm that can produce nearly 2000 different colors and shades and achieve a resolution that exceeds the resolution limit of the human eye. To demonstrate, the researchers fabricated a 1.5-cm-long image (which is relatively large compared to previous plasmonic images), and showed that colors could be accurately reproduced using a straightforward color-mapping algorithm.

Although other areas of plasmonics research may have potential applications as displays for phones and TVs, this plasmonic pixel produces a static image, where the color and structure are set at the time of fabrication and can't be altered.

"The potential applications for the plasmonic pixel (and other color-producing nanostructures in this research space) would be as an industrial paint on cars, buildings, advertising billboards, etc., as the plasmonic pixels will never fade," James told Phys.org. "With the ability to print at resolutions greater than conventional pigment-based processes, the plasmonic pixels may also have applications in security-based devices for use on high-value product packaging, medicines, etc."

Creating batteries with longer life span could be key in tech advancements from phones to cars.

Researchers now coated a gold nanowire with Thai's gel solution and found that the nanowire-based battery cell had far better storage capacity than typical lithium ion batteries. The gel electrode went through 200,000 charge cycles over three months without losing any capacity or power. For reference, batteries typically die after 5,000 to 7,000 cycles. The gel solution was published in the American Chemical Society’s Energy Letters.

"For this research right now the plan is to understand the mechanisms of how this gel electrolyte could prolong the cyclibility so well," Thai said. "The future bigger plan would be to optimize these gel electrolytes to see if it can improve even more."

Researchers have invented a DNA "tape recorder" that can trace the family history of every cell in an organism. The technique is being hailed as a breakthrough in understanding how the trillions of complex cells in a body are descended from a single egg.

"It has the potential to provide profound insights into how normal, diseased or damaged tissues are constructed and maintained," one UK biologist told the BBC. The work appears in Science journal.

The human body has around 40 trillion cells, each with a highly specialized function. Yet each can trace its history back to the same starting point - a fertilized egg. Developmental biology is the business of unravelling how the genetic code unfolds at each cycle of cell division, how the body plan develops, and how tissues become specialized. But much of what it has revealed has depended on inference rather than a complete cell-by-cell history.

"I actually started working on this problem as a graduate student in 2000," confessed Jay Shendure, lead researcher on the new scientific paper. "Could we find a way to record these relationships between cells in some compact form we could later read out in adult organisms?"

The project failed then because there was no mechanism to record events in a cell's history. That changed with recent developments in so called CRISPR gene editing, a technique that allows researchers to make much more precise alterations to the DNA in living organisms. The molecular tape recorder developed by Prof Shendure's team at the University of Washington in Seattle, US, is a length of DNA inserted into the genome that contains a series of edit points which can be changed throughout an organism's life. Each edit records a permanent mark on the tape that is inherited by all of a cell's descendants. By examining the number and pattern of all these marks in an adult cell, the team can work back to find its origins. Developmental biologist James Briscoe of the Crick Institute, in London, UK, calls it "a creative and exciting use" of the CRISPR technique.

"It uniquely and indelibly marks cells with a 'barcode' that is inherited in the DNA. This means you can use the barcode to trace all the progeny of barcoded cells," he said. Jay Shendure collaborated with molecular biologist Alex Schier of Harvard University to prove the technique on a classic lab organism - the zebrafish.

Two hundred and fifty million years ago, life on earth was in a tail-spin—climate change, volcanic eruptions, and rising sea levels contributed to a mass extinction that makes the death of the dinosaurs look like child's play.

In a paper published in Scientific Reports, paleontologists describe a new marine reptile, Sclerocormus parviceps, an ichthyosauriform that's breaking all the rules about what ichthyosaurs are like.

Ichthyosaurs were a massive group of marine reptiles that lived around the time of the earliest dinosaurs. Most of them looked a little bit like today's dolphins—streamlined bodies, long beak-like snouts, and powerful tail fins. But the new species is something of a black sheep. It has a short snout (its species name even means "small skull"), and instead of a tail with triangular flukes (think of a fish's tail-fins), it had a long, whip-like tail without big fins at the end. And while many ichthyosaurs had conical teeth for catching prey, Sclerocormus was toothless and instead seems to have used its short snout to create pressure and suck up food like a syringe. In short, it's really different from most of its relatives, and that tells scientists something important about evolution.

"Sclerocormus tells us that ichthyosauriforms evolved and diversified rapidly at the end of the Lower Triassic period," explains Olivier Rieppel, The Field Museum's Rowe Family Curator of Evolutionary Biology. "We don't have many marine reptile fossils from this period, so this specimen is important because it suggests that there's diversity that hasn't been uncovered yet."

The way this new species evolved into such a different form so quickly sheds light on how evolution actually works. "Darwin's model of evolution consists of small, gradual changes over a long period of time, and that's not quite what we're seeing here. These ichthyosauriforms seem to have evolved very quickly, in short bursts of lots of change, in leaps and bounds," says Rieppel.

Animals like Sclerocormus that lived just after a mass extinction also reveal how life responds to huge environmental pressures. "We're in a mass extinction right now, not one caused by volcanoes or meteorites, but by humans," explains Rieppel. "So while the extinction 250 million years ago won't tell us how to solve what's going on today, it does bear on the evolutionary theory at work. How do we understand the recovery and rebuilding of a food chain, of an ecosystem? How does that get fixed, and what comes first?"

From Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek to Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, anyone who spends much time forecasting the future comes to realize that language has simply got to go. In a connected world, it’s one of the only things remaining that truly separates us — it’s what keeps keeps us from being able to directly consume and understand one another’s film and literature, and what keeps occupying soldiers from being able to effectively make alliances with local peoples. It’s a primitive relic of a bygone age — if we can convert MP4 to AVI, certainly we ought to be able to convert Mandarin to German. Now, a new device called Pilot could make that dream (mostly) a reality.

A real-world Babelfish, or Universal Translator if you prefer, has been slow to materialize. We’ve got speech recognition, and we’ve got translation, and we’ve even got both of those things in real-time in some very specific cases, but a portable, near-real-time translation device that moves with you? Despite rumors of GoogleX super-projects, it hasn’t happened yet.

One big reason is that real-time translation is hard. It’s so hard, in fact, that all the advancement in computing power we’ve seen in the past 20 years did little to get us closer to the goal. It took a revolution in how we compute information, the influx of neural network models and machine learning algorithms, before we could crunch natural language and produce a translation in a reasonable amount of time — but there’s still a problem. Neural networks are themselves very hard to run, meaning we need a super-computer to do translation.

In the context of a wearable, that means you’ll probably need an always-on data connection, which itself means you’ll need a subscription and a hefty power supply to keep the connection going all day. Pilot gets around this by wirelessly accessing your cell phone’s processor to do the work locally; prior on-phone translation services have been imperfect, but Pilot claims to have reached true real-time speeds.

What this does to your cellphone’s battery is anybody’s guess, but I’d bet this sort of intensive crunching would burn through even giant Galaxy S-series batteries in a short time. It’s not exactly living “untethered” if you have to plug your phone in every 45 minutes, but sci-fi beggars can’t be choosers, and the early adopters who buy one of these for a cool $300 will still be able to feel like they’re legitimately at the forefront of a tech revolution.

The other problem that has held back universal translators is that making one is a complex challenge many practical concerns. Do you turn it on only when you need it, and if so aren’t you going to miss a lot of the unexpected banter that you’d want to hear? How does it know who you’re talking to, in a crowded room full of people speaking? How does it fit on my damn head?

Pilot gets around these problems by splitting the service into two pieces. It’s not actually an earpiece, but two earpieces. When you’ve decided you want to talk to somebody (like the dreamy French girl who allegedly inspired this thing), you simply hand them their ear-piece to begin talking. Each of you now has a translator, so you can both understand one another — this takes the place of any sort of speaker that most sci-fi translators use to say our words out loud.

So, it’s not quite a “put it in your ear and it’s like everyone’s speaking English” super-invention, and since this came out of an Indiegogo campaign, you wouldn’t really expect it to. But it is incredibly ambitious, and it could spark existing translation efforts from Skype (Microsoft) and Google to shoot a little higher, a little faster.

The world's first 3D-printed office building opened this week in Dubai, Reuters reports. The 2,700-square-foot, single-story building was built in just 17 days using a gigantic, 20-foot tall 3D printer and a special mix of concrete, fiber reinforced plastic and glass fiber reinforced gypsum.

Although the "printer" was massive at about two stories tall, 120 feet long and 40 feet wide, it only needed one staffer to make sure it was functioning properly. The rest of the 18-person construction crew consisted of installers, electricians and mechanical engineers who completed the job for a mere $140,000 in construction and labor costs — or about half the price of a comparable structure built with conventional methods. Of course, the building is more than just another gold star in the UAE's ultramodern playland — it will also serve, appropriately enough, as the temporary headquarters for the Dubai Future Foundation. Next year, the structure is scheduled to become the home of Dubai's Museum of the Future.

"This is the first 3D-printed building in the world, and it's not just a building, it has fully functional offices and staff," the UAE Minister of Cabinet Affairs, Mohamed Al Gergawi said. According to Gergawi, Dubai plans to have 25 percent of the buildings in the emirate built via 3D printing by the year 2030.

Airbus subsidiary APWorks just announced its creation of the world’s first fully-functional 3D printed motorcycle. Printed using APWorks’ patented materials and techniques, the motorcycle weighs only 35 kg. Nicknamed the “Light Rider,” this new design is certainly lightweight: it is 30% lighter than conventionally manufactured e-motorcycles, with a 6 kg frame and a small 6 kW electric motor powering it from zero to 80 km per hour in just seconds.

The design makes full use of 3D printing technology. It has hollow frame parts instead of solid ones, allowing for integrated cables, pipes and screw-on points in the final structure. The printing system melts millions of aluminum alloy particles together creating thousands of thin layers just 60 microns thick.

To make the Light Rider, the company used their own proprietary material, Scalmalloy, for the construction of the frame. Scalmalloy is a corrosion-resistant aluminum alloy that is virtually as strong as titanium, boasting high strength and ductility

Researchers have identified and dated the genetic mutation that gave rise to the black peppered moth, which spread rapidly during the Industrial Revolution.

The new findings solve a crucial missing piece of the puzzle in this iconic textbook example of evolution by natural selection.

A new study shows that male sparrows can judge if a spouse is prone to infidelity, providing less food for their brood if their partner is unfaithful.

Sparrows form pair bonds that are normally monogamous, but many females are unfaithful to their partner and have offspring with other males. Biologists believe that the male birds are unfaithful to ensure that they father as many chicks as they can, while females are unfaithful with males of better 'genetic quality' - ones that are fitter and could produce stronger offspring.

However, cheating comes with a cost - the cheating female's partner will provide less food for their nest of young. It has long been suspected that males know that not all the chicks in their nest are theirs, and so make a decision to provide less. But an alternative explanation is that cheating females and lazy males tend to pair up naturally.

Researchers from the UK, Germany, and Australia have now revealed that males make the decision of how much to provide for their chicks based on the tendency of their partner to cheat. The study, published today in The American Naturalist, followed the entire sparrow population of the island of Lundy in the Bristol Channel for 12 years.

Lead researcher Dr Julia Schroeder of the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London said: "Males changed their behavior based on their partner. When they switched from a faithful partner to one prone to infidelity, they provided less food for their brood." Females might also change their behavior when paired with a less lazy male, cheating less with a more attentive father.

Welcome to the new world of artificial intelligence. Soon, we won't program computers. We'll train them. Like dolphins. Or dogs. Or humans.

Over the past several years, the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley have aggressively pursued an approach to computing called machine learning. In traditional programming, an engineer writes explicit, step-by-step instructions for the computer to follow. With machine learning, programmers don’t encode computers with instructions. They train them. If you want to teach a neural network to recognize a cat, for instance, you don’t tell it to look for whiskers, ears, fur, and eyes. You simply show it thousands and thousands of photos of cats, and eventually it works things out. If it keeps misclassifying foxes as cats, you don’t rewrite the code. You just keep coaching it.

This approach is not new—it’s been around for decades—but it has recently become immensely more powerful, thanks in part to the rise of deep neural networks, massively distributed computational systems that mimic the multilayered connections of neurons in the brain. And already, whether you realize it or not, machine learning powers large swaths of our online activity. Facebook uses it to determine which stories show up in your News Feed, and Google Photos uses it to identify faces.

Machine learning runs Microsoft’s Skype Translator, which converts speech to different languages in real time. Self-driving cars use machine learning to avoid accidents. Even Google’s search engine—for so many years a towering edifice of human-written rules—has begun to rely on these deep neural networks. In February the company replaced its longtime head of search with machine-learning expert John Giannandrea, and it has initiated a major program to retrain its engineers in these new techniques. “By building learning systems,” Giannandrea told reporters this fall, “we don’t have to write these rules anymore.”

Terahertz spectroscopy, which uses the band of electromagnetic radiation between microwaves and infrared light, is a promising security technology because it can extract the spectroscopic “fingerprints” of a wide range of materials, including chemicals used in explosives.

But traditional terahertz spectroscopy requires a radiation source that’s heavy and about the size of a large suitcase, and it takes 15 to 30 minutes to analyze a single sample, rendering it impractical for most applications.

In the latest issue of the journal Optica, researchers from MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics and their colleagues present a new terahertz spectroscopy system that uses a quantum cascade laser, a source of terahertz radiation that’s the size of a computer chip. The system can extract a material’s spectroscopic signature in just 100 microseconds.

The device is so efficient because it emits terahertz radiation in what’s known as a “frequency comb,” meaning a range of frequencies that are perfectly evenly spaced.Click here to edit the content

A distant planet known as Kepler-62f could be habitable, a team of astronomers reports.

The planet, which is about 1,200 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Lyra, is approximately 40 percent larger than Earth. At that size, Kepler-62f is within the range of planets that are likely to be rocky and possibly could have oceans, said Aomawa Shields, the study's lead author and a National Science Foundation astronomy and astrophysics postdoctoral fellow in UCLA's department of physics and astronomy.

NASA's Kepler mission discovered the planetary system that includes Kepler-62f in 2013, and it identified Kepler-62f as the outermost of five planets orbiting a star that is smaller and cooler than the sun. But the mission didn't produce information about Kepler-62f's composition or atmosphere or the shape of its orbit.

Shields collaborated on the study with astronomers Rory Barnes,

Eric Agol, Benjamin Charnay, Cecilia Bitz and Victoria Meadows, all of the University of Washington, where Shields earned her doctorate. To determine whether the planet could sustain life, the team came up with possible scenarios about what its atmosphere might be like and what the shape of its orbit might be.

"We found there are multiple atmospheric compositions that allow it to be warm enough to have surface liquid water," said Shields, a University of California President's Postdoctoral Program Fellow. "This makes it a strong candidate for a habitable planet."

On Earth, carbon dioxide makes up 0.04 percent of the atmosphere. Because Kepler-62f is much farther away from its star than Earth is from the sun, it would need to have dramatically more carbon dioxide to be warm enough to maintain liquid water on its surface, and to keep from freezing.

Shields said that for the planet to be consistently habitable throughout its entire year, it would require an atmosphere that is three to five times thicker than Earth's and composed entirely of carbon dioxide. (This would be analogous to replacing every molecule in Earth's atmosphere with carbon dioxide, which means that the planet would have 2,500 times more carbon dioxide in its atmosphere.) Having such a high concentration of carbon dioxide would be possible for the planet because, given how far it is from its star, the gas could build up in the planet's atmosphere as temperatures get colder to keep the planet warm.

"But if it doesn't have a mechanism to generate lots of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere to keep temperatures warm, and all it had was an Earth-like amount of carbon dioxide, certain orbital configurations could allow Kepler-62f's surface temperatures to temporarily get above freezing during a portion of its year," she said. "And this might help melt ice sheets formed at other times in the planet's orbit."

The research is published online in the journal Astrobiology

A breakthrough by an Australian collaboration of researchers could make infra-red technology easy-to-use and cheap, potentially saving millions of dollars in defense and other areas using sensing devices, and boosting application.

When light falls on a very thin, uniform layer almost all of it is reflected (right-hand arrows). By etching thin grooves in the film, the light is directed sideways and almost all of it is absorbed (left-hand arrows) even though the amount of material is very small. Insets show electron micrographs of the structuring. The absorbing layer is only 0.041 μm thick.

Infra-red devices are used for improved vision through fog and for night vision and for observations not possible with visible light; high-quality detectors cost approximately $100,000 (including the device at the University of Sydney) some require cooling to -200°C.

Now, research spearheaded by researchers at the University of Sydney has demonstrated a dramatic increase in the absorption efficiency of light in a layer of semiconductor that is only a few hundred atoms thick - to almost 99 percent light absorption from the current inefficient 7.7 percent. The findings will be published overnight in the high-impact journal Optica.

Co-author from the University of Sydney's School of Physics, Professor Martijn de Sterke, said the team discovered perfect thin film light absorbers could be created simply by etching grooves into them. "Conventional absorbers add bulk and cost to the infrared detector as well as the need for continuous power to keep the temperature down. The ultrathin absorbers can reduce these drawbacks," Professor de Sterke said. "By etching thin grooves in the film, the light is directed sideways and almost all of it is absorbed, despite the small amount of material - the absorbing layer is less than 1/2000th the thickness of a human hair," he said.

Co-lead author Dr Björn Sturmberg, who carried out the research as a PhD student at the University of Sydney with the support of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, said the findings did not rely upon a particular material but could be applied to many naturally occurring weak absorbers. "There are many applications that could greatly benefit from perfectly absorbing ultra-thin films, ranging from defence and autonomous farming robots to medical tools and consumer electronics," Dr Sturmberg said.

The Director of Australia's National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) and co-author, of the paper, Professor Lindsay Botten, said the structures were much simpler to design and fabricate than using existing thin film light absorbers, which required either complex nanostructures, meta-materials and exotic materials or difficult-to-create combinations of metals and non-metals.

There could be as many as 100 to 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe. One of the most comprehensive listings comes from Galaxy Zoo, a crowdsourced astronomy project launched in 2007, which has so far classified over one million galaxy images from Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Hubble Space Telescope, and the Cosmic Assembly Near-Infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey. From such a vast database, it is hard to pick favorites - they are all dazzling clusters of stars and celestial objects. Nevertheless, here is a list of some of the most amazing galaxies categorized according to their general type (Milky Way excluded).

Researchers have designed a new algorithm that automates the manipulation and sculpting of DNA into different shapes—a process known as DNA origami.

A team of researchers from MIT, Arizona State University, and Baylor University have devised a new computer algorithm that does all the hard work for you. The results of their research have been published in the journal Science.

“The paper turns the problem around from one in which an expert designs the DNA needed to synthesize the object, to one in which the object itself is the starting point, with the DNA sequences that are needed automatically defined by the algorithm,” says Mark Bathe, associate professor of biological engineering at MIT, and lead researcher for the study.

The new algorithm, which the team has called DAEDALUS, automates the entire business of sculpting DNA shapes; essentially, you begin with the desired shape (which must have a closed surface) and feed it into the algorithm, which then maps out the order of bases (adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine) needed to produce the DNA “scaffold.”

DAEDALUS means “open source” DNA origami, enabling anyone with the inclination and access to the algorithm to design and create their own DNA-based, nanoscale objects. What Henry Ford’s assembly line concept did for manufacturing, DAEDALUS promises to do for nanoscale structures.