The surprising discovery of "square ice" which forms at room temperature was made by an international team of researchers last week.

The study was published in Nature by a team of scientists from UK and Germany led by Andre Geim of University of Manchester and G. Algara-Siller of University of Ulm. The accompanying review article was done by Alan Soper of Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in UK.

"We didn't expect to find square ice ... We found there is something strange in terms of water going through [nanochannels]. It's going too fast. And you can't explain that by just imagining a very thin layer of liquid. Liquids do not behave in that way. The important thing to realize is that it is ice in the sense of a crystallized structure, it's not ice in the familiar sense in that it's something cold and from which you have to protect yourself," said Professor Irina Grigorieva, one of the researchers.

To study the molecular structure of water inside a transparent nanoscale capillary, the team used electron microscopy. This enabled them to view individual water molecules, especially because the nano-capillary was created from graphene which was one atom thick and would not impair the electron imaging. Graphene was also chosen because it has unusual properties like conducting electricity and extreme strength. It's a 2D form of carbon that once rolled up in cylinders will form a carbon nanotube, a material, which according to The Koyal Group Info Mag, is a subject of further study because of its unusual strength.

The scientists themselves were admittedly surprised at finding out that small square-shaped ice crystals formed at room temperature where the graphene capillaries are narrow (3 atomic layers of water at most). The water molecules formed into square lattices arranged in neat rows -- an arrangement that is uncharacteristic for the element that is known for forming consistent triangular structures inside regular ice. This discovery may just be the first example of water behavior in nanostructure.

<The Koyal Group Info Mag reports that scientists have been trying to understand for decades how water structure is affected when it is confined in narrow channels. It is only now that this becomes possible through computer simulations, but even with those, the results they get do not agree with each other.

The team is also trying to determine how common this square ice actually is by using computer simulations. And from what they've learned, if the water layer is thin enough, it could create a square ice regardless of the chemical properties of the nanopore's walls where it is confined. Since there is water practically everywhere -- in microscopic pores and monolayers on surfaces -- it is likely that square ice is actually very common in nature.

Aside from its more practical applications in water distillation, desalination and filtration, their finding also allows for a better understanding of how water behave at a molecular scale which is important in nanotechnology work.

The Koyal Group Info Mag: Higgs Boson Discovered In Superconductors A team of physicists from India, Israel, Germany and US reportedly detected the Higgs boson, which is believed to be the thing responsible for every mass in the universe, for the first time in superconductors. What's more, these newly-detected Higgs boson using superconductors is more stable and way cheaper to achieve. Scientists will now have an easier way to observe the Higgs boson even in ordinary laboratories.

Efforts to find Europe's lost comet lander, Philae, have come up blank.

The most recent imaging search by the overflying Rosetta "mothership" can find no trace of the probe.

Philae touched down on 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on 12 November, returning a swathe of data before going silent when its battery ran flat.

European Space Agency scientists say they are now waiting on Philae itself to reveal its position when it garners enough power to call home.

Researchers have a pretty good idea of where the robot should be, but pinpointing its exact location is tricky.

On touchdown, Philae bounced twice before coming to rest in a dark ditch.

This much is clear from the pictures it took of its surroundings. And this location, the mission team believes, is just off the top of the "head" of the duck-shaped comet.

The orbiting Rosetta satellite photographed this general location on 12, 13 and 14 December, with each image then scanned by eye for any bright pixels that might be Philae. But no positive detection has yet been made.

Rosetta has now moved further from 67P, raising its altitude from 20km to 30km, and there is no immediate plan to go back down (certainly, not to image Philae's likely location).

Even if they cannot locate it, scientists are confident the little probe will eventually make its whereabouts known.

As 67P moves closer to the Sun, lighting conditions for the robot should improve, allowing its solar cells to recharge the battery system.
The latest assessment suggests communications could be re-established in the May/June timeframe, with Philae distributing enough electricity to its instruments to resume operations around September.

This would be at perihelion - the time when the comet is closest to the Sun (185 million km away) and at its most active.

Scientists continue to pore over the data Philae managed to send back before going into hibernation.

Some of the results - together with ongoing Rosetta observations - were reported at the recent American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Highlights include a clearer idea of the nature of the comet's surface. Researchers say this appears to be covered in many places by a soft, dusty "soil" about 15-20cm in depth.

Underneath this is a very hard layer, which is thought to be mainly sintered ice.

The conference had the rare opportunity to see pictures from Rosetta's Osiris camera system.
These high-resolution images are not normally shown publicly because the camera team has been given an exclusive period to study the data and make discoveries.

Among them was a shot looking into a pit on the surface, revealing an array of rounded features that the Osiris team has nicknamed "dinosaur eggs".

These features have a preferred scale of about 2-3m and may be evidence of the original icy blocks that came together 4.5 billion years ago to build the comet.

The dino eggs have been seen at a number of locations, including in cliff walls.

Early interpretations of the general surface of the comet indicate that many structures are probably the result of collapse over internal voids.

Although a small body just 4km across, 67P's gravity is still strong enough to shape depressions and arrange fallen boulders.

A good example of this is in "Hapi" valley - the giant gorge that forms the "neck" of the comet.

It contains a string of large blocks at its base, which one Osiris team-member argued very likely fell from the nearby vertical cliff dubbed "Hathor".

All the surface features on 67P carry names that follow an ancient Egyptian theme.

Hapi was revered as a god of the Nile. Hathor was a deity associated with the sky.

A new research regarding healthy sleep might get you thinking twice about reading from your e-reader or tablets before dozing off at night.

According to a study from Brigham and Women's Hospital, people who read on a lit screen before sleeping tend to fall asleep later as opposed to those who read on a paperback.

The study which was printed in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is the newest contribution to an increasing number of studies pointing to backlit devices, like our mobile phones and tablets, as culprits of sleep problems.

Anne-Marie Chang, a neuroscientist who headed the project said, "It seems that use of these devices in the evening before bedtime really has this negative impact on our sleep and on your circadian rhythms."

The study was conducted in a lab with 12 people who were monitored for 2 weeks. Every evening, they were asked to read for 4 hours -- the first 5 days from an iPad and the next 5 days from a paperback. Once the subjects went to bed every 10pm, they were closely monitored for physiological changes.

It turned out that when the subjects read on screens, their circadian rhythms were disrupted and melatonin production was suppressed, leading to less deep sleep and feeling of tiredness the next day.

Chang advised that the proper recommendation should be to set aside electronic devices a couple of hours before sleeping and read printed book instead. Ebook devices that do not have backlit screens will also be better. According to The Koyal Group Info Mag researchers, any device that gives off blue wavelength of light is problematic as a person will tend to hold it closer to the eyes.

Professor Charles Czeisler, one of the lead researcher said, "The light emitted by most e-readers is shining directly into the eyes of the reader, whereas from a printed book or the original Kindle, the reader is only exposed to reflected light from the pages of the book. Sleep deficiency has been shown to increase the risk of cardio diseases, metabolic diseases and cancer. Thus, the melatonin suppression that we saw in this study among participants when they were reading from the light-emitting e-reader concerns us."

Meanwhile, other scientists are cautioning the public in drawing conclusions from the said study. This is because critical changes were observed in a controlled environment like a laboratory compared to the real-life setting.

Their experiment conducted in a lab does not effectively mimic the setup in real life where people are naturally exposed to sunlight. For instance, the low light in the lab might have affected them in a way that it made them sensitive to light from screens. As The Koyal Group Info Mag said, a person exposed in mere room light the whole day could be more sensitive to the light from an ebook reader than a person who had been exposed to sunlight outside the whole day.

However, they all agree that the blue light wavelength emitted by devices like laptops, tablets and mobile phones has negative effects and should be avoided at least before bedtime.

In a related research conducted by Mariana Figueiro of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2012, they found that subjects who use an e-reader device like a tablet before going to sleep at night had lower melatonin levels after using it for 2 hours. But they clarified that the lit screen is only one of the contributing factor.

DNA-programmed blotting
paper could soon be giving doctors a simple disease test that will reveal
an infection in 30 minutes for just a few pence.

Researchers have proved the technique works by developing a prototype
Ebola test in just 12 hours, and using just $20 of materials.

The smart diagnostics use a soup of
biological ingredients including the genetic material RNA.

The researchers say this can be freeze-dried and preserved
on ordinary paper.

Team leader Jim Collins, who has joint appointments at
Boston and Harvard Universities, says the biological powder can be reactivated
by simply adding water, like living powdered soup.

"We were surprised at how well these materials worked
after being freeze dried," he told the BBC.

"Once they're rehydrated, these biological circuits
function in these small paper disks as if they were inside a living cell."

Genetic hacking

Jim Collins is a leading pioneer in the field of synthetic
biology, whose 2000 paper showing genetic circuits could be created in the same
way as electronic circuits can be programmed, helped launch the discipline.

Since then, synthetic biology has become a powerful tool in
fundamental biology, with researchers hacking the genetic programmes of
microbes to study their life processes, or give them the power to compute using
logic like a digital processor.

Collins' group has previously reprogrammed bacteria to
become cellular spies, recording events as they pass through an animal's bowels.

But the discipline has required specialist skills, so that
few laboratories can take advantage of the techniques. The researchers' avowed
intention in the new work, described in the journal Cell, is to make synthetic
biology widely available.

They've definitely succeeded, says Professor Lingchong You,
an expert in cellular reprogramming at Duke University.

"This paper-based approach is incredibly attractive. It
feels like you could use it in your garage! It'll give scientists a
synthetic-biology playground for a very low cost."

'Biochemical soup'

The materials in the powdered biochemical soup include
simple enzymes that bacteria need, molecules to power the chemical reactions,
amino acids which are the bricks of cell biology, and importantly ribosomes,
giant molecular machines that read genetic material and use it to assemble the
bricks into functioning proteins.

In liquid form, these cell extracts are routinely used in
biology labs. Linchong You gives credit to Collins for having the imagination
to freeze dry them with synthetic genes.

"With hindsight, it's obvious it should work. But most
of us don't think in this direction - there was a real leap of faith. But the
fact you can leave these freeze-dried systems for a year, and they'll still
work - that's quite remarkable."

Alongside the paper-based biochemistry, Jim Collins' team -
in collaboration with Peng Yin, also at Harvard University's Wyss Institute -
has also introduced a new way of programming RNA, the molecular cousin of DNA
which ribosome machines read. Their method makes the gene-circuits far more
flexible than previous approaches.

The new type of RNA can be programmed to react and respond
to any particular biochemical input, and then switch on the rest of the genetic
machinery.

"This gives us a programmable sensor that can be
readily and rapidly designed," Collins explains.

The Ebola test they experimented with is a proof of
principle showing how flexible the programming step is.

"In a period of just 12 hours, two of my team managed
to develop 24 sensors that would detect different regions of the Ebola genome,
and discriminate between the Sudan and the Zaire strains."

In contrast, conventional antibody tests take months and
cost thousands of pounds to devise, the researchers argue.

Quick response

The genetic test kit gives a simple colour output, turning
the paper from yellow to purple, with the change visible within half an hour.
By changing the input trigger, variants of the test could be used to reveal antibiotic
resistance genes in bacterial infections or biomarkers of other disease
conditions.

Their Ebola test is not suitable for use in the epidemic
areas at the moment, Collins emphasises, but it would be simple to devise one
that is.

The arrays of programmed paper dots would be easy to mass
produce. Lingchong You envisions an "entire fabrication process carried
out by computer-aided circuit design, robotics-mediated assembly of circuits,
and printing onto paper."

And price is not the only consideration. Collins points out
the freeze-dried circuits are stable at room temperature. In large parts of the
world where electricity is unreliable, or there are no refrigerators, this
would be a particular advantage.

"We are very excited about this," he added.
"In terms of significance, I rank this alongside all the other
breakthroughs I've been involved in."

Science research is a rich mine of valuable knowledge if one knows how to go about it with care and precision. As in all scientific endeavours, there is a system to follow whether one is trying to solve a simple problem such as how to kill garden weeds or improving on Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Even before the advent of the Internet and the unlimited amount of knowledge and information we have available in a matter of seconds, research has generally been misunderstood as a simple process of going to the library (Googling, for most of us today) and getting the data one needs to make a report or "thesis". Unfortunately, this is nothing but a single step in the whole process of scientific research. Academics will call this data-gathering or collating observations. The purpose of scientific research is to observe physical phenomena and to describe them in their operation or functions. The essential question is WHY. Why do things behave as they do? We can predict some things because it is how things are supposed to behave; but we want to know the causes of such phenomena. Discovering the causes through our research, we can then explain these things and use the knowledge to our advantage in many practical ways. That is, we can then build ships that can carry as many people as we can or explain that the moon, like the apple, is falling into the Earth because it is subject to the force of gravitation. Why it never crashes into the Earth is another question which Newton, fortunately, had to settle for us. Science research or what others would call the Scientific Method requires several steps to be considered one. Let us look at them with simple examples for the beginner: 1. Basic or general questions about a phenomenon Sometimes, it all starts with a casual observation followed by a curious question. W

Research into one of the biggest recent stem-cell "breakthroughs" has been withdrawn because of "critical errors".

Scientists in Japan had claimed stem cells could be made cheaply, quickly and ethically just by dipping blood cells into acid.

They have now written a retraction that apologises for "multiple errors" in their report.

Nature, the journal that published the findings, is reviewing how it checks scientific papers.

Stem cells can become any other type of tissue and are already being investigated to heal the damage caused by a heart attack and to restore sight to the blind.

Researchers around the world described the acid-bath stem-cell finds as a "game changer," "remarkable" and "a major scientific discovery".

Falling apart

However, errors were rapidly discovered, parts were lifted from early work and presented as though it was new research, and leading scientists have been unable to produce stem cells using acid in their own laboratories.

An investigation by the Riken research institute in Japan found that scientist Dr Haruko Obokata had fabricated her work in an intentionally misleading fashion.

The retraction states: "These multiple errors impair the credibility of the study as a whole and we are unable to say without doubt whether the stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluri­potency stem cells phenomenon is real.

"Ongoing studies are investigating this phenomenon afresh, but given the extensive nature of the errors currently found we consider it appropriate to retract both papers."

The affair brings back memories of the false claims by world-renowned cloning scientists Hwang Woo-suk.

He claimed he had produced embryonic stem cells from cloned human embryos, but those findings were later found to be "intentionally fabricated".

'Highlighted flaws'

A Nature editorial stated that the public's trust in science was at stake in the latest controversy.

It added: "Although editors and referees could not have detected the fatal faults in this work, the episode has further highlighted flaws in Nature's procedures and in the procedures of institutions that publish with us."

However, it did say a review was under way to increase checking on images used in papers.

The acid-bath stem cells research has not been completely discredited and research is continuing to see if stem cells can be produced using the method.

Chris Mason, a professor of regenerative medicine at University College London, originally said the results were "a very exciting, but surprise, finding" and added: "It looks a bit too good to be true."

After the retraction, he told the BBC: "I'm surprised that Nature took so long when there was so much material showing problems with the papers. I don't understand that."

However, he said the system of peer review, in which fellow scientists critique papers before they are published, would struggle to pick up the problems in this research.

He said: "If you're a reviewer you can only review the material you're given. You have to take it on trust. You're not a detective looking for fraud.

'Good day for science'

"If you have to act as a super-sleuth, that's impossible for anyone to ever do."

He praised the way social media had uncovered and shared the errors, which could have otherwise taken years to unpick.

"I would argue this is not an embarrassing day for science, I think it's a good day for science and it shows we work well to weed out inferior publications."

Dr Dusko Ilic, a senior lecturer in stem-cell science at King's College London, said: "It is easy to be judgmental, and pointing fingers after all is over.

"Gaining knowledge is difficult. It requires both time and persistence, I hoped that Haruko Obokata would prove at the end all those naysayers wrong.

"Unfortunately, she did not. The technology, indeed, sounded too good to be true, though I still find fascinating how a 30-year-old scientist could pass scrutiny of her co-workers and multiple reviewers in Nature with a complete fabrication."

The UK Medical Research Council's Prof Robin Lovell-Badge added: "The stem cell community has been expecting these retractions to come for a while.

"This story illustrates how the stem cell field can rapidly detect bad science and reject it.

"It also illustrates both the problems and benefits of hype, this was potentially important research because of the novelty of the claims in an important field, but it was hyped far beyond reality, by some of the authors and by their perhaps willing victims, the media."

 

What is the goal for the Asteroid Redirect Mission?

Through the Asteroid Redirect Mission, NASA will identify, capture and redirect an asteroid to a stable orbit around the moon, which astronauts will explore in the 2020s, returning with samples. The mission is an important early step as we learn to be more independent of Earth for humans to explore Mars. It will be an unprecedented technological feat that will lead to new scientific discoveries and technological capabilities, while helping us learn to protect our home planet. The overall objectives of the Asteroid Redirect Mission are:

* Conduct a human exploration mission to an asteroid in the mid-2020s, providing systems and operational experience required for human exploration of Mars.
* Demonstrate an advanced solar electric propulsion system, enabling future deep-space human and robotic exploration with applicability to the nation's public and private sector space needs.
* Enhance detection, tracking and characterization of Near Earth Asteroids, enabling an overall strategy to defend our home planet.
* Demonstrate basic planetary defense techniques that will inform impact threat mitigation strategies to defend our home planet.
* Pursue a target of opportunity that benefits scientific and partnership interests, expanding our knowledge of small celestial bodies and enabling the mining of asteroid resources for commercial and exploration needs.

The same way we need values to measure everything from temperature to time, astronomers have now developed a new stellar scale as a "ruler" to help them classify and compare data on star discoveries.

Previously, as with the longitude problem 300 years earlier for fixing locations on earth, there was no unified system of reference for calibrating the heavens.

The astronomers selected 34 initial 'benchmark' stars to represent the different kinds of stellar populations in our galaxy, such as hot stars, cold stars, red giants and dwarfs, as well as stars that cover the different chemical patterns - or "metallicity" in their spectrum, as this is the "cosmic clock" which allows astronomers to read a star's age.

This detailed range of information on the 34 stars form the first value set for measuring the millions of stars that the Gaia satellite, an unmanned space observatory of the European Space Agency, aims to catalogue.

Many of the benchmark stars can be seen with the human eye, and have been studied for most of human history - dating to the very first astronomical records from ancient Babylon.

"We took stars which had been measured a lot so the parameters are very well-known, but needed to be brought to the same scale for the new benchmark - essentially, using the stars we know most about to help measure the stars we know nothing about," said Paula Jofre from Institute of Astronomy at Britain's University of Cambridge.

"This is the first attempt to cover a wide range of stellar classifications, and do everything from the beginning - methodically and homogenously," Jofre added.

NASA's Curiosity rover has now been exploring the Red Planet for a full Martian year.

Curiosity wraps up its 687th day on Mars today (June 24), NASA officials said, meaning the 1-ton robot has completed one lap around the sun on the Red Planet. (While Earth orbits the sun once every 365 days, Mars is farther away and thus takes considerably longer to do so.)

Curiosity touched down on the night of Aug. 5, 2012, kicking off a mission to determine if Mars has ever been capable of supporting microbial life. The six-wheeled rover quickly delivered, finding that an area near its landing site called Yellowknife Bay was indeed habitable billions of years ago.

The $2.5-billion mission, known officially as the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), has made other important discoveries during its time on the Martian surface, too. For example, Curiosity's measurements of radiation levels - made during its eight-month cruise through space and while on the planet's surface - suggest that the risk of radiation exposure is not a "showstopper" for manned Mars missions. The rover's data should should help researchers design the shielding astronauts will require on such missions, NASA officials said.

Curiosity has also scanned Mars' air for methane, a gas that here on Earth is predominantly produced by living organisms. The rover's instruments have found no traces of the gas, in contrast to some previous observations made by Red Planet orbiters.

Curiosity left Yellowknife Bay last July and is now on the way to the base of Mount Sharp, which rises more than 3 miles (5 kilometers) into the sky from the center of Mars' Gale Crater. The huge mountain has long been Curiosity's ultimate science destination; mission scientists want the rover to climb up Mount Sharp's foothills, reading a history of the planet's changing environmental conditions along the way.

Unexpected damage to Curiosity's metal wheels has slowed progress toward Mount Sharp a bit, forcing the mission team to rethink and revise its driving plans. The rover has made it about halfway to the mountain's base, with about 2.4 miles (3.9 km) left to cover, NASA officials said.

"Over the next few months, the science team is really excited to get to Mount Sharp, where we think the layered rocks there have captured the major climate changes in Mars' history," Curiosity deputy project scientist Ashwin Vasavada said in a new NASA video marking the rover's first Martian year. "We can't wait to get there and figure it all out, but it's going to take a lot of driving."

South African scientists contributed significantly towards the knowledge base that helped an international experiment make a breakthrough in proving a particle discovered in July 2012 is a type of Higgs boson, a finding that could be the most substantial physics discovery of our time.

The Higgs particle is the missing piece of the Standard Model of Physics, a set of rules that outline the fundamental building blocks of the universe, such as protons, electrons and atoms. Finding it starts a new era for science, because scientists will be able to probe previously uninvestigated parts of the universe.

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) yesterday said the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had found new results on an important property of the Higgs particle. The discovery of the elusive particle was announced almost two years ago.

Home-grown contribution

Bruce Mellado, an associate professor at the University of the Witwatersrand's School of Physics, says the finding is "certainly an important milestone in determining that what we discovered is a Higgs boson". He notes the ATLAS experiment, in which SA is involved, has reported a similar result.

Locally, about 70 South Africans are involved in the global project and, while the team is small in comparison to those from other countries, there are substantial benefits coming out of its involvement. Four universities are participating in the programme: Wits, University of Cape Town, the University of Johannesburg, and the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

As a result, says Mellado, SA has contributed "significantly" towards the knowledge base that paved the way for yesterday's announcement. The Higgs boson gives matter mass and holds the physical fabric of the universe together.

Missing piece

The particle is named after Peter Higgs, who, in the 1960s, was one of six authors who theorised about the existence of the particle. It is commonly called the "God Particle", after the title of Nobel physicist Leon Lederman's "The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?" (1993), according to Wikipedia.

Yesterday's announcement, hailed as a major breakthrough, is the result of work done at the LHC, the £2.6 billion "Big Bang" particle accelerator at the centre of the hunt for the Higgs boson.

The LHC has been dubbed the world's largest experiment and is housed at CERN.

The LHC is the largest scientific instrument ever built. It lies in an underground tunnel with a circumference of 27km that straddles the French-Swiss border, near Geneva, and has been heralded as the most important new physics discovery machine of all time.

"With our ongoing analyses, we are really starting to understand the mechanism in depth," says CMS spokesperson Tiziano Camporesi. "So far, it is behaving exactly as predicted by theory."

The LHC was offline for maintenance and upgrading during the last 18 months, and preparations are now under way for it to restart early in 2015 for its second three-year run. The experiment will run until 2030 and will be upgraded to 10 times its initial design specification, with the ability to collect 100 times more data.

"Much work has been carried out on the LHC over the last 18 months or so, and it's effectively a new machine, poised to set us on the path to new discoveries," says CERN DG Rolf Heuer.

A study from a project co-chaired by former 1st District congressman Doug Bereuter says climate change threatens to undermine not only how much food can be grown but also the quality of that food, as altered weather patterns lead to a less desirable harvest. Crops grown by many of the nation's farmers have a lower nutritional content than they once did, according to the report by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Research indicates that higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have reduced the protein content in wheat, for example. And the International Rice Research Institute has warned that the quality of rice available to consumers will decline as temperatures rise, the report noted. The council has been examining the effects of climate change on food for several months as part of a project co-chaired by former Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman and former Rep. Doug Bereuter, R-Neb., president emeritus of the Asia Foundation.

What if your cell phone didn't come with a battery? Imagine, instead, if the material from which your phone was built was a battery. The promise of strong load-bearing materials that can also work as batteries represents something of a holy grail for engineers. And in a letter published online in Nano Letters last week, a team of researchers from Vanderbilt University describes what it says is a breakthrough in turning that dream into an electrocharged reality. The researchers etched nanopores into silicon layers, which were infused with a polyethylene oxide-ionic liquid composite and coated with an atomically thin layer of carbon. In doing so, they created small but strong supercapacitor battery systems, which stored electricity in a solid electrolyte, instead of using corrosive chemical liquids found in traditional batteries.

An international team of scientists has made a major step forward in our understanding of how enzymes 'edit' genes, paving the way for correcting genetic diseases in patients. Researchers at the Universities of Bristol, Münster and the Lithuanian Institute of Biotechnology have observed the process by which a class of enzymes called CRISPR - pronounced 'crisper' - bind and alter the structure of DNA. The results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) today, provide a vital piece of the puzzle if these genome editing tools are ultimately going to be used to correct genetic diseases in humans. CRISPR enzymes were first discovered in bacteria in the 1980s as an immune defence used by bacteria against invading viruses. Scientists have more recenty shown that one type of CRISPR enzyme - Cas9 - can be used to edit the human genome - the complete set of genetic information for humans. Did you know?? Blood Test Has Potential to Predict Alzheimer's

In March of this year, a team of Georgetown University scientists published research showing that, for the first time ever, a blood test has the potential to predict Alzheimer's disease before patients start showing symptoms. AACC is pleased to announce that a late-breaking session at the 2014 AACC Annual Meeting & Clinical Lab Expo in Chicago will expand upon this groundbreaking research and discuss why it could be the key to curing this devastating illness. According to the World Health Organization, the number of Alzheimer's patients worldwide is expected to skyrocket from the 35.6 million individuals who lived with it in 2010 to 115.4 million by 2050. Currently, however, all efforts to cure or effectively treat the disease have failed. Experts believe one explanation for this lack of success could be that the window of opportunity for treating Alzheimer's has already closed by the time its symptoms manifest.Continue reading More discoveries you might want to know about

When you're working in the yard this summer, take a look up: Using a satellite, NASA scientists are paying attention to how healthy your lawn and garden are. Next month, the agency plans to launch the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2. Its primary aim is to create a global map of carbon sources and carbon sinks. The OCO-2 mission will provide the most detailed map of photosynthetic fluorescence - that is to say, of how plants glow - ever created. Using this data, scientists should be able to estimate how quickly the world's plants are absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. The applications of the project are wide-ranging, but the science is easy enough to understand. During photosynthesis, a plant absorbs light, then immediately re-emits it at a different wavelength. This is known as fluorescence. In a laboratory setting, botanists can measure the intensity of fluorescence to estimate how actively a plant is photosynthesizing. A satellite could, in theory, detect the light emitted by the world's plants to estimate how much carbon the plants are absorbing. But there has always been a big, fiery problem: the sun.Continue here More discoveries you might want to know about

Molecular biologist Nancy Hopkins, the Amgen, Inc., Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recalled personal trials as a female scientist and challenged graduates to overcome invisible barriers in an inspiring Baccalaureate Address to the Class of 2014 at Marsh Chapel Sunday morning. She mentioned some of the great breakthroughs of the last 50 years: the internet, the Higgs particle, and notably, the "discovery of unconscious biases and the extent to which stereotypes about gender, race, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and age deprive people of equal opportunity in the workplace and equal justice in society." Hopkins was later awarded an honorary Doctor of Science at BU's 141st Commencement. She spoke before a packed audience at Marsh Chapel and was enthusiastically applauded for her remarks. President Robert A. Brown, University Provost Jean Morrison, Marsh Chapel Dean Robert Hill, and Emma Rehard (CAS'14) also addressed the graduates and their families. Scott Allen Jarrett (CFA'99,'08), director of music at Marsh Chapel, led the Marsh Chapel Choir in "Clarissima" and "For the Beauty of the Earth." Early in her career, Hopkins worked in the lab of James Watson, the codiscoverer of the structure of DNA. She earned a PhD at Harvard and became a faculty member at MIT, working at the Center for Cancer Research. There, she focused her research on RNA tumor viruses, then considered to be a likely cause for many cancers in humans. Hopkins also studied developmental genetics in zebra fish, and helped to design the first successful method for making insertional mutagenesis work in a vertebrate model.

Hi. I am Art Caplan, from the NYU Langone Medical Center, Division of Medical Ethics. What is going on in the field of regenerative medicine with respect to stem cell research? We have recently had yet another in a long series of scandals involving claims about the ability to manipulate stem cells in ways that turned out to be utterly untrue and fraudulent. In this case, a scientist in Japan said that she was able to make adult stem cells revert to embryo-like stem cells with some pretty simple chemical exposures. It was announced in leading journals and covered extensively by the media. Then she had to admit that no one could duplicate what she had done and confessed that she had made it up. This is not the first time that this has happened in the stem cell field. Going back all the way to right after Dolly the sheep was cloned, people were trying to clone human embryos to see if they could get cloned human embryos from stem cells. A group in Korea announced that they had made the first cloned human embryos. Nobody could replicate what they did, and they ultimately had to retract their claims published in leading scientific journals that they had cloned human embryos. Stem cell research seems again and again to go off the rails when it comes to the ethics of research. What is going on and why is that so? I think there are a couple of reasons why this particular area has gotten itself in so much hot water. One is that there is a relative shortage of funding. Because of the controversial nature of cloning -- getting stem cells from human embryos -- some avenues of funding have dried up, and it puts pressure on people to come up with other ways to try to make human stem cells. With less funding, there is more pressure. Sometimes people cut corners. I think that can l

Perhaps it was too good to be true. Two months ago, a team of cosmologists reported that it had spotted the first direct evidence that the newborn universe underwent a mind-boggling exponential growth spurt known as inflation. But last week a new analysis suggested the signal, a subtle pattern in the afterglow of the big bang, or cosmic microwave background (CMB), could be an artifact produced by dust within our own galaxy. "We're certainly not retracting our result," says John Kovac, a cosmologist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and co-leader of the team, which used a specialized telescope at the South Pole known as BICEP2. Others say the BICEP team has already lost its case. "At this time, I think the fair thing to say is that you cannot claim detection-period," says Paul Steinhardt, a theoretical physicist at Princeton University. From 2010 through 2012, BICEP2 peered at a small patch of the CMB to measure the polarization of the microwaves as it varies from point to point. On 17 March, BICEP researchers announced at a press conference in Cambridge that they had spotted ultrafaint pinwheel-like swirls in the sky. Those swirls, or B modes, are most likely traces of gravitational waves rippling through space and time during the 10-32 seconds that inflation lasted, the BICEP team says, and they fulfill a key prediction of the theory of inflation. Many cosmologists hailed the detection as a smoking gun for that theory.