The convergence of nanotechnology, biology, information technology, additive manufacturing, AI, new materials and robotics means we no longer have to wait for natural selection to change our lives
We Are Playing God with a Declassified Future
The Future, Declassified: Megatrends That Will Undo the World Unless We Take Action ( Book)
http://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Declassified-Megatrends-Unless/dp/...

Device that detects anaemia in 60 seconds
A simple testing device can now diagnose anaemia in just 60 seconds— a discovery that would allow inexpensive at-home self-monitoring of persons with chronic forms of the disease.
The disposable self-testing device analyzes a single droplet of blood using a chemical reagent that produces visible colour changes corresponding to different levels of anaemia.

The basic test produces results in about 60 seconds and requires no electrical power. A companion smartphone application can automatically correlate the visual results to specific blood hemoglobin levels.
"Patients could use this device in a way that's very similar to how diabetics use glucose-monitoring devices, but this will be even simpler because this is a visual-based test that doesn't require an additional electrical device to analyse the results".

Using a two-piece prototype device, the test works this way: A patient sticks a finger with a lance similar to those used by diabetics to produce a droplet of blood. The device's cap, a small vial, is then touched to the droplet, drawing in a precise amount of blood using capillary action. The cap containing the blood sample is then placed onto the body of the clear plastic test kit, which contains the chemical reagent. After the cap is closed, the device is briefly shaken to mix the blood and reagent.

"When the capillary is filled, we have a very precise volume of blood, about five microliters, which is less than a droplet - much less than what is required by other anaemia tests," explained Erika Tyburski.

Blood haemoglobin then serves as a catalyst for a reduction-oxidation reaction that takes place in the device. After about 45 seconds, the reaction is complete and the patient sees a colour ranging from green-blue to red, indicating the degree of anaemia.

A label on the device helps with interpretation of the colour or the device could be photographed with a smartphone running an application written by Georgia Tech undergraduate student Alex Weiss and graduate student William Stoy. The app automatically correlates the colour to a specific haemoglobin level and could one day be used to report the data to a physician.
The results of the one-minute test were consistent with those of the conventional analysis. The smartphone app produced the best results for measuring severe anaemia.

The test doesn't require a skilled technician or a draw of venous blood and you see the results immediately.
The device will be available to the public sometime in 2016.

An interesting story of a woman who doesn't have a part of her brain!

Woman of 24 found to have no cerebellum in her brain

The discovery was made when the woman was admitted to the Chinese PLA General Hospital of Jinan Military Area Command in Shandong Province complaining of dizziness and nausea. She told doctors she'd had problems walking steadily for most of her life, and her mother reported that she hadn't walked until she was 7 and that her speech only became intelligible at the age of 6.

Doctors did a CAT scan and immediately identified the source of the problem – her entire cerebellum was missing!  The space where it should be was empty of tissue. Instead it was filled with cerebrospinal fluid, which cushions the brain and provides defence against disease.

The cerebellum's main job is to control voluntary movements and balance, and it is also thought to be involved in our ability to learn specific motor actions and speak. Problems in the cerebellum can lead to severe mental impairment, movement disorders, epilepsy or a potentially fatal build-up of fluid in the brain. However, in this woman, the missing cerebellum resulted in only mild to moderate motor deficiency, and mild speech problems such as slightly slurred pronunciation. Her doctors describe these effects as "less than would be expected", and say her case highlights the remarkable plasticity of the brain. The case highlights just how adaptable the organ is.

For more information, click on the links: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329861.900-woman-of-24-foun...

http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/08/22/brain.awu239

Robot captures first images of Great Pyramid's secret chamber
An autonomous robot has transmitted the first images from inside a tiny chamber in the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt - something that has not been seen by anyone in 4,500 years.
What this robot found was 4,500-year-old hieroglyphs written in red paint, and carvings in the stone that could have been made by the stone masons at the time the chamber was being built.

"If these hieroglyphs could be deciphered they could help Egyptologists work out why these mysterious shafts were built”.
"Red-painted numbers and graffiti are very common around Giza,” added Egyptologist Peter Der Manuelian from Harvard University and director of the Giza Archives at the Museum of Fine Arts in the US. "They are often masons' or work-gangs' marks, denoting numbers, dates or even the names of the gangs."

The robot was also able to get its stretchy camera in and around the mysterious empty chamber to get a look at the back of the stone door for the first time. This allowed it to film parts of the metal pins that had never been seen before, and their beautifully looped tips suggest that rather than being functional, they were probably just ornamental features.
http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20141009-26154.html

Artificial spleen cleans up blood

Device improves survival in rats after severe infections.

Magnetic nanobeads in the 'biospleen' device bind to Escherichia coli (left) and Staphylococcus aureus (right) and remove them from blood.

Researchers have developed a high-tech method to rid the body of infections — even those caused by unknown pathogens. A device inspired by the spleen can quickly clean blood of everything from Escherichia coli to Ebola, researchers report on 14 September in Nature Medicine.
In search of a way to clear any infection, a team led by Donald Ingber, a bioengineer at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering in Boston, Massachusetts, developed an artificial 'biospleen' to filter blood.
The device uses a modified version of mannose-binding lectin (MBL), a protein found in humans that binds to sugar molecules on the surfaces of more than 90 different bacteria, viruses and fungi, as well as to the toxins released by dead bacteria that trigger the immune overreaction in sepsis.

The researchers coated magnetic nanobeads with MBL. As blood enters the biospleen device, passes by the MBL-equipped nanobeads, which bind to most pathogens. A magnet on the biospleen device then pulls the beads and their quarry out of the blood, which can then be routed back into the patient.
http://www.nature.com/news/artificial-spleen-cleans-up-blood-1.15917

How to engage with participants in field research

Building trust is the crucial foundation for successful research in the field

Trust comes from listening and understanding as much as from giving information

Good communication will often bring suggestions that improve your research
http://www.scidev.net/global/communication/practical-guide/engage-p...

Molecular mechanisms of birth defects among older women: Why older women can have babies with Down Syndrome
Researchers studying cell division in fruit flies have discovered a pathway that may improve understanding of molecular mistakes that cause older women to have babies with Down syndrome.
The study shows for the first time that new protein linkages occur in immature egg cells after DNA replication and that these replacement linkages are essential for these cells to maintain meiotic cohesion for long periods.

The study appears in the journal PLOS Genetics.
As women age, so do their eggs and during a woman's thirties, the chance that she will conceive a Down syndrome fetus increases dramatically. Most such pregnancies arise from mistakes in a process called meiosis, a specialized cell division that creates gametes, or sex cells (sperm and eggs). Mistakes in meiosis can lead to gametes with the wrong number of chromosomes, which can cause Down syndrome.
Accurate chromosome segregation during meiosis depends on protein linkages, or cohesion, that hold together sister chromatids, which are identical copies of a replicated chromosome. Recent evidence from Dartmouth and other laboratories indicates that meiotic cohesion weakens over time, contributing to the maternal age effect.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140911135440.htm

Teenager from India invents device that can convert breath to speech

Sixteen-year-old Arsh Shah Dilbagi has developed a new technology called ‘TALK’, which is a cheap and portable device to help people who are physically incapable of speaking express themselves.
Sixteen-year-old Arsh Shah Dilbagi has developed a new technology called ‘TALK’, which is a cheap and portable device to help people who are physically incapable of speaking express themselves. Right now, 1.4 percent of the world’s population has very limited or no speech, due to conditions such as Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), locked-in syndrome (LIS), Encephalopathy (SEM), Parkinson’s disease, and paralysis. So that's literally a group of people that could match the entire population of Germany, and all of them unable to speak.

Stephen Hawking has a device to help him communicate, but it's extremely expensive, costing several thousand dollars, and is also quite bulky. What Dilbagi has managed to do is invent a device that achieves the same thing, but can be purchased for just $80.

The way TALK works is that it’s able to translate the user’s breath into electric signals using a special device called a MEMS Microphone. This technology is composed of a pressure-sensitive diaphragm etched directly into a silicon chip, and an amplifying device to increase the sound of the user’s breath.

By expelling two types of breaths into the device, with different intensities and timing, the user is able to spell out words in Morse code. "A microprocessor then interprets the breathes into dots and dashes, converting them into words. The words are then sent to a second microprocessor that synthesises them into voice,” says Whitney Mallett at Motherboard. "The morse code can either be translated into English, or specific commands and phrases. The device features nine different voices varying in age and gender."

People who do not have a means of properly expressing themselves, like those living with speech disorders, experience a lower than average life expectancy because of it. Dilbagi’s aim for this device is to give millions of people like this a 'voice' for the first time.
http://kkartlab.in/group/some-science

Does smiling really help you even if you are not happy? ('Don't worry be happy! Even if your entire world collapses!', say some people).
But does that really work?
According to a recent study - smiling can backfire for some!
Surprisingly, for a section of the population, smiling actually reduced well-being. The more these people smiled, the less happy they were. This is like finding that there are some diners who, after consuming a four-course meal, feel less full!

Who are these people for whom extra smiling fails to generate corresponding increases in joy? In the answer lies the ultimate irony. It turns out that the gloomiest people were those who believed in precisely that somatic feedback hypothesis. People who realized, in other words, that you can “smile to feel happy” (called proactive smilers) were exactly those who did not enjoy the benefits of the theory they espoused. On the other hand, for those who believed that smiling is a genuine indicator of mood—those who subscribed to commonsense notions about the causal order of action and emotion (reactive smilers)—smiling boosted happiness.

How does understanding the benefits of proactive smiling eradicate its effect? It remains a matter of scientific opinion. What’s likely is that knowing too much about somatic feedback throws a wrench in the circuitry, undercutting the message the body sends to itself. At first, the brain says, “I’m smiling; I must be happy!” But upon learning that smiling can be a proactive strategy, this turns into, “I’m smiling; I must be trying to make myself happy—I must be sad!”
Well, read the entire story here:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-smiling-can-backfire/...

Donald E. Ingber, Founding Director of the Wyss Institute, Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School, and Professor of Bioengineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, talks about his article "Mechanobiology and Developmental Control," which he wrote with Tadanori Mammoto and Akiko Mammoto for the 2013 Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology. He discusses the role of physical and mechanical forces in the control of cell development and disease, which he says is as important as chemicals and genes.

Read the article online at: http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/...

A young startup at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) has developed a multi-functional water filtration membrane. Its inventors hope it will render current membranes in the water industry obsolete.

Traditional polymer-based water filtration membranes tend to end up clogged up with what they have filtered out. As a result, biofouling and organic compounds are a huge problem for the $200 billion global water industry.

With the membranes developed by NTU’s Nano Sun, biofouling is greatly reduced as organic material and bacteria are killed and destroyed when they come into contact with the membranes. Any organic material that does not decompose can also be quickly burnt by putting the membrane in an oven heated to 700 degrees celsius, since it is able to withstand high heat unlike traditional polymer membranes.

Additionally, the new membranes allow for an flow rate of at least ten times faster than current water filtration membranes.

Underlying this new invention is a titanium dioxide nanotechnology patented by Nano Sun. Titanium dioxide nanoparticles are proven to kill bacteria and to break down organic compounds in waste water with the help of sunlight or ultra violet (UV) rays.
University spin-off develops multi-functional membranes that can be used in water filtration, chemical and food industries.

Filtering Water With Nanotechnology
Source: http://www.ntu.edu.sg/Pages/home.aspx

Companies in Japan and India have started utilizing floating power farms to circumvent the lack of space on land.
Floating Solar Farms For India and Japan

To What Extent Does the Reporting Behavior of the Media Regarding a Celebrity Suicide Influence Subsequent Suicides?
A study investigated the nature of media coverage of a national entertainer's suicide and its impact on subsequent suicides. After the celebrity suicide, the number of suicide-related articles reported surged around 80 times in the week after the suicide compared with the week prior. Many articles (37.1%) violated several critical items on the World Health Organization suicide reporting guidelines, like containing a detailed suicide method. Most gender and age subgroups were at significantly higher risk of suicide during the 4 weeks after the celebrity suicide. Results imply that massive and noncompliant media coverage of a celebrity suicide can cause a large-scale copycat effect.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sltb.12109/abstract;jses...

Tugs and Prods on a Cell, Not Just Its Genes, Determine Its Fate in the Human Body
Physical pushes and pulls on a cell, not just genes, determine whether it will become part of a bone, a brain—or a deadly tumor
The human cells in our laboratory looked mild-mannered. They were normal cells, not cancer cells, which are able to proliferate rampantly, invade nearby tissues, and ultimately can kill.

But something disturbingly malignant occurred when we forced these cells to change their shape, stretching them by pulling on their edges. This maneuver, flattening out their rounded mounds, increased the activity of two proteins within the cells, YAP and TAZ. As the proteins peaked, our benign cells began acting cancerous, replicating uncontrollably. It was stunning to see how these changes were triggered not by gene modifications but by a physical force.
- Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tugs-and-prods-on-a-cell-...

Inducing Task-Relevant Responses to Speech in the Sleeping Brain
Our brains sort words as we sleep
Vigilance in slumber may explain how meaningful sounds wake a person
•Subjects classifying spoken words continue performing the task after falling asleep
•Movement-related brain activity in the absence of overt behavior is demonstrated
•The sleeping brain can process spoken words in a task-dependent manner
•Response preparation is slower in sleep than in wakefulness
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2814%2900994-4

Persistence of livestock-associated antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus aureus among industrial hog operation workers in North Carolina over 14 days
http://oem.bmj.com/content/early/2014/09/05/oemed-2014-102095.full
a small study finds that drug-resistant bacteria may hang out in the noses of some workers even after four days away from work following exposure. Almost half of the tested workers continued to harbor drug-resistant bacteria two weeks after their initial exposure, perhaps due to re-exposures on the job.

The study of the Cognitive Psychology shows us the following results
It takes years of extreme hard work to become a famous scientist. Getting fame by other means is relatively easy. That is why usually ordinary people follow 'other' means to become rich and famous and don't follow the path of  science!

But, Einstein, Curie, Tesla, Pasteur, Hawking, Edison, Turing, Feynman , Oppenheimer, Salk, Da Vinci, Freud, Chomsky
The half-life of scientists is longer.
There are few celebrities from Einstein's time who are as adored today. That is the  'quality' aspect of science.

Celebrities-- pop stars, movie stars, models and co invest heavy amount of their resources, time and hardwork only for the fact that they can be liked and adored by their fans. This is what makes them tick. This is their living. On the other hand; professions like academicians, scientists and others don't require such empty validations from us. And they get their shared adulations from those who matters. Still they deserve more.

Hacked photosynthesis could boost crop yields
An enzyme found in algae can make plants convert carbon dioxide into sugar more efficiently.
Photosynthesis is the crucial process by which plants convert sunlight, water and air into energy and food - and scientists from the US and UK have now taken the first step towards speeding the process up using enzymes from blue-green algae.
This is an important breakthrough that could lead to new ways to feed the world’s growing population.
http://www.nature.com/news/hacked-photosynthesis-could-boost-crop-y...

QOTD: “I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance.” -Reuben Blades

Spoof Nobel prizes that honor the humor in science were handed out at Harvard University on 18th sept. 2014, celebrating the physics of stepping on a banana skin and the neuroscience behind spotting Jesus in toast.

The 24th edition of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes were handed out to winners from across the world by genuine, if baffled, Nobel laureates in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The awards showcase "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think," said the organizers. The ceremony at Harvard's Sanders Theatre was attended by hundreds and broadcast live online.

The winners are serious scientists whose work is generally considered only unintentionally funny.
Japanese researchers won the physics prize for measuring the amount of friction between a shoe and a banana skin, and between a banana skin and the floor when a person steps on the discarded fruit peel.

Scientists in China and Canada won a neuroscience prize for trying to understand what happens in the brains of people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast.

The authors come from Beijing Jiaotong University's School of Computer and Information Technology, Xidian University, the Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, and the University of Toronto.

Australia, Britain and the United States shared the psychology prize for collecting evidence that people who habitually stay up late are, on average, more self-admiring, manipulative and psychopathic than early risers.

The public health prize was shared by the Czech Republic, India, Japan and the United States for investigating whether it is mentally hazardous to own a cat.

The Czech Republic also joined Germany and Zambia in winning the biology prize for documenting that when dogs defecate and urinate, they prefer to align their body axis with Earth's north-south geomagnetic field lines.

Italy took the art prize for measuring the relative pain people suffer while looking at an ugly rather than a pretty painting.

The Italian government's National Institute of Statistics walked away with the economics prize for increasing the official size of its national economy by including revenue from prostitution, illegal drug sales, smuggling, and other unlawful financial transactions between willing participants, organizers said.

India and the United States shared the medicine prize for treating "uncontrollable" nosebleeds with strips of cured pork.

Germany and Norway won the Arctic science award for testing how reindeer react to seeing humans who are disguised as polar bears.

And Spanish researchers took home the nutrition prize for a study titled "Characterization of Lactic Acid Bacteria Isolated from Infant Faeces as Potential Probiotic Starter Cultures for Fermented Sausages."

The prize-winners, who travel to collect the awards at their own expense, were given 60 seconds for an acceptance speech, a time limit enforced by an eight-year-old girl.

The ceremony also included the premiere of a mini-opera called "What's Eating You," about people who stop eating food in favor of nourishing themselves exclusively with pills.

We will have to think about this:

Radio-collar infection kills tigress in MP

The first tigress in India to be translocated to the wild after being hand-bred was on 19th sept., 2014, found dead of an infection caused by its radio collar at the Panna Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh. T4 had earlier being showcased as the biggest success story of a big-cat breeding experiment.  Can't we be careful?

The radio-collar caused infection around her neck. Rigor mortis set in around the maggot-infested wounds. This is the second incident of collar-related infection. In the first case, we had prior information and timely action was taken to remove the collar. This time, the wound was spotted only during autopsy.

Computer simulations point to formamide as prebiotic intermediate in ‘Miller’ mixtures

New Steps Shown Toward Creation of Life by Electric Charge
Simulating a famous experiment to produce life's building blocks by jolting molecules with electricity, scientists may have found a strange new intermediate state .

Localized electrical fields on the surface of minerals may have had a bigger part in prebiotic chemistry than has been appreciated.

Short-range, localized electric fields on the surface of minerals may have played a part in directing the chemistry that led to the molecules of life, according to this new study. The work does provide ‘new insights into the idea that electrical discharges, for example lightning, could have played a role in the formation of prebiotic molecules on early Earth’.

However, ‘One criticism is that the authors chose to use a somewhat reduced or hydrogen-rich mixture in their study, whereas the atmosphere on early Earth is thought to have been carbon dioxide rich, which could entail very different chemistry in the presence of an electric field. Similar studies on a more realistic prebiotic mixture could yield interesting predictions for future experiments.
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2014/09/modelling-points-formamid...

Here is another warning:
Artificial sweeteners can trigger diabetes
Artificial sweeteners may disrupt the body's ability to regulate blood sugar, causing metabolic changes that can be a precursor to diabetes, researchers are reporting. That is "the very same condition that we often aim to prevent" by consuming sweeteners instead of sugar, said Dr Eran Elinav, an immunologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, at a news conference to discuss the findings. The scientists performed a multitude of experiments, mostly on mice, to back up their assertion that the sweeteners alter the microbiome, the population of bacteria that is in the digestive system.

The different mix of microbes, the researchers contend, changes the metabolism of glucose, causing levels to rise higher after eating and to decline more slowly than they otherwise would. The findings by Dr Elinav and his collaborators in Israel, including Eran Segal, a professor of computer science and applied mathematics at Weizmann, are being published Wednesday by the journal Nature.

Cathryn R Nagler, a professor of pathology at the University of Chicago who was not involved with the research but did write an accompanying commentary in Nature, called the results "very compelling." She noted that many conditions, including obesity and diabetes, had been linked to changes in the microbiome. "What the study suggests," she said, "is we should step back and reassess our extensive use of artificial sweeteners."
Previous studies on the health effects of artificial sweeteners have come to conflicting and confusing findings. Some found that they were associated with weight loss; others found the exact opposite, that people who drank diet soda actually weighed more. Some found a correlation between artificial sweeteners and diabetes, but those findings were not entirely convincing: Those who switch to the products may already be overweight and prone to the disease.

While acknowledging that it is too early for broad or definitive conclusions, Dr Elinav said he had already changed his own behaviour.

"I've consumed very large amounts of coffee, and extensively used sweeteners, thinking like many other people that they are at least not harmful to me and perhaps even beneficial," he said. "Given the surprising results that we got in our study, I made a personal preference to stop using them."

In the initial set of experiments, the scientists added saccharin (the sweetener in the pink packets of Sweet'N Low), sucralose (the yellow packets of Splenda) or aspartame (the blue packets of Equal) to the drinking water of 10-week-old mice. Other mice drank plain water or water supplemented with glucose or with ordinary table sugar. After a week, there was little change in the mice who drank water or sugar water, but the group getting artificial sweeteners developed marked intolerance to glucose. Glucose intolerance, in which the body is less able to cope with large amounts of sugar, can lead to more serious illnesses like metabolic syndrome and Type 2 diabetes.

Six Reasons Not to Worry about the Higgs Boson Destroying the Universe
https://storify.com/AstroKatie/six-reasons-not-to-worry-about-the-h...

Source diversity among journals cited in Science Times
A content analysis of The New York Times’ Science Times section from 1998 to 2012 found evidence of increased source diversity in use of scientific journals as news sources. Science Times increased the frequency at which it cited journals, the number of different journals that it cited, and the number of disciplines represented by cited journals. The results suggest that online availability of a wide array of scientific journals has changed sourcing behaviors.

http://pus.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/07/24/0963662514542908.ab...

Top 50 science stars of Twitter:
http://news.sciencemag.org/scientific-community/2014/09/top-50-scie...

Generation of Macroscopic Singlet States in a Cold Atomic Ensemble
http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.093601 Quantum Entanglement Creates New State of Matter
Half a million ultracold atoms were linked together in the first-ever “macroscopic spin singlet” state.
Physicists have used a quantum connection Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” to link 500,000 atoms together so that their fates were entwined. The atoms were connected via “entanglement,” which means an action performed on one atom will reverberate on any atom entangled with it, even if the particles are far apart. The huge cloud of entangled atoms is the first “macroscopic spin singlet,” a new state of matter that was predicted but never before realized.

Epidemiology: Mapping Ebola in wild animals for better disease control
Identifying the regions where wild animal populations could transmit the Ebola virus should help with efforts to prepare at-risk areas for future outbreaks.
http://elifesciences.org/content/3/e04565

Mapping the zoonotic niche of Ebola virus disease in Africa

Ebola virus disease (EVD) is a complex zoonosis that is highly virulent in humans. The largest recorded outbreak of EVD is ongoing in West Africa, outside of its previously reported and predicted niche. We assembled location data on all recorded zoonotic transmission to humans and Ebola virus infection in bats and primates (1976–2014). Using species distribution models, these occurrence data were paired with environmental covariates to predict a zoonotic transmission niche covering 22 countries across Central and West Africa. Vegetation, elevation, temperature, evapotranspiration, and suspected reservoir bat distributions define this relationship. At-risk areas are inhabited by 22 million people; however, the rarity of human outbreaks emphasises the very low probability of transmission to humans. Increasing population sizes and international connectivity by air since the first detection of EVD in 1976 suggest that the dynamics of human-to-human secondary transmission in contemporary outbreaks will be very different to those of the past.

http://elifesciences.org/content/3/e04395

T cell-specific inhibition of multiple apoptotic pathways blocks negative selection and causes autoimmunity

T cell self-tolerance is thought to involve peripheral tolerance and negative selection, involving apoptosis of autoreactive thymocytes. However, evidence supporting an essential role for negative selection is limited. Loss of Bim, a Bcl-2 BH3-only protein essential for thymocyte apoptosis, rarely results in autoimmunity on the C57BL/6 background. Mice with T cell-specific over-expression of Bcl-2, that blocks multiple BH3-only proteins, are also largely normal. The nuclear receptor Nur77, also implicated in negative selection, might function redundantly to promote apoptosis by associating with Bcl-2 and exposing its potentially pro-apoptotic BH3 domain. Here, we report that T cell-specific expression of a Bcl2 BH3 mutant transgene results in enhanced rescue of thymocytes from negative selection. Concomitantly, Treg development is increased. However, aged BH3 mutant mice progressively accumulate activated, autoreactive T cells, culminating in development of multi-organ autoimmunity and lethality. These data provide strong evidence that negative selection is crucial for establishing T cell tolerance.
http://elifesciences.org/content/3/e03468#sthash.vBgMe7lK.dpuf

Active invasion of bacteria into living fungal cells
The rice seedling blight fungus Rhizopus microsporus and its endosymbiont Burkholderia rhizoxinica form an unusual, highly specific alliance to produce the highly potent antimitotic phytotoxin rhizoxin. Yet, it has remained a riddle how bacteria invade the fungal cells. Genome mining for potential symbiosis factors and functional analyses revealed that a type 2 secretion system (T2SS) of the bacterial endosymbiont is required for the formation of the endosymbiosis. Comparative proteome analyses show that the T2SS releases chitinolytic enzymes (chitinase, chitosanase) and chitin-binding proteins. The genes responsible for chitinolytic proteins and T2SS components are highly expressed during infection. Through targeted gene knock-outs, sporulation assays and microscopic investigations we found that chitinase is essential for bacteria to enter hyphae. Unprecedented snapshots of the traceless bacterial intrusion were obtained using cryo-electron microscopy. Beyond unveiling the pivotal role of chitinolytic enzymes in the active invasion of a fungus by bacteria, these findings grant unprecedented insight into the fungal cell wall penetration and symbiosis formation.
http://elifesciences.org/content/3/e03007

Winners of the 2014 Google Science Fair
Ciara, Émer and Sophie were named the Grand Prize Winner and the 15-16 age category winners of our fourth annual Google Science Fair. They are some of thousands of students ages 13-18 who dared to ask tough questions like: How can we stop cyberbullying? How can I help my grandfather who has Alzheimer's from wandering out of bed at night? How can we protect the environment? And then they actually went out and answered them.
18 finalists representing nine countries—Australia, Canada, France, India, Russia, U.K., Ukraine and the U.S.—who spent today impressing Googlers and local school students at our Mountain View, Calif. headquarters. In addition to our Grand Prize Winners, the winners of the 2014 Google Science Fair are:

13-14 age category: Mihir Garimella (Pennsylvania, USA) for his project FlyBot: Mimicking Fruit Fly Response Patterns for Threat Evasion. Like many boys his age, Mihir is fascinated with robots. But he took it to the next level and actually built a flying robot, much like the ones used in search and rescue missions, that was inspired by the way fruit flies detect and respond to threats. Mihir is also the winner of the very first Computer Science award, sponsored by Google.
17-18 age category: Hayley Todesco (Alberta, Canada) for her project Waste to Water: Biodegrading Naphthenic Acids using Novel Sand Bioreactors. Hayley became deeply interested in the environment after watching Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” Her project uses a sustainable and efficient method to break down pollutant substances and toxins found in tailing ponds water in her hometown, a hub of the oil sands industry.
The Scientific American Science in Action award: Kenneth Shinozuka (Brooklyn, New York) for his wearable sensors project. Kenneth was inspired by his grandfather and hopes to help others around the world dealing with Alzheimer's. The Scientific American award is given to a project that addresses a health, resource or environmental challenge.
Voter’s Choice award: Arsh Dilbagi (India) for his project Talk, which enables people with speech difficulties to communicate by simply exhaling.
As the Grand Prize winners, Ciara, Émer and Sophie receive a 10-day trip to the Galapagos Islands provided by National Geographic, a $50,000 scholarship from Google, a personalized LEGO prize provided by LEGO Education and the chance to participate in astronaut training at the Virgin Galactic Spaceport in the Mojave desert.
- Google Blog

Teens show off inventions at Google Science Fair

http://abc7news.com/technology/teens-show-off-inventions-at-google-...

'Time dilation' predicted by Einstein confirmed by lithium ion experiment.

Physicists have verified a key prediction of Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity with unprecedented accuracy. Experiments at a particle accelerator in Germany confirm that time moves slower for a moving clock than for a stationary one.

The work is the most stringent test yet of this ‘time-dilation’ effect, which Einstein predicted. One of the consequences of this effect is that a person travelling in a high-speed rocket would age more slowly than people back on Earth.

Few scientists doubt that Einstein was right. But the mathematics describing the time-dilation effect are “fundamental to all physical theories”, says Thomas Udem, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, who was not involved in the research. “It is of utmost importance to verify it with the best possible accuracy.”

The paper was published on September 16 in Physical Review Letters. It is the culmination of 15 years of work by an international group of collaborators including Nobel laureate Theodor Hänsch, director of the Max Planck optics institute.

To test the time-dilation effect, physicists need to compare two clocks — one that is stationary and one that moves. To do this, the researchers used the Experimental Storage Ring, where high-speed particles are stored and studied at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for heavy-ion research in Darmstadt, Germany.
http://www.nature.com/news/special-relativity-aces-time-trial-1.15970

Force of nature gave life its asymmetry

'Left-handed' electrons destroy certain organic molecules faster than their mirror versions.
Weak Nuclear Force Shown to Give Asymmetry to Biochemistry of Life
"Left-handed" electrons have been found to destroy certain organic molecules faster than their mirror versions

http://www.nature.com/news/force-of-nature-gave-life-its-asymmetry-...

Cold Atom Laboratory Chills Atoms to New Lows
Nasa's Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) mission has succeeded in producing a state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, a key breakthrough for the instrument leading up to its debut on the International Space Station in late 2016.
According to Nasa, a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) is a collection of atoms in a dilute gas that have been lowered to extremely cold temperatures and all occupy the same quantum state, in which all of the atoms have the same energy levels. At a critical temperature, atoms begin to coalesce, overlap and become synchronized. The resulting condensate is a new state of matter that behaves like a giant — by atomic standards — wave.
"CAL's ground testbed is the coolest spot at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at 200 nano-Kelvin (200 billionths of 1 Kelvin)," CAL Project Scientist Rob Thompson at JPL in Pasadena, California said. "Achieving Bose-Einstein condensation in our prototype hardware is a crucial step for the mission."
While so far, the Cold Atom Laboratory researchers have created Bose-Einstein condensates with rubidium atoms, eventually they will also add in potassium. The behavior of two condensates mixing together will be fascinating for physicists to observe, especially in space.

Besides merely creating Bose-Einstein condensates, CAL provides a suite of tools to manipulate and probe these quantum gases in a variety of ways. It has a unique role as a facility for the atomic, molecular and optical physics community to study cold atomic physics in microgravity, said David Aveline of JPL, CAL ground testbed lead.

"Instead of a state-of-the-art telescope looking outward into the cosmos, CAL will look inward, exploring physics at the atomic scale".

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2014-325

The Science Of Blue Light And Why You Maybe Can't Sleep At Night
https://www.upworthy.com/the-science-of-blue-light-and-why-you-mayb...

Higgs Boson to the World Wide Web: 7 Big Discoveries Made at CERN
http://news.yahoo.com/higgs-boson-world-wide-7-big-discoveries-made...

Automating Scientific Discovery
The power of computers to juggle vast quantities of data has proved invaluable to science. In the early days, machines performed calculations that would have taken humans far too long to perform by hand. More recently, data mining has found relationships that were not known to exist—noticing, for instance, a correlation between use of a painkiller and incidence of heart attacks. Now some computer scientists are working on the next logical step—teaching machines to run experiments, make inferences from the data, and use the results to perform new experiments. In essence, they wish to automate the scientific process.

One team of researchers, from Cornell and Vanderbilt universities and CFD Research Corporation, took a significant step in that direction when they reported last year that a program of theirs had been able to solve a complex biological problem. They focused on glycolysis, the metabolic process by which cells—yeast, in this case—break down sugars to produce energy. The team fed their algorithm with experimental data about yeast metabolism, along with theoretical models in the form of sets of equations that could fit the data.

The team seeded the program with approximately 1,000 equations, all of which had the correct mathematical syntax but were otherwise random. The computer changed and recombined the equations and ranked the results according to which produced answers that fit the data—an evolutionary technique that has been used since the early 1990s. The key step, explains Hod Lipson, associate professor of computing and information science at Cornell, was to not only rank how the equations fit the data at any given point in the dataset, but also at points where competing models disagreed.
Read more here:
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/5/148614-automating-scientific-d...

Cancer: How the immune system spots tumors
The receptor protein Dectin-1 recognizes structures found on cancerous cells, and then triggers an anti-tumor immune response. http://elifesciences.org/content/3/e04476#sthash.I8siNatR.dpuf

Lower IQ in Children Linked to Chemical in Water
Babies born to mothers with high levels of perchlorate during their first trimester are more likely to have lower IQs later in life, according to a new study
Maternal perchlorate levels in women with borderline thyroid function during pregnancy and the cognitive development of their offspring; Data from the Controlled Antenatal Thyroid Study.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25057878

Rabies can be eliminated from around the world, say Scots scientists
“Vaccinating dogs is the single-most effective way of eliminating rabies."
If you can vaccinate more than 70% of dogs through sustained campaigns, it is enough to interrupt transmission in the reservoir population so that the disease if eliminated.
That is how rabies has been purged from most industrialised countries and why South America is so close to eradicating dog-transmitted rabies from the whole American continent.
http://news.stv.tv/scotland/294128-glasgow-university-scientists-sa...