Can DNA survive space travel?

It can , under certain circumstances , shows a new study

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone....

Next battle in the war on science

The GOP Congress is ready to attack science agency funding in 2015.
GOP House members have had little success reining in research agencies so far, but, emboldened by their growing majorities, they’re hoping for better luck next year. They plan to push proposals to cut funding for global warming and social science research, put strict new rules on the National Science Foundation’s grant-making process and overhaul how science informs policy making at the EPA.

At the same time, however, researchers and their advocates in the Democratic caucus are taking increasingly aggressive stances of their own: Rather than answer GOP objections one by one, or brush them off, they’re making a larger issue of what they see as heavy-handed interference based on ideology rather than methodology.
Opponents in the scientific world and their political allies believe that, at its heart, the GOP assault isn’t about bringing greater accountability to the EPA or NSF, but rather a larger lack of trust in science that could soon spur efforts to micromanage NIH, the Department of Defense and other agencies that, all told, spend tens of billions on scientific research every year.

Researchers warn that funding only science that appears politically safe will stifle innovation and say that the agency actually does an impressive job of choosing which projects to fund.
But some in the research community say damage is already being done. Researchers will be less likely to apply for grants to fund unorthodox-sounding now — but potentially groundbreaking — research projects in future years, leaders of the Association of American Universities said recently in a statement.
Scientists and engineers, particularly young ones, should not be discouraged from pursuing unconventional, often groundbreaking scientific research.
More details here:
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/11/the-next-battle-in-the-war-on...

On the epoch of the Antikythera mechanism and its eclipse predictor
Scientists Have Made a Remarkable Discovery About the World's Oldest "Computer"
According to new research, the ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism — sometimes called the world's "oldest analog computer" for its ability to predict lunar and solar eclipses and solar, lunar and planetary positions — may be much older than previously thought.

Based on recent analysis of the dials used to predict eclipses, Christián C. Carman, a science historian at the National University of Quilmes in Argentina, and James Evans, a physicist at the University of Puget Sound in Washington, have published new findings suggesting that the machine's dials actually start counting around 205 B.C., which would mean the device is 50 to 100 years older than researchers previously believed.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00407-014-0145-5

Researchers observe evolution of life forms that bear hallmarks of multicellular organisms
n ground-breaking study a team of researchers has reported the real time evolution of life forms that have all the hallmarks of multicellular organisms.

The researchers from New Zealand, Germany and the USA at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology have observed in real time the evolution of simple self-reproducing groups of cells from previously individual cells.

The nascent organisms are comprised of a single tissue dedicated to acquiring oxygen, but this tissue also generates cells that are the seeds of future generations: a reproductive division of labour.

Intriguingly, the cells that serve as a germ line were derived from cheating cells whose destructive effects were tamed by integration into a life cycle that allowed groups to reproduce.

The life cycle turned out to be a spectacular gift to evolution and rather than working directly on cells, evolution was able to work on a developmental programme that eventually merged cells into a single organism.

When this happened groups began to prosper with the once free-living cells coming to work for the good of the whole.

When single bacterial cells of Pseudomonas fluorescens are grown in unshaken test tubes the cellular collectives prosper because they form mats at the surface of liquids where the cells gain access to oxygen that is otherwise in the liquid unavailable.

Lead author Paul Rainey explained that simple cooperating groups, like the mats that interest people, stand as one possible origin of multicellular life, but no sooner do the mats arise, than they fail, which is the same process that ensures their success, natural selection, ensures their demise.

-journal Nature,

Brain Training Doesn’t Make You Smarter
Scientists doubt claims from brain training companies

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-training-doesn-t-ma...

Dynamic mechanical behavior of multilayer graphene via supersonic projectile penetration
A new study results suggest graphene may absorb 10 times the amount of energy steel can before failing. The bullet was propelled into stacked graphene sheets at supersonic speeds of up to 2000mph by the gases produced by laser pulses rapidly evaporating a gold film. The team calculated the energy difference of the bullet before and after to determine the energy absorbed.
Graphene was able to absorb up to 0.92MJ/kg of ballistic energy in the test, with cracks forming around the impact zone. By comparison, steel targets only absorbed up to 0.08MJ/kg at the same speed.
The trick lies in energy absorption. If you can nucleate many cracks, it is a way of spreading the impact into more material. It is similar to that of tempered safety glass, a material engineered to spread damage and not locate it to a point. Graphene’s high performance is down to its high stiffness and low density, both of which control the speed of sound in the material. The stiffer and lighter the material is, the faster sound, stress and energy can travel through it. If you are able to spread the energy at higher speeds across the target area, more of the material will support the load and reduce the damaging effect of the bullet. Graphene’s dynamic strength is significant as it may behave similarly to materials specifically engineered to stop bullets, such as Kevlar, a fabric composed of aromatic polyamide threads.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/346/6213/1092

How Scientists Gained the Ability to Reverse Overdoses

Naloxone reverses the process by acting like a toddler grabbing for another child's toy, preventing death by shoving the opiate out of the way and binding to the receptor itself. This sends the user into immediate withdrawal. The side-effects – dizziness, nausea, shaking, sweating – are unpleasant but not overly dangerous. And if someone hasn't used any opioids, naloxone will have no effect, positive or negative.
http://gizmodo.com/how-scientists-gained-the-ability-to-reverse-ove...
Saved: How addicts gained the power to reverse overdoses
http://mosaicscience.com/story/saved-how-addicts-gained-power-rever...

Scientists push for 'scientific integrity' at bargaining table
Canada’s federal scientists are going to the bargaining table this week with an unprecedented package of contract changes to promote “scientific integrity” in government, including the right of scientists to speak freely and forbidding political interference in their work.
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/politics/scientists-push-for-scientif...

New HIV Mutations Welcome News for the Science Community
In a recent paper now published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Oxford University researchers have found out that the virus is becoming weaker as patients have more access to antiretroviral drugs, some of which are really potent.

Furthermore, like most viruses, HIV mutates as well, going against the immunity of a patient. While this doesn't mean that the patient is already free of the virus, it means that its progression to AIDS is much slower.
http://www.youthhealthmag.com/articles/3804/20141202/hiv-antiretrov...

World-first artificial enzymes suggest life doesn't need DNA or RNA

For the first time, scientists have built artificial enzymes using lab-grown genetic material called XNA. The experiment bolsters the idea that life could evolve without what we thought to be the fundamental building blocks of life - DNA and RNA.
Scientists in the UK have created synthetic enzymes - vital catalysts needed to support life - from scratch, using genetic material created in the lab. These enzymes don’t contain DNA or RNA, they contain artificial XNA - xeno nucleic acid - and could be used to produce new medical treatments and find life on other planets.
Catalysts from synthetic genetic polymers
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature13982...

Passive radiative cooling below ambient air temperature under direct sunlight
New material uses the cold darkness of the Universe to cool your house

New technology takes the heat from your house and beams it straight into outer space. And it’s so efficient it could replace air conditioning.
Engineers from Stanford University in the US have created a material that keeps your house cool by beaming heat back into the “cold darkness of the Universe”.

The material reflects sunlight, just like a regular mirror, but most importantly, it also beams heat from inside a building straight into outer space. This means that it lowers the temperature of anything that’s it’s placed on by up to five degrees, even if it’s sitting in direct sunlight - and all without electricity.

The material works using a phenomenon called radiative cooling, which is a way of passively transferring heat from one place to somewhere cooler. The phenomenon already happens all the time - our body emits heat into the cooler air around us, and if it’s cold outside, our house will lose heat to the atmosphere.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v515/n7528/full/nature13883.html

Study proves we CAN see ‘invisible’ infrared light

Our basic human eyes, usually deprived of the majority of the wavelengths in the world, are actually capable of detecting infrared light, new research proves. We just need a rapidly-pulsing laser to beam it into our retinas.
Humans are notoriously limited when it comes to eyesight - while we can see all the beautiful colours of the rainbow within our visible spectrum, wavelengths such as X-rays, radio waves and infrared are all invisible to us.

But now scientists have proved that our retina cells can see infrared light waves after all, we just need them to hit our eyes in the right way. The research will now help scientists to better test people's eyesight and potentially even improve it.

The researchers, from Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, tested cells from retinas of mice and humans using powerful lasers emitting pulses of infrared light. They found that when the light-sensing cells of retinas get a double hit of infrared energy, our eyes are able to detect light that falls outside our visible spectrum.
We're using what we learned in these experiments to try to develop a new tool that would allow physicians to not only examine the eye but also to stimulate specific parts of the retina to determine whether it's functioning properly," said senior researcher Vladimir J. Kefalov in a press release. "We hope that ultimately this discovery will have some very practical applications.
Human infrared vision is triggered by two-photon chromophore isomerization
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/11/25/1410162111

Evidence of Polyethylene Biodegradation by Bacterial Strains from the Guts of Plastic-Eating Waxworms
Abstract: Polyethylene (PE) has been considered nonbiodegradable for decades. Although the biodegradation of PE by bacterial cultures has been occasionally described, valid evidence of PE biodegradation has remained limited in the literature. We found that waxworms, or Indian mealmoths (the larvae of Plodia interpunctella), were capable of chewing and eating PE films. Two bacterial strains capable of degrading PE were isolated from this worm’s gut, Enterobacter asburiae YT1 and Bacillus sp. YP1. Over a 28-day incubation period of the two strains on PE films, viable biofilms formed, and the PE films’ hydrophobicity decreased. Obvious damage, including pits and cavities (0.3–0.4 μm in depth), was observed on the surfaces of the PE films using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM). The formation of carbonyl groups was verified using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and microattenuated total reflectance/Fourier transform infrared (micro-ATR/FTIR) imaging microscope. Suspension cultures of YT1 and YP1 (108 cells/mL) were able to degrade approximately 6.1 ± 0.3% and 10.7 ± 0.2% of the PE films (100 mg), respectively, over a 60-day incubation period. The molecular weights of the residual PE films were lower, and the release of 12 water-soluble daughter products was also detected. The results demonstrated the presence of PE-degrading bacteria in the guts of waxworms and provided promising evidence for the biodegradation of PE in the environment.
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es504038a?source=cen

New Twist Found in the Story of Life’s Start

All life on Earth is made of molecules that twist in the same direction. New research reveals that this may not always have been so.
http://www.quantamagazine.org/20141126-why-rna-is-right-handed/

Physicists achieve superconductivity at room temperature

German researchers have figured out how to put a piece of ceramic in a superconducting state at room temperature - no cooling required.
Physicists from the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter have kept a piece of ceramic in a superconducting state, disproving the widely-held assumption that materials need to be cooled to temperatures of at least -140 degrees Celsius to achieve superconductivity.

Superconducting materials have the potential to change everything that relies on electrical power, such as power grids, transportation, and renewable energy sources. This is because they’re able to transport electric currents without any resistance, which means they’re incredibly efficient and cost-effective to run. Except right now, they’re not, because in order to get a material to a superconducting state, it needs to be cooled to near absolute zero temperatures, which has really hampered the potential of this technology up to this point.
Over the past few decades, scientists have come to realise that metals cooled to temperatures of around -273 degrees Celsius using liquid nitrogen or helium aren’t the only materials capable of reaching a superconducting state. During the 1980s, it was discovered that ceramic materials can reach this state at significantly higher (and yet still extremely cold) temperatures of around -200 degrees Celsius. This is why they’re called high-temperature superconductors.
One such ceramic material, called yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO), has since been singled out, thanks to its great potential for use in a range of technical applications such as superconducting cables, electrical motors, and generators. Made from super-thin double layers of a copper oxide material stacked in-between layers made from barium, copper and oxygen, this material is designed to allow the bonding of electrons into what’s known as Cooper pairs.
These Cooper pairs of electrons are able to ‘tunnel’ between the alternating layers "like ghosts can pass through walls, figuratively speaking - a typical quantum effect,” they report, but it was thought this could only occur at super-cooled temperatures.

But then the physicists from Max Planck decided to see what would happen if they irradiated the YBCO ceramic material with infrared laser pulses. They found that for a fraction of a second, the ceramic becomes superconducting at room temperature. And when we say “a fraction of a second”, they mean a fraction. “It was only a few millionths of a millisecond” . "That's a very, very brief lifespan for our amazing new room temperature superconductor. However, the successful experiment is proof that such a thing is possible."
http://phys.org/news/2014-12-superconductivity-cooling.html

Vaccine myths - busted:

16 Years Ago, A Doctor Published A Study. It Was Completely Made Up, And It Made Us All Sicker.

Once upon a time, a scientist named Dr. Andrew Wakefield published in the medical journal The Lancet that he had discovered a link between autism and vaccines.

After years of controversy and making parents mistrust vaccines, along with collecting $674,000 from lawyers who would benefit from suing vaccine makers, it was discovered he had made the whole thing up. The Lancet publicly apologized and reported that further investigation led to the discovery that he had fabricated everything.

In the intervening years, millions have been spent on studying this further to see if there was anything that could connect autism and vaccines.

Read scientific facts about vaccines here:

http://www.upworthy.com/16-years-ago-a-doctor-published-a-study-it-...

Magnet Design by Integration of Layer and Chain Magnetic Systems in a π-Stacked Pillared Layer Framework

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201410057/abstract;...

New drug eliminates the malaria parasite within 48 hours in mice

A promising new compound tricks the immune system into destroying red blood cells infected with the malaria parasite in just two days. Trials are now planned in humans.
An international team of scientists has developed an anti-malarial compound that triggers the immune system to destroy red blood cells infected by malaria, but leaves healthy cells unharmed.

The compound, known as (+)-SJ733, has already been tested in mice, and a single dose has been shown to kill 80 percent of malaria parasites in the bloodstream within 24 hours. Within 48 hours the parasite was completely undetectable.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141205175027.htm

In 1911, Albert Einstein Told Marie Curie To Ignore The Trolls!
A letter addressed from Einstein to famed physicist, chemist, and two-time Nobel-Laureate, Marie Curie tells her to ignore the trolls.
Read it here:
http://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol8-trans/34

And his reply to a female fan:

Albert Einstein's Reply to a Female Fan's Confession Should Be in Every Science Textbook

when she said: "I hope you will not think any the less of me for being a girl!"

Cancer biology reproducibility effort
eLife has published the first papers from the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology.

First announced in October 2013 with $1.3 million in funding from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology (RP:CB) aims to replicate key experimental findings in 50 high-profile cancer biology papers published between 2010 and 2012. The project is a partnership between the Center for Open Science, Science Exchange, and eLife.
Following an earlier effort by the Center for Open Science, in psychology research, the outputs of the cancer biology project are being published in two distinct phases. The first phase involves the production of a Registered Report – a novel publishing format that sets out how the replications will be performed, the reagents and protocols, the sample sizes, and the planned analyses. The replications will be performed by laboratories that are part of the Science Exchange network. The second phase is the publication of these results in a Replication Study. Both the Registered Report and the Replication Study are subject to eLife’s rigorous and consultative peer review process.

An open investigation of the reproducibility of cancer biology rese...

Find out more details here: http://elifesciences.org/collections/reproducibility-project-cancer...

Cilia and Diseases
In recent decades, cilia have moved from relative obscurity to a position of importance for understanding multiple complex human diseases. Now termed the ciliopathies, these diseases inflict devastating effects on millions of people worldwide. In this review, written primarily for teachers and students who may not yet be aware of the recent exciting developments in this field, we provide a general overview of our current understanding of cilia and human disease. We start with an introduction to cilia structure and assembly and indicate where they are found in the human body. We then discuss the clinical features of selected ciliopathies, with an emphasis on primary ciliary dyskinesia, polycystic kidney disease, and retinal degeneration. The history of ciliopathy research involves a fascinating interplay between basic and clinical sciences, highlighted in a timeline. Finally, we summarize the relative strengths of individual model organisms for ciliopathy research; many of these are suitable for classroom use.
http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org/content/64/12/1126
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-scientists-are-blamin...

Even in Our Digital Age, Early Parental Writing Support Is Key to Children's Literacy
A new Tel Aviv University study says that preschoolers should be encouraged to write at a young age — even before they make their first step into a classroom.

A new study published in the Early Childhood Research Quarterly explains why early writing, preceding any formal education, plays an instrumental role in improving a child's literacy level, vocabulary, and fine motor skills. The research, conducted by Prof. Dorit Aram of TAU's Jaime and Joan Constantiner School of Education in collaboration with Prof. Samantha W. Bindman of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and other colleagues in the US, assessed the merits of early parental mediation of children's literacy and language in English, and recommended useful techniques to that end.
http://www.sciguru.org/newsitem/18089/even-our-digital-age-early-pa...

A flock of genomes
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/346/6215/1308
A remarkable international effort to map out the avian tree of life has revealed how birds evolved after the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs into more than 10,000 species alive today. More than 200 scientists in 20 countries joined forces to create the evolutionary tree, which reveals how birds gained their colourful feathers, lost their teeth, and learned to sing songs.

The project has thrown up extraordinary similarities between the brain circuits that allow humans to speak and those that give some birds song: a case of common biology being arrived at via different evolutionary routes.
Members of the project, named the Avian Phylogenomics Consortium, published the family tree and their analysis on Thursday in eight main papers in the journal Science, and in more than 20 others in different scientific journals.

Scientists crack stem cell reprogramming code
A Canadian-led international team of researchers has begun solving the mystery of just how a specialized cell taken from a person’s skin is reprogrammed into an embryonic-like stem cell, from which virtually any other cell type in the body can be generated.

The research is being touted as a breakthrough in regenerative medicine that will allow scientists to one day harness stem cells to treat or even cure a host of conditions, from blindness and Parkinson’s disease to diabetes and spinal cord injuries.

Besides creating the reprogramming roadmap, the scientists also identified a new type of stem cell, called an F-class stem cell due to its fuzzy appearance. Their work is detailed in five papers published on 10th Dec., 2014 in the prestigious journals Nature and Nature Communications.

Rosetta's new light on Cometary Origins of Earth’s Oceans

The provenance of water and organic compounds on the Earth and other terrestrial planets has been discussed for a long time without reaching a consensus. One of the best means to distinguish between different scenarios is by determining the D/H ratios in the reservoirs for comets and the Earth’s oceans. Here we report the direct in situ measurement of the D/H ratio in the Jupiter family comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by the ROSINA mass spectrometer aboard ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft, which is found to be (5.3 ± 0.7) × 10⁻⁴, that is, ~3 times the terrestrial value. Previous cometary measurements and our new finding suggest a wide range of D/H ratios in the water within Jupiter family objects and preclude the idea that this reservoir is solely composed of Earth ocean-like water.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2014/12/09/science.1261952

In the case of Earth’s oceans, it may not be either comets or asteroids that delivered them, but rather a significant mixture of both.

But the results form Rosetta show comets are not likely to have come through asteroid collisions. The water on Earth has a particular ratio of molecular isotopes - normal water and heavy water - and the water found on 67P has a ratio three times greater. This almost certainly rules out comets as source of earth's water.

Rosetta casts doubt on comets as Earth’s water providers

Researchers use real data rather than theory to measure the cosmos
For the first time researchers have measured large distances in the Universe using data, rather than calculations related to general relativity.

A research team from Imperial College London and the University of Barcelona has used data from astronomical surveys to measure a standard distance that is central to our understanding of the expansion of the universe.
-Imperial College London

Seven mind-scrambling science ideas only geniuses can understand
https://metro.co.uk/2014/12/13/seven-mind-scrambling-science-ideas-...

Invisible 'pain beam' to disperse crowds during disturbances
A long range and non-lethal 'pain beam' weapon that can be used to break up riots or protests from a distance. The Poly WB-1, which was unveiled at an air show in China, uses a millimetre-wave beam that can travel distances of up to one kilometre. When the beam reaches a person, it heats water molecules just below the skin, causing intense pain. While a short burst with the pain beam will cause a human to recoil in pain, longer bursts at certain frequencies will cause the flesh to burn and blister.

The system is very similar to the Active Denial System created by Raytheon, which was sent to Afghanistan but not used in combat due to fears it would fuel enemy propaganda and because it used so much power and took too much time to boot up. In tests of that system, most humans reach their pain threshold within three seconds, and none could withstand longer than five seconds. "For the first millisecond, it just felt like the skin was warming up. Then it got warmer and warmer and you felt like it was on fire ... As soon as you're away from that beam your skin returns to normal and there is no pain," said a spokesman from the Air Force research lab that made the system.

China is developing the weapon for naval the weapon for naval applications to help deal with con frontation in non-lethal ways. There are a number of territorial disputes in the South China and East China seas, involving various islands and boundaries. At the moment, the weapon needs to be attached to a large truck - so no non-lethal ray guns quite yet.

'Men Are Idiots,' Says Study In Prestigious Medical Journal
http://www.businessinsider.in/Men-Are-Idiots-Says-Study-In-Prestigi...

Reproducibility project: cancer biology: Time to do something about reproducibility
Individual scientists, scientific communities and scientific journals can do more to assess the publication of irreproducible results, to promote good science, and to increase the efficiency with which the scientific community self-corrects.

http://elifesciences.org/content/3/e03981?utm_source=content_alert&...

Superconductivity Record Broken with Rotten-Egg Smelling Compound
Hydrogen sulfide is found to conduct electricity without resistance at a record-high temperature of minus 83 degrees Celsius
http://www.nature.com/news/superconductivity-record-breaks-under-pr...

Merging data on high-energy bursts seen on Earth by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope with data from ground-based radar and lightning detectors, scientists have completed the most detailed analysis to date of the types of thunderstorms producing terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, or TGFs.
TGFs occur unpredictably and fleetingly, with durations less than a thousandth of a second, and remain poorly understood. Yet the gamma rays they produce rank among the highest-energy light naturally produced on Earth.
Earlier Fermi studies helped uncover lightning-like radio signals emitted by TGFs. This made it possible to use ground-based lightning location networks to pin down storms producing the flashes, opening the door to a deeper understanding of the meteorology powering these extreme events.
Scientists gathered a sample of nearly 900 Fermi TGFs accurately located by ground networks, which can pinpoint the location of lightning discharges -- and the corresponding signals from TGFs -- to within 6 miles (10 km) anywhere on the globe. From this group, they identified 24 TGFs that occurred within areas covered by Next Generation Weather Radar (NEXRAD) sites.
The researchers found that even weak and marginally electrified storms are capable of producing TGFs.
The new study also confirms previous findings indicating that TGFs tend to occur near the highest parts of a thunderstorm, between about 7 and 9 miles (11 to 14 kilometers) high. However, TGFs associated with lightning at lower altitudes would be so weakened by traveling a longer path through the atmosphere that Fermi couldn't detect them. If true, the estimated number of 1,100 TGFs occurring each day may be much larger than previously thought.

Humans First Built Fire 350000 Years Ago
New evidence from an Israeli cave indicates that humans first built fires around 350,000 years ago, according to a new study.

An international team led by Ron Shimelmitz from the University of Haifa examined flint debris and tools discovered in the Tabun Cave in northern Israel. While the study finds archaeological evidence of fire dating back to a million years ago, researchers focus on humans' habitual use of fire.
http://www.academia.edu/8858729/Fire_at_will_The_emergence_of_habit...

The use of fire is central to human survival and to the processes of becoming human. The earliest evi-dence for hominin use of fire dates to more than a million years ago. However, only when fire use became a regular part of human behavioral adaptations could its benefits be fully realized and its evolutionaryconsequences fully expressed. It remains an open question when the use of

fire shifted from occasional and opportunistic to habitual and planned. Understanding the time frame of this 'technological mutation' will help explain aspects of our anatomical evolution and encephalization over the last million years. It will also provide an important perspective on hominin dispersals out of Africa and the colonization of temperate environments, as well as the origins of social developments such as the formation of provi-sioned base camps. Frequencies of burnt flints from a 16-m-deep sequence of archaeological deposits atTabun Cave, Israel, together with data from the broader Levantine archaeological record, demonstratethat regular or habitual fire use developed in the region between 350,000-320,000 years ago. While hominins may have used

fire occasionally, perhaps opportunistically, for some million years, the researchers argue in the paper  that it only became a consistent element in behaviuoral adaptations during the second part of the Middle Pleistocene.

http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/11176/20141215/humans-first...

Celiac disease: Immune responses to wheat go beyond gluten

The immune response to gluten in wheat and related cereals in celiac disease is well established but whether other cereal components also induce an immune response is less well understood. A new paper published online in the Journal of Proteome Research suggests that non-gluten proteins in wheat do trigger an immune reaction and could potentially contribute to celiac disease.
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/pr500809b

Messages received from Voyager 1, the Nasa spacecraft travelling 19.5 billion kms away from Earth, show that it is continuing to experience a "tsunami wave" as it penetrates the interstellar medium beyond the solar System.

The spacecraft launched in 1977 is the farthest a man made object has gone from Earth ever. So far, signals from its instruments travelling at the speed of light take 36 hours and 14 minutes to reach Earth.

"Most people would have thought the interstellar medium would have been smooth and quiet. But these shock waves seem to be more common than we thought," said Don Gurnett, professor of physics at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Gurnett presented the new data Monday, Dec. 15 at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

A "tsunami wave" occurs when the sun emits a coronal mass ejection, throwing out a magnetic cloud of plasma from its surface. This generates a wave of pressure. When the wave runs into the interstellar plasma -- the charged particles found in the space between the stars -- a shock wave results that perturbs the plasma.

"The tsunami causes the ionized gas that is out there to resonate -- "sing" or vibrate like a bell," said Ed Stone, project scientist for the Voyager mission based at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Antimicrobial resistance will kill 300 million by 2050 without action
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2014/12/antimicrobial-resistance-...

Low glycemic index foods do not reduce risk factors for cardiovascular disease and diabetes
In a 5-week controlled feeding study, diets with low glycemic index of dietary carbohydrate, compared with high glycemic index of dietary carbohydrate, did not result in improvements in insulin sensitivity, lipid levels, or systolic blood pressure. In the context of an overall DASH-type diet, using glycemic index to select specific foods may not improve cardiovascular risk factors or insulin resistance.

http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2040224

Quantum-secure authentication of a physical unclonable key

Credit cards and ID cards which could never be hacked? That's the promise of quantum cryptography, which harnesses peculiar properties of subatomic particles to thwart data thieves.

Now a team of Dutch researchers says we're closer to making such technology a practical reality.

Publishing in the current issue of Optica, scientists at the University of Twente and Eindhoven University of Technology describe what they call quantum-secure authentication (QSA) of a "classical multiple-scattering key."
Authentication of persons and objects is a crucial aspect of security. We experimentally demonstrate quantum-secure authentication (QSA) of a classical multiple-scattering key. The key is authenticated by illuminating it with a light pulse containing fewer photons than spatial degrees of freedom and verifying the spatial shape of the reflected light. Quantum-physical principles forbid an attacker to fully characterize the incident light pulse. Therefore, he cannot emulate the key by digitally constructing the expected optical response, even if all information about the key is publicly known. QSA uses a key that cannot be copied due to technological limitations and is quantum-secure against digital emulation. Moreover, QSA does not depend on secrecy of stored data, does not depend on unproven mathematical assumptions, and is straightforward to implement with current technology.
http://www.opticsinfobase.org/optica/abstract.cfm?uri=optica-1-6-421

Plants are changing their 'eating choices'
A carnivorous plant that is turning vegetarian
The bladderworts (Utricularia) is a species of carnivorous plant that catches and digests tiny animals.

Now, the plant is turning to algae and pollen grains for a balanced nutrition.
The species catches its prey with the help of suction bladders, trap doors and lightning speed.

Once captured by the bladderwort, the animal suffocates, and is then broken down by enzymes and digested.

This is how the plant worked until it discovered vegetarianism.

"Bladderworts are switching to algae and pollen grains," said researchers Marianne Koller-Peroutka and Wolfram Adlassnig from the University of Vienna in Austria.

When bladderworts lived in areas where algae was plenty and animals were scarce, the vegetarian plants were actually larger than the meat eaters.

Consuming animals gave the plants a higher nitrogen content which increased the development of hibernation buds which are critical to helping them survive over cold winters.
The bladderworts (Utricularia) are one of the largest genera (a principal taxonomic category that ranks above species and below family) in carnivorous plants with over 200 species.

The study appeared in the journal Annals of Botany.

Researchers at Montana State University and Brandenburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany have created a simple mathematical model based on optical measurements that explains the stunning colors of Yellowstone National Park's hot springs and can visually recreate how they appeared years ago, before decades of tourists contaminated the pools with make-a-wish coins and other detritus.
Using a relatively simple one-dimensional model for light propagation, the group was able to reproduce the brilliant colors and optical characteristics of Yellowstone National Park’s hot springs by accounting for each pool’s spectral reflection due to microbial mats, their optical absorption and scattering of water and the incident solar and diffuse skylight conditions present when measurements were taken.
While the basic physical phenomena that render these colorful delights have long been scientifically understood -- they arise because of a complicated interplay of underwater vents and lawns of bacteria -- no mathematical model existed that showed empirically how the physical and chemical variables of a pool relate to their optical factors and coalesce in the unique, stunning fashion that they do.
Using a relatively simple one-dimensional model for light propagation, the group was able to reproduce the brilliant colors and optical characteristics of Yellowstone National Park's hot springs by accounting for each pool's spectral reflection due to microbial mats, their optical absorption and scattering of water and the incident solar and diffuse skylight conditions present when measurements were taken. In the case of Morning Glory Pool, they were even able to simulate what the pool once looked like between the 1880s and 1940s, when its temperatures were significantly higher. During this time, its waters appeared a uniform deep blue. An accumulation of coins, trash and rocks over the intervening decades has partially obscured the underwater vent, lowering the pool's overall temperature and shifting its appearance to a terrace of orange-yellow-green. This change from blue was demonstrated to result from the change in composition of the microbial mats, as a result of the lower water temperature.
A general relationship between shallow water temperature (hence microbial mat composition) and observed colors was confirmed in this study. However, color patterns observed in deeper segments of the pool are caused more by absorption and scattering of light in the water. These characteristics - mats having greater effect on color in shallow water, and absorption and scattering winning out in the deeper areas - are consistent across all the measured pools.

Evening use of light-emitting eReaders negatively affects sleep, circadian timing, and next-morning alertness

Abstract

In the past 50 y, there has been a decline in average sleep duration and quality, with adverse consequences on general health. A representative survey of 1,508 American adults recently revealed that 90% of Americans used some type of electronics at least a few nights per week within 1 h before bedtime. Mounting evidence from countries around the world shows the negative impact of such technology use on sleep. This negative impact on sleep may be due to the short-wavelength–enriched light emitted by these electronic devices, given that artificial-light exposure has been shown experimentally to produce alerting effects, suppress melatonin, and phase-shift the biological clock. A few reports have shown that these devices suppress melatonin levels, but little is known about the effects on circadian phase or the following sleep episode, exposing a substantial gap in our knowledge of how this increasingly popular technology affects sleep. Here we compare the biological effects of reading an electronic book on a light-emitting device (LE-eBook) with reading a printed book in the hours before bedtime. Participants reading an LE-eBook took longer to fall asleep and had reduced evening sleepiness, reduced melatonin secretion, later timing of their circadian clock, and reduced next-morning alertness than when reading a printed book. These results demonstrate that evening exposure to an LE-eBook phase-delays the circadian clock, acutely suppresses melatonin, and has important implications for understanding the impact of such technologies on sleep, performance, health, and safety.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/12/18/1418490112

Clouds may be dining cars for some germs
Germs don’t just hitchhike on clouds, some also treat them as a cafeteria
Researchers have discovered that at least one cloud-dwelling microbe — a bacterium belonging to the Bacillus genus— may dine on sugars while riding the winds in clouds. And this is not just any microbe. It’s one of the types most frequently found in the air and cloud-water droplets, reports a team of European scientists.
Scientists had known for decades that clouds can host diverse communities of microbes. But researchers had suspected those germs, lofted into the air by winds, were just aimlessly hitchhiking rides, sometimes between continents. The new research shows that the germs are not just jetting long distances. Some may treat their cloud ferries like club cars, dining happily as they travel.
https://student.societyforscience.org/article/clouds-may-be-dining-...

Equivalence of wave–particle duality to entropic uncertainty
Bridging Two Mysteries At The Heart Of Quantum Physics It turns out that wave-particle duality is simply the quantum uncertainty principle in disguise.
Using novel techniques from information theory, researchers from the National University of Singapore have demonstrated a striking and fundamental relationship between two fundamental characteristics of quantum physics—wave-particle duality and the uncertainty principle. This research, published in Nature Communications, paves the way for more elegant tests of both phenomena in quantum systems. http://www.asianscientist.com/2014/12/in-the-lab/bridging-mysteries...

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/141219/ncomms6814/full/ncomms6814...