Whole-Genome Sequencing of the World’s Oldest People
Analysis of world's oldest people reveals there's no gene for long life

Scientists have sequenced the entire genome of 17 of the world’s oldest living people to find that their secret is… they have no secret. Or if they do, it's just really good at hiding.

http://www.plosone.org/article/authors/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourn...
http://www.sciencealert.com/analysis-of-world-s-oldest-living-peopl...

Update on knee replacements
Two major studies published this year, researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond conducted a surgical-validity assessment. Using criteria developed in Europe, they concluded that knee replacements could be judged appropriate for only those whose arthritis in the knee was medically proven to be advanced. This means not just severe pain but also impaired physical function, like an inability to climb stairs, get out of a chair or walk without aid. Based on others' work done in Spain, the researchers also determined that surgical replacements were better suited for patients older than 65. Their reasoning? The implanted materials wear out after a couple of decades, meaning a 45-yearold patient might need an additional knee replacement during his lifetime.
In a separate study , the same researchers also found that people who were good candidates for surgery benefited substantially from the sur gery , reporting much less knee pain and much better physical functioning in the months immediately following the procedure and again two years later. On one commonly used measure of knee function, their scores improved by about 20 points on average. By contrast, subjects whose surgeries the scientists deemed inappropriate did not improve much. After a year, their scores on knee function had risen by only about two points.
The message is not that people should wait until their knees break down completely before replacing them. But they should question the need for surgery . If you do not have bone-on-bone arthritis, in which all of the cushioning cartilage in the knee is gone, think about consulting a physical therapist about exercise programs that could strengthen the joint, reducing pain and disability. Losing weight helps, too.
-Virginia Commonwealth University

Race Finished (Book)
Is there any biological foundation for current or past "racial" distinctions?
Like I said before there isn't!
http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/race-finished

A team of astronomers has solved the mystery as to why certain young galaxies flame out in a blaze of glory.

These young "starburst" galaxies that would shut down their star formation to join a category scientists call "red and dead" had puzzled astronomers for long.

Starburst galaxies result from the merger or close encounter of two separate galaxies.

"To form stars you need dense gas. When the gas gets dense enough and is not too hot, small portions of of that gas can collapse to form stars. Without a lot of cool dense gas, stars cannot be formed," said Gregory Rudnick, associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas in the US.

Previous research showed spouts of gas shooting outward from such galaxies at up to two million miles per hour.

But astronomers did not know of what led to the gas being expelled.

Rudnick and fellow researchers found that energy from the star formation itself created a shortage of gas within the starburst galaxies, shutting down the potential for further crafting of stars.

There is so much star formation that it is possible the energy from the star formation itself is able to stop the star formation," Rudnick added.

Black holes once thought to be responsible for causing these outflows did not have any role to play in them, said the study that appeared in the journal Monthly Notices.

This is why some galaxies lose their star forming ability.

Adaptive evolution: Can we read the future from a tree?
A new method uses genealogies based on sequence data to predict short-term evolutionary patterns.
http://elifesciences.org/content/3/e05060

Scientists Sequence Genomes of 17 World’s Oldest Living People to see if they could uncover the genetic basis for extreme human longevity.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone....
Supercentenarians are the world’s oldest people, living beyond 110 years of age. 74 are alive worldwide, with 22 living in the United States.

Dr Kim and his colleagues from Stanford University, the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, and the University of California Los Angeles, performed whole-genome sequencing on 17 supercentenarians to explore the genetic basis underlying their extreme longevity.
One possibility is that a specific mutation could alter the protein-coding region in a gene and confer a significant increase in longevity. Such a mutation could act in a dominant or recessive fashion, and might be shared by a significant fraction of the supercentenarian genomes.”

“Another possibility is that there may be a gene that confers extreme longevity when it is altered by any one of a number of protein alterations.”

“Many of the supercentenarians may carry variants in the same gene, but the variant in each supercentenarian may be different. The variants could act in a dominant fashion and affect only one of the two alleles. Or else they could act in a recessive fashion such that both alleles would be affected, either with the same variant or with different mutations in each allele.”

The scientists analyzed rare protein-altering variants, but found no significant evidence of enrichment for a single rare protein-altering variant or for a gene harboring different rare protein altering variants in the supercentenarians compared to control genomes (379 European individuals from the 1000Genomes Project).

– Moldy houses are hard on the lungs, and new results in mice suggest that they could also be bad for the brain. Inhaling mold spores made mice anxious and forgetful, researchers reported November 15 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

Cheryl Harding, a psychologist at the City University of New York, and colleagues dripped low doses of spores from the toxic mold Stachybotrys into mouse noses three times per week. After three weeks, the mice didn’t look sick. But they had trouble remembering a fearful place. The mice were also more anxious than normal counterparts. The anxiety and memory deficits went along with decreases in new brain cells in the hippocampus — a part of the brain that plays a role in memory — compared with control mice.

Harding and colleagues also found that the behaviors linked to increased inflammatory proteins in the hippocampus. Exposure to mold’s toxins and structural proteins may trigger an immune response in the brain. The findings, Harding says, may help explain some of the conditions that people living in moldy buildings complain about, such as anxiety and cognitive problems.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/mold-may-mean-bad-news-brain

Antiviral microbicides effective against HIV in lab tests have had inconsistent results in people. A new study that includes semen and vaginal fluids, often missing elements in laboratory studies, finds that semen actually inhibits microbicides from killing HIV.

But the study, published in the November 12 Science Translational Medicine, also finds that semen didn’t diminish the antiviral effect of one microbicidal drug called maraviroc, which works differently from others. While most microbicides target components of HIV itself, maraviroc targets the receptor protein that serves as the entry point on cells that HIV is seeking to invade.

Maraviroc stopped infection when tested in cervical cells exposed to semen-treated HIV, suggesting that agents targeting these protein receptors on cells might be more promising than those aimed at the virus itself.
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/science-ticker/semen-seems-counter...

Science and magic:

The magician deals out six cards and asks the spectator to reveal only the color of each card. The spectator then chooses one of them and the Phoney app miraculously predicts his or her card.

A lot of science in this illusion. Part of it was a matter of probability. “Think of it as a sequence of six, where each card can be a 1 or a 0, black or red,” Williams says. “That’s 26, or 64 different combinations. There are only 52 cards in a deck, so we have enough information.”

There was also a cognitive element. people studied card preferences, and found that subjects had a strong inclination toward high-ranking cards, red cards and hearts. They programmed this app to recognize these preferences when predicting which card the spectator had chosen.

During the actual performance, several illusions happen at once. First, a fresh deck of cards is cut but never actually shuffled. Then, as the spectator calls out each card’s color, the magician uses a fake lock screen—Watch the video again, carefully!—to enter that information into the system. Finally, the app combines preprogrammed preferences with probability calculations to choose the most likely card. Magicians have a lot of experience, and a lot of that depends on the human component—[they] use the fact that human beings are what they are. Of course, that’s all based on mathematical principles.

Were Neanderthals a Separate Species? Scientists Say Yes, By a Nose

Our genes suggest that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals, and that's led some anthropologists to claim Homo neanderthalensis should be considered a subspecies of Homo sapiens rather than a separate species. But other researchers disagree, and one team of specialists says the Neanderthals' nasal anatomy proves they were a species of their own. The comparisons of 3-D coordinates from CT scans of ancient fossils are published in the November issue of The Anatomical Record. "By looking at the complete morphological pattern, we can conclude that Neanderthals are our close relatives, but they are not us," Jeffrey Laitman, an anatomist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, said in a news release.

Two new subatomic particles whose existence was predicted by Canadian particle physicists have been detected at the world's largest particle collider.

The discovery of the particles, known as Xi_b'- and Xi_b*-, were announced by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research today and published online on the physics preprint server Arxiv.They have been submitted to the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.
The new particles are baryons – a type of particle each made up of three elemental subatomic particles called quarks. The protons and neutrons that make up atoms are also baryons, but the new particles are about six times more massive than a proton.

That's because they contain a very heavy kind of quark called a b quark – also known as a beauty or bottom quark. The two other quarks in the particles are the d or down quark – a very light type of quark that is also found in protons and neutrons – and a middleweight strange quark.

Shaping the oral microbiota through intimate kissing
http://www.microbiomejournal.com/content/2/1/41
. A single 10-second smooch can transfer tens of millions of bacteria from one partner to the other. That’s the finding from a study.
More than 700 different bacteria are estimated to live in the human mouth. To find out how macking mixes microbes, Dutch scientists asked 21 couples to French kiss.
Similarity indices of microbial communities show that average partners have a more similar oral microbiota composition compared to unrelated individuals, with by far most pronounced similarity for communities associated with the tongue surface. An intimate kiss did not lead to a significant additional increase of the average similarity of the oral microbiota between partners. However, clear correlations were observed between the similarity indices of the salivary microbiota of couples and self-reported kiss frequencies, and the reported time passed after the latest kiss. In control experiments for bacterial transfer, we identified the probiotic Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium marker bacteria in most kiss receivers, corresponding to an average total bacterial transfer of 80 million bacteria per intimate kiss of 10 s.

This study indicates that a shared salivary microbiota requires a frequent and recent bacterial exchange and is therefore most pronounced in couples with relatively high intimate kiss frequencies. The microbiota on the dorsal surface of the tongue is more similar among partners than unrelated individuals, but its similarity does not clearly correlate to kissing behavior, suggesting an important role for specific selection mechanisms resulting from a shared lifestyle, environment, or genetic factors from the host. Furthermore, our findings imply that some of the collective bacteria among partners are only transiently present, while others have found a true niche on the tongue’s surface allowing long-term colonization.

Banking culture primes people to cheat

Individual bankers behave honestly — except when they think about their jobs.
http://www.nature.com/news/banking-culture-primes-people-to-cheat-1...

To be a swift runner you need strong muscles, a powerful heart, determination and — symmetrical knees? That’s what scientists learned when they studied some of the world’s top sprinters.
Among the very best sprinters in the world, knee symmetry predicts who’s going to be the best of the best.
- Plos One

IIT-M Joins CERN to Explore The Secrets of The Universe
Led by an expert who was part of the ATLAS experiment that helped find the Higgs Boson by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the Indian Institute of Technology - Madras has become a full member of a collaboration with the Geneva-based organisation in search of the structure of the universe.

While reputed institutions including TIFR, BARC and a few others have been partnering with CERN, IIT-M is the first IIT to come on board of the prestigious LHC experiment.

According to Prafulla Kumar Behera, an associate professor with the department of physics, this initiative will help the institute strengthen its capabilities in fundamental research. "CERN is home to a lot of innovations, including the world wide web. This collaboration is like a bridge that would connect us to the highest level of scientific research while offering them our talent and expertise," Behera told The New Indian Express.

Besides him, another faculty, James Libby, and two PhD scholars have come on board on the CMS collaboration.

Tufts Study Finds Big Rise In Cost Of Drug Development
Pharmaceuticals: Benchmark report sees the cost of bringing a drug to market approaching $3 billion
http://cen.acs.org/articles/92/web/2014/11/Tufts-Study-Finds-Big-Ri...

Deceptive Practices in Drugs Research Could Become Harder
The proposed crack-down would close loopholes that allow researchers to hide negative findings and harmful side effects

US government cracks down on clinical-trials reporting

Proposed regulations would close loopholes that allow researchers to hide negative data.
http://www.nature.com/news/us-government-cracks-down-on-clinical-tr...

Horizontal gene transfer: Antibiotic genes spread far and wide
The genes responsible for antibiotics can spread between the three domains of life—Archaea, Bacteria and Eukaryotes.

The genes for proteins with antibacterial properties are capable of spreading across stunning evolutionary distances (Metcalf et al., 2014). Their results suggest that our search for new antibiotics needs to be broadened if we are to take full advantage of the variety of antibacterial compounds that exist in nature.
Genes are able to move between organisms in a process known as horizontal gene transfer. This happens most frequently between individuals of the same, or closely-related species (Andam and Gogarten 2011) and is thought to be responsible for the spread of antibiotic resistance genes between bacteria. However, genes can also occasionally move between distantly-related individuals, including from one domain of life, such as Bacteria, to either Archaea or Eukaryotes (Lundin et al., 2010). Whether a gene is successfully transferred depends on a number of constraints. For instance, if the organisms inhabit different environments, there are fewer opportunities to transfer genes. Once transferred, a gene may not be compatible with the recipient, or may not provide it with an advantage. Despite these constraints, some genes have spread, via horizontal transfer, to all three domains of life, and such transfer events may have been extensive during evolution .
http://elifesciences.org/content/3/e05244#sthash.ukduippX.dpuf

How DNA Damage Leads To Cancer
Scientists have identified the protein Rad54B as a key regulator of genomic stability, making it a potential target for cancer therapy.
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/141111/ncomms6426/full/ncomms6426...

New light on heart disease:
Scientists now think that inflammation is a key factor in heart disease.

The older thinking was that plaque in coronary arteries caused heart attacks. Now the thinking is that it’s also due to some living tissue under plague that gets inflamed and that disrupts the plaque. We already knew statins ameliorate heart disease, and always thought it was through lipids, but here’s a new pathway.
And Statins May Protect People from Air Pollution
Statins, prescribed to lower cholesterol and reduce risks of heart attacks and strokes, seem to diminish inflammation that occurs after people breathe airborne particles.
http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/2014/nov/statins-an...
The studies on these are still underway and we will report them when the results are published.

Hormone estrogen may shield the brain after an injury
Inflammation goes down when the sex hormone increases around an injury
Estrogen can protect the brain from harmful inflammation following traumatic injury, a new study in zebra finches suggests. Boosting levels of the sex hormone in the brain might help prevent the cell loss that occurs following damage from injuries such as stroke.

Estrogen levels quadrupled around the damaged area in both male and female zebra finches after researchers gave them experimental brain injuries, Colin Saldanha and colleagues at American University in Washington, D.C., reported November 17 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. When the scientists prevented finch brains from making estrogen, inflammatory proteins at damaged sites increased.

The helpful estrogen didn’t come from gonads. It’s made within the brain by support cells called astrocytes close to the injury.

Injury inflames the brain. Initially, this inflammation recruits helpful cells to the damaged area and aids in recovery. But the long-term presence of inflammatory proteins can cause harm, killing off brain cells and reducing functions such as movement and memory. The researchers hope that by understanding how estrogen reduces inflammatory proteins, therapies might boost this natural estrogen production to keep harmful inflammation at bay.
- http://www.abstractsonline.com/Plan/ViewAbstract.aspx?sKey=6a2113dc...

Asteroid impacts on Earth may give rise to rare, structurally bizarre diamonds on our planet, a new study suggests.

Scientists have settled a longstanding controversy over a purported rare form of diamond called lonsdaleite - formed by impact shock, but which lacks the three-dimensional regularity of ordinary diamond
A group of scientists has now shown that what has been called lonsdaleite is in fact a structurally disordered form of ordinary diamond.

"So-called lonsdaleite is actually the long-familiar cubic form of diamond, but it's full of defects," said Peter Nemeth, a former Arizona State University (ASU) visiting researcher.

These can occur, he said, due to shock metamorphism, plastic deformation or unequilibrated crystal growth

Scientists said that a large meteorite, called Canyon Diablo after the crater it formed on impact in northern Arizona, contained a new form of diamond with a hexagonal structure.

They described it as an impact-related mineral and called it lonsdaleite, after Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, a famous crystallographer.

Since then, "lonsdaleite" has been widely used by scientists as an indicator of ancient asteroidal impacts on Earth, including those linked to mass extinctions.

In addition, it has been thought to have mechanical properties superior to ordinary diamond, giving it high potential industrial significance.

All this focused much interest on the mineral, although pure crystals of it, even tiny ones, have never been found or synthesised.
Scientists re-examined Canyon Diablo diamonds and investigated laboratory samples prepared under conditions in which lonsdaleite has been reported.

Using the advanced electron microscopes, the team found, both in the Canyon Diablo and the synthetic samples, new types of diamond twins and nanometre-scale structural complexity. These give rise to features attributed to lonsdaleite

"Most crystals have regular repeating structures, much like the bricks in a well-built wall," said Peter Buseck, from the University of Bayreuth in Germany.

However, interruptions can occur in the regularity, and these are called defects.

"Defects are intermixed with the normal diamond structure, just as if the wall had an occasional half-brick or longer brick or row of bricks that's slightly displaced to one side or another," said Buseck.

The outcome of the new work is that so-called lonsdaleite is the same as the regular cubic form of diamond, but it has been subjected to shock or pressure that caused defects within the crystal structure.

The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.

India is home to one of the highest proportions of threatened species in the world

http://www.livemint.com/Politics/V5SjMWmLe30Z1c9gr1iqxK/Indias-wild...

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Beetle behind breath test for bank notes
Simply breathing on money could soon reveal if it's the real deal or counterfeit thanks to a beetle-inspired ink that reversibly changes colour in response to humidity. The photonic crystal ink developed by Chinese researchers can produce unique colour changing patterns on surfaces with an inkjet printer system, which would be extremely hard for fraudsters to reproduce. The work also shows promise for other applications including displays and wearable sensors.

Ling Bai and Zhongze Gu and colleagues at Southeast University in Nanjing, China, have developed a photonic crystal ink that mimics the way Tmesisternus isabellae – a species of longhorn beetle – reversibly switches its color from gold to red according to the humidity in its environment.

This color shift is caused by the adsorption of water vapour in their hardened front wings, which alters the thickness and average refractive index of their multilayered scales. To emulate this, the team made their photonic crystal ink using mesoporous silica nanoparticles, which have a large surface area and strong vapour adsorption capabilities that can be precisely controlled.

Using the ink in an inkjet printer, the researchers produced complex patterns on rigid and flexible materials and showed that their colour can be reversibly and precisely controlled – shifting from green to red or yellow for example – in response to nitrogen and ethanol vapours. They even saw patterns change colour simply in response to breathing on them.

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2014/11/beetle-behind-breath-test...

Natural shield 11,000 km above Earth stops radiation
Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT) and University of Colorado in Boulder have discovered an invisible shield some 11,000 kms above Earth that works against the harmful radiation belt.
High above Earth's atmosphere, electrons whiz past at close to the speed of light.

Such ultra-relativistic electrons, which make up the outer band of the Van Allen radiation belt, can streak around the planet in a mere five minutes - bombarding anything in their path.
The Van Allen belts are a collection of charged particles - gathered in place by Earth's magnetic field.

Exposure to such high-energy radiation can wreak havoc on satellite electronics and pose serious health risks to astronauts. Rresearchers found no matter where these electrons are circling around the planet's equator, they can get no further than about 11,000 km from the Earth's surface - despite their intense energy. What is keeping this high-energy radiation at bay seems to be neither the Earth's magnetic field nor long-range radio waves but rather a phenomenon termed 'plasmaspheric hiss'.
The phenomenon is described as very low-frequency electromagnetic waves in the Earth's upper atmosphere that, when played through a speaker, resemble static or white noise.

The researchers believe that plasmaspheric hiss essentially deflects incoming electrons causing them to collide with neutral gas atoms in the Earth's upper atmosphere and ultimately disappear.
The paper on which this report is based was published in the journal Nature.

Tuesday, 25th November 2014

UNESCO Launches Online Science Education Resource

From UNESCO:

UNESCO launched the UNESCO World Library of Science (WLoS), a newly created, free online science education resource for a global community of users. Developed through the joint efforts of UNESCO, Nature Education and Roche, the WLoS was created to give students around the world, especially those in disadvantaged regions, access to the latest science information as well as the opportunity to share their experiences and learning through discussion with their peers in a shared learning environment.

Launched on the occasion of World Science Day for Peace and Development 2014, the WLoS is a science resource library stocked with over 300 top-quality articles, 25 eBooks, and over 70 videos from the publishers of Nature, the most cited scientific journal in the world. It is also a state-of-the-art digital platform that provides a community hub for learning. Users can join classes, build groups and connect with other learners.

http://www.unesco.org/new/en/natural-sciences/about-us/single-view/...

Can sand dunes swallow people?

Yes, they can!

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