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Cancer signalling pathway could illuminate new avenue to therapy
Researchers have better defined a pro-growth signaling pathway common to many cancers that, when blocked, kills cancer cells but leaves healthy cells comparatively unharmed. The study could establish new avenues of therapeutic treatments for many types of solid tumors.
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European Mars Lander Crash Caused by 1-Second Glitch: ESA
PARIS — The European Space Agency (ESA) on Nov. 23 said its Schiaparelli lander’s crash landing on Mars on Oct. 19 followed an unexplained saturation of its inertial measurement unit (IMU), which delivered bad data to the lander’s computer and forced a premature release of its parachute.
Polluted by the IMU data, the lander’s computer apparently thought it had either already landed or was just about to land. The parachute system was released, the braking thrusters were fired only briefly and the on-ground systems were activated.
Instead of being on the ground, Schiaparelli was still 2.3 miles (3.7 kilometers) above the Mars surface. It crashed, but not before delivering what ESA officials say is a wealth of data on entry into the Mars atmosphere, the functioning and release of the heat shield and the deployment of the parachute — all of which went according to plan.
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Did-NASA-Mars-Rover-Find a Signature of Past Life?
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New Scientist - November 19 - 25
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NASA Just Tested The 'Impossible Drive': Does It Work?
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Plants ‘see’ underground by channelling light to their roots
A light-bulb moment? Plants seem to pipe sunlight directly down into underground roots to help them grow.
Light receptors in stems, leaves and flowers have long been known to regulate plant growth. Roots also have these receptors, but it has been unclear how they sense light deep in dark soil.
Hyo-Jun Lee at Seoul National University in South Korea and his colleagues used Arabidopsis thaliana – a small flowering plant from the mustard family – as a model to study this phenomenon.
They found that the plant stem acts like a fibre-optic cable, conducting light down to receptors in the roots known as phytochromes. These trigger the production of a protein called HY5, which promotes healthy root growth.
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THIS WEEK IN SCIENCE
November 12 - 18, 2016
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This video about the scale of black holes will crush your poor, tiny brain
We thought we were prepared...
Black holes are vast, matter-annihilating objects that seem to defy physics by their very existence. They're so weird, that when Albert Einstein's equations first predicted the existence of these beasts, he didn't believe they could actually be real.
And you can't really blame him, because the idea that we have these singularities of space-time intent on sucking up all the matter around them scattered all around our cosmic backyard is pretty hard to wrap your head around.
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Supercomputer simulations help develop new approach to fight antibiotic resistance
Supercomputer simulations have played a key role in discovering a new class of drug candidates that hold promise to combat antibiotic resistance. In a new study, lab experiments were combined with supercomputer modeling to identify molecules that boost antibiotics’ effect on disease-causing bacteria
The researchers found four new chemicals that seek out and disrupt bacterial proteins called "efflux pumps," known to be a major cause of antibiotic resistance. Although some antibiotics can permeate the protective barriers surrounding bacterial cells, many bacteria have evolved efflux pumps that expel antibiotics back out of the cell and render the medications ineffective.
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Scientists have rejuvenated old mice with the blood of human teenagers
The fountain of youth is real, and it's creepy.
It might sound like something out of a creepy folk tale, but scientists have found evidence that injecting young human blood into older bodies does seem to offer powers of rejuvenation – even if those old bodies aren't human themselves.
In a new study, researchers took blood samples from a group of healthy, young 18-year-old human participants and injected them into 12-month-old mice – late middle age in mice years, or the equivalent of being about 50 years old in human terms.
For three weeks, the mice received twice-weekly injections of human blood plasma – blood's liquid component, which scientists think is responsible for its rejuvenating properties.
After this, scientists from California-based biopharmaceutical company Alkahest compared the injected animals' behaviour to young and old control groups of three-month-old and 12-month-old mice – neither of which had received the plasma injections.
The new blood made the old mice act young again, with the treated animals running around in open spaces much like their younger controls.
But there was also evidence that their powers of memory had improved.
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CRISPR gene-editing has been tested in a human for the first time
Chinese scientists have become the first in the world to inject an adult human with cells that have been genetically edited using the revolutionary CRISPR/Cas9 technique.
The CRISPR-edited cells were injected on October 28 by a team from the Sichuan University in Chengdu, as part of a clinical trial against aggressive lung cancer - and experts think it could trigger a biomedical race between the US and China.
If you haven't heard of CRISPR as yet, you soon will. The new gene-editing technique is poised to revolutionise the way we treat disease, by offering scientists a quick and easy way to cut and paste genes from our DNA.
CRISPR/Cas9 basically works like a pair of molecular scissors. Researchers just need to program it, and it can cut out certain genes - or add new ones - far more cheaply and quickly than any previous genetic tools
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The year is 2033, and humanity's first crewed mission to Mars is about to become a reality. As a clock counts down the final 90 seconds to landing, an expert crew of astronauts endures the final harrowing moments before touching down on the red planet. Even with the best training and resources available, the maiden crew of the Daedalus spacecraft must push itself to the brink of human capability in order to successfully establish the first sustainable colony on Mars. Set both in the future and in the present day, the global miniseries event MARS blends feature film-caliber scripted elements set in the future with documentary vérité interviews with today’s best and brightest minds in modern science and innovation, illuminating how research and development is creating the space technology that will enable our first attempt at a mission to Mars.
Episode 1 - NOVO MUNDO
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Why scientists say dark energy could have just disappeared (Video)
Where did it go?
You might have read the headlines a few weeks ago about a controversial study that found evidence that the Universe might not actually be expanding at an accelerating rate.
The paper was big news for the scientific community. Not only are our future projections about the Universe based on the idea that it's expanding faster and faster, but so is the entire concept of dark energy - the hypothetical force that scientists think is pushing the Universe apart faster than gravity can pull it back in.
In other words, if the Universe isn't actually expanding at an accelerating rate, did dark energy just disappear?
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Scientists have measured the smallest fragment of time ever
We just witnessed an electron escaping an atom.
Our understanding of time and the world around us just got way more precise. Physicists have successfully measured changes in an atom on the level of zeptoseconds. That's a trillionth of a billionth of a second - the smallest fragment of time ever observed.
With this new level of detail, they were able to measure the entire process of an electron escaping its atom for the first time, in a stunning test of Einstein's photoelectric effect.
The photoelectric effect was first proposed by Albert Einstein in 1905, and occurs when particles of light, known as photons, strike the electrons orbiting an atom.
According to quantum mechanics, the energy from these photons is either absorbed entirely by one electron, or divided among a few of them. But until now, no one has been able to study this process in enough detail to know for sure how it's decided.
The end result is that an electron is sent flying from the bonds of its parent atom in an incredibly rapid process. Previous research has shown that the whole thing from start to finish takes between 5 and 15 attoseconds (10-18 seconds).
But before this, researchers had only been able to measure in detail what happened after the electron fled its atom.
Now a team led by the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany has been able to see the other side of the process for the first time - and measure what happens in the tiny amount of time before the electron leaves the atom.
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Diver Finds Long-Lost Nuke While Hunting Sea Cucumbers
A man diving off the coast of British Columbia, Canada, may have stumbled upon a nuclear weapon that the United States lost decades ago.
Now, the Royal Canadian Navy is scoping out the strange object to see if it is indeed a Mark IV bomb that was jettisoned by an American pilot in 1950 just before his plane crashed.
The man, Sean Smyrichinsky, was using an underwater scooter to hunt for sea cucumbers near Pitt Island, when he came upon a weird bagel-shaped object. After straying from his boat, he came upon a bizarre object that looked a bit like a half-cut bagel the size of a king-sized bed, he told CBC.
"I came out from the dive and I came up and I started telling my crew, 'My god, I found a UFO. I found the strangest thing I'd ever seen!' Smyrichinsky told CBC. "It resembled, like, a bagel cut in half, and then around the bagel these bowls molded into it."
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Neuroscientists have successfully removed specific phobias from people's brains
Neuroscientists have figured out how to remove specific fears from patients' brains using a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and brain scanning technology, and the technique could change the lives of people with crippling phobias.
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EverythingScience introducing an easier way to watch the latest episodes of Mars: A dedicated channel to keep track of all the episodes. Stay tuned as they will be uploaded as soon as available.
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November 19 - 25 2016
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The surgeon behind the first human head transplant is using VR to prepare his patient
In case you haven’t heard the rumblings over the past year or so, Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero is hell-bent on performing the world’s first human head transplant, and says the procedure will take place within the next 12 months.
He’s even got a willing participant - Valery Spiridonov, a 30-year-old Russian man with muscular atrophy - and Canavero has just announced that his patient will spend much of his preparation time inside a virtual reality machine to get him used to his new body.
If all of this is sounding to you like a terrible, horrible dream... we wish.
Last year, when Spiridonov announced his willing participation and progressed the project from 'Crazy surgeon speaking in hypotheticals' to 'Oh crap, this is actually happening' levels of weird.
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Astronomers have traced the source of the most powerful radio signal ever received from space
Scientists have observed the most powerful fast radio burst (FRB) ever – an intensely brilliant burst of radiation emanating from outside our own Milky Way galaxy.
The signal, which researchers say travelled at least a billion light-years to reach Earth, only lasted for a fraction of a second, but the observation could help us understand more about the epic gaps that exist between galaxies, called the cosmic web.
"FRBs are extremely short but intense pulses of radio waves, each only lasting about a millisecond," says astrophysicist Ryan Shannon from Curtin University in Australia. "Some are discovered by accident and no two bursts look the same."
There's a lot we still don't understand about FRBs and where they come from, partly because we've so far witnessed very few of them.
This new burst – called FRB 150807 – is just the 18th FRB detected to date since they were first discovered in 2001.
But despite this apparent rarity, scientists actually think these intensely powerful but short phenomena are happening all the time – we just don't notice them.
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The North Pole is 20°C hotter than it should be right now
Temperatures near the North Pole are an unheard of 36°F (20°C) warmer than average right now, researchers have reported.
The Arctic is currently in the midst of polar night, where the Sun hardly ever rises. Usually, it’s the time when things get really cold and vast, thick ice sheets form for the winter.
But this year, temperatures are much warmer than usual – while the weather stations around the North Pole record the biggest difference, even in parts of Arctic Russia, temperatures are up to 12.6°F (7°C) warmer.And even though sea ice is forming again after reaching its annual low in September, it’s doing so much slower than usual.
In fact, so far the amount of ice coverage is even lower than the record-breaking low of 2012.
Scientists have taken to Twitter to express their concern over just how bad the situation is getting.
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Last-line antibiotics are failing
A new report shows that in 2015, antibiotic resistance continued to increase for most bacteria and antibiotics under surveillance. In particular, the EU average percentage of carbapenem resistance in Klebsiella pneumoniae increased from 6.2% in 2012 to 8.1% in 2015, and combined resistance to carbapenems and polymyxins (e.g. colistin) was sometimes reported. These two groups of antibiotics are considered last-line antibiotics as they usually are the last treatment options for patients infected with bacteria resistant to other available antibiotics.
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Scientists have identified an antibody that neutralises 98% of HIV strains
We're closer than ever to an HIV vaccine
Scientists have discovered an antibody produced by an HIV-positive patient that neutralises 98 percent of all HIV strains tested - including most of the strains that are resistant to other antibodies of the same class.
Due to HIV’s ability to rapidly respond to the body’s immune defences, an antibody that can block a wide range of strains has been very hard to come by. But now that we’ve found one, it could form the basis of a new vaccine against the virus.
Researchers from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) found that the antibody, called NG, was able to maintain its ability to recognise the HIV virus, even as the virus morphed and broke away from it.
It’s also up to 10 times more potent than VRC01 - an antibody in the same class as N6, which has progressed to phase II clinical trials in human patients, after protecting monkeys against HIV for nearly six months.
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High-speed electrons have been spotted outside Earth's magnetic field, and NASA can't explain it
So fast, they break current physics models.
In the region of space just outside Earth’s magnetic field, NASA has detected electrons that are being accelerated to almost the speed of light - and no one can explain why.
In fact, our current understanding of particle physics says this kind of acceleration should be impossible so far out from the magnetosphere, and now physicists are trying to figure out what kind of force can be pushing them to such speeds.
"This is a puzzling case because we're seeing energetic electrons where we don't think they should be, and no model fits them," says one of the researchers, David Sibeck from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre. "There is a gap in our knowledge, something basic is missing."
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We finally have a solid lead on one of space’s most mysterious signals
Where do fast radio bursts come from?
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are among the most explosive and mysterious signals ever detected from space. They only last milliseconds, but in that short period of time, they generate as much energy as the Sun does in an entire day. And we have no idea where they come from.
Until now, we've detected just a handful of the strange events, and only ever through radio wave emissions. But for the first time, researchers say they've now spotted a huge burst of gamma rays - high-energy waves on the opposite end of the electromagnetic spectrum to radio waves - that corresponds with an FRB.
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This world-first brain implant is letting a 'locked-in' woman communicate
Paralysis is about to get a whole lot less lonely.
A paralysed woman in the Netherlands is the first to be fitted with a new type of brain implant that allows patients who cannot speak or move to communicate using nothing but their thoughts.
The new implant, which works with a computer interface to help her spell out words and sentences, can be used anywhere, allowing her to communicate with people in the outside world, without medical experts on hand to help.
"This is a world first," neuroscientist and lead researcher Nick Ramsay, from the University Medical School Utrecht, told CNN. "It's a fully implantable system that works at home without need for any experts to make it work."
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A Mysterious Unidentified Object Crashes in Myanmar
A large, unidentified metal object fell from the sky Thursday (Nov. 10) in the remote mountainous region of Myanmar.
The cylindrical object, which is about 12 feet (3.7 meters) long and 5 feet in diameter, blasted into the village of Lone Khin, near a jade mine. Villagers woke early in the morning to a loud boom and vibrations, when the object fell to the ground. Though no one was injured, the UFO ripped through a jade miner's tent, and afterwards, the smell of burning filled the air, according to The Myanmar Times.
"Initially, we thought it was a battle. The explosion made our houses shake. We saw the smoke from our village," Lone Khin villager Daw Ma Kyi told The Myanmar Times.
At first glance, the object looks like it may have come from an aircraft.
"I think it was an engine because I found a diode and many copper wires at the tail of the body," villager Ko Maung Myo told The Myanmar Times. "It also looks like a jet engine block."
However, government officials say that they haven't identified the object and are sending experts to examine it. One former government official with the Department of Aviation said that the image shown on Facebook of the metal "UFO" looked more like a rocket booster than part of a commercial plane.
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