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There is no easy answer to this question due to the many different classifications of computers. The first mechanical computer, created by Charles Babbage in 1822, doesn't resemble what most would consider a computer today. Therefore, this page lists each of the computer firsts, starting with the Difference Engine and leading up to the computers we use today.

Early inventions that lead up to the computer, such as the abacus, astrolabe, slide rule, clocks, calculator, and tablet machines, are not accounted for on this page.

When was the word "computer" first used?

The word "computer" was first used in 1613 in the book The Yong Mans Gleanings by Richard Braithwaite and originally described a human who performed calculations or computations. The definition of a computer remained the same until the end of the 19th century, when the industrial revolution gave rise to mechanical machines whose primary purpose was calculating.

First mechanical computer or automatic computing engine concept

In 1822, Charles Babbage conceptualized and began developing the Difference Engine, the first automatic computing machine to approximate polynomials. The Difference Engine could compute several sets of numbers and make hard copies of the results. Babbage received some help with developing the Difference Engine from Ada Lovelace, who was considered the first computer programmer for her work. Unfortunately, because of funding, Babbage could never complete a full-scale functional version of this machine. In June 1991, the London Science Museum completed the Difference Engine No. 2 for the bicentennial year of Babbage's birth and later completed the printing mechanism in 2000.

First general-purpose computer

In 1837, Charles Babbage proposed the first general mechanical computer, the Analytical Engine. The Analytical Engine contained an ALU ( arithmetic logic unit), basic flow control, punch cards (inspired by the Jacquard Loom), and integrated memory. It is the first general-purpose computer concept that could be used for many things, not only one particular computation. Unfortunately, because of funding issues, this computer was never built while Charles Babbage was alive. In 1910, Henry Babbage, Charles Babbage's youngest son, completed a portion of this machine and performed basic calculations.

The first machine to record and store information

In 1890, Herman Hollerith developed a method for machines to record and store information on punch cards for the US census. Hollerith's machine was approximately ten times faster than manual tabulations, saving the census office millions of dollars. Hollerith would later form the company we know today as IBM.

First programmable computer

The was created by German Konrad Zuse in his parents' living room between 1936 and 1938. It is the first electromechanical binary programmable computer and the first functional modern computer.

Konrad Zuse would also later create the Z3, the first functioning programmable computer that could be fully automated.

First concepts of what we consider a modern computer

The Turing machine was first proposed by Alan Turing in 1936 and became the foundation for theories about computing and computers. The machine was a device that printed symbols on paper tape in a manner that emulated a person following several logical instructions. Without these fundamentals, we wouldn't have the computers we use today.

The first electric programmable computer

The was the first electric programmable computer, developed by Tommy Flowers, and was first demonstrated in December 1943. The Colossus was created to help the British code breakers read encrypted German messages.

The first digital computer

Short for Atanasoff-Berry Computer, the began development by Professor John Vincent Atanasoff and graduate student Cliff Berry in 1937. Its development continued until 1942 at Iowa State College (now Iowa State University).

The ABC was an electrical computer that used more than 300 vacuum tubes for digital computation, including binary math and Boolean logic, and had no CPU (central processing unit) (was not programmable). On October 19, 1973, US Federal Judge Earl R. Larson signed his decision that the ENIAC patent by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly was invalid. In the decision, Larson named Atanasoff the sole inventor.

The (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was invented by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania and began construction in 1943 and was not completed until 1946. It occupied about 1,800 square feet, used about 18,000 vacuum tubes, and weighed almost 50 tons. Although a judge later ruled the ABC computer was the first digital computer, many still consider the ENIAC to be the first digital computer because it was fully functional.

The first stored program computer

The first computer to electronically store and execute a program was the SSEM (Small Scale Experimental Machine), also known as the "Baby" or "Manchester Baby," in 1948. It was designed by Frederic Williams and built by his protégée, Tom Kilburn, with the assistance of Geoff Tootill, at the University of Manchester, England. Kilburn wrote the first electronically-stored program, which finds the highest proper factor of an integer using repeated subtraction rather than division. Kilburn's program was executed on June 21, 1948.

The second stored-program computer was also British: the (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator), built and designed by Maurice Wilkes at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in England. The EDSAC performed its first calculation on May 6, 1949. It was also the first computer to run a graphical computer game, "OXO," an implementation of tic-tac-toe displayed on a 6-inch cathode ray tube.

Around the same time, the Manchester Mark 1 was another computer that could run stored programs. Built at the Victoria University of Manchester, the first version of the Mark 1 computer became operational in April 1949. Mark 1 was used to run a program to search for Mersenne primes for nine hours without error on June 16 and 17 that same year.

The first computer company

The first computer company was Electronic Controls Company and was founded in 1949 by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the same individuals who helped create the ENIAC computer. The company was later renamed to EMCC (Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation) and released several mainframe computers under the UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) name.

First computer with a program stored in memory

First delivered to the United States government in 1950, the UNIVAC 1101 or ERA 1101 is considered the first computer capable of storing and running a program from memory.

First commercial computer

In 1942, Konrad Zuse began working on the Z4, the first commercial computer. The computer was sold to Eduard Stiefel, a mathematician at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, on July 12, 1950.

IBM's first computer

On April 7, 1953, IBM publicly introduced the , its first commercial scientific computer.

The first computer with RAM

MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) introduced the Whirlwind machine on March 8, 1955, a revolutionary computer that was the first digital computer with magnetic core RAM (random-access memory) and real-time graphics.

The first transistor computer

The TX-0 (Transistorized Experimental computer) was the first transistorized computer to be demonstrated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956.

The first minicomputer

In 1960, Digital Equipment Corporation released its first of many PDP (Programmed Data Processor) computers, the PDP-1.

The first desktop and mass-market computer

In 1964, the first desktop computer, the Programma 101, was unveiled at the New York World's Fair. It was invented by Pier Giorgio Perotto and manufactured by Olivetti. About 44,000 Programma 101 computers were sold, each with a price tag of $3,200.

In 1968, Hewlett Packard began marketing the HP 9100A, the first mass-marketed desktop computer.

The first workstation

Although it was never sold, the first workstation is considered to be the , introduced in 1974. The computer was revolutionary for its time and included a fully functional computer, display, and mouse. The computer operated like many GUI (graphical user interface) computers today, utilizing windows, menus, and icons as an interface to its operating system. Many of the computer's capabilities were first demonstrated in The Mother of All Demos by Douglas Engelbart on December 9, 1968.

The first microprocessor

Intel introduced the first microprocessor, the , on November 15, 1971.

The first microcomputer

The Vietnamese-French engineer André Truong Trong Thi and Francois Gernelle developed the Micral computer in 1973. Considered the first microcomputer, it used the Intel 8008 processor and was the first commercial non-assembly computer. It originally sold for $1,750.

The first personal computer (PC)

In 1975, Ed Roberts coined the term "personal computer" when he introduced the Altair 8800. However, the first personal computer is considered by many to be the KENBAK-1, which was introduced for $750 in 1971. The computer relied on several switches for inputting data and output data by turning on and off several lights.

The first laptop or portable computer

The was the first portable computer, released in September 1975. The computer weighed 55-pounds and had a five-inch CRT (cathode ray tube) display, tape drive, 1.9 MHz PALM processor, and 64 KB of RAM. The picture is an ad for the IBM 5100 taken from a November 1975 issue of Scientific American.

The first truly portable computer or laptop is considered to be the Osborne I, which was released in April 1981 and developed by Adam Osborne. The Osborne I weighed 24.5-pounds, had a 5-inch display, 64 KB of memory, two 5 1/4" floppy drives, ran the CP/M 2.2 operating system, included a modem, and cost $1,795.

The IBM PCD (PC Division) released the IBM portable in 1984, its first portable computer that weighed 30-pounds. Later, in 1986, IBM PCD announced its first laptop computer, the PC Convertible, weighing 12-pounds. Finally, in 1994, IBM introduced the IBM ThinkPad 775CD, the first notebook with an integrated CD-ROM (compact disc read-only memory).

The first Apple computer

The Apple I ( Apple 1) was the first Apple computer that initially sold for $666.66. The computer kit was developed by Steve Wozniak in 1976 and contained a 6502 8-bit processor and 4 kb of memory, which was expandable to 8 or 48 kb using expansion cards. Although the Apple I had a fully assembled circuit board, the kit required a power supply, display, keyboard, and case to be operational. Below is a picture of an Apple I from an advertisement by Apple.

The first IBM personal computer

IBM introduced its first personal computer, the IBM PC, in 1981. The computer was code-named Acorn. It featured an 8088 processor and 16 KB of memory, which was expandable to 256 and used MS-DOS.

The first PC clone

The Compaq Portable is considered the first PC clone and was released in March 1983 by Compaq. The Compaq Portable was 100% compatible with IBM computers and could run any software developed for IBM computers.

See our index of computer companies for information about manufacturers of IBM-compatible computers.

In 1992, Tandy Radio Shack released the M2500 XL/2 and M4020 SX, among the first computers to feature the MPC standard.

Other computer company firsts

Below are other computer companies' first products.

- In 1977, Commodore introduced its first computer, the " Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor)."
- In March 1983, Compaq released its first computer and the first 100% IBM-compatible computer, the "Compaq Portable."
- In 1985, Dell introduced its first computer, the "Turbo PC."
Hewlett-Packard - In 1966, HP (Hewlett-Packard) released its first general computer, the "HP-2115."
- In 1958, NEC built its first computer, the "NEAC 1101."
Packard Bell - Developed the first silicon computer in 1957, which became the "Packard Bell PB250."
- In 1954, Toshiba introduced its first computer, the "TAC" digital computer.

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The complete history of when the first computer was invented, including all types of computers back to 1822.

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Exo planet made of diamonds

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A team of astrophysicists has estimated that an exoplanet twice the size of Earth is largely made up of diamond.

[partner id="wireduk" align="right"]The planet, 55 Cancri e, is located around 40 light years from Earth and has a mass eight times that of our planet. With that knowledge in mind, now picture a third of that mass being made up of graphite and diamond. Or just look at the artist's impression above, created by the team at Yale University and Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planetologie in Toulouse, which represents the ratio of diamond to, well, everything else. Earth, by comparison, has "less than a part in thousand by mass."

"On this planet there would basically be a thin layer below the surface which will have both graphite and diamond," lead author on the paper Nikku Madhusudhan told * Universe Today*. "But, below that there will be a thick layer (a third of the radius) with mostly diamond. For a large part the diamond will be like the diamond on Earth, except really, really pure. But at greater depths the diamond could also be in liquid form." So once we've nailed warp drive and can hop over to the planet, expect the cost of diamonds to plummet significantly.

"This is our first glimpse of a rocky world with a fundamentally different chemistry from Earth," said Madhusudhan in a press release. "The surface of this planet is likely covered in graphite and diamond rather than water and granite."

The planet, part of the constellation of Cancer that's clearly visible from Earth sans binoculars, is the first exoplanet to display these unique properties - in 2011 a "diamond planet" was spotted in the constellation of Serpens, but that planet did not orbit a star similar to our Sun and was not studied in such detail. The two do share certain characteristics, however. For instance, a year on the fast-orbiting 55 Cancri e lasts just 18 hours, while the Milky Way planet's orbit lasts around two hours.

The team presumably used radio telescope data to determine the mass, diameter and orbit of the 1,648 C-hot 55 Cancri e (the method and results are yet to be published in A strophysical Journal Letters), which in turn was used to estimate the make-up of the planet. We do know that the team used computer models to estimate possible planetary compositions from the data, with updated information on its mass being key. The most likely explanation for this planet's formation, the models concluded, is a water-light recipe of carbon - in the form of graphite and diamond - and silicon carbide, which is a combination of silicon and carbon. There will also be smaller amounts of iron.

The find, though providing us with a wonderful mental image, means that in our hunt for Earth-like exoplanets orbiting Sun-like stars, we can expect to find plenty more disappointingly uninhabitable sites, such as the water planet GJ 1214b (another great and satisfying mental image, however).

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New Exoplanet Is Twice Earth's Size - And Made Largely of Diamond

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A team of astrophysicists has estimated that an exoplanet twice the size of Earth is largely made up of diamond. The planet, 55 Cancri e, is located around 40 light years from Earth and has a mass eight times that of our planet.

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Across the surface of our nearest neighbour is frozen ice, hiding out in places in the polar regions that aren't touched by the sun.

The breakthrough has prompted discussion a moon village that could allow people to live on the moon. From there, we could launch into the rest of our neighbourhood, providing vast new opportunities for space exploration.

And, as ever, it has prompted discussion of whether the water spread throughout our Solar System might mean alien life is living far nearer to us than we think.

Does it mean there might be aliens?

Probably not. Nasa's ruling principle in its search for aliens has been to follow the water, since that is thought to be required for any kind of life, but that doesn't necessarily mean that life exists everywhere water does.

Nasa's most stunning pictures of space
Show all 30
The environment on the Moon is still unremittingly harsh. It is freezing cold in the shade where the ice is, and devastatingly hot out of it; almost certainly too difficult for life. And that's not to get started on the radiation that pounds the Moon's surface.

Of course, we can't say for sure there aren't aliens; nobody can, until we've scoured the entire Moon. There might be forms of life that look entirely different to what we expect, and which are able to live in very harsh environments - we have certainly found such organisms down here on Earth.

Can we go and live there?

The much more enticing prospect for life on the Moon is if, instead of searching for it, we put it there ourselves. The life we've been looking for might be our own.

"We found direct and definitive evidence for surface-exposed water ice in the lunar polar regions," the researchers in the new paper, which is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"The abundance and distribution of ice on the Moon are distinct from those on other airless bodies in the inner solar system such as Mercury and Ceres, which may be associated with the unique formation and evolution process of our Moon.

"These ice deposits might be utilised as an in situ resource in future exploration of the Moon."

While we might be able to take the important parts of the infrastructure for life on the Moon up with us - the technology that would allow us to breathe and protect ourselves from the harsh environment, for instance - it will be far too resource intensive to take supplies like water at the same time. So things like water are key to being able to establish ourselves on the Moon.

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What Nasa's latest huge discovery means for alien life

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Across the surface of our nearest neighbour is frozen ice, hiding out in places in the polar regions that aren't touched by the sun. The breakthrough has prompted discussion a moon village that could allow people to live on the moon. From there, we could launch into the rest of our neighbourhood, providing vast new opportunities for space exploration.

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Over the three-year mission, 287,309 stars were observed and tens of thousands more rolled in every few months.

They also discovered 44 Jupiter-sized planets, 72 Neptune-sized, 44 Earth-sized, and 53 so-called Super Earth's, which are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.

But the most exciting discovery for some was the K2-138 planetary system, home to at least five "sub-Neptune" planets between the size of Earth and Neptune, nearly 620 light years from Earth.

The exoplanet family was discovered after researchers launched a crowdsourcing project to help sift through three years' worth of data from 280,000 stars.

And findings from citizen scientists helped lead to the discovery, which is the first of its kind made through crowdsourcing.

Members of the public were given access to the project in an attempt to speed up the research after a software malfunction meant scientists would have to manually comb through the data, collected using the NASA Kepler space telescope.

K2 collaboration member at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Jessie Christensen said: "People anywhere can log on and learn what real signals from exoplanets look like, and then look through actual data collected from the Kepler telescope to vote on whether or not to classify a given signal as a transit or just noise.

"We have each potential transit signal looked at by a minimum of 10 people, and each needs a minimum of 90 percent of 'yes' votes to be considered for further characterisation."

Within 48 hours of the citizen science project launch, more than 10,000 people had participated, with over two million systems classified.

After three nights, the K2-128 system was identified - which has been described as the "first multiplanet system of exoplanets discovered entirely by crowdsourcing".

Astronomers reviewed the citizen scientist data and confirmed the existence of the new system, claiming it's "extremely likely" it contains at least four planets and a possible fifth.

There have even been some hints at a sixth planet in the system, which orbits around star K2-138.

Dr Christiansen said: "Some current theories suggest that planets form by a chaotic scattering of rock and gas and other material in the early stages of the planetary system's life.

"However, these theories are unlikely to result in such a closely packed, orderly system as K2-138."

"What's exciting is that we found this unusual system with the help of the general public

The findings have been published in the Astrophysical Journal and were presented at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

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ALIEN LIFE: New planets similar to Earth found by citizen scientists in shock discovery

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FIVE new planets similar to earth have been discovered by citizens scientists in a shock discovery, a new report has revealed. There could even be a sixth to add to the system, which is the first to be discovered by crowdsourcing.

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The first phone

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We invite you and your family to participate in these activities, inspired by the collections, programs, and expertise of the Library of Congress.

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The activities below require just a few simple items you can find easily around the house and items from the Library's website. Kids are encouraged to use their creativity to enhance, adapt, or recreate anything we share. Check back often for new activities and opportunities with engage with us!

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Resources for Family Engagement from the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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We invite you and your family to participate in these activities, inspired by the collections, programs, and expertise of the Library of Congress.

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Engineers at The Australian National University (ANU) have invented a semiconductor with organic and inorganic materials that can convert electricity into light very efficiently, and it is thin and flexible enough to help make devices such as mobile phones bendable.

The invention also opens the door to a new generation of high-performance electronic devices made with organic materials that will be biodegradable or that can be easily recycled, promising to help substantially reduce e-waste.

The huge volumes of e-waste generated by discarded electronic devices around the world is causing irreversible damage to the environment. Australia produces 200,000 tonnes of e-waste every year -- only four per cent of this waste is recycled.

The organic component has the thickness of just one atom -- made from just carbon and hydrogen -- and forms part of the semiconductor that the ANU team developed. The inorganic component has the thickness of around two atoms. The hybrid structure can convert electricity into light efficiently for displays on mobile phones, televisions and other electronic devices.

Lead senior researcher Associate Professor Larry Lu said the invention was a major breakthrough in the field.

"For the first time, we have developed an ultra-thin electronics component with excellent semiconducting properties that is an organic-inorganic hybrid structure and thin and flexible enough for future technologies, such as bendable mobile phones and display screens," said Associate Professor Lu from the ANU Research School of Engineering.

PhD researcher Ankur Sharma, who recently won the ANU 3-Minute Thesis competition, said experiments demonstrated the performance of their semiconductor would be much more efficient than conventional semiconductors made with inorganic materials such as silicon.

"We have the potential with this semiconductor to make mobile phones as powerful as today's supercomputers," said Mr Sharma from the ANU Research School of Engineering.

"The light emission from our semiconducting structure is very sharp, so it can be used for high-resolution displays and, since the materials are ultra-thin, they have the flexibility to be made into bendable screens and mobile phones in the near future."

The team grew the organic semiconductor component molecule by molecule, in a similar way to 3D printing. The process is called chemical vapour deposition.

"We characterised the opto-electronic and electrical properties of our invention to confirm the tremendous potential of it to be used as a future semiconductor component," Associate Professor Lu said.

"We are working on growing our semiconductor component on a large scale, so it can be commercialised in collaboration with prospective industry partners."

Journal Reference:

Linglong Zhang, Ankur Sharma, Yi Zhu, Yuhan Zhang, Bowen Wang, Miheng Dong, Hieu T. Nguyen, Zhu Wang, Bo Wen, Yujie Cao, Boqing Liu, Xueqian Sun, Jiong Yang, Ziyuan Li, Arara Kar, Yi Shi, Daniel Macdonald, Zongfu Yu, Xinran Wang, Yuerui Lu. Efficient and Layer-Dependent Exciton Pumping across Atomically Thin Organic-Inorganic Type-I Heterostructures. Advanced Materials, 2018; 30 (40): 1803986 DOI: 10.1002/adma.201803986

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technology; graphene; electronics; materials science; chemistry; spintronics; engineering and construction; organic chemistry

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Part-organic invention can be used in bendable mobile phones

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Engineers at The Australian National University (ANU) have invented a semiconductor with organic and inorganic materials that can convert electricity into light very efficiently, and it is thin and flexible enough to help make devices such as mobile phones bendable.

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Before it became one of the wealthiest companies in the world, Apple Inc. was a tiny start-up in Los Altos, California. Co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, both college dropouts, wanted to develop the world's first user-friendly personal computer. Their work ended up revolutionizing the computer industry and changing the face of consumer technology. Along with tech giants like Microsoft and IBM, Apple helped make computers part of everyday life, ushering in the Digital Revolution and the Information Age.

The Early Years

Apple Inc. - originally known as Apple Computers - began in 1976. Founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak worked out of Jobs' garage at his home in Los Altos, California. On April 1, 1976, they debuted the Apple 1, a desktop computer that came as a single motherboard, pre-assembled, unlike other personal computers of that era.

The Apple II was introduced about a year later. The upgraded machine included an integrated keyboard and case, along with expansion slots for attaching floppy disk drives and other components. The Apple III was released in 1980, one year before IBM released the IBM Personal Computer. Technical failures and other problems with the machine resulted in recalls and damage to Apple's reputation.

The first home computer with a GUI, or graphical user interface - an interface that allows users to interact with visual icons - was the Apple Lisa. The very first graphical interface was developed by the Xerox Corporation at its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the 1970s. Steve Jobs visited PARC in 1979 (after buying Xerox stock) and was impressed and highly influenced by the Xerox Alto, the first computer to feature a GUI. This machine, though, was quite large. Jobs adapted the technology for the Apple Lisa, a computer small enough to fit on a desktop.

The Macintosh Computer

In 1984, Apple introduced its most successful product yet - the Macintosh, a personal computer that came with a built-in screen and mouse. The machine featured a GUI, an operating system known as System 1 (the earliest version of Mac OS), and a number of software programs, including the word processor MacWrite and the graphics editor MacPaint. The New York Times said that the Macintosh was the beginning of a "revolution in personal computing."

In 1985, Jobs was forced out of the company over disagreements with Apple's CEO, John Scully. He went on to found NeXT Inc., a computer and software company that was later purchased by Apple in 1997.

Over the course of the 1980s, the Macintosh underwent many changes. In 1990, the company introduced three new models - the Macintosh Classic, Macintosh LC, and Macintosh IIsi - all of which were smaller and cheaper than the original computer. A year later Apple released the PowerBook, the earliest version of the company's laptop computer.

The iMac and the iPod

In 1997, Jobs returned to Apple as the interim CEO, and a year later the company introduced a new personal computer, the iMac. The machine became iconic for its semi-transparent plastic case, which was eventually produced in a variety of colors. The iMac was a strong seller, and Apple quickly went to work developing a suite of digital tools for its users, including the music player iTunes, the video editor iMovie, and the photo editor iPhoto. These were made available as a software bundle known as iLife.

In 2001, Apple released its first version of the iPod, a portable music player that allowed users to store "1000 songs in your pocket." Later versions included models such as the iPod Shuffle, iPod Nano, and iPod Touch. By 2015, Apple had sold 390 million units.

In 2007, Apple extended its reach into the consumer electronics market with the release of the iPhone, a smartphone that sold over 6 million units. Later models of the iPhone have added a multitude of features, including GPS navigation, Touch ID, and facial recognition, along with the ability to shoot photos and video. In 2017, Apple sold 223 million iPhones, making the device the top-selling tech product of the year.

Under CEO Tim Cook, who took over Apple after Jobs' death in 2011, the company has expanded, releasing a new generation of iPhones, iPads, iMacs, and MacBooks, along with new products such as the Apple Watch and the HomePod. In 2018, the tech giant became the first U.S. company to be worth $1 trillion.

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Before it became one of the wealthiest companies in the world, Apple Inc. was a tiny start-up in Los Altos, California. Co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, both college dropouts, wanted to develop the world's first user-friendly personal computer. Their work ended up revolutionizing the computer industry and changing the face of consumer technology.

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26,000 pound dinosaur

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Zoey

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Menopause hormone therapy and your heart

Are you taking - or considering - hormone therapy to treat bothersome menopause symptoms? Understand potential risks to your heart and whether hormone therapy is right for you.
By Mayo Clinic Staff
Long-term hormone replacement therapy used to be routinely prescribed for postmenopausal women to relieve hot flashes and other menopause symptoms. Hormone replacement therapy was also thought to reduce the risk of heart disease.

Before menopause, women have a lower risk of heart disease than men do. But as women age, and their estrogen levels decline after menopause, their risk of heart disease increases. In the 1980s and 1990s, experts advised older women to take estrogen and other hormones to keep their hearts healthy.

However, hormone replacement therapy - or menopause hormone therapy, as it's now called - has had mixed results. Many of the hoped-for benefits failed to materialize for large numbers of women. The largest randomized, controlled trial to date actually found a small increase in heart disease in postmenopausal women using combined (both estrogen and progestin) hormone therapy. For women in this study using estrogen alone, there was no increased risk in heart disease.

Other studies suggest that hormone therapy, especially estrogen alone, may not affect - or may even decrease - the risk of heart disease when taken early in postmenopausal years. However, these studies can be confusing to interpret into practice, since study outcomes can be affected by many factors, such as the ages of the study participants, the time elapsed since menopause and the duration of hormone therapy use. Continued research will help doctors more clearly understand the relationship between menopause hormone therapy and heart disease.

Risks in perspective

If you're having a tough time with symptoms of menopause but worry about how hormone therapy will affect your heart, talk with your doctor to put your personal risk into perspective. Consider these points:

The risk of heart disease to an individual woman taking hormone therapy is very low. If you are in early menopause, have moderate to severe hot flashes and other menopausal symptoms, and are otherwise healthy, the benefits of hormone therapy likely outweigh any potential risks of heart disease.

Your individual risk of developing heart disease depends on many factors, including family medical history, personal medical history and lifestyle practices. Talk to your doctor about your personal risks. If you're at low risk of heart disease, and your menopausal symptoms are significant, hormone therapy is a reasonable consideration.

Risk differs for women with premature menopause or premature ovarian failure. If you stopped having periods before age 40 (premature menopause) or lost normal function of your ovaries before age 40 (premature ovarian failure), you have a different set of heart and blood vessel (cardiovascular) health risks compared with women who reach menopause near the average age of about 50. This includes a higher risk of coronary heart disease. If you have premature ovarian failure, you'll likely be given hormone therapy to protect against heart disease.

Menopause hormone therapy risks may vary depending on:

Whether estrogen is given alone or with a progestin

Your current age and age at menopause

The dose, type of estrogen and route, or how you take it (oral, transdermal, transvaginal)

Other health risks, such as your family medical history and cancer risks

Who should not take hormone therapy

If you've already had a heart attack, menopause hormone therapy is not for you. If you already have heart disease or you have a history of blood clots, the risks of hormone therapy have been clearly shown to outweigh any potential benefits.

How to limit the risks

Talk with your doctor about these strategies to reduce the risks of menopause hormone therapy:

Try a form of hormone therapy that has limited systemic effects. Estrogen and progestin are available in many forms, including pills, skin patches, gels, vaginal creams, and slow-releasing suppositories or rings that you place in your vagina. Low-dose vaginal preparations of estrogen - which come in cream, tablet or ring form - can effectively treat vaginal symptoms while minimizing absorption into the body. Similarly, hormones delivered through skin patches aren't as extensively metabolized in the body and have less potential for unwanted side effects.

Minimize the amount of medication you take. Use the lowest effective dose for the shortest amount of time needed to treat symptoms, unless you're younger than age 45 - in that case, you need enough estrogen for protection against long-term health effects of estrogen deficiency. If you have lasting menopausal symptoms that significantly impair your quality of life, your doctor may recommend longer term treatment.

Make healthy lifestyle choices. Counter the risks of developing heart disease by making heart-healthy lifestyle choices. Don't smoke or use tobacco products. Get regular physical activity. Eat a healthy diet focusing on fruits, vegetables, whole grains and low-fat protein. Maintain a healthy weight. And get regular health screenings to check your blood pressure and cholesterol levels to detect early signs of heart disease.

Seek regular follow-up care. See your health care provider regularly to ensure that the benefits of hormone therapy continue to outweigh the risks, and for cancer screenings such as mammograms and pelvic exams.

A balancing act

Women of all ages should take heart disease seriously. Among U.S. women, nearly 1 in 3 deaths each year is due to heart and blood vessel (cardiovascular) disease.

Most healthy women who are within five years of menopause can safely take short-term hormone therapy for menopausal symptoms without significantly increasing the risk of heart disease. If you experience classic menopausal symptoms, including intolerable hot flashes, vaginal dryness or insomnia, talk to your doctor about how you can relieve troublesome symptoms without putting your health at risk.

See more In-depth

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Are you taking - or considering - hormone therapy to treat bothersome menopause symptoms? Understand potential risks to your heart and whether hormone therapy is right for you. By Mayo Clinic Staff Long-term hormone replacement therapy used to be routinely prescribed for postmenopausal women to relieve hot flashes and other menopause symptoms. Hormone replacement therapy was also thought to reduce the risk of heart disease.

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Doctors grow 'mini organs' in petri dish

Doctors in the Netherlands are taking a novel approach to treat cystic fibrosis: They're growing miniature organs to test the viability of potential medicines.

Els van der Heijden, who has cystic fibrosis, struggled to breathe as her lungs filled with thick, sticky mucus. Despite taking more than a dozen pills a day and using inhalers, the 53-year-old was not making any progress.

Doctors did not want to try a new, expensive drug because it hasn't been proven to work in people with the rare type of cystic fibrosis that van der Heijden had.
New gut from cells
Instead, they scraped a few cells from van der Heijden and used them to grow a mini version of her large intestine in a petri dish. When van der Heijden's "mini gut" responded to treatment, doctors knew it would help her too.

This experiment to help people with rare forms of cystic fibrosis in the Netherlands aims to grow mini intestines for every Dutch patient with the disease to figure out, in part, what treatment might work for them. It's an early application of a technique now being worked on in labs all over the world, as researchers learn to grow organs outside of the body for treatment - and maybe someday for transplants.
So-called "mini guts" grown in petri dishes could be used to treat cystic fibrosis, instead of expensive drugs. Small but complete
So far, doctors have grown mini guts - just the size of a pencil point - for 450 of the Netherlands' roughly 1 500 cystic fibrosis patients.

"The mini guts are small, but they are complete," said Dr Hans Clevers of the Hubrecht Institute, who pioneered the technique. Except for muscles and blood vessels, the tiny organs "have everything you would expect to see in a real gut, only on a really small scale".

These so-called organoids mimic features of full-size organs, but don't function the same way. Although many of the tiny replicas are closer to undeveloped organs found in an embryo than adult ones, they are helping scientists unravel how organs mature and providing clues on how certain diseases might be treated.
Not a new technique

Previous Health24 articles mention studies where organs were grown to treat diseases.

In Australia, mini kidneys are being grown that could be used to test drugs. Researchers in the US are experimenting with tiny bits of livers that might be used to boost failing organs.

At Cambridge University in England, scientists have created hundreds of mini brains to study how neurons form and better understand disorders like autism. During the height of the Zika epidemic last year, mini brains were used to show how the virus causes malformed brains in babies.
Cutting costs
In the Netherlands, the mini guts are used as a stand-in for cystic fibrosis patients to see if those with rare mutations might benefit from a number of pricey drugs.

Making a single mini gut and testing whether the patient would benefit from certain drugs costs a couple of thousand euros. The program is paid for by groups including health insurance companies, patient foundations and the government. The idea is to find a possible treatment for patients, and avoid putting them on expensive drugs that wouldn't work for them.

About 50 to 60 patients across the Netherlands have been treated after drugs were tested on organoids using their cells, said Dr Kors van der Ent, a cystic fibrosis specialist at the Wilhelmina Children's Hospital, who leads the research.

Clevers made a discovery about a decade ago that got researchers on their way. They found pockets of stem cells, which can turn into many types of other cells, in the gut. They then homed in a growing environment in the lab that spurred these cells to reproduce rapidly and develop.

"To our surprise, the stem cells started building a mini version of the gut," Clevers recalled.
Idea sounds promising

Cystic fibrosis is caused by mutations in a single gene that produces a protein called CFTR, responsible for balancing the salt content of cells lining the lungs and other organs.

To see if certain drugs might help cystic fibrosis patients, the medicines are given to their custom-made organoids in the lab. If the mini organs puff up, it's a sign the cells are now correctly balancing salt and water. That means the drugs are working, and could help the patient from whom the mini-gut was made.

Researchers are also using the mini guts to try another approach they hope will someday work in people - using a gene editing technique to repair the faulty cystic fibrosis gene in the organoid cells.

While the idea sounds promising, some scientists said there are obstacles to using mini organs to study cancer.

Growing a mini cancer tumour, for example, would be far more challenging because scientists have found it difficult to make tumours in the lab that behave like in real life, said Mathew Garnett of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, who has studied cancer in mini organs but is not connected to Clevers' research.

Also, growing the cells and testing them must happen faster for cancer patients who might not have much time to live, he said.
The dream of life-size organs

Meanwhile, Clevers wants to one day make organs that are not so mini.

"My dream would be to be able to custom-make organs," he said, imagining a future where doctors might have a "freezer full of livers" to choose from when sick patients arrive.

Others said while such a vision is theoretically possible, huge hurdles remain.

"There are still enormous challenges in tissue engineering with regards to the size of the structure we're able to grow," said Jim Wells, a paediatrics professor at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. He said the mini organs are far smaller than what would be needed to transplant into people and it's unclear if scientists can make a working, life-sized organ in the lab.

There are other limitations to growing miniature organs in a dish, said Madeline Lancaster at Cambridge University.
Image credit: iStock

Related articles

Els van der Heijden, who has cystic fibrosis, struggled to breathe as her lungs filled with thick, sticky mucus. Despite taking more than a dozen pills a day and using inhalers, the 53-year-old was not making any progress.

Doctors did not want to try a new, expensive drug because it hasn't been proven to work in people with the rare type of cystic fibrosis that van der Heijden had.
New gut from cells
Instead, they scraped a few cells from van der Heijden and used them to grow a mini version of her large intestine in a petri dish. When van der Heijden's "mini gut" responded to treatment, doctors knew it would help her too.

This experiment to help people with rare forms of cystic fibrosis in the Netherlands aims to grow mini intestines for every Dutch patient with the disease to figure out, in part, what treatment might work for them. It's an early application of a technique now being worked on in labs all over the world, as researchers learn to grow organs outside of the body for treatment - and maybe someday for transplants.
So-called "mini guts" grown in petri dishes could be used to treat cystic fibrosis, instead of expensive drugs. Small but complete
So far, doctors have grown mini guts - just the size of a pencil point - for 450 of the Netherlands' roughly 1 500 cystic fibrosis patients.

"The mini guts are small, but they are complete," said Dr Hans Clevers of the Hubrecht Institute, who pioneered the technique. Except for muscles and blood vessels, the tiny organs "have everything you would expect to see in a real gut, only on a really small scale".

These so-called organoids mimic features of full-size organs, but don't function the same way. Although many of the tiny replicas are closer to undeveloped organs found in an embryo than adult ones, they are helping scientists unravel how organs mature and providing clues on how certain diseases might be treated.
Not a new technique

Previous Health24 articles mention studies where organs were grown to treat diseases.

In Australia, mini kidneys are being grown that could be used to test drugs. Researchers in the US are experimenting with tiny bits of livers that might be used to boost failing organs.

At Cambridge University in England, scientists have created hundreds of mini brains to study how neurons form and better understand disorders like autism. During the height of the Zika epidemic last year, mini brains were used to show how the virus causes malformed brains in babies.
Cutting costs
In the Netherlands, the mini guts are used as a stand-in for cystic fibrosis patients to see if those with rare mutations might benefit from a number of pricey drugs.

Making a single mini gut and testing whether the patient would benefit from certain drugs costs a couple of thousand euros. The program is paid for by groups including health insurance companies, patient foundations and the government. The idea is to find a possible treatment for patients, and avoid putting them on expensive drugs that wouldn't work for them.

About 50 to 60 patients across the Netherlands have been treated after drugs were tested on organoids using their cells, said Dr Kors van der Ent, a cystic fibrosis specialist at the Wilhelmina Children's Hospital, who leads the research.

Clevers made a discovery about a decade ago that got researchers on their way. They found pockets of stem cells, which can turn into many types of other cells, in the gut. They then homed in a growing environment in the lab that spurred these cells to reproduce rapidly and develop.

"To our surprise, the stem cells started building a mini version of the gut," Clevers recalled.
Idea sounds promising

Cystic fibrosis is caused by mutations in a single gene that produces a protein called CFTR, responsible for balancing the salt content of cells lining the lungs and other organs.

To see if certain drugs might help cystic fibrosis patients, the medicines are given to their custom-made organoids in the lab. If the mini organs puff up, it's a sign the cells are now correctly balancing salt and water. That means the drugs are working, and could help the patient from whom the mini-gut was made.

Researchers are also using the mini guts to try another approach they hope will someday work in people - using a gene editing technique to repair the faulty cystic fibrosis gene in the organoid cells.

While the idea sounds promising, some scientists said there are obstacles to using mini organs to study cancer.

Growing a mini cancer tumour, for example, would be far more challenging because scientists have found it difficult to make tumours in the lab that behave like in real life, said Mathew Garnett of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, who has studied cancer in mini organs but is not connected to Clevers' research.

Also, growing the cells and testing them must happen faster for cancer patients who might not have much time to live, he said.
The dream of life-size organs

Meanwhile, Clevers wants to one day make organs that are not so mini.

"My dream would be to be able to custom-make organs," he said, imagining a future where doctors might have a "freezer full of livers" to choose from when sick patients arrive.

Others said while such a vision is theoretically possible, huge hurdles remain.

"There are still enormous challenges in tissue engineering with regards to the size of the structure we're able to grow," said Jim Wells, a paediatrics professor at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. He said the mini organs are far smaller than what would be needed to transplant into people and it's unclear if scientists can make a working, life-sized organ in the lab.

There are other limitations to growing miniature organs in a dish, said Madeline Lancaster at Cambridge University.
Image credit: iStock

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Doctors grow 'mini organs' in petri dish

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Els van der Heijden, who has cystic fibrosis, struggled to breathe as her lungs filled with thick, sticky mucus. Despite taking more than a dozen pills a day and using inhalers, the 53-year-old was not making any progress.

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New sneaker technologies increase performance. Nike's Air Force used little pockets of gas to create better cushioning, while Reebok introduced The Pump-air pumped into shoes to make them fit more snugly. Sneaker surprises continue: Spira Footwear, for example, has built a spring in the soles to reduce foot stress.

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Neratinib is effective in breast tumors bearing both amplification and mutation of ERBB2 (HER2)

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Breast cancers with amplification or mutation in the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) family member HER2 are usually treated with targeted inhibitors, but resistance is common. Amplification and mutation of HER2 are generally considered mutually exclusive occurrences in treatment-naïve patients. However, Cocco et al .

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An artist's rendering of Lingwulong shenqi, a newly discovered dinosaur unearthed in northwestern China. Credit Credit Zhang Zongda

A farmer in China stumbled upon some fossils more than a decade ago, which led to an excavation, which led to a realization: It's time to rethink the evolutionary history of some of the biggest dinosaurs that ever walked the earth.

In a study published this week in the science journal Nature Communications, paleontologists said they had discovered the earliest diplodocoid yet, and the only one to be unearthed in East Asia.

Diplodocoids are part of the sauropod subgroup - the one known for those big plant-eaters with four legs and long necks. The fossils in China belonged to a previously undiscovered species, Lingwulong shenqi, and are about 174 million years old. That's about 15 million years older than would be expected for a dinosaur of its type.

"This means that actually a large number of different sauropod groups must have evolved a lot earlier than previously realized," said Philip Mannion, a paleontologist at Imperial College London and one of the study's authors.

Image

Technicians measuring a shoulder bone of Lingwulong shenqi, which was not as big as some cousins, like the Apatosaurus or Diplodocus. It appears to have been between 35 and 55 feet long. Credit Xu Xing

It also means that diplodocoids made their way to East Asia before the continents - once a giant landmass called Pangea - tore away from each other.

The fossils of Lingwulong shenqi, or the "amazing dragon of Lingwu" in Mandarin, were uncovered near the city of Lingwu in northwestern China. It was a stunning find: At least seven dinosaurs had died near each other, giving scientists plenty of material to work with.

The study was led by Xu Xing of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a paleontologist known for his groundbreaking discoveries.

"Diplodocus-like neosauropods were thought to have never made it to East Asia because this region was cut off from the rest of the world by Jurassic seaways, so that China evolved its own distinctive and separate dinosaur fauna," Dr. Xu said in a statement from University College London, which was involved in the study.

"However, Lingwulong shows that these Diplodocus-like sauropods were present after all, and implies that the isolation of East Asia was less profound" than paleontologists had realized.

Lingwulong shenqi was not as big as some of its sauropod cousins, like the Apatosaurus or Diplodocus. Its neck was shorter and it appears to have been between 35 and 55 feet long from head to tail.

Sauropods proliferated in the Late Jurassic epoch, but the discovery of Lingwulong shenqi in rocks from the Middle Jurassic suggests that sauropod species began to diverge much earlier than we thought. And that raises a new question: Did this "amazing dragon" have brothers, sisters and cousins, in Asia or elsewhere, that have never been seen?

"It's so exciting because what that means is that we have a lot more to discover," said Mathew Wedel, a paleontologist and sauropod expert who was not a part of the study. "All of that missing history is out there. It's waiting to be found. We've just got to go find these Middle Jurassic rocks. We have to look harder."

This week's study follows another paper about an herbivorous, four-legged giant - the Ingentia prima, which also lived earlier than might be expected. And now Lingwulong shenqi has opened up another new line of inquiry and exploration.

"It suggests that we have major gaps," Dr. Mannion said, adding that it will take many more discoveries before humans are able to fully trace the branches of the sauropods' family tree.

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'Amazing Dragon' Discovery in China Reshapes History of Dinosaurs' Evolution

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A farmer in China stumbled upon some fossils more than a decade ago, which led to an excavation, which led to a realization: It's time to rethink the evolutionary history of some of the biggest dinosaurs that ever walked the earth.

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Why Apple's iPhone X Is Its Best Smartphones Ever

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Apple's iPhone X is the best smartphone the company has ever made. And the iPhone X hate has gone too far.

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Google's Pixel Buds Let You Translate Up to 40 Languages in Real Time

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Google recently unveiled the Pixel Buds that are wireless headphones meant to be paired with the Pixel 2. A tap on the right ear piece allows the user to speak to Google assistant and have it play music, make phone calls and much more.

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Related Topics: Falcon Heavy, SpaceX Dragon Falcon 9, NASA Space Launch System, Space Tourism, International Space Station

Rocket launches used to be the realm of national governments, but with the rise of private spaceflight companies more rockets are launching into space than ever before. While most rockets launch satellites into orbit, some like Russia's Soyuz, carry astronauts on missions into space. SpaceX's Dragon and Boeing's CST-100 Starliner will fly Americans into orbit, while Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin will launch space tourists on short suborbital trips. SpaceX and Blue Origin even land their rockets after launch for later reuse. See news, photos and videos of the latest rocket launches from around the world here.

Copyright © All Rights Reserved.

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Related Topics: Falcon Heavy, SpaceX Dragon Falcon 9, NASA Space Launch System, Space Tourism, International Space Station Rocket launches used to be the realm of national governments, but with the rise of private spaceflight companies more rockets are launching into space than ever before.

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Each year, Science's editors and writers highlight a top research achievement as their Breakthrough of the Year. For 2017, the honor goes to the first full observation of a neutron-star merger, made possible by detecting gravitational waves created by the stars as they spiraled into each other. But there a lot of other advances to talk about, from the oldest ice to the newest ape. Check them all out in this video rundown.

doi:10.1126/science.aar8345

David is the Online News Editor of Science.

More from ScienceShots

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The biggest scientific breakthroughs of the year, now in video form!

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Each year, Science's editors and writers highlight a top research achievement as their Breakthrough of the Year. For 2017, the honor goes to the first full observation of a neutron-star merger, made possible by detecting gravitational waves created by the stars as they spiraled into each other.

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Antarctica has a current that circles the landmass as part of the Southern Ocean. This current is called the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. When the westerly winds strengthen during the Southern Hemisphere's summer, waters south of the current acidify faster than can be accounted for in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere alone. The opposite pattern was observed north of the current.
Why does this happen and why does it matter?
University of Delaware Professor Wei-Jun Cai co-wrote a paper that appeared in Nature Communications and addresses those questions.

Researchers involved in the study say these effects are due to a combination of processes driven by these westerly winds -- a theory that was borne out by two decades' worth of observational data from south of Tasmania.

Understanding the factors that control ocean acidification is important for predicting the impact that the changing chemistry of the ocean will have on marine organisms and ecosystems in the future. The Southern Ocean, also known as the Antarctic Ocean, is a critical place to study these mechanisms because of its vast capacity to store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, a crucial component of climate change.
Data-driven results benefit future prediction models
The fourth largest ocean, the Southern Ocean has a naturally low pH and saturation state for aragonite, a carbonate mineral that marine organisms need to build their shells. This is considered to be due to the Southern Ocean's cold temperatures, which average -2 to 7 degrees Celsius (approximately 28 to 45 degrees Fahrenheit), and strong vertical mixing throughout the water column.

Because of these cold temperatures and deep mixing, the carbon dioxide absorbed at the water's surface can be quickly transferred to and stored in the deep regions of the Southern Ocean, unlike most lower latitude oceans where huge temperature differences prevent the surface water and the deep ocean from mixing.

As atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue to increase, however, surface waters in the Southern Ocean are expected to become increasingly vulnerable to ocean acidification.

"The Southern Ocean is a window to the deep ocean," said Cai, an expert in inorganic carbon chemistry and the Mary A.S. Lighthipe Chair of Earth, Ocean and Environment at UD. " Better understanding the mechanisms of ocean acidification here can help improve prediction models for how much atmospheric carbon dioxide the ocean can take up here and elsewhere."

In the southern hemisphere, the main way that the atmosphere varies is through what is known as the Southern Annual Mode (SAM). As this mode changes from one extreme to another, the pressure difference causes the belt of westerly winds (or jet stream) around Antarctica to move north or south. When the jet stream of air strengthens (a positive SAM trend), it contracts toward Antarctica. When the jet stream weakens (a negative SAM trend), it expands north toward the equator.

In their study, the researchers explored how westerly winds regulate the rates of ocean acidification, using continuous data measurements of carbon dioxide from south of Tasmania recorded over two contrasting decades, 1991-2000 and 2001-2011. The researchers attributed the enhanced acidification to the westerly winds transporting more acidic waters horizontally from higher latitude locations toward the equator and vertically from the subsurface to the surface.

"When you have a pressure difference, you have a stronger wind and the wind always moves from high pressure to low pressure, driving the surface ocean currents from one point to another. In physical oceanography we call this wind-driven Ekman transport," said Cai.

When westerly winds decrease, the result is the opposite and less acidic surface water is transferred toward the South Pole.

"Whether we study this in the Chesapeake Bay, the Gulf of Mexico or the Southern Ocean, it is all the same reason that another source of carbon dioxide or acidified water comes into the study area. But depending on the location, this mechanism can manifest itself differently," said Cai.

This Southern Ocean mixing extends to a depth of approximately 300 to 400 meters (around 1,000 to 1,300 feet). This is far deeper than, say, in the Chesapeake Bay or oxygen-deficient Gulf of Mexico where the water's deepest regions might extend only 20 to 50 meters (54-164 feet deep).

In theory, as atmospheric carbon dioxide increases, ocean carbon dioxide levels (i.e., ocean acidification) should increase in parallel. However, Cai explained that upwelling of deeper waters that contain more carbon dioxide combined with ocean circulation patterns, or mixing of different layers of the ocean, can cause the water's pH and carbonate saturation state to vary quite a lot. Cai said though there have been a few recent papers in this area, he and his colleagues are the first to show with direct data that this is caused by wind stress.

"There is a lot of debate on this issue, but when put together, the two decades' worth of data gave a consistent story that ocean circulation patterns really affect ocean acidification," said Cai.
So, what does the Southern Ocean have to do with Delaware?
"The Southern Ocean is an area that really changes the deep ocean carbon dioxide signal because of this rapid mixing to the deep ocean," said Cai. "Consequently, when wind speeds cause the layers of the water to mix and change circulation patterns, it really can drive changes that may be significant to the global ocean, and broadly, would eventually influence other areas, including the Atlantic Ocean."

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oceanography; global warming; geography; ecosystems; water; climate; ecology; environmental awareness

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Wind holds key to climate change turnaround: Research sheds light on acidification in Southern Ocean

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New research could help bring about the kind of far-reaching changes deemed necessary in the UN's dire new climate change report. Scientists found that when westerly winds in the Antarctic Ocean strengthen during the austral summer (Oct.-Feb.), surface waters in the region acidify faster than can be accounted for by increases in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere alone.

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Hurricane Michael, seen here by the GOES East satellite at 2:45 p.m. ET on Oct. 9, 2018, strengthened as it moved north-northwest toward the Florida Panhandle.

Credit: NOAA

After gaining strength overnight, Hurricane Michael will be a storm of unprecedented intensity for the Florida Panhandle when it is expected to make landfall later today (Oct. 10).

"This storm will bring deadly surge to the Florida Panhandle and Big Bend coast and is not comparable to anything we have seen before," the National Weather Service forecast office in Tallahassee said in a warning just after 1 a.m. ET.

Hurricane Michael became a Category 4 storm overnight, packing 140 mph (220 km/h) winds with even stronger gusts. The storm would be the most powerful hurricane to hit the mainland United States this year. [ Hurricane Season 2018: How Long It Lasts and What to Expect]

Florida Gov. Rick Scott declared a state of emergency for 35 Florida counties ahead of the "monstrous" storm, and more than 100,000 people have been ordered to evacuate, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

As of 5 a.m. ET, Michael was about 130 miles (215 kilometers) southwest of Apalachicola, Florida, and moving at about 13 mph (20 km/h), according to an advisory from the National Hurricane Center.

Unlike slow-moving Hurricane Florence, which made landfall in North Carolina last month and dumped record-breaking amounts of rain, Hurricane Michael is moving quickly. "The storm is fast-moving, so only 6-10+ inches (15-25+ centimeters) of precipitation are forecasted to fall over the Panhandle," Marangelly Fuentes, a NASA atmospheric scientist, told NASA's Earth Observatory.

However, Hurricane Michael's strong winds and storm surge could be devastating. The worst storm surge is expected to occur between Tyndall Air Force Base near Panama City, Florida, and Keaton Beach, Florida, and it could be up to 13 feet if it occurs at the same time as high tide.

The strength of the hurricane is especially alarming because many people in the Panhandle "have little or no experience with storms this intense," Fuentes said. "Only eight major hurricanes on record have passed within or near the projected landfall of Michael, and only three of those (Eloise 1975, Opal 1995 and Dennis 2005) occurred in the past 100 years.

Michael already proved deadly in Central America, where at least 13 deaths associated with the heavy rains and flooding were reported across Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua, according to the Associated Press.

After making landfall, Michael is expected to weaken as it swerves northeast over Georgia and South Carolina before reaching the Atlantic Ocean on Friday, according to the National Hurricane Center.

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Hurricane Michael Strengthens to 'Unprecedented' Category 4 Storm Overnight

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After gaining strength overnight, Hurricane Michael will be a storm of unprecedented intensity for the Florida Panhandle when it is expected to make landfall later today (Oct. 10). "This storm will bring deadly surge to the Florida Panhandle and Big Bend coast and is not comparable to anything we have seen before," the National Weather Service forecast office in Tallahassee said in a warning just after 1 a.m.

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There was a lot of news that came out of Tesla shareholder meeting this week, but there was one important statement that sort of went under the radar.

Elon Musk is generally careful not to use the term "breakthrough" when describing advancements in battery technology but he has used it this week to talk about Tesla's latest advancements in battery energy density and cost.

Tesla's CEO even gave us a pretty good idea of the automaker's current battery costs.

One of the automaker's most important goal is to achieve a battery pack cost of $100 per kWh.

At that cost, the battery pack isn't a bottleneck to achieve price parity with gas-powered cars, which would make any of Tesla's vehicles even more competitive.

Tesla has always been careful about not revealing its battery cost and CTO JB Straubel reiterated that at the meeting this week.

He said:

"It's difficult for us to talk about specific cost numbers. It's a difficult topic, but we are still very confident that we have the best price and performance of anything out there in the world. If there's anything better, I don't know about it and we have looked as hard as we possibly can. We try to talk with every single battery startup, every lab, every large manufacturer. We get quotes from them. We test cells from them. If there's anything better, we are all ears, we want to find it, but we haven't found it yet."

But Musk later did reveal a few interesting details and price points.

After thinking about it for a moment, Musk added:

"We think we have come up with some pretty cool breakthroughs on energy density and cost of the battery pack. It's going to be pretty great."

The CEO thinks that the company is on pace to achieve a battery cell cost of $100 per kWh by the end of the year depending on commodity prices remaining stable in the next few months.

While we are only talking about battery cell costs and not the cost of the whole battery pack, it would still be an impressive price point.

In comparison, GM is currently buying battery cells from LG Chem for the Chevy Bolt EV at $145 per kWh and Audi says that it is buying batteries at $114 per kWh for its upcoming e-tron quattro that has yet to launch.

As for the cost at the pack level, Musk sees Tesla achieving that important price point of $100 per kWh for the overall battery pack in less than two years.

Musk also added that he sees Tesla achieving a 30% improvement in volumetric energy density within 2 to 3 years using current proven technology that "needs to be scaled and made reliable."

Such an improvement in volumetric energy density would mean that Tesla could, for example, fit 130 kWh of energy capacity in its current Model S and Model X 100 kWh battery packs and push the range of those vehicles over 400 miles on a single charge.
Electrek's Take
Since the unveiling of the Tesla Semi, we have been arguing that the vehicle's launch at a price point of $150,000 to $180,000 is dependent on Tesla achieving an important battery cost breakthrough.

Musk's new comments are now aligned with our expectations.

It looks like Tesla's bet on the Gigafactory is starting to pay off with much lower battery cost.

$100 per kWh at the battery cell level by the end of the year would also help Tesla launch the Model 3 standard battery pack starting at $35,000.

We don't know exactly what would be the battery pack cost on top of the cells, but I find it hard to believe that they are over $50 per kWh at the volume that Tesla is producing Model 3 battery pack these days.

What do you think? Let us know in the comment section below.

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Tesla might have achieved battery energy density and cost breakthroughs

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There was a lot of news that came out of Tesla shareholder meeting this week, but there was one important statement that sort of went under the radar. Elon Musk is generally careful not to use the term "breakthrough" when describing advancements in battery technology but he has used it this week to talk about [...]

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A certified medical assistant in Corpus Christi, Texas, prepares a Gardasil shot.

Credit: Matthew Busch for The Washington Post via Getty Images

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced last week that Gardasil 9, the HPV vaccine, is now approved for use in people ages 27 to 45.

The vaccine, which protects against several strains of a sexually transmitted infection called human papillomavirus, has been on the market for 12 years; however, it was approved only for people ages 9 to 26. New research led the agency to expand the age range to 45, the FDA said in an Oct. 5 statement.

But does the new age approval mean that adults who never got the HPV vaccine should get one now? Not necessarily. [ 51 Facts About Sex]

To understand why that might be the case, it's important to understand what the vaccine can and cannot do. Gardasil 9, which is the version offered in the U.S., protects people from nine strains of HPV, seven of which can cause cancer in the cervix, vagina, anus, penis and throat, and two of which can cause genital warts. (The original version of the vaccine, simply called Gardasil, protected against the warts strains and two of the strains linked to cancer, the FDA said.)

All told, the vaccine prevents over 90 percent of possible HPV-caused cancers, said Gypsyamber D'Souza, an epidemiologist at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.

But here's the catch: The vaccine only works if the recipient hasn't had HPV before. If someone has already been exposed to a given strain of HPV - which a majority of reproductive-age Americans already have, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - the vaccine can't clear that infection, D'Souza told Live Science.

Still, because the vaccine protects against nine strains, if an adult hasn't previously been exposed to some of the other strains in the vaccine, it could protect against future infection with those strains.

Most HPV infections, including potentially cancer-causing varieties, go away on their own, the National Cancer Institute says. But about 33,700 people are diagnosed with HPV-induced cancers each year, the CDC says. And for those individuals whose infection would cause cancer, getting the vaccine before becoming sexually active can prevent their HPV encounters from turning into an infection and, eventually, leading to cancer, D'Souza said. Indeed, that's why the FDA approval and vaccine recommendations focused on younger, potentially less sexually active people in the past.

Generally, adults ages 27 to 45 are expected to have already been exposed to HPV, D'Souza said, because they're more likely to be in monogamous, long-term sexual relationships. Of course, not everyone in this age group is having low-risk sex, and now they have the option of getting the HPV vaccine. With the new research and approval of Gardasil 9 in this age group, the FDA is saying that the drug can still prevent HPV infections in these adults, D'Souza said.

The FDA announcement means that "it's approved for them because it's safe and will allow them to get vaccinated if they so desire," D'Souza said. "But we're going to need to look to our [medical] organizations that make recommendations about prevention and disease screening to review the data and understand whether the vaccine should be widely recommended for the age group."

Vaccines of any kind can have emotional and, depending on insurance coverage, financial costs. And while the HPV vaccine will not cause any harm, D'Souza said, medical organizations won't make any official recommendations until they have ample data showing the benefits of the vaccine for the entire age group. (Some of the organizations that will weigh in include the such as the American Society for Colposcopy and Cervical Pathology and the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.)

Editor's note: This story was updated on Oct. 10 to clarify that, if a person has already been exposed to a particularly strain of the HPV virus before being vaccinated, the vaccine won't protect against that strain. However, it will protect against strains the person hasn't been exposed to.

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The HPV Vaccine Was Just Approved for Adults Up to Age 45. Should They Get It?

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced last week that Gardasil 9, the HPV vaccine, is now approved for use in people ages 27 to 45. The vaccine, which protects against several strains of a sexually transmitted infection called human papillomavirus, has been on the market for 12 years; however, it was approved only for people ages 9 to 26.

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About 50 percent of people who reach the age of 85 will develop Alzheimer's disease. Most will die within about five years of exhibiting the hallmark symptoms of the disease -- severe memory loss and a precipitous decline in cognitive function.

But the molecular processes that lead to the disease will have begun years earlier.

Currently, there are no known ways to prevent the disease or to stop its progression once it has begun. But research at the University of Virginia offers new understanding of how the disease develops at the molecular level, long before extensive neuronal damage occurs and symptoms show up.

Additionally, the researchers have found that an FDA-approved drug, memantine, currently used only for alleviating the symptoms of moderate-to-severe Alzheimer's disease, might be used to prevent or slow the progression of the disease if used before symptoms appear. The research also offers, based on extensive experimentation, a hypothesis as to why this might work.

The findings are published currently online in the journal Alzheimer's & Dementia.

"Based on what we've learned so far, it is my opinion that we will never be able to cure Alzheimer's disease by treating patients once they become symptomatic," said George Bloom, a UVA professor and chair of the Department of Biology, who oversaw the study in his lab. "The best hope for conquering this disease is to first recognize patients who are at risk, and begin treating them prophylactically with new drugs and perhaps lifestyle adjustments that would reduce the rate at which the silent phase of the disease progresses.

"Ideally, we would prevent it from starting in the first place."

As Alzheimer's disease begins, there is a lengthy period of time, perhaps a decade or longer, when brain neurons affected by the disease attempt to divide, possibly as a way to compensate for the death of neurons. This is unusual in that most neurons develop prenatally and then never divide again. But in Alzheimer's the cells make the attempt, and then die.

"It's been estimated that as much as 90 percent of neuron death that occurs in the Alzheimer's brain follows this cell cycle reentry process, which is an abnormal attempt to divide," Bloom said. "By the end of the course of the disease, the patient will have lost about 30 percent of the neurons in the frontal lobes of the brain."

Erin Kodis, a former Ph.D. student in Bloom's lab and now a scientific editor at AlphaBioCom, hypothesized that excess calcium entering neurons through calcium channels on their surface drive those neurons back into the cell cycle. This occurs before a chain of events that ultimately produce the plaques found in the Alzheimer's brain. Several experiments by Kodis ultimately proved her theory correct.

The building blocks of the plaques are a protein called amyloid beta oligomers. Kodis found that when neurons are exposed to toxic amyloid oligomers, the channel, called the NMDA receptor, opens, thus allowing the calcium flow that drives neurons back into the cell cycle.

Memantine blocks cell cycle reentry by closing the NMDA receptor, Kodis found.

"The experiments suggest that memantine might have potent disease-modifying properties if it could be administered to patients long before they have become symptomatic and diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease," Bloom said. "Perhaps this could prevent the disease or slow its progression long enough that the average age of symptom onset could be significantly later, if it happens at all."

Side effects of the drug appear to be infrequent and modest.

Bloom said potential patients would need to be screened for Alzheimer's biomarkers years before symptoms appear. Selected patients then would need to be treated with memantine, possibly for life, in hopes of stopping the disease from ever developing, or further developing.

"I don't want to raise false hopes," Bloom said, but "if this idea of using memantine as a prophylactic pans out, it will be because we now understand that calcium is one of the agents that gets the disease started, and we may be able to stop or slow the process if done very early."

Bloom currently is working with colleagues at the UVA School of Medicine to design a clinical trial to investigate the feasibility of using memantine as an early intervention.

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alzheimer's research; healthy aging; parkinson's research; chronic illness; alzheimer's; dementia; disorders and syndromes; caregiving

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Alzheimer's drug may stop disease if used before symptoms develop, study suggests

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About 50 percent of people who reach the age of 85 will develop Alzheimer's disease. Most will die within about five years of exhibiting the hallmark symptoms of the disease -- severe memory loss and a precipitous decline in cognitive function. But the molecular processes that lead to the disease will have begun years earlier.

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News in electrical research. Read full text articles on electricity and magnetism, the latest research on efficient electrical systems and more.

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During World War II, American physicists and engineers conducted a race against Nazi Germany to become the first to exploit the newly understood process of nuclear fission for military applications. Their secret endeavor, which lasted from 1942 to 1945, was known as the Manhattan Project.

The effort led to the invention of atomic bombs, including the two that were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing or injuring over 200,000 people. These attacks forced Japan to surrender and brought an end to World War II, but they also marked a crucial turning point in the early Atomic Age, raising enduring questions about the implications of nuclear warfare.

The Project

The Manhattan Project was named for the Manhattan, New York, home of Columbia University, one of the initial sites of atomic study in the United States. While the research took place at several secret sites across the U.S., much of it, including the first atomic tests, occurred near Los Alamos, New Mexico.

For the project, the U.S. military teamed with the best minds of the scientific community. Military operations were headed by Brig. Gen. Leslie R. Groves, and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer served as the scientific director, overseeing the project from concept to reality. The Manhattan Project cost the U.S. over $2 billion in just four years.

German Competition

In 1938, German scientists had discovered fission, which occurs when the nucleus of an atom breaks into two equal parts. This reaction releases neutrons that break up more atoms, causing a chain reaction. Since significant energy is released in only millionths of a second, it was thought that fission could cause an explosive chain reaction of considerable force inside a uranium bomb.

Beginning in the late 1930s, a number of scientists, many escaping fascist regimes in Europe, immigrated to the U.S., bringing with them news of this discovery. In 1939, physicist Leo Szilard and other American and recently immigrated scientists tried to warn the U.S. government about this new danger but did not get a response. So Szilard contacted Albert Einstein, one of the best-known scientists of the day.

Einstein, a devoted pacifist, was at first reluctant to contact the government. He knew that he would be asking them to work toward creating a weapon that could potentially kill millions of people. Einstein was eventually swayed by concerns that Nazi Germany would develop the weapon first.

U.S. Government Gets Involved

On August 2, 1939, Einstein wrote a now-famous letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, outlining the potential uses of an atomic bomb and ways to help support American scientists in their research. In response, Roosevelt created the Advisory Committee on Uranium the following October.

Based on recommendations of the committee, the government outlaid $6,000 to buy graphite and uranium oxide for research. Scientists believed that graphite might be able to slow a chain reaction, keeping the bomb's energy somewhat in check.

The project was underway, but progress was slow until one fateful event brought the reality of war to American shores.

Development of the Bomb

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese military bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the headquarters of the United States Pacific Fleet. In response, the U.S. declared war on Japan the next day and officially entered World War II.

With the country at war and the realization that the United States was three years behind Nazi Germany, Roosevelt was ready to seriously support U.S. efforts to create an atomic bomb.

Costly experiments began at the University of Chicago, the University of California Berkeley, and Columbia. Reactors, devices designed to initiate and control nuclear chain reactions, were built in Hanford, Washington, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Oak Ridge, known as "The Secret City," was also the site of a massive uranium enrichment laboratory and plant to make the nuclear fuel.

Researchers worked simultaneously at all the sites to devise ways to produce the fuel. Physical chemist Harold Urey and his Columbia colleagues built an extraction system based on gaseous diffusion. At Berkeley, the inventor of the cyclotron, Ernest Lawrence, used his knowledge and skills to devise a process for magnetically separating the fuel: uranium-235 and plutonium-239 isotopes.

Research kicked into high gear in 1942. On December 2, at the University of Chicago, Enrico Fermi created the first successful chain reaction in which atoms were split in a controlled environment, renewing hopes that an atomic bomb was possible.

Site Consolidation

Another priority for the Manhattan Project soon became clear: It was becoming too dangerous and difficult to develop nuclear weapons at these scattered universities and towns. Scientists needed an isolated laboratory away from the populace.

In 1942, Oppenheimer suggested the remote area of Los Alamos, New Mexico. Groves approved the site and construction began at the end of that year. Oppenheimer became the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, which would be known as "Project Y."

Scientists continued to work diligently, but it took until 1945 to produce the first nuclear bomb.

Trinity Test

When Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, Vice President Harry S. Truman became the 33rd president of the United States. Until then, Truman had not been told of the Manhattan Project, but he was quickly briefed on the atomic bomb development.

That summer, a test bomb code-named "The Gadget" was taken to a location in the New Mexico desert known as Jornada del Muerto, Spanish for "Journey of the Dead Man." Oppenheimer code-named the test "Trinity," a reference to a poem by John Donne.

Everyone was anxious: Nothing of this magnitude had been tested before. No one knew what to expect. While some scientists feared a dud, others feared the end of the world.

At 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, scientists, Army personnel, and technicians donned special goggles to watch the beginning of the Atomic Age. The bomb was dropped.

There was a forceful flash, a wave of heat, a stupendous shock wave, and a mushroom cloud extending 40,000 feet into the atmosphere. The tower from which the bomb was dropped disintegrated, and thousands of yards of surrounding desert sand was turned into a brilliant jade green radioactive glass.

The bomb was a success.

The bright light from the Trinity test stood out in the minds of everyone within hundreds of miles of the site that morning. Residents in faraway neighborhoods said the sun rose twice that day. A blind girl 120 miles from the site said she saw the flash.

The men who created the bomb were astonished. Physicist Isidor Rabi expressed worry that mankind had become a threat to upset the equilibrium of nature. The test brought to Oppenheimer's mind a line from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." Physicist Ken Bainbridge, the test director, told Oppenheimer, "Now we're all sons of bitches."

The unease among many witnesses led some to sign petitions arguing that this terrible thing they had created could not be let loose in the world. Their protests were ignored.

2 A-Bombs End World War II

Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945, two months before the Trinity test. Japan refused to surrender, despite threats from Truman that terror would fall from the sky.

The war had lasted six years and involved most of the globe, resulting in the deaths of 61 million people and the displacement of countless others. The last thing the U.S. wanted was a ground war with Japan, so the decision was made to drop an atomic bomb.

On August 6, 1945, a bomb named "Little Boy" for its relatively small size was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, by the Enola Gay. Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the B-29 bomber, wrote in his journal moments later, "My God, what have we done?"

The target of Little Boy was the Aioi Bridge, which spanned the Ota River. At 8:15 that morning the bomb was dropped, and by 8:16 over 66,000 people near ground zero were dead. Some 69,000 more were injured, most burned or suffering from radiation sickness, from which many would later die.

This single atomic bomb produced absolute devastation. It left a "total vaporization" zone of one-half mile in diameter. The "total destruction" area extended to one mile, while the impact of a "severe blast" was felt for two miles. Anything flammable within two and a half miles was burned, and blazing infernos were seen up to three miles away.

On August 9, after Japan still refused to surrender, a second bomb was dropped, a plutonium bomb named "Fat Man" after its round shape. The bomb's target was the city of Nagasaki, Japan. Over 39,000 people were killed and 25,000 injured.

Japan surrendered on August 14, 1945, bringing an end to World War II.

The deadly impact of the atomic bomb was immediate, but the effects would last for decades. The fallout caused radioactive particles to rain on Japanese who had survived the blast, and more lives were lost to radiation poisoning.

Survivors of the bombs passed radiation on to their descendants. The most prominent example was an alarmingly high rate of leukemia among their children.

The bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki revealed the true destructive power of these weapons. Though countries throughout the world have continued to develop nuclear weapons, there have also been movements to promote nuclear disarmament, and anti-nuclear treaties have been signed by major world powers.

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The Manhattan Project and the Invention of the Atomic Bomb

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During World War II, American physicists and engineers conducted a race against Nazi Germany to become the first to exploit the newly understood process of nuclear fission for military applications. Their secret endeavor, which lasted from 1942 to 1945, was known as the Manhattan Project.

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The year 2008 closes with two enormous scientific and technological challenges unresolved: How to create renewable and benign sources of energy and how to lessen the damage we're doing to the global climate system.

Those twin issues are the " greatest challenge facing modern science," according to Nobel laureate Steven Chu, the gifted physicist who has been nominated to head the Department of Energy. He will be at the center of the effort to deal with these vexing problems, and his nomination signals a new day in that effort.

Clearly, those two issues dominated the world of science during 2008, a year that also saw much progress in fields as diverse as genetic engineering, the imaging of new planets outside our solar system and the maturing of social media that has altered everything from how we meet people to financing a costly and victorious campaign for the presidency of the United States. It's difficult to pick a single scientific achievement that stands out above all others because science, as a whole, doesn't work that way.

Science is and always will be a work in progress. Discoveries today are built upon past discoveries as progress is achieved, inch by inch. But rarely has there been a year when two inseparable issues dominated so much of our lives.

Energy and climate moved science from the lab to our living rooms and they were the "hot button" scientific issues of 2008.

The "breakthrough" in this case is not just hardware; it's a growing understanding of the urgency in solving these critical problems. Here's our list of the top 10.

Energy and Climate Change

The year the earth stood still. Polluted air, a lopsided dependence on shaky sources of foreign oil and congested highways couldn't convince Americans that it was time to get serious about new sources of energy. But more than four bucks per gallon at the gas pump did the trick.

Biofuels, hybrids and photovoltaic cells slipped into our conversations like invaders from another planet. Progress was reported from all areas of energy production but not all roads led us closer to energy independence. Corn isn't going to replace gasoline. That may be the most important energy "discovery" in 2008. Corn displaces agricultural land normally used for food production and, according to one study, it takes about 28 gallons of water to produce enough biofuel from corn to push a car just one mile. Substitute water wars for gas wars.

That disappointment grew out of research that was dictated by funding. Washington thought corn was a good idea and that's where a lot of research funds went. It should be the other way around. Let discoveries chart the course; let the funding follow. Stay fluid.

Throughout the year, discoveries flowed in from hundreds of labs: wearable electronic circuits that can use body movements to recharge batteries; solar panels so flexible they can be "painted" on a roof; photovoltaic cells that are twice as effective at converting sunlight to electricity; and a new generation of fuel-efficient vehicles.

The Sun Is Rising

Construction is under way on new wind farms, with huge turbines generating electricity from the passing breeze, and vast acreage is being converted to solar collectors. Scientists at several institutions made progress in creating a way to store solar energy by using solar power to split water into oxygen and hydrogen and using the hydrogen as fuel.

It took a long time but the sun is finally rising as our most promising source of clean, sustainable energy.

Cells, a New Beginning

Scientists achieved several goals in what was once thought impossible -- reprogramming adult cells to act as stem cells, morphing into new cells. That progress, labeled by Science magazine as the "breakthrough of the year," could potentially solve two huge problems.

It now appears much more likely that scientists will be able to reprogram cells to fight a wide range of diseases, including muscular dystrophy and Parkinson's disease, as well as many others. And it eases the ethical problem of using embryonic stem cells, which results in the destruction of the embryo, because mature cells may be reprogrammed to do the job. Furthermore, it is likely that a patient's own cells can be reprogrammed in the near future, thus lessening the need to introduce foreign cells.

It is, put mildly, a new day in medical research.

But the road ahead is still bumpy. The process is not well understood and there is some concern that reprogrammed cells might not always act the way they are supposed to. But many researchers around the world are working to solve those problems.

A Really Big Machine

The grandest new toy to go online in 2008 is the Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile-long, ring-shaped particle accelerator on the French-Swiss border meant to recreate the conditions during the first instant after the Big Bang. The machine, built by 26 nations for $8 billion, gives scientists their best chance yet to find the postulated Higgs boson or so-called "God particle," which is believed to be the particle that gave mass to all other particles. But every new accelerator, erroneously referred to as atom smashers, seems to come with its own agenda. Who's to say, at this point, what the Hadron will tell us about the beginning of the universe?

Unfortunately, the collider had to be shut down after operating a few days in September because it sprang a helium leak. It is scheduled to be operational again in June. But, fortunately, it didn't do what some folks feared it might -- create black holes that could destroy the earth. Physicists have tried to dehorn that myth, noting that particle collisions happen naturally all the time and the planet is still here.

Social Media

Here's a newcomer to the annual year's top 10 list, and it slipped in so quietly that a lot of lists missed it entirely.

Some of its components have been around for awhile -- Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. -- but during 2008 they took center stage, changing the way many of us interact and providing vital information during disasters ranging from fires to warfare to terrorism.

Social Networking Here to Stay

This year, it helped President-elect Barack Obama make history, raising enough money from millions of citizens to finance a successful campaign for the presidency. Obama used the new kid on the block, Twitter, to keep his followers informed and, of course, to lift a little change out of their pockets.

Social networking is here to stay and several sites remain the hottest on the Internet. Earlier this month. Google reported that four of the 10 "fastest-rising" search terms in 2008 were for social-networking sites, including three in Europe -- Facebook login (3), tuenti (4), nasza klasa (7) and wer kennt wen (8).

Dead Mice Resurrected

Geneticists in Japan cloned dead mice that had been frozen for 16 years and produced 13 healthy, live mice. The breakthrough suggests that it may be possible to bring back extinct animals, like the wooly mammoth, that have been dead and frozen for some time, a feat that was once thought impossible. This process relied on transferring the nuclei from dead cells drawn from the brains and blood of the dead mice and injecting just that part into unfertilized mouse eggs, creating embryos.

But it will be difficult to resurrect animals that have been dead for a long time, the scientists said in announcing their discovery, because cells from dead animals decay quickly, even if frozen.

It's not quite Jurassic Park but maybe it's a step in that direction.

Spacewalk, Made in China

Low earth orbit isn't exactly crowded but it grew a little tighter this year when a Chinese astronaut took a 15-minute spacewalk outside the Shenzhou VII capsule 213 miles above the Earth. It was China's third manned venture into space, and the country plans to launch its own space station in a little more than a decade.

China is now recruiting more astronauts -- or "taikonauts" in Chinese lingo -- for future missions.

Planets, Anyone?

Discovery of new planets outside our solar system came in rapid fire during 2008 and, for the first time, astronomers were able to image several planets, not just infer their existence from various clues. New telescopes, and new techniques, revealed huge planets orbiting at great distances from their stars, so none of them are likely to harbor life as we know it. But it was a significant milestone in the search for whatever, or whoever, is out there.

Previously, astronomers relied on faint movements of the stars from the gravitation of an orbiting planet, called the wobble effect, as one means of finding planets. They could also measure the slight dimming of a star when a planet passed between the star and the earth. But neither of these techniques allowed them to actually see the planets, which were too dim to be seen near a brilliant star. Now, they can begin analyzing their data to learn more about the planets' atmosphere and, thus, more about whether they could sustain life.

None of the exoplanets imaged so far are likely candidates but maybe someday ...

Can You See Me Now?

Invisibility Cloaks on the Horizon

Have you ever wished you could be invisible, a fly on the wall that no one could see? Well, stay tuned.

Some clever researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, say they are close to inventing a "cloak of invisibility" that can deflect anything that travels as a wave, like light and sound. You can't see it, you can't hear it, how you going to know it's there?

This magic resulted from the creation of new substances, called metamaterials. The surface has incredibly tiny structures that are small enough to interfere with individual waves. If you were cloaked in such material, light waves would bend around you and meet up on the other side. You would have disappeared without a clue.

The technology could have many practical applications, some of which are obvious. Think stealth bomber.

Life on Mars?

Not yet, at least not that we know of. But NASA's intrepid spacecraft Phoenix, cobbled together partly with some leftover parts at a paltry cost of $420 million, showed once and for all that there is ice beneath Mars' north pole. That increases the possibility that there is, or at least was, life somewhere on the Red Planet, because water is essential for life as we know it.

Phoenix wasn't exactly looking for life but months of poking and digging and analyzing produced some reason for hope. The small craft found salts and clays, which require water to form, and it dug up ice crystals from the red soil.

Because of the planet's varying distances from the sun, and its tilted axis, the polar regions do warm up about every million years or so, making those areas more suitable for life. Even a microbe would be a welcome sight.

Your Genome, Cheap

DNA guru James Watson had his entire genome sequenced. It took a couple of months and cost only about $1 million. Now, it seems, everybody wants to get into the act.

A number of companies began offering genome sequencing, and the cost dropped to about $200,000. Still others opened shop, offering an abbreviated profile that would search for a wide range of potential illnesses for a few hundred dollars. But health authorities across the country became alarmed because of the potential for mistakes and difficulty in interpreting what the findings actually mean, and regulatory agencies leaped into action with new and proposed rules.

So at the moment it's not clear how available any of these services are likely to be but it's probably only a matter of time. At least we would know more about what to dread, even if we can't cure it yet.

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A Year of Breakthroughs: Science in 2008

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In the world of science, the year 2008 saw much progress in fields of genetic engineering, imaging of new planets outside our solar system, and the maturing of social media. However, 2008 closes with two enormous scientific and technological challenges unresolved: how to create renewable and benign...

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In December 2021, the Daimler Trucks & Buses division was spun off from the former Daimler AG. Daimler Truck Holding AG, one of the largest commercial vehicle manufacturers with a global reach, now is an independent listed company.

The remaining Daimler AG with the Cars & Vans divisions was renamed to Mercedes-Benz Group AG as of Feb 1, 2022. This marks the completion of its historic realignment that began in 2021.
Open Daimler Truck Website Open Mercedes-Benz Group Website
Provider:
Daimler Truck AG - Fasanenweg 10 - 70771 Leinfelden-Echterdingen - Germany
Phone: +49 711 8485-0 | E-mail: contact@daimlertruck.com
Represented by the Board of Management: Martin Daum (Chairman), Karl Deppen, Andreas Gorbach, Jürgen Hartwig, John O'Leary, Karin Rådström, Stephan Unger
Chairman of the Supervisory Board: Joe Kaeser
Commercial Register Stuttgart, No. HRB 762884
VAT registration number: DE 32 12 81 771

Mercedes-Benz AG - Mercedesstraße 120 - 70372 Stuttgart - Germany
Phone: +49 7 11 17-0 | E-mail: dialog@mercedes-benz.com
Represented by the Board of Management: Ola Källenius (Chairman), Jörg Burzer, Renata Jungo Brüngger, Sabine Kohleisen, Markus Schäfer, Britta Seeger, Hubertus Troska, Harald Wilhelm
Chairman of the Supervisory Board: Bernd Pischetsrieder
Commercial Register Stuttgart, No. HRB 762873
VAT registration number: DE 32 12 81 763

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In December 2021, the Daimler Trucks & Buses division was spun off from the former Daimler AG. Daimler Truck Holding AG, one of the largest commercial vehicle manufacturers with a global reach, now is an independent listed company.

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Experimental drug stops Parkinson's disease progression in mice

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Johns Hopkins researchers say they have developed an experimental drug, similar to compounds used to treat diabetes, that slows the progression of Parkinson's disease itself-as well as its symptoms-in mice. In experiments ...

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The discovery of penicillin, one of the world’s first antibiotics, marks a true turning point in human history -- when doctors finally had a tool that could completely cure their patients of deadly infectious diseases. Many school children can recite the basics. Penicillin was discovered in London i…

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DNA testing of more than 6,000 dogs has revealed that a duplication on canine chromosome 18 is strongly associated with blue eyes in Siberian Huskies, according to a study published October 4, 2018, in the open-access journal PLOS Genetics by Adam Boyko and Aaron Sams of Embark Veterinary, Inc., and colleagues. Embark is a dog DNA startup company headquartered in Boston, MA, and Ithaca, NY, and research partner of the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine. According to the authors, this represents the first consumer genomics study ever conducted in a non-human model and the largest canine genome-wide association study to date.

Consumer genomics enables genetic discovery on an unprecedented scale by linking very large databases of genomic data with phenotype information voluntarily submitted via web-based surveys. But the promise of consumer genomic data is not limited to human research. Genomic tools for dogs are readily available but the genetic underpinnings of many important traits remain undiscovered. Although two genetic variants are known to underlie blue eye color in some dogs, these do not explain the trait in some other dogs, like Siberian Huskies.

To address this gap in knowledge, Boyko, Sams and colleagues used a diverse panel of 6,070 genetically tested dogs with owners that contributed phenotype data via web-based surveys and photo uploads. They found that a 98.6-kilobase duplication on chromosome 18 near the ALX4 gene, which plays an important role in mammalian eye development, was strongly associated with variation in blue eye color, primarily in Siberian Huskies but also in non-merle Australian Shepherds. One copy of the variant was enough to cause blue eyes or heterochromia (blue and brown eyes), although some dogs with the variant did not have blue eyes, so other genetic or environmental factors are still involved. Future studies of the functional mechanism underlying this association may lead to the discovery of a novel pathway by which blue eyes develop in mammals. From a broader perspective, the results underscore the power of consumer data-driven discovery in non-human species, especially dogs, where there is intense owner interest in the personal genomic information of their pets, a high level of engagement with web-based surveys, and an underlying genetic architecture ideal for mapping studies.

Aaron J. Sams adds: "Using genetic data from the pets of our customers, combined with eye colors reported by customers for those same animals, we have discovered a genetic duplication that is strongly associated with blue eye color. This study demonstrates the power of the approach that Embark is taking towards improving canine health. In a single year, we collected enough data to conduct the largest canine study of its kind. Embark is currently pursuing similar research projects in a range of morphological and health-related traits and we hope to continue to use our platform to move canine genetics and health forward in a very real way."
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Materials provided by PLOS. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

Petra E. Deane-Coe, Erin T. Chu, Andrea Slavney, Adam R. Boyko, Aaron J. Sams. Direct-to-consumer DNA testing of 6,000 dogs reveals 98.6-kb duplication associated with blue eyes and heterochromia in Siberian Huskies. PLOS Genetics, 2018; 14 (10): e1007648 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1007648

Cite This Page:

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dogs; biology; genetics; veterinary medicine; biochemistry research; animal learning and intelligence; animals; evolutionary biology

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Why huskies have blue eyes: Duplication associated with blue eyes in dogs

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DNA testing of more than 6,000 dogs has revealed that a duplication on canine chromosome 18 is strongly associated with blue eyes in Siberian Huskies, according to a study published October 4, 2018, in the open-access journal PLOS Genetics by Adam Boyko and Aaron Sams of Embark Veterinary, Inc., and colleagues.

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TOKYO-- Since 1994, when comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 plunged to its spectacular demise on Jupiter, astronomers have wondered whether any records of similar older impacts exist. Now their curiosity should be at least partly satisfied: A Japanese engineer and amateur astronomer, Isshi Tabe, hit pay dirt while digging through old manuscripts in the library of the Paris Observatory.

Tabe found a drawing made by the famous 17th century astronomer Giovanni-Dominique Cassini, then director of the Paris Observatory. Cassini had recorded how a spot on Jupiter--much like the dark bruises Shoemaker-Levy left on the planet's gassy surface--varied over 18 days after it first appeared on 5 December 1690. "I was really surprised," says Tabe, who says he didn't think people did such detailed astronomical drawings before the 1800s. His analysis will appear next month in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan.

The drawing has intrigued those who have seen it. "The variation over time looked very much like that of Shoemaker-Levy 9," says Junichi Watanabe of Japan's National Astronomical Observatory in Tokyo. "It was really exciting."

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TOKYO-- Since 1994, when comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 plunged to its spectacular demise on Jupiter, astronomers have wondered whether any records of similar older impacts exist. Now their curiosity should be at least partly satisfied: A Japanese engineer and amateur astronomer, Isshi Tabe, hit pay dirt while digging through old manuscripts in the library of the Paris Observatory.

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Scientists say they may have discovered a way to develop cool new vaccines-and they mean that literally. By replacing essential genes in a mammalian pathogen with their counterparts from Arctic bacteria, they have created strains that provoke a protective immune response in mice-but that don't spread to the warm parts of the body where they could do serious harm. The team hopes that the method will lead to a new generation of vaccines for major bacterial diseases such as tuberculosis.

So-called temperature-sensitive vaccines already exist for a few viruses. An influenza vaccine called FluMist, for instance, consists of a weakened flu virus that can't grow at 37˚C, the temperature inside the lungs, but that can reproduce in the slightly cooler nose and throat. As it does so, it triggers a protective immune response.

The strain used in FluMist was created by growing flu virus for many generations at gradually declining temperatures and letting it adapt. For bacterial pathogens, Francis Nano of the University of Victoria in Canada, took a very different tack: He turned to the psychrophilic, or cold-loving, bacteria from Earth's polar regions. These organisms have many enzymes that can function only at lower temperatures; turn up the heat and they die.

For a proof of principle, Nano used a bacterium called Francisella novicida, an innocuous cousin of a human pathogen called F. tularensis. (The latter is high up on the list of potential bioweapons because it causes incapacitating malaise and fever and would be easy to disseminate.) One at a time, the team swapped out nine so-called essential genes-involved, for instance, in DNA repair or cell division-in F. novicida for their counterparts from Arctic bacteria, such as Colwellia psychrerythraea, a marine microbe that lives in polar waters and ice. Francisella normally dies at 45˚C; introducing the cold-loving genes lowered that threshold by up to 12˚C, depending on the gene and the species it was borrowed from.

When the researchers injected these altered strains into the relatively cool tails of rats, they found that the microbes reproduced locally but didn't spread to the warmer spleen and lungs, where they would normally replicate as well. The key test was whether the strains could act as vaccines. F. novicida is lethal to mice, but when the researchers injected the temperature-sensitive strains, the animals didn't get sick-and they were protected from an otherwise fatal dose of the unaltered F. novicida given 3 weeks later.

Nano-who has patented the method and assigned the rights to his university-says he's particularly interested in developing a vaccine for TB, which kills more than a million people a year and for which only a very imperfect, old vaccine exists. As part of the study, the researchers showed they could make Mycobacterium smegmatis-a research stand-in for M. tuberculosis-temperature-sensitive, but they didn't test its potential as a vaccine. The team reports its findings online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"It's a unique and very innovative approach," says Michael Brennan, senior adviser for global affairs at Aeras Global TB Vaccine Foundation in Rockville, Maryland. But the method still has quite a way to go, he cautions. Because these vaccines are alive, safety is going to be a crucial issue, Brennan says. The researchers will have to show that it's impossible for the microbes to lose their temperature sensitivity and cause disease.

The method could have other uses as well, Nano notes. Right now, research on many pathogenic bacteria "is like working on the space shuttle" because of the strict containment measures that prevent researchers from becoming infected. Creating harmless strains of the same bacteria that are identical except in their maximum temperature could make such studies a lot easier, he says.

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Scientists say they may have discovered a way to develop cool new vaccines-and they mean that literally. By replacing essential genes in a mammalian pathogen with their counterparts from Arctic bacteria, they have created strains that provoke a protective immune response in mice-but that don't spread to the warm parts of the body where they could do serious harm.

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The Breakthrough®Fuel Applied Knowledge team is assembling all the information you need for the second to last Breakthrough®Advisor publication...

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A progressively drying climate punctuated by variable wetter episodes may have precipitated the transition from our hominin ancestors to anatomically modern humans, according to research published on Oct. 8 in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS).

Since the discovery of a rich assemblage of human fossils as well as stone tools and other archeological evidence in the rift valley of East Africa, a region often referred to as the cradle of humanity, scientists have attempted to piece together the complex puzzle that is the history of our human origins, including the environmental context of that history.

The study, based on lake sediment cores, is the first to provide a continuous environmental context for the diverse archeological evidence recovered from nearby localities in the rift valley basins of southern Kenya. The cores were sampled from Lake Magadi as part of the Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project, or HSPDP, which is directed by University of Arizona professor Andrew Cohen.

Lake Magadi, a shallow, periodically dry lake, is close to the Olorgesailie basin in Kenya, one of the most productive sites for archaeological evidence of human evolution in Africa. The authors suggest that the profound climatic changes may have been driving forces behind hominin evolution, the origins of modern Homo sapiens and the onset of the Middle Stone Age.

While previous hypotheses have related hominin evolution to climate change, most prior studies lack regional-scale evidence for a link between environment and hominin evolution, the authors write in the paper, "Progressive aridification in East Africa over the last half million years and implications for human evolution." According to the study, a trend toward intense aridification in the area began 575,000 years ago. The change, not previously documented in continuous continental cores from East Africa, corresponds with faunal extinctions and a major transformation in stone tool technology documented in the Olorgesailie region.

"Much evidence for human evolution has been gathered from the area, but linking those records to detailed environmental records was missing until now," said the study's lead author, Richard Owen, of Hong Kong Baptist University. "There is a big gap in the records between the last Early Stone Age tools 500,000 years ago and the appearance of Middle Stone Age tools about 320,000 years ago. Our results plugged that gap with a continuous environmental record."

A critical transition occurred sometime during this gap, a period for which archeologists have unearthed evidence of a leap in early humans' abilities to make, use and trade stone tools.

The cores from Lake Magadi provide the first detailed link between climate change and events known from the region's archeological record.

"We have known for a while that the climate at the time was very varied, but the key here is that the records are in proximity to the archeological evidence for this transition," says Cohen, a professor in the University of Arizona's Department of Geosciences. "The older stone tools found at Olorgesailie did not change much between 1.2 million and a half-million years ago. And suddenly, after 500,000 and before 320,000 years ago -- we don't know exactly when, but in that timespan -- there was a critical transition in archeology when tools became more sophisticated and were transported over longer distances."

At the same time the lake core records point to the climate becoming drier and more variable, there is evidence elsewhere in Africa of the appearance of modern Homo sapiens, prompting much speculation whether the two are connected, Cohen said.

"Whether the evolution of bigger brains goes hand in hand with new toolkits is not entirely clear," he said. "But the earliest modern Homo sapiens fossils from Morocco date back 325,000 years, the same time we see this transition of tools. And both happened around the same time that our core record indicates severe drying very close to the archeological sites."

The deepest core drilled at Lake Magadi reached 200 meters (650 feet), penetrating all sedimentary layers down to the volcanic bedrock of the lake. The core samples, each about 10 feet long and 2 1/2 inches in diameter, are cut into manageable 5-foot segments, packaged and air-freighted to the National Lake Core Facility at the University of Minnesota for curation, analysis and storage.

According to the hypothesis of variability selection, a rapidly changing environment creates selective pressure that forces species to adapt to rapid change, Owen said. Under that scenario, the larger brains of anatomically modern humans would have allowed our ancestors to adapt quickly to an increasingly less predictable world.

"Now we have evidence that at the same time the toolkits were changing, the mammal fauna changed and the climate became more arid," Owen said. "So you have a series of coincidences that makes you think, 'This could be real.' Now we can say when the environment changed and then compare that to the archeological evidence of the region."

Drilling at other nearby sites by HSPDP has been completed as researchers gather more of the region's climate data to continue studying the importance of environmental variability in the course of human evolution.

The Hong Kong Research Grants Council, the International Continental Drilling Program, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan funded the research.

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climate; environmental awareness; ice ages; environmental policy; early climate; human evolution; early humans; evolution

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Drier, less predictable environment may have spurred human evolution

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Evidence of a variable but progressively drying climate coincides with a major shift in stone-tool-making abilities and the appearance of modern Homo sapiens. Sediment cores obtained by the Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project provide the first continuous environmental context for the diverse archeological evidence recovered from nearby localities in the East African rift valley.

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Orville's brother Wilbur piloting the record flight lasting 59 seconds over a distance of 852 feet.
The conditions on the morning of December 17 were perfect for flight - high, consistent winds blowing from the north. At about 10:30 that morning, Orville Wright lay down on the plane's wing surface and brought its engine to life in preparation of launching it and himself into history. His diary tells the story: "When we got up, a wind of between 20 and 25 miles was blowing from the north.

We got the machine out early and put out the signal for the men at the station. Before we were quite ready, John T. Daniels, W. S. Dough, A. D. Etheridge, W. C. Brinkley of Manteo, and Johnny Moore of Nags Head arrived.

After running the engine and propellers a few minutes to get them in working order, I got on the machine at 10:35 for the first trial. The wind, according to our anemometers at this time, was blowing a little over 20 miles (corrected) 27 miles according to the Government anemometer at Kitty Hawk. On slipping the rope the machine started off increasing in speed to probably 7 or 8 miles. The machine lifted from the truck just as it was entering on the fourth rail. Mr. Daniels took a picture just as it left the tracks.

I found the control of the front rudder quite difficult on account of its being balanced too near the center and thus had a tendency to turn itself when started so that the rudder was turned too far on one side and then too far on the other. As a result the machine would rise suddenly to about 10 ft. and then as suddenly, on turning the rudder, dart for the ground. A sudden dart when out about 100 feet from the end of the tracks ended the flight. Time about 12 seconds (not known exactly as watch was not promptly stopped). The lever for throwing off the engine was broken, and the skid under the rudder cracked. After repairs, at 20 min. after 11 o'clock Will made the second trial.

The course was about like mine, up and down but a little longer over the ground though about the same in time. Dist. not measured but about 175 ft. Wind speed not quite so strong.

With the aid of the station men present, we picked the machine up and carried it back to the starting ways. At about 20 minutes till 12 o'clock I made the third trial. When out about the same distance as Will's, I met with a strong gust from the left which raised the left wing and sidled the machine off to the right in a lively manner. I immediately turned the rudder to bring the machine down and then worked the end control. Much to our surprise, on reaching the ground the left wing struck first, showing the lateral control of this machine much more effective than on any of our former ones. At the time of its sidling it had raised to a height of probably 12 to 14 feet.
At just 12 o'clock Will started on the fourth and last trip. The machine started off with its ups and downs as it had before, but by the time he had gone over three or four hundred feet he had it under much better control, and was traveling on a fairly even course. It proceeded in this manner till it reached a small hummock out about 800 feet from the starting ways, when it began its pitching again and suddenly darted into the ground.

The front rudder frame was badly broken up, but the main frame suffered none at all. The distance over the ground was 852 feet in 59 seconds. The engine turns was 1071, but this included several seconds while on the starting ways and probably about a half second after landing. The jar of landing had set the watch on machine back so that we have no exact record for the 1071 turns. Will took a picture of my third flight just before the gust struck the machine.

The machine left the ways successfully at every trial, and the tail was never caught by the truck as we had feared.

After removing the front rudder, we carried the machine back to camp. We set the machine down a few feet west of the building, and while standing about discussing the last flight, a sudden gust of wind struck the machine and started to turn it over. All rushed to stop it. Will who was near one end ran to the front, but too late to do any good. Mr. Daniels and myself seized spars at the rear, but to no purpose. The machine gradually turned over on us. Mr. Daniels, having had no experience in handling a machine of this kind, hung on to it from the inside, and as a result was knocked down and turned over and over with it as it went. His escape was miraculous, as he was in with the engine and chains. The engine legs were all broken off, the chain guides badly bent, a number of uprights, and nearly all the rear ends of the ribs were broken. One spar only was broken.

After dinner we went to Kitty Hawk to send off telegram to M.W. While there we called on Capt. and Mrs. Hobbs, Dr. Cogswell and the station men."

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The Wright Brothers - First Flight, 1903

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Orville Wright describes the first powered flight.

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The year 2017 has catapulted us into a science-fiction future, from human cell regeneration for growing organs, to banishing genetic disease through breakthrough gene-editing techniques and recycling orbital rockets - and it's only August at the time of writing. A lot has happened in the last eight months; scientific breakthroughs have made our lives safer, easier and more enjoyable. And the scientific community is only getting started.

Researchers and scientists around the globe have worked tirelessly to bring us this future, so it's worthwhile to take a step back and applaud their tremendous efforts. The world of tomorrow is being shaped as you read this, so let's have a look at ten of the biggest stories in science of this year, so far.

Scientists Successfully Edited the First Human Embryo Ever in The U.S.
Image Source: Getty Images
Jul 27, 2017: Researchers in Portland, Oregon have achieved a significant breakthrough in gene-editing technology. Taking advantage of the revolutionary gene- editing technique, CRISPR, a gene linked to heart conditions was successfully "deleted" from a human embryo.
Read the full story here.
Scientists Have Finally Created Metallic Hydrogen
Image Source: Harvard University
January 27, 2017: For the first time in the wold, scientists created metallic hydrogen by applying almost five million atmospheres of pressure to liquid hydrogen. That's about five million times the pressure we experience at sea level, and 4,500 times that at the bottom of the ocean. It is the first time a state of hydrogen has existed in a metallic state on Earth. In its metallic state, hydrogen could act as a genuine superconductor and could revolutionize everything from energy storage to rocketry.
Read the full story here.
Scientists Discovered an Alien Planet That's The Best Candidate for Life As We Know It
Image Source: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle
On April 19 this year scientists at the European Organisation for Astronomical Research (ESO) found the best candidate for extraterrestrial life so far. The super-Earth named LHS 1140b was found in the habitable zone of a dim star 40 light-years away from Earth. It receives about half as much sunlight from its star, LHS 1140, as the Earth does from the Sun.

"This is the most exciting exoplanet I've seen in the past decade," author Jason Dittmann of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said in an ESO press release. "We could hardly hope for a better target to perform one of the biggest quests in science - searching for evidence of life beyond Earth."
Read the full story here. Image Source: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health
June 1, 2017: In one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs of 2017, scientists used the gene-editing technology CRISPR (the most accessible gene-editing technique so far) inside the human body for the very first time. A new human trial aimed to remove the human papillomavirus (HPV) by applying a gel that carries the necessary DNA coding to the cervixes of 60 women to disable the tumor growth mechanism.
Read the full story here.
Breakthrough Initiative Will Grow Organs and Regenerate Human Tissue
Image Source: Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center
May 1, 2017: Major strides have been made in the field of regenerative medicine. The Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine is currently leading projects to speed up the development of artificially growing human tissue and even organs in a lab to help patients worldwide. These new initiatives may one day repair nerve damage and even grow entire limbs and organs.
Read the full story here.
DeepMind Has Taught an AI to Do Something Quite Remarkable
Image Source: DeepMind/YouTube
July 11, 2017: Google's artificial intelligence subsidiary DeepMind published a paper illustrating the way they are teaching AI computer agents to navigate complex environments. It may look funny to us, but it's a big step forward for autonomous AI movement.
Read the full story here.
SpaceX's Historic Launch Proves Recycled Rockets Are the Future of Space Exploration

March 30, 2017: SpaceX made space launch history in March by successfully relaunching and re-landing a used Falcon 9 rocket booster via rocket descent. This is the stuff of old-school scifi. Already having been the cheapest orbital rocket system, this breakthrough brought the affordability down even more - a saving of more than $18 million per launch.
Read the full story here.
This Fluid-Filled Bag Lets Lambs Develop Outside the Womb. Humans Are Next.
Image Source: Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
April 26, 2017: Physicians at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia have managed to imitate a woman's uterus using a synthetic device in order to prevent mortality and disease of prematurely born children younger than 37 weeks.
Read the full story here.
A New Breakthrough in Quantum Computing is Set to Transform Our World
Image Source: Getty Images
July 28, 2017: A 51-qubit quantum computer was unveiled to the world at the 2017 International Conference on Quantum Technologies in Moscow, paving the way for a number of new possible applications of the technology.
Read the full story here.
Google's AlphaGo Proves Its Mettle Against a Team of Five
Image Source: AlphaGo/Deep Mind
May 29, 2017: After beating a human in the Computer Go game in 2016, Alphabet Inc.'s Google DeepMind computer took on five more of the world's best human professional Go players and defeated them in earnest.
Read the full story here.
We've seen it for ourselves; whatever negativity 2017 might bring the world, this year has been one incredible leap after the other - and it's still Summer.

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The 10 Most Significant Scientific Discoveries Of the Year (So Far)

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The year 2017 has catapulted us into a science-fiction future, from human cell regeneration for growing organs, to banishing genetic disease through breakthrough gene-editing techniques and recycling orbital rockets - and it's only August at the time of writing. A lot has happened in the last eight months; scientific breakthroughs have made our lives safer, easier and more enjoyable.

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Prospects for Carbon Capture and Sequestration Technologies Assuming Their Technological Learning

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This chapter analyzes potentials of carbon capture and sequestration technologies (CCT) in a set of long-term energy-economic-environmental scenarios ...

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Plants in the Arctic are growing taller because of climate change, according to new research from a global scientific collaboration led by the University of Edinburgh.

While the Arctic is usually thought of as a vast, desolate landscape of ice, it is in fact home to hundreds of species of low-lying shrubs, grasses and other plants that play a critical role in carbon cycling and energy balance.

Now, Arctic experts have discovered that the effects of climate change are behind an increase in plant height across the tundra over the past 30 years.

As well as the Arctic's native plants growing in stature, in the southern reaches of the Arctic taller species of plants are spreading across the tundra. Vernal sweetgrass, which is common in lowland Europe, has now moved in to sites in Iceland and Sweden.

Dr Isla Myers-Smith of the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh, and Dr Anne Bjorkman from the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F) in Frankfurt, led the international team of 130 scientists in the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)-funded project.

More than 60,000 data observations from hundreds of sites across the Arctic and alpine tundra were analysed to produce the findings, which were published in Nature today.

Dr Bjorkman said: "Rapid climate warming in the Arctic and alpine regions is driving changes in the structure and composition of plant communities, with important consequences for how this vast and sensitive ecosystem functions.

"Arctic regions have long been a focus for climate change research, as the permafrost lying under the northern latitudes contains 30 to 50 percent of the world's soil carbon.

"Taller plants trap more snow, which insulates the underlying soil and prevents it from freezing as quickly in winter.

"An increase in taller plants could speed up the thawing of this frozen carbon bank, and lead to an increase in the release of greenhouse gases.

"We found that the increase in height didn't happen in just a few sites, it was nearly everywhere across the tundra.

"If taller plants continue to increase at the current rate, the plant community height could increase by 20 to 60 percent by the end of the century."

Dr Myers-Smith, of the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh, said: "Quantifying the link between environment and plant traits is critical to understanding the consequences of climate change, but such research has rarely extended into the Northern hemisphere, home to the planet's coldest tundra ecosystems.

"This is the first time that a biome-scale study has been carried out to get to the root of the critical role that plants play in this rapidly-warming part of the planet."

The team now has a comprehensive data set on Arctic tundra plants, collected from sites in Alaska, Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia and Russia. Alpine sites in the European Alps and Colorado Rockies were also included in the study.

The team assessed relationships between temperature, soil moisture and key traits that represent plants' form and function. Plant height and leaf area were analysed and tracked, along with specific leaf area, leaf nitrogen content and leaf dry matter content, as well as woodiness and evergreenness.

Surprisingly, only height was found to increase strongly over time. Plant traits were strongly influenced by moisture levels in addition to temperature.

Dr Myers-Smith said: "While most climate change models and research have focused on increasing temperatures, our research has shown that soil moisture can play a much greater role in changing plant traits than we previously thought.

"We need to understand more about soil moisture in the Arctic. Precipitation is likely to increase in the region, but that's just one factor that affects soil moisture levels."

Helen Beadman, Head of Polar, Climate and Weather at NERC, said: "This research is a vital step in improving our understanding of how Arctic and alpine vegetation is responding to climate change.

"Shrub growth and expansion could have a profound impact not only on the Arctic ecosystem, but also further afield if it results in an increase in the release of greenhouse gases."

Journal Reference:

Anne D. Bjorkman, Isla H. Myers-Smith, Sarah C. Elmendorf, Signe Normand, Nadja Rüger, Pieter S. A. Beck, Anne Blach-Overgaard, Daan Blok, J. Hans C. Cornelissen, Bruce C. Forbes, Damien Georges, Scott J. Goetz, Kevin C. Guay, Gregory H. R. Henry, Janneke HilleRisLambers, Robert D. Hollister, Dirk N. Karger, Jens Kattge, Peter Manning, Janet S. Prevéy, Christian Rixen, Gabriela Schaepman-Strub, Haydn J. D. Thomas, Mark Vellend, Martin Wilmking, Sonja Wipf, Michele Carbognani, Luise Hermanutz, Esther Lévesque, Ulf Molau, Alessandro Petraglia, Nadejda A. Soudzilovskaia, Marko J. Spasojevic, Marcello Tomaselli, Tage Vowles, Juha M. Alatalo, Heather D. Alexander, Alba Anadon-Rosell, Sandra Angers-Blondin, Mariska te Beest, Logan Berner, Robert G. Björk, Agata Buchwal, Allan Buras, Katherine Christie, Elisabeth J. Cooper, Stefan Dullinger, Bo Elberling, Anu Eskelinen, Esther R. Frei, Oriol Grau, Paul Grogan, Martin Hallinger, Karen A. Harper, Monique M. P. D. Heijmans, James Hudson, Karl Hülber, Maitane Iturrate-Garcia, Colleen M. Iversen, Francesca Jaroszynska, Jill F. Johnstone, Rasmus Halfdan Jørgensen, Elina Kaarlejärvi, Rebecca Klady, Sara Kuleza, Aino Kulonen, Laurent J. Lamarque, Trevor Lantz, Chelsea J. Little, James D. M. Speed, Anders Michelsen, Ann Milbau, Jacob Nabe-Nielsen, Sigrid Schøler Nielsen, Josep M. Ninot, Steven F. Oberbauer, Johan Olofsson, Vladimir G. Onipchenko, Sabine B. Rumpf, Philipp Semenchuk, Rohan Shetti, Laura Siegwart Collier, Lorna E. Street, Katharine N. Suding, Ken D. Tape, Andrew Trant, Urs A. Treier, Jean-Pierre Tremblay, Maxime Tremblay, Susanna Venn, Stef Weijers, Tara Zamin, Noémie Boulanger-Lapointe, William A. Gould, David S. Hik, Annika Hofgaard, Ingibjörg S. Jónsdóttir, Janet Jorgenson, Julia Klein, Borgthor Magnusson, Craig Tweedie, Philip A. Wookey, Michael Bahn, Benjamin Blonder, Peter M. van Bodegom, Benjamin Bond-Lamberty, Giandiego Campetella, Bruno E. L. Cerabolini, F. Stuart Chapin, William K. Cornwell, Joseph Craine, Matteo Dainese, Franciska T. de Vries, Sandra Díaz, Brian J. Enquist, Walton Green, Ruben Milla, Ülo Niinemets, Yusuke Onoda, Jenny C. Ordoñez, Wim A. Ozinga, Josep Penuelas, Hendrik Poorter, Peter Poschlod, Peter B. Reich, Brody Sandel, Brandon Schamp, Serge Sheremetev, Evan Weiher. Plant functional trait change across a warming tundra biome. Nature, 2018; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0563-7

Cite This Page:

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endangered plants; nature; botany; soil types; climate; global warming; tundra; environmental awareness

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Taller plants moving into Arctic because of climate change

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Plants in the Arctic are growing taller because of climate change, according to new research from a global scientific collaboration led by the University of Edinburgh. While the Arctic is usually thought of as a vast, desolate landscape of ice, it is in fact home to hundreds of species of low-lying shrubs, grasses and other plants that play a critical role in carbon cycling and energy balance.

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A new study found that nectar-feeding bats evolved extra-long whiskers unlike those of any other bat species that allow them to hover as they feed on flowers, much like hummingbirds. The researchers ...

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Researchers have generated the first induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from bats, gaining valuable insights into the close relationship between bats and ... Geckos can use their tongue to differentiate their own odor from that of other members of their species, as researchers have shown in a new experimental study.

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Who Invented Eyeglasses? Who Invented Sunglasses?

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Spectacles were a 13th century Italian development but no one inventor of glasses has been identified. Who invented sunglasses? Ancient Chinese and Inuits.

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World's oldest known animal identified after long mystery

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The oldest known animal in the geological record has been identified, in a discovery that scientists are calling "the Holy Grail of palaeontology."

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Rare, mystery blasts from sun can devastate the ozone layer and spike radiation levels on Earth

The vibrant auroras from earlier this year have a darker side that scientists are still uncovering.

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Science news, expert analysis and the latest discoveries

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The latest science news and groundbreaking discoveries, with expert analysis and interesting articles on today\'s most important events and breakthroughs.

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Limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society, the IPCC said in a new assessment. With clear benefits to people and natural ecosystems, limiting global warming to 1.5°C compared to 2°C could go hand in hand with ensuring a more sustainable and equitable society, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said on Monday.

The Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C was approved by the IPCC on Saturday in Incheon, Republic of Korea. It will be a key scientific input into the Katowice Climate Change Conference in Poland in December, when governments review the Paris Agreement to tackle climate change.

"With more than 6,000 scientific references cited and the dedicated contribution of thousands of expert and government reviewers worldwide, this important report testifies to the breadth and policy relevance of the IPCC," said Hoesung Lee, Chair of the IPCC.

Ninety-one authors and review editors from 40 countries prepared the IPCC report in response to an invitation from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) when it adopted the Paris Agreement in 2015.

The report's full name is Global Warming of 1.5°C, an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.

"One of the key messages that comes out very strongly from this report is that we are already seeing the consequences of 1°C of global warming through more extreme weather, rising sea levels and diminishing Arctic sea ice, among other changes," said Panmao Zhai, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group I.

The report highlights a number of climate change impacts that could be avoided by limiting global warming to 1.5°C compared to 2°C, or more. For instance, by 2100, global sea level rise would be 10 cm lower with global warming of 1.5°C compared with 2°C. The likelihood of an Arctic Ocean free of sea ice in summer would be once per century with global warming of 1.5°C, compared with at least once per decade with 2°C. Coral reefs would decline by 70-90 percent with global warming of 1.5°C, whereas virtually all (> 99 percent) would be lost with 2°C.

"Every extra bit of warming matters, especially since warming of 1.5°C or higher increases the risk associated with long-lasting or irreversible changes, such as the loss of some ecosystems," said Hans-Otto Pörtner, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group II.

Limiting global warming would also give people and ecosystems more room to adapt and remain below relevant risk thresholds, added Pörtner. The report also examines pathways available to limit warming to 1.5°C, what it would take to achieve them and what the consequences could be. "The good news is that some of the kinds of actions that would be needed to limit global warming to 1.5°C are already underway around the world, but they would need to accelerate," said Valerie Masson-Delmotte, Co-Chair of Working Group I.

The report finds that limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require "rapid and far-reaching" transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities. Global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO ₂) would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching 'net zero' around 2050. This means that any remaining emissions would need to be balanced by removing CO ₂ from the air.

"Limiting warming to 1.5°C is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics but doing so would require unprecedented changes," said Jim Skea, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group III.

Allowing the global temperature to temporarily exceed or 'overshoot' 1.5°C would mean a greater reliance on techniques that remove CO ₂ from the air to return global temperature to below 1.5°C by 2100. The effectiveness of such techniques are unproven at large scale and some may carry significant risks for sustainable development, the report notes.

"Limiting global warming to 1.5°C compared with 2°C would reduce challenging impacts on ecosystems, human health and well-being, making it easier to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals," said Priyardarshi Shukla, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group III.

The decisions we make today are critical in ensuring a safe and sustainable world for everyone, both now and in the future, said Debra Roberts, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group II.

"This report gives policymakers and practitioners the information they need to make decisions that tackle climate change while considering local context and people's needs. The next few years are probably the most important in our history," she said.

The IPCC is the leading world body for assessing the science related to climate change, its impacts and potential future risks, and possible response options.

The report was prepared under the scientific leadership of all three IPCC working groups. Working Group I assesses the physical science basis of climate change; Working Group II addresses impacts, adaptation and vulnerability; and Working Group III deals with the mitigation of climate change.

The Paris Agreement adopted by 195 nations at the 21st Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC in December 2015 included the aim of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change by "holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels."

As part of the decision to adopt the Paris Agreement, the IPCC was invited to produce, in 2018, a Special Report on global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways. The IPCC accepted the invitation, adding that the Special Report would look at these issues in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.

Global Warming of 1.5°C is the first in a series of Special Reports to be produced in the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Cycle. Next year the IPCC will release the Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, and Climate Change and Land, which looks at how climate change affects land use.

The Summary for Policymakers (SPM) presents the key findings of the Special Report, based on the assessment of the available scientific, technical and socio-economic literature relevant to global warming of 1.5°C.

The Summary for Policymakers of the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR15) is available at https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15 or www.ipcc.ch.

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global warming; climate; environmental issues; environmental policy; environmental awareness; geography; earth science; sustainability

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Rapid response needed to limit global warming: Summary for Policymakers of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C approved by governments

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Limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society, the IPCC said in a new assessment. With clear benefits to people and natural ecosystems, limiting global warming to 1.5°C compared to 2°C could go hand in hand with ensuring a more sustainable and equitable society, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said on Monday.

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2017 was a year of discovery: NASA started using reusable rockets, patients started treating cancer using only their own cells, and scientists discovered the Earth's lost eighth continent.

Here are some of the wildest, coolest, most promising science finds of the year.

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The wildest scientific discoveries of 2017

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2017 was a year of discovery: NASA started using reusable rockets, patients started treating cancer using only their own cells, and scientists discovered the Earth's lost eighth continent. Here are some of the wildest, coolest, most promising science finds of the year.

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The timeline of our observable Universe's history, where the observable portion expands to larger and larger sizes as we move forward in time away from the Big Bang.NASA / WMAP SCIENCE TEAM

1940s — While the vast majority of experimental and observational resources went into spy satellites, rocketry and the development of nuclear technology, theoretical physicists were still hard at work. In 1945, George Gamow made the ultimate extrapolation of the expanding Universe: if the Universe is expanding and cooling today, then it must have been hotter and denser in the past. Going backwards, there must have been a time where it was so hot and dense that neutral atoms couldn’t form, and before that where atomic nuclei couldn’t form. If this were true, then before any stars ever formed, that material the Universe began with should have a specific ratio of the lightest elements, and there ought to be a leftover glow permeating all directions in the Universe just a few degrees above absolute zero today. This framework is today known as the Big Bang, and was the greatest idea to come out of the 1940s.

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A tiny neuro-controller created by researchers at the University of Connecticut could provide more precise control of futuristic biobots, such as cyborg cockroaches that are already being tested for use in search and rescue missions inside collapsed buildings.

Scientists have spent the better part of the past decade exploring ways to tether live insects to miniaturized computer hardware so they can manipulate an insect's movement. Such possibilities are of interest to the U.S. Department of Defense, search and rescue teams, and others.

Success has been limited and numerous technological challenges continue to exist. This is mainly due to the tremendous difficulty building robotic systems at such small scale and the challenge interfacing electronic hardware with the insect's biological nerve tissue to initiate movement.

The neuro-controller micocircuit developed at UConn is part of a tiny electronic 'backpack' that can be attached to the insect with its wires connected to the insect's antennae lobes. By sending slight electrical charges to neural tissue in either the insect's left or right antenna lobe, operators can trick the insect into thinking it has detected an obstacle, causing it to move in another direction. A charge sent to the right antenna makes a cockroach move left. Likewise, a charge to the left antenna makes it move right.

While similar control systems for insects already exist, what makes UConn's controller unique is the degree to which operators can stimulate an insect's antennae lobes using four-channel microcircuitry. The system also provides real-time feedback of the insect's neural-muscular response to stimuli. That level of detail makes it easier to monitor and control movement, a long sought-after advantage in the micro robotic insect community.

"The use of insects as platforms for small robots has an incredible number of useful applications from search and rescue to national defense," says Abhishek Dutta, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at UConn, who developed the circuit along with an undergraduate researcher in his lab, Evan Faulkner. "We believe our microcircuit provides a more sophisticated and reliable control system that brings us one step closer to real world implementation of this technology."

The controller's value comes in the form of an advanced 9-axis inertial measurement unit inside the UConn device that tracks an insect's linear and rotational acceleration, identifies its compass heading, and detects the ambient temperature surrounding the creature. The latter feature is important, the scientists say, because tests have shown that ambient temperature can have an impact on how some insect hosts perform.

The information gathered by the microcircuit is transmitted to the operator via a tiny Bluetooth antenna on the device. The signal can be easily detected by an ordinary cellphone. As the insect's heading, acceleration, and other data comes in, operators can extrapolate the insect's trajectory, adjust the antennae stimuli accordingly, send the appropriate electrical impulses to the insect remotely, and steer it in a desired direction.

To test the new controller, Dutta, an expert in control system optimization and cyber-physical systems, attached the device to a Madagascar hissing cockroach in his lab. The tests showed the cockroach moving left when its right antenna lobe was stimulated and moving right when the left one received a small electrical charge.

One interesting tidbit the researchers noticed was that the intensity of the roach's movements left or right in response to artificial stimulation decreased after the initial stimulus. So if the roach made a hard left after the first electronic pulse hit its right antenna lobe, its left turn was less dramatic with each subsequent pulse to that lobe.

Dutta and Faulkner plan to conduct additional research to refine the system.

The research is being presented at the Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience in Philadelphia on Sept. 6, 2018.

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insects (including butterflies); animals; pests and parasites; technology; energy technology; engineering; artificial intelligence; neural interfaces; computers and internet

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A cyborg cockroach could someday save your life: Scientists' neuro-controller could improve performance of micro biobots

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A tiny neuro-controller created by researchers at the University of Connecticut could provide more precise control of futuristic biobots, such as cyborg cockroaches that are already being tested for use in search and rescue missions inside collapsed buildings.

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The amount of plastic washing up onto the shores of remote South Atlantic islands is 10 times greater than it was a decade ago, according to new research published today (8 October) in the journal Current Biology.

Scientists investigating plastics in seas surrounding the remote British Overseas Territories discovered they are invading these unique biologically-rich regions. This includes areas that are established or proposed Marine Protected Areas (MPAs).

The study shows for the first time that plastic pollution on some remote South Atlantic beaches is approaching levels seen in industrialised North Atlantic coasts.

During four research cruises on the BAS research ship RRS James Clark Ross between 2013 and 2018, a team of researchers from ten organisations sampled the water surface, water column and seabed, surveyed beaches and examined over 2000 animals across 26 different species.

The amount of plastic reaching these remote regions has increased at all levels, from the shore to the seafloor. More than 90% of beached debris was plastic, and the volume of this debris is the highest recorded in the last decade.

Lead author Dr David Barnes from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) explains:

"Three decades ago these islands, which are some of the most remote on the planet, were near-pristine. Plastic waste has increased a hundred-fold in that time, it is now so common it reaches the seabed. We found it in plankton, throughout the food chain and up to top predators such as seabirds."

The largest concentration of plastic was found on the beaches. In 2018 we recorded up to 300 items per metre of shoreline on the East Falkland and St Helena -- this is ten times higher than recorded a decade ago. Understanding the scale of the problem is the first step towards helping business, industry and society tackle this global environmental issue."

Plastic causes many problems including entanglement, poisoning and starving through ingestion. The arrival of non-indigenous species on floating plastic "rafts" has also been identified as a problem for these remote islands. This study highlights that the impacts of plastic pollution are not only affecting industrialised regions but also remote biodiverse areas, which are established or proposed MPAs.

Andy Schofield, biologist, from the RSPB, who was involved in this research says:

"These islands and the ocean around them are sentinels of our planet's health. It is heart-breaking watching Albatrosses trying to eat plastic thousands of miles from anywhere. This is a very big wake up call. Inaction threatens not just endangered birds and whale sharks, but the ecosystems many islanders rely on for food supply and health."

Journal Reference:

D.K.A. Barnes, S.A. Morley, J. Bell, P. Brewin, K. Brigden, M. Collins, T. Glass, W.P. Goodall-Copestake, L. Henry, V. Laptikhovsky, N. Piechaud, A. Richardson, P. Rose, C.J. Sands, A. Schofield, R. Shreeve, A. Small, T. Stamford, B. Taylor. Marine plastics threaten giant Atlantic Marine Protected Areas. Current Biology, 2018; 28 (19): R1137 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2018.08.064

Cite This Page:

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new species; nature; marine biology; soil types; recycling and waste; geography; environmental issues; environmental awareness

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Increase in plastics waste reaching remote South Atlantic islands

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The amount of plastic washing up onto the shores of remote South Atlantic islands is 10 times greater than it was a decade ago, according to new research. Scientists investigating plastics in seas surrounding the remote British Overseas Territories discovered they are invading these unique biologically-rich regions.

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General relativity is physicist Albert Einstein's understanding of how gravity affects the fabric of space-time.

The theory, which Einstein published in 1915, expanded the theory of special relativity that he had published 10 years earlier. Special relativity argued that space and are inextricably connected, but that theory didn't acknowledge the existence of .

Einstein spent the decade between the two publications determining that particularly massive objects warp the fabric of , a distortion that manifests as gravity, according to NASA.

Related: The hunt for wormholes: How scientists look for space-time tunnels

How does general relativity work?

To understand general relativity, first, let's start with gravity, the force of attraction that two objects exert on one another. Sir Isaac Newton quantified gravity in the same text in which he formulated his three laws of motion, the " Principia."

The gravitational force tugging between two bodies depends on how massive each one is and how far apart the two lie, according to NASA Glenn Research Center. Even as the center of the is pulling you toward it (keeping you firmly lodged on the ground), your center of mass is pulling back at the Earth. But the more massive body barely feels the tug from you, while with your much smaller mass, you find yourself firmly rooted thanks to that same force. Yet Newton's laws assume that gravity is an innate force of an object that can act over a distance.

Albert Einstein, in his theory of special relativity, determined that the laws of physics are the same for all non-accelerating observers, and he showed that the speed of light within a vacuum is the same no matter the speed at which an observer travels, according to Wired.

As a result, he found that space and time were interwoven into a single continuum known as space-time. And events that occur at the same time for one observer could occur at different times for another.

Related: What would happen if the speed of light was much lower?

As he worked out the equations for his general theory of relativity, Einstein realized that massive objects caused a distortion in space-time. Imagine setting a large object in the center of a trampoline. The object would press down into the fabric, causing it to dimple. If you then attempt to roll a marble around the edge of the trampoline, the marble would spiral inward toward the body, pulled in much the same way that the gravity of a planet pulls at rocks in space.

In the decades since Einstein published his theories, scientists have observed countless of phenomena matching the predictions of relativity.

General relativity FAQs answered by an expert

We asked Elena Giorgi, an assistant professor of mathematics at Columbia University a few commonly asked questions about general relativity.

Image credit: ​April Renae, Columbia University.

Assistant Professor

What is general relativity?

What force is explained by general relativity?

When was the theory of general relativity established?

Is general relativity proven?
Related: What Is Quantum Gravity?

(Image credit: NASA and European Space Agency (ESA))

Gravitational lensing

Light bends around a massive object, such as a black hole, causing it to act as a lens for the things that lie behind it. Astronomers routinely use this method to study stars and galaxies behind massive objects.

The Einstein Cross, a in the Pegasus constellation, according to the European Space Agency (ESA), and is an excellent example of gravitational lensing. The quasar is seen as it was about 11 billion years ago; the that it sits behind is about 10 times closer to Earth. Because the two objects align so precisely, four images of the quasar appear around the galaxy because the intense gravity of the galaxy bends the light coming from the quasar.

In cases like Einstein's cross, the different images of the gravitationally lensed object appear simultaneously, but that isn't always the case. Scientists have also managed to observe lensing examples where, because the light traveling around the lens takes different paths of different lengths, different images arrive at different times, as in the case of one particularly interesting .

Changes in Mercury's orbit

The orbit of is shifting very gradually over time due to the curvature of space-time around the massive sun, according to NASA.

As the closest planet to the sun, Mercury's perihelion (the point along its orbit that it's closest to the sun) is predicted to follow a slightly different direction over time. Under Newton's predictions, gravitational forces in the solar system should advance Mercury's precession ( change in its orbital orientation) is measured to be 5,600 arcseconds per century (1 arcsecond is equal to 1/3600 of a degree). However, there is a discrepancy of 43 arcseconds per century, something Einstein's theory of general relativity accounts for. Using Einstein's theory of curved space-time, the precession of Mercury's perihelion should advance slightly more than under the predictions of Newton, since planets don't orbit the sun in a static elliptical orbit.

Sure enough, several research papers published since the mid 20th century have confirmed Einstein's calculations of Mercury's perihelion precession to be accurate.

In a few billion years, this wobble could even cause the innermost planet to collide with the sun or a planet.

Frame-dragging of space-time around rotating bodies

The spin of a heavy object, such as Earth, should twist and distort the space-time around it. In 2004, NASA launched the Gravity Probe B (GP-B). The axes of the satellite's precisely calibrated gyroscopes drifted very slightly over time, according to NASA, a result that matched Einstein's theory.

"Imagine the Earth as if it were immersed in honey," Gravity Probe-B principal investigator Francis Everitt, of Stanford University, said in a NASA statement about the mission.

"As the planet rotates, the honey around it would swirl, and it's the same with space and time. GP-B confirmed two of the most profound predictions of Einstein's universe, having far-reaching implications across astrophysics research."

Gravitational redshift

The electromagnetic radiation of an object is stretched out slightly inside a gravitational field. Think of the sound waves that emanate from a siren on an emergency vehicle; as the vehicle moves toward an observer, sound waves are compressed, but as it moves away, they are stretched out, or redshifted. Known as the Doppler Effect, the same phenomena occurs with waves of light at all frequencies.

In the 1960s, according to the American Physical Society, physicists Robert Pound and Glen Rebka shot gamma-rays first down, then up the side of a tower at Harvard University. Pound and Rebka found that the gamma-rays slightly changed frequency due to distortions caused by gravity.

Gravitational waves

Einstein predicted that violent events, such as the collision of two black holes, create ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves. And in 2016, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory ( LIGO) announced that it had detected such a signal for the first time.

That detection came on Sept. 14, 2015. LIGO, made up of twin facilities in Louisiana and Washington, had recently been upgraded, and were in the process of being calibrated before they went online. The first detection was so large that, according to then-LIGO spokesperson Gabriela Gonzalez, it took the team several months of analysis to convince themselves that it was a real signal and not a glitch.

Related: Phantom energy and dark gravity: Explaining the dark side of the universe

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

"We were very lucky on the first detection that it was so obvious," she said during the 228 American Astronomical Society meeting in June 2016.

Since then, scientists have begun quickly catching gravitational waves. All told LIGO and its European counterpart Virgo have detected a total of 50 gravitational-wave events, according to program officials, according to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory.

Those collisions have included unusual events like a collision with an object that scientists can't definitively identify as a black hole or neutron star, merging neutron stars accompanied by a bright explosion, mismatched black holes colliding and more.

Observing neutron stars

In 2021 research published in the journal Physical Review X, challenged several of Einstein's predictions by observing a double-pulsar system around 2,400 light-years from Earth. Each of the seven predictions of general relativity was confirmed by the study.

Pulsars are a type of neutron star that appears to pulse due to beams of electromagnetic radiation and that are emitting from their magnetic poles.

The pulsar test subjects spin very fast - around 44 times a second - and are 30% more massive than the sun but are only 15 miles (around 24 kilometers) in diameter, making them incredibly dense. This means that their gravitational pull is immense, for example, on the surface of a neutron star gravity is around 1 billion times stronger than its pull on Earth. This makes neutron stars a great test subject to challenge predictions in Einstein's theories, such as the ability of gravity to bend light.

"We follow the propagation of radio photons emitted from a cosmic lighthouse, a pulsar, and track their movements in the strong gravitational field of a companion pulsar," Professor Ingrid Stairs from the University of British Columbia at Vancouver said in a statement.

"We see for the first time how the light is not only delayed due to a strong curvature of spacetime around the companion but also that the light is deflected by a small angle of 0.04 degrees that we can detect. Never before has such an experiment been conducted at such a high spacetime curvature" Stairs adds.

Additional resources

Read more about general relativity in the book Relativity: The Special and the General Theory - 100th Anniversary Edition. Explore the Nature of Space and Time (Isaac Newton Institute Series of Lectures, 3) and The Physics Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained.

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Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity is based on the idea that massive objects cause a distortion in space-time, which is felt as gravity

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How Did the Black Plague Start?

Even before the "death ships" pulled into port at Messina, many Europeans had heard rumors about a "Great Pestilence" that was carving a deadly path across the trade routes of the Near and Far East. Indeed, in the early 1340s, the disease had struck China, India, Persia, Syria and Egypt.

The plague is thought to have originated in Asia over 2,000 years ago and was likely spread by trading ships, though recent research has indicated the pathogen responsible for the Black Death may have existed in Europe as early as 3000 B.C.

Symptoms of the Black Plague

Europeans were scarcely equipped for the horrible reality of the Black Death. "In men and women alike," the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio wrote, "at the beginning of the malady, certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits...waxed to the bigness of a common apple, others to the size of an egg, some more and some less, and these the vulgar named plague-boils."

Blood and pus seeped out of these strange swellings, which were followed by a host of other unpleasant symptoms-fever, chills, vomiting, diarrhea, terrible aches and pains-and then, in short order, death.

The Bubonic Plague attacks the lymphatic system, causing swelling in the lymph nodes. If untreated, the infection can spread to the blood or lungs.

How Did the Black Death Spread?

The Black Death was terrifyingly, indiscriminately contagious: "the mere touching of the clothes," wrote Boccaccio, "appeared to itself to communicate the malady to the toucher." The disease was also terrifyingly efficient. People who were perfectly healthy when they went to bed at night could be dead by morning.

Did you know? Many scholars think that the nursery rhyme "Ring around the Rosy" was written about the symptoms of the Black Death.

Understanding the Black Death

Today, scientists understand that the Black Death, now known as the plague, is spread by a bacillus called Yersinia pestis. (The French biologist Alexandre Yersin discovered this germ at the end of the 19th century.)

They know that the bacillus travels from person to person through the air, as well as through the bite of infected fleas and rats. Both of these pests could be found almost everywhere in medieval Europe, but they were particularly at home aboard ships of all kinds-which is how the deadly plague made its way through one European port city after another.

Not long after it struck Messina, the Black Death spread to the port of Marseilles in France and the port of Tunis in North Africa. Then it reached Rome and Florence, two cities at the center of an elaborate web of trade routes. By the middle of 1348, the Black Death had struck Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon and London.

Today, this grim sequence of events is terrifying but comprehensible. In the middle of the 14th century, however, there seemed to be no rational explanation for it.

No one knew exactly how the Black Death was transmitted from one patient to another, and no one knew how to prevent or treat it. According to one doctor, for example, "instantaneous death occurs when the aerial spirit escaping from the eyes of the sick man strikes the healthy person standing near and looking at the sick."

How Do You Treat the Black Death?

Physicians relied on crude and unsophisticated techniques such as bloodletting and boil-lancing (practices that were dangerous as well as unsanitary) and superstitious practices such as burning aromatic herbs and bathing in rosewater or vinegar.

Meanwhile, in a panic, healthy people did all they could to avoid the sick. Doctors refused to see patients; priests refused to administer last rites; and shopkeepers closed their stores. Many people fled the cities for the countryside, but even there they could not escape the disease: It affected cows, sheep, goats, pigs and chickens as well as people.

In fact, so many sheep died that one of the consequences of the Black Death was a European wool shortage. And many people, desperate to save themselves, even abandoned their sick and dying loved ones. "Thus doing," Boccaccio wrote, "each thought to secure immunity for himself."

Black Plague: God's Punishment?

Because they did not understand the biology of the disease, many people believed that the Black Death was a kind of divine punishment-retribution for sins against God such as greed, blasphemy, heresy, fornication and worldliness.

By this logic, the only way to overcome the plague was to win God's forgiveness. Some people believed that the way to do this was to purge their communities of heretics and other troublemakers-so, for example, many thousands of Jews were massacred in 1348 and 1349. (Thousands more fled to the sparsely populated regions of Eastern Europe, where they could be relatively safe from the rampaging mobs in the cities.)

Some people coped with the terror and uncertainty of the Black Death epidemic by lashing out at their neighbors; others coped by turning inward and fretting about the condition of their own souls.

Flagellants

Some upper-class men joined processions of flagellants that traveled from town to town and engaged in public displays of penance and punishment: They would beat themselves and one another with heavy leather straps studded with sharp pieces of metal while the townspeople looked on. For 33 1/2 days, the flagellants repeated this ritual three times a day. Then they would move on to the next town and begin the process over again.

Though the flagellant movement did provide some comfort to people who felt powerless in the face of inexplicable tragedy, it soon began to worry the Pope, whose authority the flagellants had begun to usurp. In the face of this papal resistance, the movement disintegrated.

How Did the Black Death End?

The plague never really ended and it returned with a vengeance years later. But officials in the port city of Ragusa were able to slow its spread by keeping arriving sailors in isolation until it was clear they were not carrying the disease-creating social distancing that relied on isolation to slow the spread of the disease.

The sailors were initially held on their ships for 30 days (a trentino), a period that was later increased to 40 days, or a quarantine- the origin of the term "quarantine" and a practice still used today.

Does the Black Plague Still Exist?

The Black Death epidemic had run its course by the early 1350s, but the plague reappeared every few generations for centuries. Modern sanitation and public-health practices have greatly mitigated the impact of the disease but have not eliminated it. While antibiotics are available to treat the Black Death, according to The World Health Organization, there are still 1,000 to 3,000 cases of plague every year.
Gallery: Pandemics That Changed History

Fact Check

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The Black Death was a devastating global epidemic of bubonic plague that struck Europe and Asia in the mid-1300s. Explore the facts of the plague, the symptoms it caused and how millions died from it.

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2002 News Releases - Astronomers Discover 11 More Small Moons of Jupiter

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The new discoveries bring the known total of Jovian satellites to 39, of which 31 are irregulars. The eight regular satellites include four large moons discovered by the astronomer Galileo Galilei and four smaller moons on circular orbits closer to Jupiter.

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from research organizations
Credit: ©2018 Yuki Okoda, Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo
Early in 2017, Assistant Professor Yoko Oya gave graduate student Yuki Okoda some recent complex data on a nearby star with which she could begin her Ph.D. Little did she realize that what she would find could unlock not only the secrets of how planets form but possibly her career as a professional astronomer.

The star in question (only known by its catalog number IRAS 15398-3359) is small, young and relatively cool for a star. It's diminutive stature means the weak light it shines can't even reach us through a cloud of gas and dust that surrounds it. But this doesn't stop inquisitive minds from exploring the unknown.

In 2013, Oya and her collaborators used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile to observe the star in submillimeter wavelengths, as that kind of light can penetrate the dust cloud -- for reference, red light is around 700 nanometers. A painstaking analysis revealed some interesting nebulous structures, despite the images they worked from being difficult to comprehend.

"The greatest academic challenge I've faced was trying to make sense of grainy images. It's extremely difficult to know exactly what you're really looking at." says Okoda. "But I felt compelled to explore the nature of the structures Dr. Oya had seen with ALMA, so I came up with a model to explain them." The model she produced came as a surprise to Okoda and her colleagues, but it fit the data perfectly. It describes a dense disk of material that consists of gas and dust from the cloud that surrounds the star. This has never before been seen around such a young star.

The disk is a precursor to a protoplanetary disk, which is far denser still and eventually becomes a planetary system in orbit around a star.

"We can't say for sure this particular disk will coalesce into a new planetary system," explains Oya. "The dust cloud may be pushed away by stellar winds or it might all fall into the star itself, feeding it in the process. What's exciting is how quickly this might happen."

The star is small at around 0.7 percent the mass of our sun, based on observations of the mass of the surrounding cloud. It could grow to as large as 20 percent in just a few tens of thousands of years, a blink of the eye on the cosmic scale.

"I hope our observations and models will enhance knowledge of how solar systems form," says Okoda. "My research interests involve young protostellar objects, and the implication that protoplanetary disks could form earlier than expected really excites me."

Okoda began this project a year-and-a-half ago to hone her skills as an astronomer, but mirroring the young star she observed, the practice evolved quickly and became a full research project, which will hopefully earn her a Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo.

The observations and resultant model were only possible thanks to advancements in radio astronomy with observatories such as ALMA. The team was lucky that the plane of the disk is level with our own solar system as this means the starlight ALMA sees passes through enough of the gas and dust to divulge important characteristics of it.

"We were also lucky to be given time with ALMA to carry out our observations. Only about 20 percent of applications actually go ahead," explains Oya. "With highly specialized astronomical instruments, there is much competition for time. My hope is our success will inspire a new generation of astronomers in Japan to reach for the stars."
Story Source:
Materials provided by University of Tokyo. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

Yuki Okoda, Yoko Oya, Nami Sakai, Yoshimasa Watanabe, Jes K. Jørgensen, Ewine F. Van Dishoeck, and Satoshi Yamamoto. The Co-evolution of Disks and Stars in Embedded Stages: The Case of the Very-low-mass Protostar IRAS 15398-3359. Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2018 DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/aad8ba

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stars; extrasolar planets; astronomy; nebulae; galaxies; black holes; solar flare; sun

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Little star sheds light on young planets: Astronomers discover new stage in evolution of young solar systems

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Astronomers discovered a dense disk of material around a young star, which may be a precursor to a planetary system. Their research could vastly improve models of how solar systems form, which would tell us more about our own place in the cosmos.

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UCLA researchers have discovered a common process in the development of late-stage, small cell cancers of the prostate and lung. These shared molecular mechanisms could lead to the development of drugs to treat not just prostate and lung cancers, but small cell cancers of almost any organ.

The key finding: Prostate and lung cells have very different patterns of gene expression when they're healthy, but almost identical patterns when they transform into small cell cancers. The research suggests that different types of small cell tumors evolve similarly, even when they come from different organs.

The study, led by Dr. Owen Witte, founding director of the UCLA Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research and professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics, was published in the journal Science. Witte collaborated with scientists from UCLA's Crump Institute for Molecular Imaging and the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Cancers that become resistant to treatment often develop into small cell cancers -- also known as small cell neuroendocrine carcinomas, or SCNCs -- which generally have extremely poor prognoses. Certain cancers can evade treatment in part by changing cell types -- from aggressive adenocarcinoma to small cell carcinoma, for example.

Previous research hinted that small cell cancers from different organs may be driven by common mechanisms, but the UCLA study is the first to so clearly describe the steps in their evolution.

"Small cell cancers of the lung, prostate, bladder, and other tissues were long thought to be similar in name alone -- and they were treated by oncologists as different entities," Witte said. "Over the past few years, though, researchers have increasingly begun to realize that there are similarities in the cancers, and that's what our work confirms."

Dr. Jung Wook Park, the study's first author, and UCLA collaborators explored the potential parallels between the cancer types by transplanting human prostate cells with five genes, known collectively as PARCB, into mice. When those cells grew in the mice, they displayed unique features of human small cell neuroendocrine carcinomas.

The team also identified that for small cell neuroendocrine carcinomas to develop in the prostate, two tumor suppressor genes, TP53 and RB1, which are known for protecting normal cells from transforming into cancer cells, had to be simultaneously inactivated when PARCB was introduced.

Additional tests confirmed striking similarities between the PARCB-SCNC cells and small cell prostate cancer cells from humans. In particular, RNA expression and the turning on and off of certain genes were nearly identical.

"The similarities between the PARCB-SCNC cancers and human small cell prostate cancer samples were extraordinary," Witte said. "If you blindly gave the data sets to any statistician, they would think they were the same cells."

The team also looked at large databases of gene expression, to compare the patterns of gene expression in their PARCB-SCNC cells to cancers of other organs. They found that the pattern of gene expression in PARCB-SCNC cells was extremely similar to those of both prostate and lung small cell cancers.

Next, they tested whether PARCB genes could alter healthy cells from human lungs into small cell lung cancers, and the scientists found that they could.

The team now is working on mapping which genes control the entire cascade of events that underlies the transition to small cell cancer.

"Our study revealed shared 'master gene regulators' -- the key proteins that control expression of multiple genes in small cell cancer cells," Witte said. "Studying the network of the master gene regulators could lead to a new way of combating deadly cancers."

The research was supported by the Broad Stem Cell Research Center Stem Cell Training Program and Hal Gaba Fund for Prostate Cancer Research, the UCLA Medical Scientist Training Program, the UCLA Specialized Program of Research Excellence in Prostate Cancer, the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute, the Prostate Cancer Foundation, the Department of Defense, the American Cancer Society and the W.M. Keck Foundation.

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lung cancer; prostate cancer; brain tumor; lymphoma; cancer; men's health; lung disease; stem cells

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Aggressive prostate and lung cancers are driven by common mechanisms, researchers find

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Researchers have discovered a common process in the development of late-stage, small cell cancers of the prostate and lung. These shared molecular mechanisms could lead to the development of drugs to treat not just prostate and lung cancers, but small cell cancers of almost any organ.

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British scientists are playing a key role in the drive to make electronic gadgets smaller, smarter and even more powerful. Researchers from five universities are designing a new generation of 'nano-electronic' circuits (chips) that will power the computers and mobile phones of the future. The circuits may also make possible entirely new forms of electronic device that could benefit a range of sectors, including entertainment, communications and medicine.

The quest for new circuits has been prompted by the relentless advance of technology, which is now proving to be a real headache for the microelectronics industry. The microscopic transistors which are the cogs and wheels of all electronic devices are becoming even smaller and designers must now devise electronic circuits that are compatible with them.

Teams at the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Southampton and York are striving to create nanoscale circuits, using transistors that are 80,000 times smaller than a hair's breadth. Because the circuits in today's ipods and PCs will not work with nano-transistors, this research - which is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council - is vital to prevent the industry from grinding to a halt.

In the next decade, transistors will not only be ten times smaller - they will also behave very differently. Two of todays transistors, identical in shape and size, will behave in more or less the same way. That, however, will not be the case at nanoscale.

The next generation of transistors will, in the jargon of chip design, be 'unmatched'- despite being apparently identical. They will also be extremely 'noisy', adding a strong random signal of their own (known as device noise) to whatever signal they are dealing with.

"The circuits we currently use cannot cope with this form of mismatch and randomness," says Professor Alan Murray, of the University of Edinburgh. "They will require at least re-design - possibly even complete replacement - with circuits that have not yet been invented. We can't wait for silicon technology to create viable, production-line nanoscale transistors. It will then be too late to start looking for ways to use them. We must start now."

This new project will allow circuits to be designed that can cope with, or even make use of, the unavoidable bad behaviour of nanoscale transistors. It will use e-Science - which draws on shared data and massive computing power - to bring together computer simulations of transistors that do not yet exist and simulations of circuits that use them.

Principal investigator, Professor Asen Asenov, of the University of Glasgow, is looking forward to the challenge: "This project brings together leading semiconductor device, circuit and system experts from academia and industry and e-scientists with strong Grid expertise. Only by working in close collaboration, and adequately connected and resourced by e-Science and Grid technology, can we understand and tackle the design complexity of nano-CMOS electronics, securing a competitive advantage for the UK electronics industry."

Professor Richard Sinnott, of the National e-Science Centre at the University of Glasgow, who will lead the e-Science development activity, is also eagerly anticipating the project: "Through close collaboration with our partners, we expect to revolutionise the way in which the disparate teams involved in electronics design process work. Our Grid efforts will be on four key areas: workflows, security, data management and resource management, each targeted to the real needs of the scientists we are to support."

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technology; electronics; nanotechnology; telecommunications; computer science; computers and internet; information technology; mobile computing

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Nano-Chips To Power Computers, Phones Of The Future

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British scientists are playing a key role in the drive to make electronic gadgets smaller, smarter and even more powerful. Researchers from five universities are designing a new generation of â€˜nano-electronicâ€™ circuits (chips) that will power the computers and mobile phones of the future.

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Gene Barrier In Corn May Boost Trade, Environment

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MADISON -- Working with teosinte, a wild cousin of maize, a University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist has found a molecular barrier that, bred into modern hybrid corn, is capable of completely locking out foreign genes, including those from genetically modified corn.

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from research organizations
Credit: Nicole Valenzuela
A discovery by scientists at the University of Kent has provided significant insight into the overall genome structure of dinosaurs.

By comparing the genomes of different species, chiefly birds and turtles, the Kent team were able to determine how the overall genome structure (i.e. the chromosomes) of many people's favourite dinosaur species -- like Velociraptor or Tyrannosaurus -- might have looked through a microscope.

The research was carried out in the laboratory of Professor Darren Griffin, of the University's School of Biosciences, and is now published in the journal Nature Communications. It involved extrapolating the likely genome structure of a shared common ancestor of birds and turtles that lived around 260 million years ago -- 20 million years before the dinosaurs first emerged.

Dr Becky O'Connor, senior postdoctoral researcher and co-author of the Nature Communications paper, then traced how chromosomes changed over evolutionary time from a reptile ancestor to the present day.

The team found that, although the individual chromosomes rearranged their genes internally, this did not occur much at all between the chromosomes -- what the scientists describe as 'a significant discovery'.

Birds (which are themselves living dinosaurs) have a lot of chromosomes compared to most other species and that is possibly one of the reasons why they are so diverse. This research suggests that the pattern of chromosomes (karyotype) seen in early emerging dinosaurs and later theropods is similar to that of most birds and, again, may help explain their great diversity.

The new discovery suggests that, had scientists had the opportunity to make a chromosome preparation from a theropod dinosaur, it might have looked very similar to that of a modern-day ostrich, duck or chicken.

One of the key pieces of biotechnology that made it possible was the development of a set of fluorescent probes derived from birds that worked well on the chromosomes of turtles.

The genetics laboratory run by Professor Darren Griffin in Kent's School of Biosciences carries out research into how genes organise into chromosomes and how that is different between species. The work is a collaboration with Dr Denis Larkin at the Royal Veterinary College in London, Iowa State University, the University of Cambridge, Oxford Genome Technologies and the Natural History Museum, London. The work is a collaboration with Dr Denis Larkin at the Royal Veterinary College in London, Iowa State University, the University of Cambridge, the Cambridge company Cytocell and the Natural History Museum, London.

Journal Reference:

Rebecca E. O'Connor, Michael N. Romanov, Lucas G. Kiazim, Paul M. Barrett, Marta Farré, Joana Damas, Malcolm Ferguson-Smith, Nicole Valenzuela, Denis M. Larkin, Darren K. Griffin. Reconstruction of the diapsid ancestral genome permits chromosome evolution tracing in avian and non-avian dinosaurs. Nature Communications, 2018; 9 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-04267-9

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biology; genetics; nature; birds; dinosaurs; early birds; evolution; ancient dna

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Genome structure of dinosaurs discovered by bird-turtle comparisons

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A discovery has provided significant insight into the overall genome structure of dinosaurs. By comparing the genomes of different species, chiefly birds and turtles, a research team was able to determine how the overall genome structure (i.e. the chromosomes) of many dinosaur species might have looked through a microscope.

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NEWPORT, Ore. - Scientists have identified a prolific parasite thatpreys on mud shrimp - a native species of West Coast estuaries - andthreatens to decimate mud shrimp populations, raising concern for thefragile, complex ecosystems of these coastal inlets.

This bopyrid isopod, known as Orthione griffenis (or Griffen'sisopod) is a form of aquatic crustacean that enters the shrimp gillchamber under the carapace. It destroys the shrimp's ability toreproduce by sucking their blood or nutrients. Oregon StateUniversity's John Chapman, an invasive species expert, thinks theparasite is a non-native species, probably introduced to West Coastwaters through ballast water released from ships.

"If we're right," Chapman said, "this may be the most significantballast water introduction of a non-native species yet discovered onthe West Coast."

The zebra mussel, the most well-known invasive aquatic species inthe United States, has thus far been restricted to the East Coast andGreat Lakes, where it has caused millions of dollars in damages todams, ships and structures.

A professor of fisheries and wildlife at OSU, Chapman heads theBiological Invasions Program at the university's Hatfield MarineScience Center in Newport. He and his colleagues already have found theparasite in Yaquina Bay, Alsea Bay, Siletz Bay and Tillamook Bay inOregon, as well as in Willapa Bay in Washington. There also are reportsof the isopod as far south as Santa Barbara, Calif., and as far northas British Columbia, he added.

Chapman says the parasite's impact on mud shrimp populations isdifficult to estimate. In 1999 and 2001, Ted DeWitt, an HMSC ecologistwith the Environmental Protection Agency, conducted mud shrimp surveysin Yaquina Bay. This summer, Chapman and colleagues are working withLincoln County natural resource crews on new surveys that will givethem an idea of the early impact of the parasite on mud shrimp numbers,though the effect of limited reproduction may take time to complete.

"Nothing we know already provides reason to be optimistic," saidChapman, who added that all of the mud shrimp populations they'veinvestigated this summer have been infested with the parasite.

The researchers estimate an overall parasite infestation rate ashigh as 45 percent and believe that 80 percent or more of thebreeding-sized adults may be infested. Once infested, reproduction -almost without exception - is halted.

Humans use mud shrimp primarily as fishing bait, but they arevaluable prey for birds, fish, and other animals in estuaries. The mudshrimp are a dominant species in many Oregon estuaries, comprising thegreatest biomass in many intertidal mudflats. Mud shrimp feeding mayfilter as much as 80 percent of the water per day in some estuaries.

Chapman says removing a dominant species from any ecosystem can have large impacts.

"It's hard to guess what the removal of mud shrimp would mean to theestuary," Chapman said, "but because they are so abundant and filter somuch of the water, we have to be concerned. Mud shrimp also areimportant in the sediment dynamics of estuaries and their loss couldconceivably lead to greater erosion. There also are signs that wheremud shrimp are disappearing, populations of sand shrimp increase. Bothspecies cause problems for oyster growers, but sand shrimp may beworse."

Chapman and Brett Dumbauld, a U.S. Department of Agricultureecologist working out of OSU's Hatfield Marine Science Center, recentlyexamined 42 female mud shrimp from Yaquina Bay during the winterbreeding season and found that only eight of them had eggs. The restwere infested with the parasite. Only one of the eight females that hadeggs was infested - and she had just 15 eggs. Normally, females produce1,800 to 11,000 eggs.

The message, Chapman said, is that infestation cuts offreproduction. He is working to find out why. "Mud shrimp don't begin toreproduce until their carapaces are about 20 millimeters long, andthese parasites seem to have targeted them by that time," he said.

Chapman said this parasite is huge compared to previously discoveredspecies. At eight-tenths of an inch, Griffen's isopod is the largestbopyrid isopod ever seen on the West Coast.

"Over the past 140 years, virtually every new parasitic isopodspecies discovered has been smaller than previously known species," hesaid. "In comparison, this recently discovered species is a monster.Because of its great abundance, large size and it occurrence also inJapan, we are sure this is an introduced species, and not an overlookednative species.

"If you had a water buffalo in your back yard," he said, wryly, "you would notice it."

The parasitic isopod primarily targets the mud shrimp, Upogebiapugettensis, but doesn't seem to affect sand shrimp. Though the twospecies appear to be similar, sand shrimp are burrowing animals thatget their nutrients from the sand, while mud shrimp draw water downinto their mud tubes and filter it through their feeding baskets.

Chapman said this parasite wasn't fully identified until this pastwinter. Since then, he and other scientists have been scrambling tolearn more about it. They have been able to trace its appearance on theWest Coast back about 20 years by combing through references inscientific literature, examining samples and/or photos of mud shrimpused in other studies, and working with biological museums. Itsnumbers, however, have been very small.

Something caused the population to "take off" over the last fewyears, Chapman said, and scientists aren't sure why. Unusual oceanconditions, characterized by changes in upwelling, may have played arole by maximizing their growth and reproduction at a time when otherspecies have suffered. Or more of them may have been introduced to WestCoast waters in recent years.

Chapman said the origins of the parasitic isopod may be in Asia.Japanese taxonomist Gyo Itani of the Center for Marine EnvironmentalStudies at Ehime University found a Japanese bopryid isopod that ismorphologically identical to Orthione griffenis.

How the parasite arrived at the West Coast is a matter of guesswork.More important, Chapman said, is trying to understand how prevalent itis and what impact it may have.

Dumbauld has been working with oyster growers in Willapa Bay foryears studying the impact of mud shrimp on the industry. Some localpopulations of the shrimp there have almost completely disappeared, andthe researchers suspect the parasite is to blame. The few remainingWillapa Bay mud shrimp are heavily infested.

Chapman said it doesn't appear that the isopod invasion willdisappear soon. Water samples from the bay are full of the parasites attheir early stages of life.

Female Orthione griffenis brood their young and may release as manyas 60,000 epicarid offspring. These epicarids migrate out of theestuaries and into the ocean, where ey attach themselves to copepodsand parasitize them before moulting into their final dispersal phase,known as "cryptoniscans." These cryptoniscans return to estuaries andapparently seek out mud shrimp as final hosts. Their abundance in theseawater covering mud shrimp communities is surprising, Chapman said.

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fisheries; new species; invasive species; pests and parasites; fish; nature; ecology research; wild animals

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
New Invasive Parasite Raises Concern For West Coast Estuaries

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
NEWPORT, Ore. - Scientists have identified a prolific parasite thatpreys on mud shrimp - a native species of West Coast estuaries - andthreatens to decimate mud shrimp populations, raising concern for thefragile, complex ecosystems of these coastal inlets. This bopyrid isopod, known as Orthione griffenis (or Griffen'sisopod) is a form of aquatic crustacean that enters the shrimp gillchamber under the carapace.

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(Washington, DC) - Oil from the common herb oregano may be an effective treatment against dangerous, and sometimes drug-resistant bacteria, a Georgetown researcher has found. Two studies have shown that oregano oil-and, in particular, carvacrol, one of oregano's chemical components-appear to reduce infection as effectively as traditional antibiotics. These findings were presented at the American College of Nutrition's annual meeting October 6 and 7 in Orlando, Fla.

Harry G. Preuss, MD, MACN, CNS, professor of physiology and biophysics, and his research team, tested oregano oil on staphylococcus bacteria-which is responsible for a variety of severe infections and is becoming increasingly resistant to many antibiotics. They combined oregano oil with the bacteria in a test tube, and compared oregano oil's effects to those of standard antibiotics streptomycin, penicillin and vacnomycin. The oregano oil at relatively low doses was found to inhibit the growth of staphylococcus bacteria in the test tubes as effectively as the standard antibiotics did.

Another aspect of the study examined the efficacy of oregano oil and carvacrol, which is believed to be the major antibacterial component of oregano, in 18 mice infected with the staph bacteria

Six of the mice received oregano oil for 30 days, and 50% of this group survived the 30-day treatment. Six received the carvacrol in olive oil, not oregano oil, and none survived longer than 21 days. Six mice received olive oil alone with no active agents (the control group) and all died within three days. A repeat study corroborated these findings, which demonstrates that there are components of oregano oil other than carvacrol that have antibiotic properties.

"While this investigation was performed only in test tubes and on a small number of mice, the preliminary results are promising and warrant further study," Preuss said. "The ability of oils from various spices to kill infectious organisms has been recognized since antiquity. Natural oils may turn out to be valuable adjuvants or even replacements for many anti-germicidals under a variety of conditions."

This study was sponsored by Waukegan, Ill.-based North American Herb and Spice.

Georgetown University Medical Center includes the nationally ranked School of Medicine, School of Nursing and Health Studies, and a biomedical research enterprise. For more information, please visit http://www.georgetown.edu/gumc

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
infectious diseases; pharmacology; pharmaceuticals; wounds and healing; bacteria; mice; microbes and more; food and agriculture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Oregano Oil May Protect Against Drug-Resistant Bacteria, Georgetown Researcher Finds

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Oil from the common herb oregano may be an effective treatment against dangerous, and sometimes drug-resistant bacteria, a Georgetown researcher has found. Two studies have shown that oregano oil--and, in particular, carvacrol, one of oregano's chemical components--appear to reduce infection as effectively as traditional antibiotics.

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Try to imagine life without antibiotics. We wouldn't live nearly as long as we do without them. Here's a look at some discoveries that have changed the world. It's impossible to rank their importance, so they're listed in the order they were discovered.

The Copernicum System

In 1543, while on his deathbed, Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus published his theory that the Sun is a motionless body at the center of the solar system, with the planets revolving around it. Before the Copernicum system was introduced, astronomers believed the Earth was at the center of the universe.

Gravity

Isaac Newton, an English mathematician and physicist, is considered the greatest scientist of all time. Among his many discoveries, the most important is probably his law of universal gravitation. In 1664, Newton figured out that gravity is the force that draws objects toward each other. It explained why things fall down and why the planets orbit around the Sun.

Electricity

If electricity makes life easier for us, you can thank Michael Faraday. He made two big discoveries that changed our lives. In 1821, he discovered that when a wire carrying an electric current is placed next to a single magnetic pole, the wire will rotate. This led to the development of the electric motor. Ten years later, he became the first person to produce an electric current by moving a wire through a magnetic field. Faraday's experiment created the first generator, the forerunner of the huge generators that produce our electricity.

Evolution

When Charles Darwin, the British naturalist, came up with the theory of evolution in 1859, he changed our idea of how life on earth developed. Darwin argued that all organisms evolve, or change, very slowly over time. These changes are adaptations that allow a species to survive in its environment. These adaptations happen by chance. If a species doesn't adapt, it may become extinct. He called this process natural selection, but it is often called the survival of the fittest.

Louis Pasteur

Before French chemist Louis Pasteur began experimenting with bacteria in the 1860s, people did not know what caused disease. He not only discovered that disease came from microorganisms, but he also realized that bacteria could be killed by heat and disinfectant. This idea caused doctors to wash their hands and sterilize their instruments, which has saved millions of lives.

Theory of Relativity

Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity, which he published in 1905, explains the relationships between speed, time and distance. The complicated theory states that the speed of light always remains the same-186,000 miles/second (300,000 km/second) regardless of how fast someone or something is moving toward or away from it. This theory became the foundation for much of modern science.

The Big Bang Theory

Nobody knows exactly how the universe came into existence, but many scientists believe that it happened about 13.7 billion years ago with a massive explosion, called the Big Bang. In 1927, Georges Lemaître proposed the Big Bang theory of the universe. The theory says that all the matter in the universe was originally compressed into a tiny dot. In a fraction of a second, the dot expanded, and all the matter instantly filled what is now our universe. The event marked the beginning of time. Scientific observations seem to confirm the theory.

Penicillin

Antibiotics are powerful drugs that kill dangerous bacteria in our bodies that make us sick. In 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered the first antibiotic, penicillin, which he grew in his lab using mold and fungi. Without antibiotics, infections like strep throat could be deadly.

DNA

On February 28, 1953, James Watson of the United States and Francis Crick of England made one of the greatest scientific discoveries in history. The two scientists found the double-helix structure of DNA. It's made up of two strands that twist around each other and have an almost endless variety of chemical patterns that create instructions for the human body to follow. Our genes are made of DNA and determine how things like what color hair and eyes we'll have. In 1962, they were awarded the Nobel Prize for this work. The discovery has helped doctors understand diseases and may someday prevent some illnesses like heart disease and cancer.

Periodic Table

The Periodic Table is based on the 1869 Periodic Law proposed by Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleev. He had noticed that, when arranged by atomic weight, the chemical elements lined up to form groups with similar properties. He was able to use this to predict the existence of undiscovered elements and note errors in atomic weights. In 1913, Henry Moseley of England confirmed that the table could be made more accurate by arranging the elements by atomic number, which is the number of protons in an atom of the element.

X-Rays

Wilhelm Roentgen, a German physicist, discovered X-rays in 1895. X-rays go right through some substances, like flesh and wood, but are stopped by others, such as bones and lead. This allows them to be used to see broken bones or explosives inside suitcases, which makes them useful for doctors and security officers. For this discovery, Roentgen was awarded the first-ever Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.

Quantum Theory

Danish physicist Niels Bohr is considered one of the most important figures in modern physics. He won a 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics for his research on the structure of an atom and for his work in the development of the quantum theory. Although he help develop the atomic bomb, he frequently promoted the use of atomic power for peaceful purposes.

Atomic Bomb

The legacy of the atomic bomb is mixed: it successfully put an end to World War II, but ushered in the nuclear arms race. Some of the greatest scientists of the time gathered in the early 1940s to figure out how to refine uranium and build an atomic bomb. Their work was called the Manhattan Project. In 1945, the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tens of thousands of civilians were instantly killed, and Japan surrendered. These remain the only two nuclear bombs ever used in battle. Several of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project later urged the government to use nuclear power for peaceful purposes only. Nevertheless, many countries continue to stockpile nuclear weapons. Some people say the massive devastation that could result from nuclear weapons actually prevents countries from using them.

HIV/AIDS

In 1983 and 1984, Luc Montagnier of France and Robert Gallo of the United States discovered the HIV virus and determined that it was the cause of AIDS. Scientists have since developed tests to determine if a person has HIV. People who test positive are urged to take precautions to prevent the spread of the disease. Drugs are available to keep HIV and AIDS under control. The hope is that further research will lead to the development of a cure.

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Try to imagine life without antibiotics. We wouldn't live nearly as long as we do without them. Here's a look at some discoveries that have changed the world. It's impossible to rank their importance, so they're listed in the order they were discovered.

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The Compass (206 BC) – The Pathfinder

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In our current times, it may seem as if we are constantly bombarded with exciting new innovations and discoveries. However, many of the new ideas and technologies that are shaping our modern world often can be traced back centuries in their origins. Humans have the impressive ability to keep innovating and pushing onward.

There are a number of inventions throughout history that may have contributed more than others to advance civilization and technological development. As you probably guessed, today we are going to look at some of these inventions.

Let's look at some of the inventions that revolutionized history.

1. The Wheel (3500 BC) - Let's Get Things Rolling

One early invention that altered the history of humanity was the wheel. Although, the wheel is not really as old as you may think. The first wheel was likely developed sometime around 4000 B.C. By that time, humans were already casting metal alloys, constructing canals and sailboats, and even designing complex musical instruments such as harps.

In fact, the key innovation was not the wheel itself, which was likely invented the first time someone saw a rock rolling along, but the combination of the wheel and a fixed axle, which allows the wheel to be connected to a stable platform. Without the fixed axel, the wheel has very limited utility.

Evidence suggests that the first device to use the wheel and axle combination was a true potter's wheel, which is freely-spinning and has a wheel and axle mechanism. These were developed in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq, Kuwait, Turkey, and Syria) sometime around 4000 BCE. The oldest surviving example, which was found in Ur, dates to around 3100 BCE, and there is evidence of wheeled vehicles by the late 4th millennium BCE.

2. The Compass (c. 200 BC)

The compass has helped humans to explore and navigate around the world. In today's world of satellites and GPS, it may seem irrelevant, but it was an important invention in its day.

However, the compass may have originally been created for spiritual purposes and only later adapted for navigational purposes. The earliest compasses were most likely invented by the Chinese, around 200 BC. Some were made of lodestone, which is a naturally-occurring form of the mineral magnetite.

There is also evidence that other civilizations may have used lodestone for navigation or for spiritual purposes. At some point, possibly around 1050 CE, people began suspending the lodestones to allow them to move freely, and using them for navigation. A description of a magnetized needle and its use among sailors occurs in a European book written in 1190, so by that time, it is likely that the use of a needle as a compass was commonplace.

3. Waterwheel

Awater wheelis amachinethat converts the energy of flowing or falling water into useful forms of power, such as awatermill. A water wheel consists of a wheel and a number ofbladesorbucketsarranged on the outside rim forming the driving car.

The water wheel was invented independently in a number of places. Some of the earliest were developed by the ancient Greeks, who used it for both irrigation and milling, beginning sometime in the period between the 3rd and 1st century BC.

By at least the 1st century AD, the Eastern Han Dynasty was using horizontal water wheels for milling and to power the piston-bellows used to forge iron ore into cast iron.

There are also ancient Indian texts dating to the 4th century BC that refer to devices that may have been some of the first water wheels, but this is yet to be confirmed.

4. Calendar

The notion of a calendar, in the sense of keeping track of how many days have passed, is likely quite old - at least as old as writing itself. The first "calendars" were based on the phases of the Moon, as this would have been easy to track.

However, the lunisolar calendar, in which months are based on the lunar cycle, but years are solar - bringing the seasons into line so that, for example, the grain was harvested in the same lunar month each year - was used in the early civilizations in the Middle East and in Greece. The formula may have been invented in Mesopotamia in the 3rd millennium BCE .

Many civilizations continued to use a lunar calendar, which had fewer days than the solar year. In order to keep the months from moving around too much, an extra month would often be added every other year. The ancient Romans used a system similar to this, but by around 46 BC, the system had broken down, so that civic events and religious holidays were occurring during the wrong season. Julius Caesar thus introduced a new system, which set the length of the months and the year to align with the solar year. This was the Julian calendar.

This worked well, but was still off by enough so that it gained a day every 128 years. To fix the error, the Gregorian calendar, which most of the world uses today was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582.

5. Ancient Concrete

We live in a world that is built using materials held together with concrete. Concrete is a composite material madefrom a mixture of broken stone or gravel, sand, Portland cement, and water, which can be spread or poured into molds and forms a mass resembling stone on hardening.

One of the key ingredients of concrete is cement, and the origins of cement may stretch back to 3000 BC. At this time, the Egyptians were using early forms of concrete as a mortar in their building.

Around 1300 BC, builders in the Middle East were coating the outside of their clay fortresses with a thin, moist layer of burned limestone. This would chemically react with gasses in the air to form a hard, protective surface. By 700 BC, the significance of hydraulic lime was known, which led to the development of mortar kilns for the construction of rubble-wall houses, concrete floors, and underground waterproof cisterns.

The ancient Greeks and Romans used a form of concrete which included Pozzolana, which uses an aluminum and silica mixture that reacts with calcium hydroxide at room temperature and in the presence of water to form a substance that acts as cement. It was very strong - one reason why so many Greek and Roman ruins survive today.

In 1824, Portland cement was invented by Joseph Aspdin of England. George Bartholomew had laid down the first concrete street in the US during 1891, which still exists.

By the end of the 19 th century, the use of steel-reinforced concrete was developed. In 1902, using steel-reinforced concrete, Auguste Perret designed and built an apartment building in Paris. This building garnered a lot of admiration and popularity for concrete, and eventually influenced the development of reinforced concrete.

In 1921, Eugène Freyssinet pioneered the use of reinforced concrete construction by building two colossal parabolic-arched airship hangars at Orly Airport in Paris.

6. Clock (725 AD) - the First Mechanical Clock

Imagine modern civilization without having a sense of time? Depending on your point of view, this is either wonderful or horrible. Humans have used devices to measure time for thousands of years - the current system of time measurement, based on 60 seconds to the minute and 60 minutes to the hour, was created by the Sumerians around 2000 BC.

The earliest timepieces used the movement of the sun (sundials) or water (waterclocks). Other early "clocks" include the candle clock, the time stick, and the hourglass.

The earliest known mechanical clock used a water-powered escapement mechanism to transfer rotational energy into intermittent motion, and was developed in Greece around the 3rd centuryBC. In the 10th century AD, Chinese engineersinvented clocks which used mercury-powered escapement mechanisms, and Arabic engineersinvented water clocks that were driven by gearsand weights in the 11th century.

The first mechanical clocks that used gear trains to advance the mechanism, called a verge escapement, were invented in Europe at around the start of the 14th century. These were the standard until the pendulum clock was invented in 1656.

Pendulum clocks were the most accurate timepieces until the 1930s, when quartz clocks were invented, followed by atomic clocks after World War II.

7. The Printing Press

The printing press is a prominent part of the foundation on which modern civilization was built upon.

German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg is credited with inventing the printing press around 1436, although he was not the first to automate the printing process. Woodblock printing in China dates back to the 9th century, and Korean bookmakers were printing with moveable metal type around 100 years before Gutenberg.

Johannes Gutenberg's machine, however, improved on the already existing presses and introduced them to the West. By 1500, Gutenberg presses were operating throughout Western Europe, with a production of 20 million materials, from individual pages, to pamphlets, and books.

The printing press not only allowed the mass production of newspapers and pamphlets, it also lowered the price of printed materials, making books and newspapers accessible to many, and fostering literacy.

The impact of the printing press in history was described by Mark Twain as, " What the world is today, good and bad, it owes to Gutenberg."

8. The Steam Engine - The Invention that Started a Revolution

A Spanish mining administrator named Jerónimo de Ayanz is thought to have been the first person to develop a steam engine. Hie patented a device that used steam power to propel water from mines.

However, it is Englishman Thomas Savery, an engineer and inventor, who is usually credited with developing the first practical steam engine, in 1698. His device used steam pressure to draw water from flooded mines. In developing his engine, Savery had used principles set forth by Denis Papin, a French-born British physicist who invented the pressure cooker.

In 1711, another Englishman, Thomas Newcomen, improved on the steam engine, and in 1781, James Watt, a Scottish instrument maker employed by Glasgow University, added a separate condenser to Newcomen's engine, which allowed the steam cylinder to be maintained at a constant temperature - dramatically improving its functionality. He later developed a double rotating steam engine that, by the 1800s, would be powering trains, mills, factories, and numerous other manufacturing operations - kickstarting the Industrial Revolution.

9. Vaccines - One of the Most Important Inventions for Medicine

The history of vaccination actually dates back farther than you might think. The practice of variolation - smearing a small cut in the skin with cowpox to give immunity to smallpox was practiced in 17th century China.

In the West, Edward Jenner is considered the founder of vaccinology, after noticing that "milkmaids" often suffered from cowpox but rarely from smallpox and hypothesized that the less dangerous cowpox virus could confer some immunity to smallpox. In 1796, he inoculated a 13 year-old-boy with cowpox, then exposed him to smallpox - demonstrating an early form of vaccination.

In 1798, the first smallpox vaccine was developed.

Louis Pasteur's experiments later led to the development of live attenuated cholera vaccine and inactivated anthrax vaccine in humans (1897 and 1904, respectively).

In 1923, Alexander Glenny perfected a method to inactivate tetanus toxin using formaldehyde, creating a tetanus vaccine. The same method was used to develop a vaccine against diphtheria in 1926.

Viral tissue culture methods developed from 1950-1985, and led to the advent of the Salk (inactivated) polio vaccine and the Sabin (live attenuated oral) polio vaccine.

10. The Steam-Powered Train - Chugging Along with the Industrial Revolution

The first full-scale working railway steam locomotive was built in the United Kingdom in 1804 by Richard Trevithick, a British engineer . It used high-pressure steam to drive the engine. On 21 February 1804, the world's first steam-powered railway journey took place when Trevithick's unnamed steam locomotive hauled a train along a tramway in Wales.

The first commercially successful steam locomotive, the Salamanca, was built in 1812-13 by John Blenkinsop. In 1814, George Stephenson built a steam engine, the Locomotion No. 1, based on Blenkinsop's design.

In 1821, Stephenson was appointed as an engineer for the construction of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in the northeast of England, which was opened as the first public steam-powered railway in 1825. His Locomotion became the first steam locomotive to haul passengers on a public railway. In 1829, he built his famous steam engine, Rocket, and the age of railways had begun.

11. Electric Battery - Volta's Remarkable Feat

In the 1800s, people did not have continuous electric lines that carried a constant supply of power. So, the production of electricity was not at all an easy task.

The battery may actually date back almost 2,000 years, to the Parthian empire. Archaeologists have unearthed an ancient battery consisting of a clay jar filled with a vinegar solution, into which an iron rod surrounded by a copper cylinder was inserted. These batteries might have been used to electroplate silver.

Alessandro Volta is generally credited with discovering the first practical battery. He invented his batteryin 1799, it consisted of discs of two different metals, such as copper and zinc, separated by cardboard soaked in brine.

In 1802, William Cruickshank invented the Trough battery, an improvement on Volta's voltaic pile. Batteries had a breakthrough in 1859, with the invention of the first rechargeable battery based on lead-acid by the French physician Gaston Planté. The Nickel-Cadmium (NiCd) battery was introduced in 1899 by Waldemar Jungner.

12. Computer (1822) - The First Mechanical Computer by Babbage

Computers are one of humanity's greatest inventions. Initially built for doing complex mathematical calculations, the bulky computers of the past have evolved into machines that sit on almost every desktop and are carried in our pockets.

Mechanical engineer Charles Babbage laid the foundation for this remarkable and most reliable invention, along with Ada Lovelace, who created the first programs. In the early 19 thcentury, the "father of the computer" conceptualized and developed an early mechanical computer. Although there's no single inventor of the modern computer, the principle was proposed by Alan Turing in his seminal 1936 paper.

13. Refrigerator - Beating the Heat

According to the report of 2009 by the U.S Department of energy, 99% of US homes have at least one refrigerator. This statistic itself is representative of the popularity of the refrigerator in the modern world. The great invention helps keep perishable food products fresh much longer.

The first vapor-compression refrigerator was patented in 1835 by Jacob Perkins, based on a theory put forward earlier by Oliver Evans. British engineer James Harrison built the first mechanical refrigeration system, to create ice, in around 1851. He founded the Victorian Ice Works and is often called "the father of refrigeration". In 1873, he demonstrated that meat kept frozen for months remained perfectly edible.

However, the first refrigerator to be manufactured for widespread use was the General Electric "Monitor-Top" refrigerator of 1927. While it helped to rev up industrial processes initially, it became an industry itself later on.

14. Telegraph (1830-1840) - The Communication Device that Introduced the Morse Code

In the early 19th century, the development of the battery allowed current to be used in a controlled environment. Then, in 1820, Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851) demonstrated the connection between electricity and magnetism. After this, scientists and inventors began experimenting with both batteries and electromagnetism to develop some kind of communication system.

In the 1830s, the British team of Sir William Cooke and Sir Charles Wheatstone developed a telegraph system using magnetic needles that could be pointed around a panel of letters and numbers using an electric current. Around the same time, Samuel Morse worked to develop an electric telegraph of his own, eventually producing a single-circuit telegraph that worked by pushing the operator key down to complete the electric circuit of the battery. This sent the electric signal to a receiver at the other end.

At the same time, Morse and Alfred Vale also created what is now called Morse code to transmit messages across telegraph wires.

15. Steel - From Pins to the Brooklyn Bridge

Source: Wlodi/Wikimedia

The weight to strength ratio has made steel a preferred choice of builders over other materials. For example, while Bronze was the first metal forged for use by humans, it is relatively weak. Around 1,800 BC, people along the Black Sea began using iron ore to create sturdy wrought iron weapons. The even-stronger cast iron was first made in China, beginning around 500 BC.

Around 400 BC, Indian metalworkers invented a smelting method that used a clay dish to hold ingots of wrought iron and pieces of charcoal. When these were inserted into a furnace, the wrought iron melted and absorbed the carbon in the charcoal. When the crucibles cooled, they contained ingots of pure steel - which was much stronger and less brittle than iron.

In 1856, British engineer Henry Bessemer developed a process that blasted air through molten pig iron to create carbon-free, pure iron.

The Bessemer Process paved the way for the mass production of steel, making it one of the biggest industries on the planet. Today steel is used in the creation of everything from bridges to skyscrapers.

16. Electric Bulb (1880) - Lighting Up the World

Electric lights were pioneered in the early 19th century by Humphry Davy, who experimented with electricity and invented an electric battery. When he connected wires between his battery and a piece of carbon, the carbon glowed, producing light. His invention was known as the electric arc lamp.

Over the next seven decades, other inventors also created "lightbulbs." However, the filaments used tended to break after a few days of use, making them impractical.

In 1850 an English physicist named Joseph Wilson Swan created a "light bulb" by enclosing carbonized paper filaments in an evacuated glass bulb. But without a good vacuum, his bulb had too short a lifetime for commercial use. However, in the 1870s, better vacuum pumps became available and Swan was able to develop a longer-lasting lightbulb.

Thomas A. Edison improved on Swan's design by using metal filaments and in 1878 and 1879 he filed patents for electric lights using different materials for the filament. He eventually discovered that a carbonized bamboo filament could last over 1200 hours. This discovery made commercially manufactured light bulbs commercially feasible.

17. The Airplane (1903) - Making the Flying Dream Come True

Leonardo da Vinci was one of the visionaries who believed that powered flight was possible. He made several designs for flying machines, although there is no evidence that any were actually constructed.

Many other flying machines were dreamed up since da Vinci's time, and powered flight was achieved thanks to the work of countless inventors over the centuries. It was the Wright Brothers who became the first people to achieve controlled, powered flight. Beginning with their work on gliders, the duo's success laid the foundation for modern aeronautical engineering by demonstrating what was possible.

On December 17, 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright achieved the first powered, sustained, and controlled flight.

Now humans can cover thousands of miles in a matter of hours thanks to the achievement of Wilbur and Orville Wright.

18. Transistors (1947) - The Secret of Modern Day Computing

The electronics age owes its inception to transistors used to amplify electric signals. These replaced the bulky vacuum tubes that came before.

In 1926, Julius Lilienfeld patented a field-effect transistor, but the working device was not feasible. In 1947 John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley developed the first practical transistor device at Bell Laboratories. Their invention won the trio the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics.

Transistors have since become a fundamental piece of the circuitry in countless electronic devices including televisions, cellphones, and computers, making a remarkable impact on technology.

19. ARPANET (1969) - The Early Internet

The Internet has no single "inventor." Instead, it has evolved over time. It started in the United States around the 1950s, along with the development of computers.

The first workable prototype of the Internet came in the late 1960s, with the creation of ARPANET, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. By the 1970s, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP/IP) was developed by Vinton Cerf, which enabled computers to communicate with each other. ARPANET adopted the TCP/IP protocols on January 1, 1983, and from there, researchers began to assemble the "network of networks" that became the modern Internet.

The Internetis a networking infrastructure, whereas the World Wide Web is a way to access information using the Internet. The father of the World Wide Web is considered to be British Computer Scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, who created the Web to allow information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.

In 1989 and 1990, Berners-Lee worked with Belgian systems engineer Robert Cailliau to formalize a proposal for the web architecture, including describing a "WorldWideWeb" in which "hypertext documents" could be viewed by "browsers."

A Long Way Indeed!

Looking back at these ground-breaking inventions, one thing is clear - our desire to improve and innovate. We see a society that invented the wheel to tread ground quickly, who mastered the skies and waves. It is truly remarkable and something that we will continue to do for ages to come! What major inventions will be created in the coming decade?

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19 Great Inventions That Revolutionized History

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In our current times, it may seem as if we are constantly bombarded with exciting new innovations and discoveries. However, many of the new ideas and technologies that are shaping our modern world often can be traced back centuries in their origins. Humans have the impressive ability to keep innovating and pushing onward.

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Antennas of CSIRO's Australian SKA Pathfinder with the Milky Way overhead.

Credit: Alex Cherney/CSIRO

Earth is being bombarded with invisible light that nobody understands.

Known as fast radio bursts (or FRBs), these ultrashort, ultrapowerful pulses of ancient energy are the universe's brightest flashes you cannot see. They travel billions of light-years across time and space, shine with the intensity of nearly 100 suns and then blip out of existence mere milliseconds after reaching the range of Earthly telescopes. Because they are radio waves, they do all of this while remaining totally invisible to human eyes.

Could these mystery pulses be the distant flashes of supermassive supernovas? The wild spin of the universe's speediest neutron stars? Perhaps the thrust of alien spacecraft sailing across the cosmos? Nobody knows for sure. But while only about 30 FRBs have been detected since their initial discovery in 2007, astronomers think they may be a near-constant phenomenon that modern technology isn't equipped to fully capture. [ 9 Strange Scientific Reasons for Why Humans Haven't Found Aliens Yet]

Today (Oct. 10), a new study published in the journal Nature adds evidence to that assertion, thanks to a high-tech telescope in Australia.

"We've found 20 fast radio bursts in a year, almost doubling the number detected worldwide since they were discovered in 2007," lead study author Ryan Shannon, an astronomer at Swinburne University of Technology and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Australia, said in a statement. "We've also proved that fast radio bursts are coming from the other side of the universe rather than from our own galactic neighborhood."

In their new study, Shannon and his colleagues used the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) - a cluster of 36 identical antennas linked up to a single, powerful radio telescope - to monitor a wider swath of sky for FRBs than has ever been observed before.

Each ASKAP antenna watches the sky at a slightly different angle, leaning out of the remote, scrubby plains of western Australia to stare down 240 square degrees of space all at once. According to the researchers, the array monitors a slice of sky with "about a thousand times the area of the full Moon," providing one of the world's greatest catcher's mitts for intergalactic radio transmissions.

So, what do you do after you catch an FRB by the toe? For starters, ask it where it came from.

An artist's impression of CSIRO's ASKAP radio telescope detecting a fast radio burst (FRB).

Credit: OzGrav, Swinburne University of Technology

After recording 20 new FRBs in the past year, ASKAP scientists have also been able to estimate how far each pulse of light has traveled across the cosmos. As FRBs surge through the universe, they pass through clouds of intergalactic dust and gas that slow and stretch the light's waveform.

"The burst [then] reaches Earth with its spread of wavelengths arriving at the telescope at slightly different times, like swimmers at a finish line," study co-author Jean-Pierre Macquart, a senior lecturer at ICRAR, said in the statement. "Timing the arrival of the different wavelengths tells us how much material the burst has travelled through on its journey."

The wider the spread of wavelengths in a given pulse, the more likely that pulse has traveled through an enormous stretch of the universe - perhaps several billions of light-years - before finally colliding with Earth. In fact, Macquart said, studying FRBs could even help astronomers figure out exactly what types of matter exist between galaxies.

About one third of the universe's run-of-the-mill matter made of protons and neutrons (also called "baryonic matter") is thought to exist somewhere in clouds of gas between distant stars, according to a study published earlier this year. Studying how FRBs warp and slow in certain parts of the sky could help pinpoint where, exactly, those clouds of baryons really are.

"[FRBs] can act as cosmic lighthouses,"Macquart said in a video accompanying the new study. "They can actually find that matter, find where it's lurking in the universe and find out exactly how much is missing."

Further study of these invisible blasts of space-light could go a long way toward completing our map of the known universe. So, let's hope that if FRBs are indeed caused by superintelligent alien spaceships, they're thrusting away from Earth.

Originally published on Live Science.

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Astronomers Confirm Earth Is Being Bombarded with Ancient, Invisible Energy from Another Galaxy

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Earth is being bombarded with invisible light that nobody understands. Known as fast radio bursts (or FRBs), these ultrashort, ultrapowerful pulses of ancient energy are the universe's brightest flashes you cannot see. They travel billions of light-years across time and space, shine with the intensity of nearly 100 suns and then blip out of existence mere milliseconds after reaching the range of Earthly telescopes.

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The Galileo Project | Science | Thermometer

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The liquid in glass thermometer was developed in the 1630s, but a universal standard of temperature remained elusive. Each scientist had his own scale divisions, often based on different reference points. It is impossible for us accurately to convert their measurements to our temperature scale, and at the time it was impossible to compare temperatures in different places.

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Pressures produced when penguins pooh-calculations on avian defaecation

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Chinstrap and Adélie penguins generate considerable pressures to propel their faeces away from the edge of the nest. The pressures involved can be approximated if the following parameters are known:...