Over the last few years, advances in science have made the kind of experiments once only accessible to PhDs with fancy labs far more attainable. College undergrads are constructing gene drives. Anyone can buy a kit on the internet to concoct their own bioluminescent beer.
[…]
The German government, it seems, is none too pleased with this development. Two weeks ago its consumer protection office issued a statement making clear just how upset it is: Any science enthusiast doing genetic engineering outside of a licensed facility, it wrote, might face a fine of €50,000 or up to three years in prison.
[…]
The law behind the German DIY bio crackdown isn’t new. The government was simply reminding so-called biohackers of a long-existing law that forbids genetic engineering experiments outside of laboratories supervised and licensed by the state.
[…]
“The statement has to be seen in light of the newly formed DIY biology scene and due to the appearance of low-priced DIY biology kits in online shops,” the BVL told Gizmodo, via email.
[…]
The BVL conceded that the new rules will make it virtually impossible for a lone scientist to meet the legal requirements to do genetic engineering. To begin with, any lab needs a project manager qualified by academic credentials such as a master’s degree in science. Labs also require a commissioner for biological safety who is similarly qualified.

“This makes genetic engineering experiments rather unattractive for individuals,” the BVL’s spokesman said.

Source: Germany Is Threatening Biohackers With Prison

On the one hand I understand the need for oversight and ethics, on the other hand, it should be a lot easier for individuals to play and learn in this field. It must be possible to balance the two needs.

In a paper for the journal Biofabrication, the team details how the printer lays down bioinks containing human plasma as well as primary human fibroblasts and keratinocytes. The printer first lays down a layer of external epidermis and then a thicker layer of fibroblasts that produce collagen, which will make the flesh strong and elastic.

“Knowing how to mix the biological components, in what conditions to work with them so that the cells don’t deteriorate, and how to correctly deposit the product is critical to the system,” said Juan Francisco del Cañizo, of the Hospital General Universitario.

The end result is a 100-cm2 slab of skin, printed in 35 minutes, that can be transplanted onto patients. Its production can be automated to a large degree. The skin can also be used to test the irritant qualities of consumer products without having to shave animals and use them as test subjects.

“We use only human cells and components to produce skin that is bioactive and can generate its own human collagen, thereby avoiding the use of the animal collagen that is found in other methods,” the team notes in its paper.

Source: Gimme some skin: Boffins perfect 3D bioprinter that produces slabs of human flesh • The Register

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have announced the development of the first stable semisynthetic organism. Building on their 2014 study in which they synthesized a DNA base pair, the researchers created a new bacterium that uses the four natural bases (called A, T, C and G), which every living organism possesses, but that also holds as a pair two synthetic bases called X and Y in its genetic code.

TSRI Professor Floyd Romesberg and his colleagues have now shown that their single-celled organism can hold on indefinitely to the synthetic base pair as it divides. Their research was published January 23, 2017, online ahead of print in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
[…]
First, Zhang and Lamb, co-first authors of the study, optimized a tool called a nucleotide transporter, which brings the materials necessary for the unnatural base pair to be copied across the cell membrane. “The transporter was used in the 2014 study, but it made the semisynthetic organism very sick,” Zhang explained. The researchers discovered a modification to the transporter that alleviated this problem, making it much easier for the organism to grow and divide while holding on to X and Y.

Next, the researchers optimized their previous version of Y. The new Y was a chemically different molecule that could be better recognized by the enzymes that synthesize DNA molecules during DNA replication. This made it easier for cells to copy the synthetic base pair.

A New Use for CRISPR-Cas9

Finally, the researchers set up a “spell check” system for the organism using CRISPR-Cas9, an increasingly popular tool in human genome editing experiments. But instead of editing a genome, the researchers took advantage of CRISPR-Cas9’s original role in bacteria.

The genetic tools in CRISPR-Cas9 (a DNA segment and an enzyme) originated in bacteria as a kind of immune response. When a bacterium encounters a threat, like a virus, it takes fragments of the invader genome and pastes them into its own genome—a bit like posting a “wanted” poster on the off chance it sees the invader again. Later, it can use those pasted genes to direct an enzyme to attack if the invader returns.

Knowing this, the researchers designed their organism to see a genetic sequence without X and Y as a foreign invader. A cell that dropped X and Y would be marked for destruction, leaving the scientists with an organism that could hold on to the new bases. It was like the organism was immune to unnatural base pair loss.
[…]
Romesberg emphasized that this work is only in single cells and is not meant to be used in more complex organisms. He added that the actual applications for this semisynthetic organism are “zero” at this point. So far, scientists can only get the organism to store genetic information.

Source: Scientists create first stable semisynthetic organism

Already researchers have developed photovoltaic paint, which can be used to make “paint-on solar cells” that capture the sun’s energy and turn it into electricity. Now in a new study, researchers have created thermoelectric paint, which captures the waste heat from hot painted surfaces and converts it into electrical energy.

“I expect that the thermoelectric painting technique can be applied to waste heat recovery from large-scale heat source surfaces, such as buildings, cars, and ship vessels,” Jae Sung Son, a coauthor of the study and researcher at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST)

Source: Thermoelectric paint enables walls to convert heat into electricity

Scientists from the National Institutes of Health have identified an antibody from an HIV-infected person that potently neutralized 98 percent of HIV isolates tested, including 16 of 20 strains resistant to other antibodies of the same class. The remarkable breadth and potency of this antibody, named N6, make it an attractive candidate for further development to potentially treat or prevent HIV infection, say the researchers.

Source: NIH Scientists Identify Potent Antibody that Neutralizes Nearly All HIV Strains | NIH: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

Touch is essential for hand use. Yet, brain-controlled prosthetic limbs have not been endowed with this critical sense. In a new study by Flesher et al ., microelectrode arrays were implanted into the primary somatosensory cortex of a person with spinal cord injury and, by delivering current through the electrodes, generated sensations of touch that were perceived as coming from his own paralyzed hand. These sensations often felt like pressure, could be graded in intensity, and were stable for months. The authors suggest that this approach could be used to convey information about contact location and pressure necessary for prosthetic hands to interact with objects.

In a new study by Flesher et al., microelectrode arrays were implanted into the primary somatosensory cortex of a person with spinal cord injury and, by delivering current through the electrodes, generated sensations of touch that were perceived as coming from his own paralyzed hand. These sensations often felt like pressure, could be graded in intensity, and were stable for months.

Source: Intracortical microstimulation of human somatosensory cortex

A popular antibiotic called rifampicin, used to treat tuberculosis, leprosy, and Legionnaire’s disease, is becoming less effective as the bacteria that cause the diseases develop more resistance.
[…]
“Antibiotic resistance is one of the major problems in modern medicine,” said Adbelwahab. “Our studies have shown how this enzyme deactivates rifampicin. We now have a blueprint to inhibit this enzyme and prevent antibiotic resistance.”

Rifampicin, also known as Rifampin, has been used to treat bacterial infections for more than 40 years. It works by preventing the bacteria from making RNA, a step necessary for growth.

The enzyme, Rifampicin monooxygenase, is a flavoenzyme—a family of enzymes that catalyze chemical reactions that are essential for microbial survival. These latest findings represent the first detailed biochemical characterization of a flavoenzyme involved in antibiotic resistance, according to the authors.

Source: Team unravels mystery of bacteria’s antibiotic resistance

A British man could become the first person in the world to be cured of HIV using a new therapy designed by a team of scientists from five UK universities.

The 44-year-old is one of 50 people currently trialling a treatment which targets the disease even in its dormant state.

Scientists told The Sunday Times that presently the virus is completely undetectable in the man’s blood, although that could be a result of regular drugs. However if the dormant cells are also cleared out it could represent the first complete cure. Trial results are expected to be published in 2018.

Source: HIV cure close after disease ‘vanishes’ from blood of British man 

Scientists have long known that cells have various types of sensory abilities that are key to their function, such as sensing light, heat, nerve signals, damage, chemicals or other inputs.

In this process, a chemical stimulus called ATP functions as a signaling molecule, which in turn causes calcium levels in a cell to rise and decline, and tells a cell it’s time to do its job – whether that be sending a nerve impulse, seeing a bird in flight or repairing a wound. These sensing processes are fundamental to the function of life.

“The thing is, individual cells don’t always get the message right, their sensory process can be noisy, confusing, and they make mistakes,” Sun said. “But there’s strength in numbers, and the collective sensory ability of many cells working together usually comes up with the right answer. This collective communication is essential to life.”

In this study, researchers helped explain just how that works for animal cells.

When cells meet, a small channel usually forms between them that’s called a gap junction. […] But with gap junction-mediated communications, despite significant variability in sensing from one cell to another, the sensitivity to ATP is increased

This interactive chatter continues, and a preponderance of cells receiving one sensation persuade a lesser number of cells reporting a different sensation that they must be wrong. By working in communication and collaboration, most of the cells eventually decide what the correct sensory input is, and the signal that gets passed along is pretty accurate.

Source: Research outlines cellular communication processes that make life possible

Wind map and weather forecast

Source: Windyty, wind map & forecast

Absolutely gorgeous interactive moving windmap

The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 challenged our Nation to grow our technical and scientific abilities in air and space. Since the 1970s, numerous economic reports and articles have demonstrated that NASA investments help grow the US economy. Perhaps most importantly NASA-funded R&D helped stimulate our long-term capacity for innovation and economic growth within the government, at universities, and at industrial companies. The disciplines advanced are many – including earth and space science, materials, computing and electronics, fuels, radio communications, safety, and even human health.

PubMed Central (PMC) is a full-text, online archive of journal literature operated by the National Library of Medicine. NASA is using PMC to permanently preserve and provide easy public access to the peer-reviewed papers resulting from NASA-funded research.

Find it all here

When placed in an acoustic field, small objects experience a net force that can be used to levitate the objects in air. In a new study, researchers have experimentally demonstrated the acoustic levitation of a 50-mm (2-inch) solid polystyrene sphere using ultrasound—acoustic waves that are above the frequency of human hearing.

The demonstration is one of the first times that an object larger than the wavelength of the acoustic wave has been acoustically levitated. Previously, this has been achieved only for a few specific cases, such as wire-like and planar objects. In the new study, the levitated sphere is 3.6 times larger than the 14-mm acoustic wavelength used here.

Source: Researchers demonstrate acoustic levitation of a large sphere

New research suggests that it is possible to create a new form of light by binding light to a single electron, combining the properties of both.
[…]
by using theoretical physics to model the behaviour of light and a recently-discovered class of materials known as topological insulators, Imperial researchers have found that it could interact with just one electron on the surface.

This would create a coupling that merges some of the properties of the light and the electron. Normally, light travels in a straight line, but when bound to the electron it would instead follow its path, tracing the surface of the material.
[…]
Their models showed that as well as the light taking the property of the electron and circulating the particle, the electron would also take on some of the properties of the light.

Normally, as electrons are travelling along materials, such as electrical circuits, they will stop when faced with a defect. However, Dr Giannini’s team discovered that even if there were imperfections in the surface of the nanoparticle, the electron would still be able to travel onwards with the aid of the light.

If this could be adapted into photonic circuits, they would be more robust and less vulnerable to disruption and physical imperfections

Source: Scientists discover light could exist in a previously unknown form

The sheep are just four of 13 clones that Sinclair shepherds, but they’re the most famous because of their relation to Dolly, the sheep that made headlines two decades ago as the first successfully cloned mammal.

” ‘Sister clones’ probably best describes them,” Sinclair says. “They actually come from the exactly the same batch of cells that Dolly came from.”
[…]
Dolly’s life did not turn out as scientists in the cloning field hoped it would. She died young — 6 1/2 — with a nasty lung virus. “That was really just bad luck,” Sinclair says, and had “nothing to do” with the fact that Dolly was a clone.

But she also had osteoarthritis in her knees and rear hip at a surprisingly early age and the tips of her chromosomes were short — both signs that she’d aged more quickly than a normal sheep.

“That sort of threw fuel to the fire and strengthened concerns that clones might be aging prematurely,” says Sinclair. Because clones like Dolly were derived from the cell of an adult animal, the thinking went, her body might be set to an older clock from the start.
[…]
But, the good health of the 13 clones in the Nottingham herd suggest better prospects for the procedure. Sinclair and his colleagues evaluated the animals’ blood pressure, metabolism, heart function, muscles and joints, looking for signs of premature aging. They even fattened them up (since obesity is a risk factor for metabolic problems including diabetes) and gave them the standard tests to gauge how their bodies would handle glucose and insulin.

The results? Normal, normal, normal.

“There is nothing to suggest that these animals were anything other than perfectly normal,” says Sinclair. They had slight signs of arthritis (Debbie in particular), but not enough to cause problems. “If I put them in with a bunch of other sheep, you would never be able to identify them,” he says.

Source: ‘Sister Clones’ Of Dolly The Sheep Are Alive And Kicking

Scientists at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) have made an object disappear by using a composite material with nano-size particles that can enhance specific properties on the object’s surface.

Researchers from QMUL’s School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, worked with UK industry to demonstrate for the first time a practical cloaking device that allows curved surfaces to appear flat to electromagnetic waves.
[…]
“Previous research has shown this technique working at one frequency. However, we can demonstrate that it works at a greater range of frequencies making it more useful for other engineering applications, such as nano-antennas and the aerospace industry.”

Source: Scientists move one step closer to creating an invisibility cloak

Using a small quantum system consisting of three superconducting qubits, researchers at UC Santa Barbara and Google have uncovered a link between aspects of classical and quantum physics thought to be unrelated: classical chaos and quantum entanglement. Their findings suggest that it would be possible to use controllable quantum systems to investigate certain fundamental aspects of nature.

“It’s kind of surprising because chaos is this totally classical concept—there’s no idea of chaos in a quantum system,” Charles Neill, a researcher in the UCSB Department of Physics and lead author of a paper that appears in Nature Physics. “Similarly, there’s no concept of entanglement within classical systems. And yet it turns out that chaos and entanglement are really very strongly and clearly related.”
[…]
“There’s a very clear connection between entanglement and chaos in these two pictures,” said Neill. “And, it turns out that thermalization is the thing that connects chaos and entanglement. It turns out that they are actually the driving forces behind thermalization.

“What we realize is that in almost any quantum system, including on quantum computers, if you just let it evolve and you start to study what happens as a function of time, it’s going to thermalize,” added Neill, referring to the quantum-level equilibration. “And this really ties together the intuition between classical thermalization and chaos and how it occurs in quantum systems that entangle.”

Source: Researchers blur the line between classical and quantum physics by connecting chaos and entanglement

Dror and Hampikian gave the DNA evidence to 17 lab technicians for examination, withholding context about the case to ensure unbiased results. All of the techs were experienced, with an average of nine years in the field. Dror and Hampikian asked them to determine whether the mixture included DNA from the defendant. In 2011, the results of the experiment were made public: Only one of the 17 lab technicians concurred that the defendant could not be excluded as a contributor. Twelve told Dror and Hampikian that the DNA was exclusionary, and four said that it was inconclusive. In other words, had any one of those 16 scientists been responsible for the original DNA analysis, the rape trial could have played out in a radically different way. Toward the end of the study, Dror and Hampikian quote the early DNA-testing pioneer Peter Gill, who once noted, “If you show 10 colleagues a mixture, you will probably end up with 10 different answers” as to the identity of the contributor. (The study findings are now at the center of the defendant’s motion for a new trial.)

[…]

The case against Anderson started when police matched biological matter found under Kumra’s fingernails to Anderson’s DNA in a database. Anderson was held in jail for five months before his lawyer was able to produce records showing that Anderson had been in detox at a local hospital at the time of the killing; it turned out that the same paramedics who responded to the distress call from Kumra’s mansion had treated Anderson earlier that night, and inadvertently transferred his DNA to the crime scene via an oxygen-monitoring device placed on Kumra’s hand

[…]

DNA transfer—the migration of cells from person to person, and between people and objects—is inevitable when we touch, speak, do the laundry. A 1996 study showed that sperm cells from a single stain on one item of clothing made their way onto every other item of clothing in the washer. And because we all shed different amounts of cells, the strongest DNA profile on an object doesn’t always correspond to the person who most recently touched it. I could pick up a knife at 10 in the morning, but an analyst testing the handle that day might find a stronger and more complete DNA profile from my wife, who was using it four nights earlier. Or the analyst might find a profile of someone who never touched the knife at all. One recent study asked participants to shake hands with a partner for two minutes and then hold a knife; when the DNA on the knives was analyzed, the partner was identified as a contributor in 85 percent of cases, and in 20 percent as the main or sole contributor.

[…]

In 2011, Legal Aid requested a hearing to question whether the software met the Frye standard of acceptance by the larger scientific community. To Goldthwaite and her team, it seemed at least plausible that a relatively untested tool, especially in analyzing very small and degraded samples (the FST, like TrueAllele, is sometimes used to analyze low-copy-number evidence), could be turning up allele matches where there were none, or missing others that might have led technicians to an entirely different conclusion. And because the source code was kept secret, jurors couldn’t know the actual likelihood of a false match.

At the hearing, bolstered by a range of expert testimony, Goldthwaite and her colleagues argued that the FST, far from being established science, was an unknown quantity. (The medical examiner’s office refused to provide Legal Aid with the details of its code; in the end, the team was compelled to reverse-engineer the algorithm to show its flaws.)

[…]

In 2012, shortly after Legal Aid filed its challenge to the FST, two developers in the Netherlands, Hinda Haned and Jeroen de Jong, released LRmix Studio, free and open-source DNA-profiling software—the code is publicly available for other users to explore and improve.

Erin Murphy, of NYU, has argued that if probabilistic DNA typing is to be widely accepted by the legal community—and she believes that one day it should be—it will need to move in this direction: toward transparency.

An exclusive look at data from the controversial web site Sci-Hub reveals that the whole world, both poor and rich, is reading pirated research papers.

Source: Who’s downloading pirated papers? Everyone

It turns out to be two factors:
1. Polar ice is melting.
2. We are storing water in different places and moving it around the planet using piping.
These factors redistribute the weight of the water around the planet, making the poles wander around.

We analyze space geodetic and satellite gravimetric data for the period 2003–2015 to show that all of the main features of polar motion are explained by global-scale continent-ocean mass transport. The changes in terrestrial water storage (TWS) and global cryosphere together explain nearly the entire amplitude (83 ± 23%) and mean directional shift (within 5.9° ± 7.6°) of the observed motion. We also find that the TWS variability fully explains the decadal-like changes in polar motion

Source: Climate-driven polar motion: 2003–2015

So just what has got mathematicians spooked? Apart from 2 and 5, all prime numbers end in 1, 3, 7 or 9 – they have to, else they would be divisible by 2 or 5 – and each of the four endings is equally likely. But while searching through the primes, the pair noticed that primes ending in 1 were less likely to be followed by another prime ending in 1. That shouldn’t happen if the primes were truly random – consecutive primes shouldn’t care about their neighbour’s digits.

“In ignorance, we thought things would be roughly equal,” says Andrew Granville of the University of Montreal, Canada. “One certainly believed that in a question like this we had a very strong understanding of what was going on.”

The pair found that in the first hundred million primes, a prime ending in 1 is followed by another ending in 1 just 18.5 per cent of the time. If the primes were distributed randomly, you’d expect to see two 1s next to each other 25 per cent of the time. Primes ending in 3 and 7 take up the slack, each following a 1 in 30 per cent of primes, while a 9 follows a 1 in around 22 per cent of occurrences.

Similar patterns showed up for the other combinations of endings, all deviating from the expected random values. The pair also found them in other bases, where numbers are counted in units other than 10s. That means the patterns aren’t a result of our base-10 numbering system, but something inherent to the primes themselves. The patterns become more in line with randomness as you count higher – the pair have checked up to a few trillion – but still persists.

Source: Mathematicians shocked to find pattern in ‘random’ prime numbers | New Scientist

The CRAYFIS project is a novel approach to observing cosmic ray particles at the highest energies.It uses the world-wide array of existing smartphones instead of building an expensive dedicated detector.

Modern smartphones contain high-resolution cameras with digital sensors which are sensitive to the particles in a cosmic ray shower. They know where they are (GPS) and can upload their data (wi-fi). Most importantly, there are 1.5 billion active smartphones spread across the planet. Essentially, this detector has already been deployed; all that is missing is the app to collect the data

The CRAYFIS app operates in a manner similar to a screensaver. When the phone is connected to a power source and the screen goes to sleep, the app begins data-taking. No active participation is required on the part of the user after the initial download and installation.

Source: Crayfis: The app that turns your phone into a cosmic ray detector.

Wonder how much battery it eats?

Using a combination of ultrafast chemical fixation and cryogenic storage, it is the first demonstration that near­ perfect, long­-term structural preservation of an intact mammalian brain is achievable.

Source: The Brain Preservation Foundation – Small Mammal BPF Prize Winning Announcement

Renewal of cryogenics?