What’s the News: A gene that makes bacteria resistant to up to 14 antibiotics has been discovered in bacteria in drinking water and street puddles in the Indian capital of New Delhi by a research team from the University of Cardiff in Wales. Scientists were already aware that microbes bearing this gene, which produces an enzyme called NDM-1, were infecting people in India, but it had been thought that such bacteria were mainly picked up in hospitals. This study shows that the gene, which is capable of jumping from species to species, is loose in the environment.
Researchers Find “Fattest Schrodinger Cats Realized to Date”
What’s the News: On a quest to discover at what size the kooky quantum physics that governs atoms (teleporting!) gives way to the ho-hum classical physics that governs humans (no teleporting), scientists have shown that if conditions are right, a molecule of a record 430 atoms can be in two states at once, like Schrödinger’s infamous cat. For the last three decades, researchers have been watching progressively larger objects under special conditions to see how big of an item they can catch showing quantum behavior. This molecule, which was created by a team at University of Vienna and their collaborators for the experiment, is the largest on record.
Contagious Chimp Yawns Seem to Point to Human-Like Empathy
What’s the News: Chimpanzees, like people, can “catch” yawns from others. But not all yawns are created equal, it seems; chimps are more likely to catch yawns from a chimp they know than from a stranger, a new study found. (You can see a video of it here.) This supports the idea that it’s empathy—rather than just everybody needing a nap—that makes yawns contagious.
Can You Patent a Shape? 3D Printing on Collision Course With Intellectual Property Law
A uPrint 3D printer in action
What’s the News: Earlier this year, designer Ulrich Schwanitz, a Dutch designer, made a real model of an “impossible” object—the Penrose triangle—using a 3D printer; he then started selling these models, through a company that printed them, for $70 apiece. When another designer figured out how to make a 3D blueprint for the shape, and put it up on Thingiverse, an open-source site for printable objects, Schwanitz lodged a copyright complaint against Thingiverse.
Although Schwanitz soon rescinded the complaint, it was the first instance where 3D printing ran smack up against copyright law. ars technica has an excellent piece looking at intellectual property issues that are likely to arise as 3D printing becomes better, cheaper, and more widespread, letting consumers create all kinds of stuff at home.
IBM Creates Nanoparticles That Burst Superbugs Like Popped Balloons
What’s the News: Scientists are using nanoparticles to develop ways to fight bacteria that are resistant to conventional antibiotics. These tiny drugs physically punch holes through bacteria instead of killing them chemically, which means that they could be especially effective on antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains like the dangerous methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). “The applications are going to be very diverse, whether we’re talking about wound healing or dressing, skin infection, and quite possibly injections into the bloodstream,” James Hedrick, master inventor at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, told Popular Science.
“Endosymbiotic” Algae Live Within the Cells of Salamanders
What’s the News: Spotted salamander embryos, a recent study found, have green algae living inside their cells. While scientists have long known that the two species are symbiotic, each helping the other to survive, the new findings show that the arrangement is, in the researchers’ words, “more intimate than previously reported.” In fact, it’s the first such organism-within-cell partnership—known as endosymbiosis—ever observed in vertebrates.
How the Heck:
“Sexy Math” Helps App Amp Up Car Services
What’s the News: Cool new apps come out every day, but not every app comes with its own car service. Starting in San Francisco, one company lets pedestrians hail a car using their iPhone or Android phone (or any old text-messaging clunker), providing a more expensive, yet faster alternative to cabs. To make this possible, computer scientists had to find a way to make driving routes as efficient as possible, which is actually quite complicated when you’re dealing with a city-ful of car-hailing people. As Uber CEO Travis Kalanick told Wired, “It’s really fun, sexy math.”
3 Creative Tools for Nuclear Cleanup: Algae, Rust, and Bacteria
In the future, nuclear clean-up workers may be getting help from some surprising sources. None of these three methods are in widespread use right now, but they show promise:
1) Algae
- Scientists have discovered that a type of algae can precipitate strontium into crystals. This could lead to better nuclear clean-up techniques, potentially sequestering radioactive strontium-90 from tainted water into crystalline form, which is easier to contain.
- The algae, called C. moniliferum, collects strontium in sulfate-rich vacuoles, and because strontium and barium have low solubility in sulfate solutions, they precipitate out of solution as crystals.
What’s the Context: The danger of strontium-90 is that it is chemically similar to calcium, and so can be taken up into milk, bones, and other tissues. Nuclear waste and spills can contain significant amounts of strontium; C. moniliferum is especially helpful because it can precipitate strontium but leave calcium alone (calcium is different enough from barium that the bacteria doesn’t crystallize it).
Not So Fast: Scientists don’t yet know how well the algae can withstand radioactivity, which could potentially put a damper on this clean-up method. Now, the scientists would like to find ways of increasing sulphate levels in the environment, which may in turn increase the ability of the algae to crystallize strontium.
Study: Nuclear Fission Reactions May Have Continued After Fukushima’s Alleged Shutdown
Reactor 3 at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, on March 24
What’s the News: A non-peer-reviewed study (pdf) publicized last week by radioactivity-detection expert Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress suggests that nuclear fission reactions continued at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power station well after the plant’s operators had allegedly shut down the reactors there. The paper says there may be what are called “localized criticalities” have occurred in the plutonium and uranium left in the reactors—little pockets of fuel that have gone critical, propagating the nuclear chain reaction and generating potentially harmful radiation. The existence of criticalities is controversial: some researchers say there are certainly none; Dalnoki-Veress himself says it’s only a possibility.
A History of Comet Collisions Inscribed in Saturn & Jupiter’s Rings
What’s the News: Looking at images of odd undulations in the rings of Saturn and Jupiter, astronomers have discovered that comets are to blame. The finding means that a planet’s rings act as a historical record of passing comets, possibly leading to a better understanding of comet populations. “We now know that collisions into the rings are very common—a few times per decade for Jupiter and a few times per century for Saturn,” Mark Showalter, from the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, told the Daily Mail. “Now scientists know that the rings record these impacts like grooves in a vinyl record, and we can play back their history later.”
Ingenious Geological Sleuthing Reveals the Shapes of Ancient Mountains
Fiordland National Park in New Zealand, the location of the study
What’s the News: Researchers have mapped out the detailed geological history of a 300-square-mile chunk of New Zealand, from 2.5 million years ago to the present day. The study showed how glaciers carved out the area’s distinctive valleys using a little-known technique called thermochronometry, which involves shooting proton beams onto rocks and making note of what happens—along with some impressive analytical skills.
Bats Worth Billions to Agriculture—But They’re Dying Fast
What’s the News: Bats are an economic boon worth approximately $23 billion per year, and possibly up to $54 billion, to U.S. agriculture, a study in today’s issue of Science estimates. Their voracious appetite for insects—a colony of 150 brown bats eats about 1.3 million pesky, crop-chomping bugs each year—means that bats function as effective, and free, natural pesticides.
Obama’s Energy Talk: New Ideas, or Same Old Song and Dance?
What’s the News: President Obama gave a major address outlining his plan for U.S. energy security yesterday. His major goal is quite ambitious: to cut American oil imports by one-third by 2025. And towards that goal, he listed a number of initiatives that many news organizations see as a rehashing of old ideas, however good they might be. According to The Economist, “it is hard to see his recycled list of proposals as anything more than a reassurance to the environmentally minded, and to Americans fretting about rising fuel prices, that the president feels their pain.”
From White Dwarfs to Dark Matter Clouds, the Universe May Have Many Homes for Habitable Planets
What’s the News: While the Kepler spacecraft is busy finding solar system-loads of new planets, other astronomers are expanding our idea where planets could potentially be found. One astronomer wants to look for habitable planets around white dwarfs, arguing that any water-bearing exoplanets orbiting these tiny, dim stars would be much easier to find than those around main-sequence stars like our Sun. Another team dispenses with stars altogether and speculates that dark matter explosions inside a planet could hypothetically make it warm enough to be habitable, even without a star. “This is a fascinating, and highly original idea,” MIT exoplanet expert Sara Seager told Wired, referring to the dark matter hypothesis. “Original ideas are becoming more and more rare in exoplanet theory.”
How the Heck:
- Because white dwarfs are much smaller than our Sun, an Earth-sized planet that crossed in front of it would block more of its light, which should make these planets easier to spot. So astronomer Eric Agol suggests survey the 20,000 white dwarfs closest to Earth with relatively meager 1-meter ground telescopes.
- And because white dwarfs are so cool, a planet in a white dwarfs habitable zone would be very close, meaning its transit would happen very fast. Agol says we’d only need to watch a star for 32 hours to pick up on any transiting, habitable planets.
- One leading theory about dark matter is that it’s made of theoretical particles called WIMPS (weakly interacting massive particles). It’s thought that when WIMPs collide (if, of course, they exist), they would explode. Astronomers think that these WIMP explosions could possibly heat a planet enough to make it habitable.
- There are no immediate plans to test the dark matter hypothesis, which is quite theoretical, and any plan to find dark matter-fueled planets would need to look far from here: our part of the universe doesn’t have nearly enough dark matter to bring a planet to habitability.
What’s the Context:
- In other white dwarf news, astronomers have discovered a red dwarf in an extremely tight orbit with a white dwarf.
- And others are still wrangling over what dark matter really is.
- As for exoplanets, astronomers have actually seen one—as in, with visible light—orbiting its star.
Not So Fast:
- It’s not at all clear if white dwarfs have any planets, and if so, whether any of them could possibly support water or life as we know it. For one thing, planets in the habitable zone would be tidally locked with the star—permanent scalding daylight on one side; permanent frozen nighttime on the other.
- Taking 32 hours to find a planet orbiting a white dwarf may seem like a short time, but when you’re looking at tens of thousands of stars, it adds up. Agol told UW Today, “This could take a huge amount of time, even with [a network of telescopes].”
- And just like star-orbiting planets have their Goldilocks zones (not to hot or too cold), dark matter-containing planets would need the right amount of dark matter to be habitable. “It’s not something that’s likely to produce a lot of habitable planets,” Fermilab researcher Dan Hooper told Wired. “But in very special places and in very special models, it could do the trick.”
References: Eric Agol. “TRANSIT SURVEYS FOR EARTHS IN THE HABITABLE ZONES OF WHITE DWARFS.” doi: 10.1088/2041-8205/731/2/L31
Dan Hooper and Jason H. Steffen. “Dark Matter And The Habitability of Planets.” arXiv:1103.5086v1
Image: NASA/European Space Agency
Carbon-Nanotube Cancer Detector Can Catch Even a Single Marauding, Malignant Cell
What’s the News: Scientists have developed a new carbon nanotube device (pictured above) that’s capable of detecting single cancer cells. Once implemented in hospitals, this microfluidic device could let doctors more efficiently detect the spread of cancer, especially in developing countries that don’t have the money for more sophisticated diagnostic equipment. Any improvement in detecting cancer’s spread is important, says MIT associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics Brian Wardle, because “of all deaths from cancer, 90 percent are … from tumors that spread from the original site.”
What’s the Context:
- The researchers’ original microfluidic device from four years ago featured tens of thousands of microscopic silicon posts coated with tumor-sticking antibodies: when cancer cells bumped into the posts, they’d stick. But if cancer cells didn’t bump into a silicon post, they’d go undetected. The group says their new version is eight times better.
- When cancer cells migrate, there are “usually only several [cancer] cells per 1-milliliter sample of blood” containing billions of other cells, making cancer exceedingly difficult to detect.
- This new dime-sized microfluidic machine works in the same way, but the solid silicon tubes were switched out for highly porous carbon nanotubes. This allows the blood to actually flow through the tubes instead of just around them, increasing the likelihood of catching a cancer cell.
- In other cancer detection news, some are using dogs to sniff out cancer and others use genetic tests to figure out cancer risks.
- Combating cancer ranges from new cancer-fighting drugs to just ignoring cancer (sometimes).
Not So Fast: The process of commercializing a technology like this takes quite a while; the previous version from four years ago is being tested in hospitals now and is may be commercially available “within the next few years.”
Next Up: The scientists are currently tweaking the device to try to catch HIV.
Reference: Grace D. Chen et al. “Nanoporous Elements in Microfluidics for Multiscale Manipulation of Bioparticles.” Small. DOI: 10.1002/smll.201002076
Image: Brian Wardle/MIT
