Cheerful or not

Nanosponges Soak Up Antibiotic-resistant Bacteria and Toxins || IEEE Spectrum

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, have developed a nanoparticle that mimics a human blood cell so that it can circulate through our bloodstream soaking up bacterial infections and toxins. These so-called ‘nanosponges’ are expected to be particularly effective in treating bacterial infections that have developed an immunity to antibiotic treatments—and also for treating venoms from snake bites.

The nanosponges are made up of a biocompatible polymer core and covered by an outer layer of red blood cell membrane. With a diameter of 85 nanometers, the nanosponges are 3000 times smaller than a human blood cell, so in a single infusion of nanosponges into the blood stream they would easily outnumber the red blood cells, and thus intercept most of the attacking toxins before they damaged the actual blood cells.

Intercontinental mind-meld unites two rats || Nature

The brains of two rats on different continents have been made to act in tandem. When the first, in Brazil, uses its whiskers to choose between two stimuli, an implant records its brain activity and signals to a similar device in the brain of a rat in the United States. The US rat then usually makes the same choice on the same task.

Miguel Nicolelis, a neuroscientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, says that this system allows one rat to use the senses of another, incorporating information from its far-away partner into its own representation of the world. “It’s not telepathy. It’s not the Borg,” he says. “But we created a new central nervous system made of two brains.”

Nicolelis says that the work, published today in Scientific Reports, is the first step towards constructing an organic computer that uses networks of linked animal brains to solve tasks. But other scientists who work on neural implants are skeptical.

Private Plan to Send Humans to Mars in 2018 Might Not Be So Crazy || Wired

An ambitious private manned mission to Mars aims to launch a two-person crew to fly around the Red Planet and return to Earth in 501 days, starting in January 2018.

This bold undertaking is planned by the Inspiration Mars Foundation, a non-profit company founded by millionaire and space tourist Dennis Tito that was officially unveiled on Feb. 27 after early details leaked. Though the spacecraft would not land humans on Mars or even put them in orbit, it would bring people within a few hundred kilometers of the Martian surface — roughly the same distance between the International Space Station and Earth — and represent a major milestone in human spaceflight. If successful, the mission would go down in history as the first time a private company accomplished something government agencies were unable to do in space.

The mission is extremely ambitious, well beyond anything previously accomplished by the private sector and it faces plenty of obstacles. The company has an aggressive schedule to keep if it wants to hit its 2018 mark and needs to make sure the necessary technology is developed and well-tested. Despite its deep-pocketed backer, the mission has nowhere near the funding it needs to launch and will require raising greater sums than have ever been done for a private space endeavor. Its designers also need to figure out exactly how to keep the crew healthy, both physically and psychologically, for the 501-day duration of the flight as they face dangers from radiation, bone and muscle loss, fatigue, and depression. Mission designers will have to ensure they can get the crew safely to the ground when the capsule returns to Earth at a screaming 30,000 mph.

Physicists Succeed in Making ‘Impossible’ Gamma-Ray Lens || Wired

Lenses are a part of everyday life—they help us focus words on a page, the light from stars, and the tiniest details of microorganisms. But making a lens for highly energetic light known as gamma rays had been thought impossible. Now, physicists have created such a lens, and they believe it will open up a new field of gamma-ray optics for medical imaging, detecting illicit nuclear material, and getting rid of nuclear waste….

The bending in his group’s experiment isn’t much—about a millionth of a degree, which corresponds to a refractive index of about 1.000000001. However, it could be boosted using lenses made of materials with larger nuclei such as gold, which should contain more virtual electron-positron pairs. With some refinement, gamma-ray lenses could be made to focus beams of a specific energy.

Such focused beams could detect radioactive bomb-making material, or radioactive tracers used in medical imaging. That’s because the beams would only scatter off certain radioisotopes, and stream past others unimpeded. The beams could even make new isotopes altogether, by “evaporating” off protons or neutrons from existing samples. That process could turn harmful nuclear waste into a harmless, nonradioactive byproduct.

Pentagon Scientists Use ‘Time Hole’ to Make Events Disappear || Danger Room @ Wired

A team at Cornell University, with support from Darpa, the Pentagon’s out-there research arm, managed to hide an event for 40 picoseconds (those are trillionths of seconds, if you’re counting). They’ve published their groundbreaking research in this week’s edition of the journal Nature.

This is the first time that scientists have succeeded in masking an event, though research teams have in recent years made remarkable strides in cloaking objects. Researchers at the University of Texas, Dallas, last year harnessed the mirage effect to make objects vanish. And in 2010, physicists at the University of St. Andrews made leaps towards using metamaterials to trick human eyes into not seeing what was right in front of them.

Masking an object entails bending light around that object. If the light doesn’t actually hit an object, then that object won’t be visible to the human eye.

Where events are concerned, concealment relies on changing the speed of light. Light that’s emitted from actions, as they happen, is what allows us to see those actions happen. Usually, that light comes in a constant flow. What Cornell researchers did, in simple terms, is tweak that ongoing flow of light — just for a mere iota of time — so that an event could transpire without being observable.

Pentagon Regrowing Soldiers’ Muscles From Pig Cells || Danger Room @ Wired

The tantalizing prospect of regrowing tissue using Badylak’s technique first made headlines in 2007, when he announced the successful regrowth of a small portion of fingertip using a concoction based on cells derived from a pig’s bladder. His approach with muscle tissue is similar: Surgeons start by implanting what’s called an extracellular matrix, a sort of “cellular glue,” whose key components are growth factor proteins from pig bladders. Those proteins trigger the body’s own stem cells to flock to the area and initiate the process of tissue growth and wound repair — which adult muscles normally wouldn’t do. Combined with an intensive rehab program to essentially “exercise” the nascent muscle, the body is able to restore not only basic muscle tissue, but the tendons and nerves that are necessary for function.

“The patient needs to do their part, and that involves a lot of work — we aren’t just putting a cast on the leg and waiting,” Badylak said. “But these soldiers coming in with 60, 70 percent muscle loss, they’ll do anything to get their lives back.”

Now, only four years after Badylak’s fingertip achievement suggested his technique could restore lost tissue, his team is celebrating a notable milestone: The first patient enrolled in their trial, a veteran who lost the majority of the anterior tibial muscle in his lower leg during an IED attack, has today graduated from the requisite six-month rehabilitation program that follows surgery. “He’s doing great,” Badylak says of the unnamed patient, who has yet to be identified.

Online gamers have managed to solve a decade-old scientific puzzle. In three weeks. || io9

In diseases like HIV, enzymes known as retroviral proteases play a key role in a virus’s ability to overwhelm the immune system and proliferate throughout the body. For years, scientists have been working to identify what these retroviral proteases look like, in order to develop drugs that target these enzymes and stymie the progression of deadly viral diseases like AIDS. Unfortunately, many of these researchers’ efforts have been met with little success.

Now, a group of online gamers has solved a scientific puzzle that managed to confound top-tier research scientists for over a decade…only the gamers pulled it off in just three weeks. Scientists can be such noobs….

Foldit is a computer game that presents players with the spatial challenge of determining the three-dimensional structures of proteins, the molecules comprising the workforce that runs your entire body.

Players are required to have minimal (if any) biological or biochemical experience to start playing the game, but their large-scale participation, competition, and cooperation (Foldit has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times) has been used to help scientists solve numerous long-standing protein-folding puzzles.

“We wanted to see if human intuition could succeed where automated methods had failed,” said University of Washington biochemist Firas Khatib[.]

Breaching Defense Contractor Data || Aviation Week

Then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s prediction in 2009 that China would have no stealth aircraft in 2020 and only a handful in 2025 had started to look optimistic—but was contradicted by U.S. Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Phillip Breedlove’s Senate testimony in July. China, he said, can close the technology gap faster than expected because of “the way they’re intruding into the nets of our manufacturers and our government.” Breedlove added: “When they say they’re going to build 300 [J-20s] in the next five years, they will build 300 in the next five years.”

China has made rapid progress in other areas….  These advances are emerging 5-6 years after cybersecurity professionals detected what came to be dubbed the advanced persistent threat, or APT—in other words, reducing the time taken from conceptual design of a military system to prototyping.

The APT was barely mentioned in public until last year. Even now, few people in industry or government call it what it is—a massive campaign of cybernetwork exploitation (CNE) originating in China.