Reaching Out to Stars Beyond Our Galaxy

An international team of researchers in Japan is getting ready to power up a 50,000-ton neutrino detector by adding a single metal, which will turn it into the world's first detector capable of analyzing exploding stars beyond the immediate neighborhood of the Milky Way.

Neutrinos are relics from supernovae, or exploding stars. They are so tiny and interact so weakly that every second, trillions of them manage to pass through human bodies without anyone noticing. Studying them can reveal details about how stars in the universe, like our sun, work.

The problem is that all supernova neutrinos that have been detected to-date have come from the immediate vicinity of our galaxy. No one knows whether neutrinos from older galaxies far outside ours act the same way as neutrinos close to Earth, or whether there is a completely new class of tiny particles yet to be discovered.

Astronaut Kelly Touches Down After 1-Year Mission

After handing over the proverbial keys to the International Space Station (ISS) to fellow astronaut Tim Kopra, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, along with cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Sergey Volkov, returned to Earth aboard the Soyuz TMA-18M, touching down in Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan last night at 11:26 p.m. EST.

Kelly, who won R&D Magazine’s 2015 Scientist of the Year Award, returned to Earth after spending 340 days in space, surpassing the American record of 215 days, which was set by astronaut Michael López-Alegría between 2006 and 2007. The international record still stands at 438 days, set by cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov, who set the record aboard the Mir space station between 1994 and 1995.

Kelly has accumulated the most days spent in space by any U.S. astronaut with 520 days.

“Scott Kelly’s one-year mission aboard the ISS has helped to advance deep space exploration and America’s Journey to Mars,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden in a statement. “Scott has become the first American astronaut to spend a year in space, and in doing so, helped us take one giant leap toward putting boots on Mars.”

New Thoughts on the Rise of the Nubian Pharaohs

In a middle-class tomb just east of the Nile River in what was Upper Nubia, a woman offers a glimpse of how two met civilizations met, mingled and a new pharaonic dynasty arose. Her tomb was Egyptian, but she was buried in the Nubian style — placed in a flexed position on her side and resting on a bed. Around her neck she wore amulets of the Egyptian god Bes, the protector of households.

The Nubian woman is, according to Stuart Tyson Smith, a professor of archaeology and chair of the Department of Anthropology at UC Santa Barbara, a prime example of “cultural entanglement,” the process by which colonizing powers and indigenous people influence one another and change over time.

In a paper published in American Anthropologist, Michele Buzon of Purdue University and Smith explore cultural identity and transformation in the ancient village of Tombos in what is now northern Sudan. “Entanglement and the Formation of Ancient Nubian Napatan State” details the findings from Smith and Buzon’s excavations of cemeteries in Tombos, which became an important colonial hub after the Egyptians conquered Nubia around 1500 BCE.

“You get this really interesting entangled culture blending different elements in really different ways, but also there seems to be a lot of individual choice involved,” said Smith. “It’s not just a matter of the two cultures mash up and then you get this new hybrid thing that’s consistent. There seems to be a lot of individual choice — whether or not you want a Nubian bed and/or an Egyptian coffin and/or to be wrapped like a mummy or whether or not you want an Egyptian-style amulet and/or Nubian ivory jewelry.”

QX200 Droplet Digital PCR System Makes for Highly-Accurate Diagnostic Detection

Medical practitioners in Europe can use Bio-Rad’s CE-IVD marked QX200 Droplet Digital™ PCR (ddPCR™) System, IVD for highly-accurate diagnostic detection and quantification of nucleic acids, aiding clinical decision-making in the treatment of diseases ranging from cancer to transplant rejection and viral infection.

The system includes a QX200™ Droplet Generator, QX200™ Droplet Reader, and QuantaSoft™ software. The droplet generator and reader are CE-IVD marked for use in the European Union for in vitro diagnostics and are the only digital PCR instruments available for use in a clinical laboratory.

Molecular Architectures See The Light

Organic photovoltaics bear great potential for large-scale, cost-effective solar power generation. One challenge to be surmounted is the poor ordering of the thin layers on top of the electrodes. Utilizing self-assembly on atomically flat, transparent substrates, a team of scientists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has engineered ordered monolayers of molecular networks with photovoltaic responses. The findings open up intriguing possibilities for the bottom-up fabrication of optoelectronic devices with molecular precision.

Nature is unrivaled when it comes to the self-assembly of complex, high-performance molecular machinery for light absorption, exciton or charge separation and electron transfer. Molecular nanotechnologists have long dreamt of mimicking such extraordinary biomolecular architectures and rewiring them to produce inexpensive electricity.

Ruby Red Improves in Microwave Oven

Researchers from India's CSIR - Institute of Minerals and Materials Technology (IMMT) have tested a new way to improve the colour, clarity and lustre of rubies: microwaves. The study, conducted by Subhashree Swain, is published in Springer's journal Applied Physics A.

Rubies are among the world's most popular precious gemstones, and are also used in high power switches and sensors. Most natural rubies are not uniform in color, and sometimes blue patches can be seen in the red stone. This decreases the value of a stone.

Heat treatments count among the first methods to have been used to improve the colour saturation, clarity and trading value of gemstones. Treatments such as high energy, lasers, applying different chemicals or surface coatings and particle or electron beam irradiation are some of the other methods that have been used on rubies so far. The research team at IMMT is the first to add microwave heating to the possible methods of treating red gemstones. This technique has already been successfully used for materials such as ceramics, metals and composites.

Gene Identified that Helps Wound Healing

Researchers at Ohio State University have pinpointed a human gene product that helps to regulate wound healing and may control scarring in people recovering from severe injuries and damage to certain internal organs.

The protein, MG53, travels throughout the bloodstream and helps the body fix injuries to the skin, heart, lungs, kidneys and other organs without causing scars. It's a discovery that could help heal open wounds, decrease recovery time after surgery and reduce the spread of infections.

"A massive scar on your skin may look bad, but imagine you have a heart attack and get a scar on your heart--that could be lethal," said Jianjie Ma, a physiologist at Ohio State and co-author of the presentation.

All animals carry this gene, he said, and it's almost identical no matter which species. MG53 fixes the cell and tissue damage that occurs during everyday living. Even simple actions, like walking or typing, will cause injuries to the body. Usually this isn't a problem because MG53 can make repairs before there's any serious harm.

Infant Hand Prints in 'Cave of Beasts' May Belong to Lizards

In 2002, an Egyptian-Italian tourist group discovered a dazzling display of prehistoric art in the Libyan Desert. Between 6,000 and 8,000 painted and engraved images decorate the walls of Wadi Sura II, colloquially known as the “Cave of Beasts.” Anthropomorphic figures dancing and hunting, beasts roaming, and stenciled hands literally paint the story of a culture from up to 8,000 years ago. In some stencils, what look like small baby hands are placed within the outlines of larger hands.

Researchers, publishing in the Journal of Archaeological Science, are challenging the long-held assumption that the smaller hands belong to human infants.

Emmanuelle Honoré, of University of Cambridge’s McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, and colleagues performed a study comparing the morphology of the cave hands to babies born at term and pre-term.

Some Bacterial CRISPRs Can Snip RNA

You've probably seen news stories about the highly lauded, much-discussed genome editing system CRISPR/Cas9. But did you know the system was actually derived from bacteria, which use it to fight off foreign invaders such as viruses? It allows many bacteria to snip and store segments of DNA from an invading virus, which they can then use to "remember" and destroy DNA from similar invaders if they are encountered again. Recent work from a team of researchers including Carnegie's Devaki Bhaya demonstrates that some bacteria also use the CRISPR/Cas system to snip and recognize segments of RNA, not just DNA. It was published by Science.

A quick primer on CRISPR/Cas systems: A few decades ago, biologists noticed that many bacterial genomes contain small repeated segments of DNA that were interspersed with segments of "mystery" DNA. They christened them CRISPR for "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats." Years later they figured out that the unique segments of DNA often came from invading viruses. The bacteria's complex of Cas enzymes snips and incorporates virus DNA into these CRISPR regions. This arsenal of snipped segments of viral DNA helps the bacterium to recognize identical invading DNA, after which the Cas protein machinery moves in to destroy it. Very recently, scientists figured out that this system could be repurposed into precision-guided gene-editing tool that is faster, cheaper, and more accurate than any previous options.

Mammal March Madness Injects Fun into Science

It’s the ultimate showdown of athleticism. A tournament of champions that comes once a year. That’s right, it’s time for the fourth annual Mammal March Madness hosted by Arizona State Univ. (ASU).

What? Did you think we were talking about basketball?

Hosted on Prof. Katie Hinde’s blog, the event last year attracted around 180,000 people to her site.

“A lot of laypeople think of science as dry and dusty and memorization of a lot of facts,” said Hinde, of the university’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change and the Center for Evolution and Medicine, to ASU Now. “What it really is is one of the most creative things you can do. You have to think and imagine things about the world in order to design the studies we do. This is an opportunity for us to celebrate the imagination of science.”