Researchers at Tel Aviv University have given a rat an artificial brain part -- the cerebellum -- to restore lost functions and thereby ushering in the era of true brain-to-computer communication for humans.

Matti Mintz, professor of psychobiology, and his colleagues, built a computerized cerebellum and linked it to an anaesthetized rat whose own cerebellum was disabled. The cerebellum is the round, cue ball-sized structure at the back of a the brain that controls how messages get from the brain to the body and back again. Critically, it controls the timing of movement, which is why injuries to the cerebellum cause people to lose their balance or suffer motor control disorders, rather than paralysis.

Attaching the synthetic cerebellum to the rat, the scientists tried to condition it to blink at the sound of a tone. To get the rat to blink they first fired a puff of air at the rat when the tone sounded and then just sounded the tone. The experiment worked: the rat blinked when it heard the sound. When the synthetic cerebellum was disconnected, the rat could not learn the response.

In 2009, Japanese scientists journeyed to Antarctica to recover evidence of alterations to Earth's atmosphere caused in medieval times by supernovae recorded by scholars - including obscure Irish monasteries where monks later interpreted them signs of the Antichrist . No, this isn't the plot of the next Dan Brown novel (or a Dan Brow fanfiction written by an X-Files addict): this is real science.

Supernovae release terrific amounts of energy, as in "If one happened too close the planet would be sterilized" truly terror-inducing terrific. Some of this energy is fired off as gamma rays, which can travel thousands of light-years and still pack enough of a punch after to alter the atmosphere - which is exactly what happened in 1006 and again in 1054, when gamma rays blasted the upper atmosphere and created spikes in NO3 levels. There was also quite a lot of visible light, creating a star visible even during the day which was noted by various Chinese, Egyptian and even monastic records.

To access past records of the atmosphere, a team of Japanese scientists carefully extracted 122 meters of ice core from Antarctica. Even better, to locate events on such a stretch of frozen time you use known volcanic atmosphere-altering events as reference points - in other words, these guys use exploding mountains as a ruler.

New tweezers can reach smaller particles and keep their cool

Scientists have been working on ways for decades to trap tiny microscopic parts of a cell. Today, scientists are going even further with the ability to trap even smaller nanoscale particles using optical tweezers. The original optical tweezers used on microscopic particles had issues with overheating that made them impractical for use with smaller nanoscale particles.

Engineers at Harvard have been able to create a device that makes it easier to isolate nanoparticles like viruses and tiny individual cellular components. The optical tweezers use light from a laser to trap particles. The light is shined through a microscope and the new design prevents overheating that was common in older designs.

"We can get beyond the limitations of conventional optical tweezers, exerting a larger force on a nanoparticle for the same laser power," says principal investigator Ken Crozier, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

The next generation optical tweezers are being called plasmonic nanotweezer and have an integrated heatsink. The smaller the particles scientists are trying to trap, the more laser energy is needed. The problem was that the researchers found that the higher power laser would cause the water that the particles they wanted to trap were suspended in to boil. The boiling occurred even when the team used a heatsink made up of tiny gold discs submerged into the water.

The team found that replacing the sheet of glass with gold discs on it with a sheet of silicon coated in copper and gold with raised gold pillars they were able to dissipate the heat from the laser. That means the water didn't boil and the particles the scientists wanted to trap were reachable.

"The gold, copper, and silicon under the pillars act just like the heat sink attached to the chip in your PC, drawing the heat away," says lead author Kai Wang (Ph.D. '11), who completed the work at SEAS and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The team also found that they were able to rotate the trapped particles by simply rotating the linear polarizer on the optical table where the experiments were conducted. The electromagnetic field used in the experiments moved at 1014 rotations per second. However, the particle rotated at a velocity of about five rotations per second due to fluid drag. The team calls that phenomenon a terminal velocity.

Back in 2009, acoustic tweezers were being used to target parts of a living cell.

Genome sequencing study suggests that Aboriginal Australians are descended from early wave of modern humans who migrated out of Africa perhaps 62,000 - 75,000 years ago

Little did he know that giving a team of scientists a lock of his hair would provide answers to some profound questions about the origins of humankind in his native Australia. But that is exactly what happened when scientists sequenced his genome and found that he was descended from a very ancient wave of modern humanity out of Africa and eventually into Australia some 62,000 - 75,000 years ago.

He is an Aboriginal Australian. The results of the genetic tests showed that modern humans migrated into Eastern Asia in more than one wave and that he, along with all of his fellow Aboriginal Australians, could claim direct heritage with a very early wave, perhaps even the first wave. This meant that his population constituted one of the oldest continuous populations outside of Africa.

Scientists at the Penn State College of Medicine said this week they have discovered a virus that is capable of killing all grades of breast cancer "within seven days" of first introduction in a laboratory setting.

The virus, known as adeno-associated virus type 2 (AAV2), is naturally occurring and carried by up to 80 percent of humans, but it does not cause any disease.

Researchers learned of its cancer-killing properties in 2005, after Penn State scientists observed it killing cervical cancer cells. They also found that women who carried the AAV2 virus and human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes cervical cancer, had a lower propensity to develop cervical cancer.

When combined in a lab recently, AAV2 eradicated all the breast cancer cells "within seven days," according to researchers. Better still, it proved capable of wiping out cancer cells at multiple stages, negating the need for differing treatments used today.

Dutch artist Jalila Essaïdi and cell biologist Abdoelwaheb El Ghalbzouri have blended spider silk with human skin to produce material that is three times stronger than kevlar.

There is mounting archaeological evidence for the evolution of a human "super-brain" no later than 75,000 years ago that spurred a modern capacity for novelty and invention, according to John Hoffecher, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado.

While the concept of a human super-brain is analogous to social insects like bees and ants, which collectively behave as a super-organism by gathering, processing, and sharing information about their environment, there is one important difference, Hoffecker said. "Human societies are not super-organisms -- they are composed of people who are for the most part unrelated, and societies filled with competing individuals and families."

While crude stone tools crafted by human ancestors beginning about 2.5 million years ago likely were an indirect consequence of bipedalism (walking upright) -- which freed up the hands for new functions -- the first inklings of a developing super-brain likely began about 1.6 million years ago when early humans began crafting stone hand axes, thought by Hoffecker and others to be one of the first external representations of internal thought.

The emerging modern mind in Africa was marked by a three-fold increase in brain size over 3-million-year-old human ancestors like Lucy, thought by some to be the matriarch of modern humans. Humans were producing perforated shell ornaments, polished bone awls and simple geometric designs incised into lumps of red ochre by 75,000 years ago. "With the appearance of symbols and language -- and the consequent integration of brains into a super-brain -- the human mind seems to have taken off as a potentially unlimited creative force," Hoffecker said.

The circular patterns within the cosmic microwave background suggest that space and time did not come into being at the Big Bang but that our universe in fact continually cycles through a series of "aeons," according to University of Oxford theoretical physicist Roger Penrose, who says that data collected by NASA's WMAP satellite supports his idea of "conformal cyclic cosmology".

Penrose's finding runs directly counter to the widely accepted inflationary model of cosmology which states that the universe started from a point of infinite density known as the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago, expanded extremely rapidly for a fraction of a second and has continued to expand much more slowly ever since, during which time stars, planets and ultimately humans have emerged. That expansion is now believed to be accelerating due to a scientific X factor called dark energy and is expected to result in a cold, uniform, featureless universe.

Penrose, however, said Physics World, takes issue with the inflationary picture "and in particular believes it cannot account for the very low entropy state in which the universe was believed to have been born - an extremely high degree of order that made complex matter possible. He does not believe that space and time came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang but that the Big Bang was in fact just one in a series of many, with each big bang marking the start of a new "aeon" in the history of the universe."

The core concept in Penrose's theory is the idea that in the very distant future the universe will in one sense become very similar to how it was at the Big Bang. Penrose says that "at these points the shape, or geometry, of the universe was and will be very smooth, in contrast to its current very jagged form. This continuity of shape, he maintains, will allow a transition from the end of the current aeon, when the universe will have expanded to become infinitely large, to the start of the next, when it once again becomes infinitesimally small and explodes outwards from the next big bang. Crucially, he says, the entropy at this transition stage will be extremely low, because black holes, which destroy all information that they suck in, evaporate as the universe expands and in so doing remove entropy from the universe."

Some people who receive deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's disease behave impulsively, making quick, often bad, decisions. New research published in Nature Neuroscience explains why, and shows that under normal circumstances key parts of the brain collaborate to buy time for careful consideration of difficult decisions.

Take your time. Hold your horses. Sleep on it.

When people must decide between arguably equal choices, they need time to deliberate. In the case of people undergoing deep brain stimulation (DBS) for Parkinson's disease, that process sometimes doesn't kick in, leading to impulsive behavior. New research into why that happens has led scientists to a detailed explanation of how the brain devotes time to reflect on tough choices.

Michael Frank, professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences at Brown University, studied the impulsive behavior of Parkinson's patients when he was at the University of Arizona several years ago. His goal was to model the brain's decision-making mechanics. He had begun working with Parkinson's patients because DBS, a treatment that suppresses their tremor symptoms, delivers pulses of electrical current to the subthalamic nucleus (STN), a part of the brain that Frank hypothesized had an important role in decisions. Could the STN be what slams the brakes on impulses, giving the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) time to think?

"We didn't have any direct evidence of that," said Frank, who is affiliated with the Brown Institute for Brain Science. "To test that theory for how areas of the brain interact to prevent you from making impulsive decisions and how that could be changed by DBS, you have to do experiments where you record brain activity in both parts of the network that we think are involved. Then you also have to manipulate the system to see how the relationship between recorded activity in one area and decision making changes as a function of stimulating the other area."

Frank and his team at Brown and Arizona did exactly that. They describe their findings in a study published online in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Hundreds of pictures of Earth, each taken at about 06:00 local time, show the terminator - the day/night line - over the course of one year. The Earth is tilted with respect to its orbit, the so the angle of the sunrise line tilts first one way and then the other over time.

You can see Africa and Saudi Arabia to the upper right, and clouds frantically changing each day.

The images were taken with the METEOSAT-9 Earth-observing satellite.


Credit: NASA Earth Observatory