Will the Olympics as we know it survive genetic engineering?

That seems to be the question behind a new opinion piece in this week's journal Nature. As scientists uncover the genes that help people become world-class sprinters or record-breaking skiers, the idea that medals are won with just hard work, sweat and tears begins to feel outdated, according to the authors.

"When you start sequencing [the genes] of lots and lots of human beings, what we're going to find out is that we're more different than people had realized," said Steve Gullans, a managing director of Excel Venture Management in Boston, who co-wrote the piece with his colleague Juan Enriquez.

Already, Gullans said, DNA tests have shown that some Olympic athletes have distinct advantages. Finnish cross-country skier and seven-time Olympic medalist Eero Mäntyranta, for example, carried a mutation in his EPOR gene that meant he produced up to 25 percent more red blood cells than the norm. That mutation gave Mäntyranta an edge because his blood carried more oxygen than the blood of people without the mutation, Gullans told LiveScience. And that raises the question of whether "gene doping," or gene therapy to improve performance, should be banned.

"If someone else is carrying the EPOR receptor that I don't have, why shouldn't I be able to give it to myself to play on an equal playing field?" Gullans said.

When we were children, my father used to march us to the cliffs above Bournemouth beach and instruct us to fill our lungs with good sea air.

At the time, it seemed a bit of a palaver. But I'm pleased to say science has vindicated my dad's habit.

This week, researchers at the University of Exeter released the results of a study that proves the sea is good for you. All those 'Skegness is SO bracing' posters? They were right after all.

The study found that people living by the sea enjoy higher than average rates of good physical health and that they also suffer much less stress than those living inland.

Dolphins may use complex nonlinear mathematics when hunting, according to a new study that suggests these brainy marine mammals could be far more skilled at math than was ever thought possible before.

Inspiration for the new study, published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society A, came after lead author Tim Leighton watched an episode of the Discovery Channel's "Blue Planet" series and saw dolphins blowing multiple tiny bubbles around prey as they hunted.

"I immediately got hooked, because I knew that no man-made sonar would be able to operate in such bubble water," explained Leighton, a professor of ultrasonics and underwater acoustics at the University of Southampton, where he is also an associate dean.

"These dolphins were either 'blinding' their most spectacular sensory apparatus when hunting -- which would be odd, though they still have sight to reply on -- or they have a sonar that can do what human sonar cannot...Perhaps they have something amazing," he added.

Leighton and colleagues Paul White and student Gim Hwa Chua set out to determine what the amazing ability might be. They started by modeling the types of echolocation pulses that dolphins emit. The researchers processed them using nonlinear mathematics instead of the standard way of processing sonar returns. The technique worked, and could explain how dolphins achieve hunting success with bubbles.

The math involved is complex. Essentially it relies upon sending out pulses that vary in amplitude. The first may have a value of 1 while the second is 1/3 that amplitude.

"So, provided the dolphin remembers what the ratios of the two pulses were, and can multiply the second echo by that and add the echoes together, it can make the fish 'visible' to its sonar," Leighton told Discovery News. "This is detection enhancement."

But that's not all. There must be a second stage to the hunt.

During the most dream-filled phase of sleep, our muscles become paralyzed, preventing the body from acting out what's going on in the brain. Now, researchers have discovered the brain chemicals that keep the body still in sleep.

The findings could be helpful for treating sleep disorders, the scientists report Wednesday (July 18) in The Journal of Neuroscience.

The brain chemicals kick into action during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, a phase that usually begins about 90 minutes into a night's rest. During REM, the brain is very active, and dreams are at their most intense. But the voluntary muscles of the body - arms, legs, fingers, anything that is under conscious control - are paralyzed.

This paralysis keeps people still even as their brains are acting out fantastical scenarios; it's also the reason people sometimes experience sleep paralysis, or the experience of waking up while the muscles are still frozen. This sensation has been the basis for myths such as the succubus and the incubus, demons said to pin people down in their sleep, usually to have sex with them.

Experiment in New Mexico will try to establish the possibility of cooling the planet by dispersing sulphate aerosols

Two Harvard engineers are to spray sun-reflecting chemical particles into the atmosphere to artificially cool the planet, using a balloon flying 80,000 feet over Fort Sumner, New Mexico.

The field experiment in solar geoengineering aims to ultimately create a technology to replicate the observed effects of volcanoes that spew sulphates into the stratosphere, using sulphate aerosols to bounce sunlight back to space and decrease the temperature of the Earth.

David Keith, one of the investigators, has argued that solar geoengineering could be an inexpensive method to slow down global warming, but other scientists warn that it could have unpredictable, disastrous consequences for the Earth's weather systems and food supplies. Environmental groups fear that the push to make geoengineering a "plan B" for climate change will undermine efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

Keith, who manages a multimillion dollar geoengineering research fund provided by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, previously commissioned a study by a US aerospace company that made the case for the feasibility of large-scale deployment of solar geoengineering technologies.

The solution to a long-standing puzzle, why magnetic north sits off the coast of Canada, rather than at the North Pole, may have been found in the strange, lopsided nature of Earth's inner core.

The inner core is a ball of solid iron about 760 miles (1,220 kilometers) wide. It is surrounded by a liquid outer core (mostly iron and nickel), a rocky, viscous mantle layer and a thin, solid crust.

As the inner core cools, crystallizing iron releases impurities, sending lighter molten material into the liquid outer core. This upwelling, combined with the Earth's rotation, drives convection, forcing the molten metal into whirling vortices. These vortices stretch and twist magnetic field lines, creating Earth's magnetic field. Currently, the center of the field, called an axis, emerges in the Arctic Ocean west of Ellesmere Island, about 300 miles (500 kilometers) from the geographic North Pole.

In the last decade, seismic waves from earthquakes revealed the inner core looks like a navel orange, bulging slightly more on its western half. Geoscientists recently explainedthe asymmetry by proposing a convective loop: The inner core might be crystallizing on one half and melting on the other.

Peter Olson and Renaud Deguen, geophysicists at Johns Hopkins University, set out to test this theory, called translational instability. They ran numerical models simulating the forces that generate Earth's magnetic field, and included a lopsided inner core.

A camera that can see through skin and even frosted glass has been revealed. The scientists behind the breakthrough say their research could even lead to cameras with the ability to see around corners. The Israel team have found a novel trick to make their camera work. Reported in Nature Photonics, it uses natural light rather than lasers.

The technique uses what is called a spatial light modulator to 'undo' the scattering that makes objects opaque or non-reflecting.

'If you want to look to see an embryo developing inside an egg but the eggshell scatters everything, or you want to look through the skin, scattering is the main enemy there, and time-of-flight is not a good solution,' said Professor Yaron Silberberg of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, who led the research.

Planetary Resources, Inc., the asteroid mining company, has announced an agreement with Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic's "LauncherOne" (above) to provide launch capability for the Arkyd series of robotic low-Earth orbit (LEO) space telescopes for the exploration and commercial development of Near-Earth Asteroids. LauncherOne uses the WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft to launch an orbital booster which delivers about 225 Kg to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). That's enough payload to launch about 8 Arkyd-100 satellites.

"While the Arkyd spacecraft line itself radically reduces the traditional cost of exploring the NEAs, the less expensive the cost to launch an Arkyd spacecraft to LEO, the more spacecraft the company will launch. The more spacecraft that the company launches, the faster it will create a future where access to asteroid resources results in a vast network of propellant depots throughout space and a future where once precious and rare materials are abundant for all. This will enable humanity's prosperity to continue for centuries to come," said Eric Anderson, Co-Founder & Co-Chairman of Planetary Resources, Inc.

Fifteen years of work by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility (NIF) team paid off on July 5 with a historic record-breaking laser shot. The NIF laser system of 192 beams delivered more than 500 trillion watts (terawatts or TW) of peak power and 1.85 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet laser light to its target. Five hundred terawatts is 1,000 times more power than the United States uses at any instant in time, and 1.85 megajoules of energy is about 100 times what any other laser regularly produces today.

The shot validated NIF's most challenging laser performance specifications set in the late 1990s when scientists were planning the world's most energetic laser facility. Combining extreme levels of energy and peak power on a target in the NIF is a critical requirement for achieving one of physics' grand challenges -- igniting hydrogen fusion fuel in the laboratory and producing more energy than that supplied to the target.

System is designed to be less-intrusive then full-autopilot

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed a system called "intelligent co-pilot". Rather than aiming for fully autonomous artificial intelligence-driven driving, à la Google Inc.'s (GOOG) self-driving car project, the new MIT study focuses on a "semi-autonomous" system.

Hunting for Safety

According to Sterling Anderson, a PhD student in MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering, most current commercially implemented algorithms hunt for static clues in their environment, such as the curb.

This isn't how the human driver functions. Comments Mr. Anderson, "The problem is, humans don't think that way. When you and I drive, [we don't] choose just one path and obsessively follow it. Typically you and I see a lane or a parking lot, and we say, 'Here is the field of safe travel, here's the entire region of the roadway I can use, and I'm not going to worry about remaining on a specific line, as long as I'm safely on the roadway and I avoid collisions."