Shocked to learn a braille printer can cost $2,000, preventing many blind kids and adults from being able to read braille, one 12-year-old boy used Legos to create a cost-effective option.

When Shubham Banerjee's mother vetoed his initial science fair project idea — an experiment involving colored lights and plant growth — saying he could do better, the then 12-year-old was forced to get creative.

Scientists are claiming "extraordinary" success with engineering immune cells to target a specific type of blood cancer in their first clinical trials.

Among several dozen patients who would typically have only had months to live, early experimental trials that used the immune system's T-cells to target cancers had "extraordinary results".

In one study, 94% of participants with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) saw symptoms vanish completely. Patients with other blood cancers had response rates greater than 80%, and more than half experienced complete remission.

Speaking at the annual meeting for the American Association for the Advancement for Science (AAAS), researcher Stanley Riddell said: "This is unprecedented in medicine, to be honest, to get response rates in this range in these very advanced patients."

To administer the T-cell therapy, doctors remove immune cells from patients, tagging them with "receptor" molecules that target a specific cancer, as other T-cells target the flu or infections. They then infuse the cells back in the body.

"There are reasons to be optimistic, there are reasons to be pessimistic," said Riddell, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Washington state. He added that the researchers believe that lowering the dose of T-cells can reduce the risk of side-effects.

"These are in patients that have failed everything. Most of the patients in our trial would be projected to have two to five months to live."

Even more hopeful was researcher Chiara Bonini, who said she has not seen remission rates like those of recent trials in over 15 years. "This is really a revolution," she said.

Scientists have used 3D-printing technology to create first-of-their-kind structures made of living tissue. The bioprinter breakthrough has shown promise with cartilage, bone and muscle, opening the prospect of creating replacement human body parts.

Researchers using a bioprinter, described Monday in Nature Biotechnology, say that they've found a way to manufacture living muscle, bone and cartilage. They say that this technology can make unprecedented advances in the healing of battlefield injuries by using a combination of living cells and a plastic-like material.

While printed tissue has been accomplished before, scientists have not figured out a way to nourish the tissues by allowing blood vessels to colonize them after they are transplanted.

"Cells simply cannot survive without a blood vessel supply that's smaller than 200 microns [0.07 inches], which is extremely small," Atala told Gizmodo. "That's the maximum distance. And that's not just for printing, that's nature."

On a quiet morning on Feb. 15, 2013, a meteor entered the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of 40,000 miles per hour (11 miles per second), exploding over Chelyabinsk, Russia with a reported force of 30 atomic bombs. In fact, the shockwave was allegedly so intense that people reported damage up to 75 miles away from the meteor's explosion, which occurred about nine miles above sea level.

Hundreds of studies have been written since then, but scientists are still trying to figure out where it came from, and how it went undetected. It's not like the rock itself was particularly big—about 65 feet—but it continues to leave a mark. Upon its atmospheric entry, the explosion generated a superbolide that scientists say was brighter than the sun; some eyewitnesses at the time reported feeling an intense heat from the fireball.

It must have truly felt like the end of the world.

About 1,500 people were injured due to broken glass and other debris, though no deaths were reported. Although scientists have an idea of where the Chelyabinsk meteor came from, they're still not 100 percent sure. To that end, researchers also aren't sure if it's part of a larger threat. Following the event in 2013, one researcher said, "If humanity does not want to go the way of the dinosaurs, we need to study an event like this in detail."

The bad news is rocks the size of the Chelyabinsk meteor are undetectable from Earth, which means a similar event could happen at any time.

"Another body of this size could hit Earth without warning in the future," said Jiri Borovicka, as astronomer at the Academy of Science of the Czech Republic.

Source: Agenciasinc

Two scientific conferences have heard evidence that at least two Australian birds have learned to use fire, picking up smoldering sticks and dropping them in unburnt territory. The behavior has not been photographed, but numerous sightings have been reported, and is woven into the culture of local Indigenous communities.

Astonishingly, it is only a few decades since textbooks confidently proclaimed that humans were the only tool-making species. In 1960, Jane Goodall's ground-breaking reports of tool use amongst chimpanzees overthrew this theory, and today tool use is studied from dolphins to parrots, with crows revealing a sophistication that outshines many humans.

Fire propagation, however, is considered a bright line marking humans apart from animals. Except that is, by the fourteen rangers interviewed by Bob Gosford, and many Australian Aboriginal people in north-central Australia, who say birds use it too.

Biologists say they have solved the riddle of how a tiny bacterium senses light and moves towards it: the entire organism acts like an eyeball.

In a single-celled pond slime, they observed how incoming rays are bent by the bug's spherical surface and focused in a spot on the far side of the cell.

By shuffling along in the opposite direction to that bright spot, the microbe then moves towards the light.

Other scientists were surprised and impressed by this "elegant" discovery.

Despite being just three micrometres (0.003mm) in diameter, the bacteria in the study use the same physical principles as the eye of a camera or a human.

What makes some words easier to learn than others? Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Radboud University taught Japanese words to Dutch students and found that ideophones — words that sound like what they mean — are easier to learn than regular words. This suggests that some of our associations between sound and meaning may be universal.

Often, the sound of a word doesn't say much about its meaning: none of the individual sounds in dog mean anything about having four legs or enjoying being scratched behind the ears. This is why a domesticated canine can be referred to as dog in English, hond in Dutch, and inu in Japanese — and why it takes hard work to learn any language.

But not all words are like that. Many languages have words which use the sounds of language in a vivid way to show what the word means: ideophones like kibikibi 'energetic' or bukubuku 'fat'.

Some 53 million years ago, a six-foot, flightless bird roamed a swampy land that is now the frozen Arctic. Researchers confirmed the prehistoric birds presences in the wintry land after re-examining a toe bone found on Ellesmere Island.

Discovered in the 1970s, this is the first evidence suggesting this species exists above the Arctic Circle. The fossil is a match with the toe bones discovered in Wyoming along side other remnants belonging to the prehistoric bird, Gastornis, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and the University of Colorado Boulder. The exotic bird is believed to have weighed several hundred pounds with a head the size of a horse's.

'The Gastornis material reported from Ellesmere Island is the northernmost record of that taxon in North America,' reads the study published in journal Nature. 'Some galloanserine birds today (such as Ruffed Grouse, Spruce Grouse, Sharp-tailed Grouse, Willow Ptarmigan, and Rock Ptarmigan) are Arctic residents, and even some waterfowl winter above the Arctic Circle.'

The federal government spent $1 million to create an online database that will collect "suspicious" memes and track "misinformation." The project, which is known as the "Truthy Database" is being funded by The National Science Foundation, but it seems as if the operation has some powerful political motivations.

Ironically enough, the project takes its name from a term that was popularized by television personality, Stephen Colbert.

The project will seek to understand how misinformation is spread online, but it will be up to a team of government-funded researchers at Indiana University to decide what type of political speech is true and which is false.

According to the grant for the project, the operation will be open source and the database will be open to the public.

The tale of how one researcher has made nearly every scientific paper ever published available for free to anyone, anywhere in the world.

On the evening of November 9th, 1989, the Cold War came to a dramatic end with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Four years ago another wall began to crumble, a wall that arguably has as much impact on the world as the wall that divided East and West Germany. The wall in question is the network of paywalls that cuts off tens of thousands of students and researchers around the world, at institutions that can't afford expensive journal subscriptions, from accessing scientific research.

On September 5th, 2011, Alexandra Elbakyan, a researcher from Kazakhstan, created Sci-Hub, a website that bypasses journal paywalls, illegally providing access to nearly every scientific paper ever published immediately to anyone who wants it. The website works in two stages, firstly by attempting to download a copy from the LibGen database of pirated content, which opened its doors to academic papers in 2012 and now contains over 48 million scientific papers. The ingenious part of the system is that if LibGen does not already have a copy of the paper, Sci-hub bypasses the journal paywall in real time by using access keys donated by academics lucky enough to study at institutions with an adequate range of subscriptions. This allows Sci-Hub to route the user straight to the paper through publishers such as JSTOR, Springer, Sage, and Elsevier. After delivering the paper to the user within seconds, Sci-Hub donates a copy of the paper to LibGen for good measure, where it will be stored forever, accessible by everyone and anyone.

This was a game changer. Before September 2011, there was no way for people to freely access paywalled research en masse; researchers like Elbakyan were out in the cold. Sci-Hub is the first website to offer this service and now makes the process as simple as the click of a single button.

As the number of papers in the LibGen database expands, the frequency with which Sci-Hub has to dip into publishers' repositories falls and consequently the risk of Sci-Hub triggering its alarm bells becomes ever smaller. Elbakyan explains, "We have already downloaded most paywalled articles to the library ... we have almost everything!" This may well be no exaggeration. Elsevier, one of the most prolific and controversial scientific publishers in the world, recently alleged in court that Sci-Hub is currently harvesting Elsevier content at a rate of thousands of papers per day. Elbakyan puts the number of papers downloaded from various publishers through Sci-Hub in the range of hundreds of thousands per day, delivered to a running total of over 19 million visitors.