One of the foundations of the scientific method is the reproducibility of results. In a lab anywhere around the world, a researcher should be able to study the same subject as another scientist and reproduce the same data, or analyze the same data and notice the same patterns.

This is why the findings of a study published today in Current Biology are so concerning. When a group of researchers tried to email the authors of 516 biological studies published between 1991 and 2011 and ask for the raw data, they were dismayed to find that more 90 percent of the oldest data (from papers written more than 20 years ago) were inaccessible. In total, even including papers published as recently as 2011, they were only able to track down the data for 23 percent.

"Everybody kind of knows that if you ask a researcher for data from old studies, they'll hem and haw, because they don't know where it is," says Timothy Vines, a zoologist at the University of British Columbia, who led the effort. "But there really hadn't ever been systematic estimates of how quickly the data held by authors actually disappears."

The pattern in society today is clear to see. Whenever a storm hits a region and submerges terrain in water, or if a drought destroys crops, then the one to blame is quickly found: It has got to be man and his debaucherous CO2-spewing lifestyle that is bringing the climate into a state of catastrophic instability. In former times witches and sorcerers were made responsible for meteorological extremes, and they were burned at the town square so that future bad weather could be prevented. Like today, back then no one really cared about scientific arguments.

But here one only needs to look over the scientific literature in order to recognize that storms and weather extremes have always been the case and things really aren't any different today. Yet another new study has just come out, appearing in the November 2013 edition of the Quaternary Science Reviews, by a team of scientists led by Tina Swierczynski of the Geoforschungszentrum (GFZ) Potsdam. The scientists examined sediment deposits taken from the Austrian Mondsee and they were able to identify the development of flooding phases of rivers in the region caused by heavy rainfalls in the spring and summers. The geological archive goes back more than 7000 years.

Inside a nondescript office park in Silicon Valley, a robotic arm is running a test. With rapid, precise movements, the arm pipettes colored liquids into wells on a tray. Within a few minutes its work is done: the arm has pipetted the logo for Transcriptic, a fast-growing, Google Ventures-backed robotics startup that could upend the way biologists do their research.

Transcriptic's small team is calibrating the robot arm, which serves as the linchpin of the company's efforts to transform life-science research by making it cheaper and more accessible. Scientists send in raw materials - DNA, for example, or biopsied mouse tissue - and tell Transcriptic what to do with it. Costs for the service start at a few dollars per test, and the turnaround time is typically limited only by how long it takes for cells to divide.

The company began taking orders from all comers earlier this year, selling services including cell cloning, genotyping, and biobanking. Early customers include Stanford; the California Institute of Technology; the University of California, San Diego; and the University of Chicago. Since July, the number of customers has roughly doubled every month. The heart of Transcriptic is what it calls the "work cell," the automated lab where the robot arm performs its duties: manipulating samples using the various connected machines that run protocols.

The company had never previously allowed journalists inside its walls. But recently, Transcriptic invited The Verge to come look behind the curtain - the work cell is normally hidden behind an actual, physical curtain - to see how the company is using robotics to do work that has previously been the province of PhDs.

It is being called the perfect crime and it has law enforcement around the globe baffled.

It all starts with a simple email. "They are scared and they are angry. It is a real terrible experience for them." Joe Ruthaford is talking about computer users who mistakenly launched a potent internet phishing scheme. He recently saw one of those ravaged computers in his Beacon Hill repair shop.

"It is extremely damaging. It is one of the worst ones." It's called cryptolocker ransomware. Kevin Swindon is with the FBI in Boston. "I would think about this particular type of malware as what would happen if your computer was destroyed," Swindon said.

In the past 90 days, thousands of people worldwide have opened a seemingly innocuous link to track a holiday package. Suddenly, all the files on their computer are encrypted.

New South Wales professor in US rolled back the key indicators of aging to make two-year-old mice appear six months old

Australian and US researchers hope an anti-aging compound could be trialled on humans as early as next year, following a key breakthrough that saw the ageing process reversed in mice.

The study, involving Harvard University and the University of NSW, discovered a way of restoring the efficiency of cells, completely reversing the ageing process in muscles.

Two-year-old mice were given a compound over a week, moving back the key indicators of aging to that of a six-month-old mouse. Researchers said this was the equivalent of making a 60-year-old person feel like a 20-year-old.

It's hoped the research, published in Cell, will be expanded to humans as early as next year, with scientists set to look at how the theory of age reversal can be used to treat diseases such as cancer, dementia and diabetes.

What makes cells age? Wear and tear, yes. But biologically, says, Dr. David Sinclair, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, it's lack of oxygen that signals cells that it's their time to go. Without oxygen, the energy engines known as the mitochondria become less efficient at turning physiological fuel like glucose into the energy that the cells need to function. Eventually, they shut down.

But in a paper published in the journal Cell, Sinclair and his colleagues describe for the first time a compound naturally made by young cells that was able to revive older cells and make them energetic and youthful again. In an experiment in mice, the team found that giving older mice a chemical called NAD for just one week made 2-year-old-mice tissue resemble that of 6-month-old mice (in human years, that would be akin to a 60-year-old's cells becoming more like those belonging to a 20-year-old).

As mammals age, says Sinclair, levels of NAD drop by 50%; with less of the compound, the communication between the cell and its mitochondrial energy source also falters, and the cell becomes vulnerable to common aging assaults - inflammation, muscle wasting and slower metabolism. By tricking the cell into thinking it's young again, with adequate amounts of NAD, aging can theoretically be reversed. "When we give the molecule, the cells think oxygen levels are normal and everything revs back up again," Sinclair says.

Scientists are stretching the boundaries of understanding what happens as the body dies - and learning more about ways to perhaps interrupt the process, which takes longer than we might suppose.

Death is the final outcome for 100 percent of patients. But there's growing evidence that revival is possible for at least some patients whose hearts and lungs have stopped working for many minutes, even hours. And brain death - when the brain irreversibly ceases function -- is also proving less open and shut.

For decades, doctors have recorded cases where people immersed in very cold water have been revived after hours have gone by. Normally, brain cells start dying within a few minutes after the heart stops pumping oxygen.

Many studies have found that hypothermia protects the brain by decreasing its need for oxygen and staving off cell death. Body cooling has become common for many patients after cardiac arrest. However, cooling more a few degrees below normal temperature can also cause cell damage.

Tests at two wastewater treatment plants in northern China revealed antibiotic-resistant bacteria were not only escaping purification but also breeding and spreading their dangerous cargo. Joint research by scientists from Rice, Nankai and Tianjin universities found "superbugs" carrying New Delhi Metallo-beta-lactamase (NDM-1), a multidrug-resistant gene first identified in India in 2010, in wastewater disinfected by chlorination.

They found significant levels of NDM-1 in the effluent released to the environment and even higher levels in dewatered sludge applied to soils. The study, led by Rice University environmental engineer Pedro Alvarez, appeared this month in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters. "It's scary," Alvarez said.

In the midst of a winter cold snap, a study from researchers in the United States and Greece reveals an overlooked side effect of economic crisis -- dangerous air quality caused by burning cheaper fuel for warmth.

The researchers, led by Constantinos Sioutas of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, show that the concentration of fine air particles in one of Greece's economically hardest hit areas has risen 30 percent since the financial crisis began, leading to potential long-term health effects.

These fine particles -- measuring less than 2.5 microns in diameter (approximately 1/30th the diameter of a human hair) -- are especially dangerous because they can lodge deep into the tissue of lungs, according to the EPA.

"People need to stay warm, but face decreasing employment and rising fuel costs," explained Sioutas, senior author of the study in the journal Environmental Science & Technology and Fred Champion Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the USC Viterbi School. "The problem is economic hardship has compelled residents to burn low quality fuel, such as wood and waste materials, that pollutes the air."

New research published in the journal Nature resolves decades of scientific controversy over the origin of the extremely energetic particles known as ultra-relativistic electrons in the Earth's near-space environment and is likely to influence our understanding of planetary magnetospheres throughout the universe.

Discovering the processes that control the formation and ultimate loss of these electrons in the Van Allen radiation belts - the rings of highly charged particles that encircle the Earth at a range of about 1,000 to 50,000 kilometers above the planet's surface - is a primary science objective of the recently launched NASA Van Allen Probes mission. Understanding these mechanisms has important practical applications, because the enormous amounts of radiation trapped within the belts can pose a significant hazard to satellites and spacecraft, as well astronauts performing activities outside a craft.