Normally a material can be either magnetically or electrically polarized, but not both. Now researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen have studied a material that is simultaneously magnetically and electrically polarizable. This opens up new possibilities, for example, for sensors in technology of the future. The results have been published in the scientific journal, Nature Materials.

Materials that can be both magnetically and electrically polarized and also have additional properties are called multiferroics and were previously discovered by Russian researchers in the 1960s. But the technology to examine the materials did not exist at that time. It is only now, in recent years, that researchers have once again focused on analyzing the properties of such materials. Now you have research facilities that can analyze the materials down to the atomic level.

Surprising test results

"We have studied the rare, naturally occurring iron compound, TbFeO3, using powerful neutron radiation in a magnetic field. The temperature was cooled down to near absolute zero, minus 271 C. We were able to identify that the atoms in the material are arranged in a congruent lattice structure consisting of rows of the heavy metal terbium separated by iron and oxygen atoms. Such lattices are well known, but their magnetic domains are new. Normally, the magnetic domains lie a bit helter-skelter, but here we observed that they lay straight as an arrow with the same distance between them. We were completely stunned when we saw it," explains Kim Lefmann, Associate Professor at the Nano-Science Center, University of Copenhagen.

Researchers have identified a protein that's essential for the regrowth of nerves responsible for movement and sensation in injured limbs. They hope the finding might some day make it possible to repair crippling damage to other parts of the central nervous system.

Scientists have long known that severed nerves in the arms and legs have the ability to regenerate after they have been been surgically reattached. But until now, the mechanisms underlying that regrowth have been poorly understood.

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, discovered that a protein, called dual-leucine zipper kinase (DLK), plays a key role in repairing the long, thin nerve fibers, or axons, that extend several meters from the nerve cell body within the spinal cord to so-called peripheral nerves in the limbs.

Developmental biology professor Aaron DiAntonio, who studies how the nervous system responds to injury, says that when a peripheral nerve is damaged, DLK signals the nucleus of its nerve cell - the nerve's "brain" in effect, at the other end of the axon in the spinal cord - to turn on its regeneration program.

Doctors at a Florida hospital announced this week that they had successfully removed an extremely rare tumor from the mouth of a 17-week-old fetus.

According to BBC News reports published Friday, surgeons at the Jackson Memorial Hospital revealed that they removed an oral teratoma from Leyna Gonzalez while she was still in her mother Tammy's womb five months prior to her October 2010 birth.

The doctors added that the teratoma was so rare that it had only been seen once in 20 years at the medical facility. They used a local anesthetic, pushed through the protective amniotic sac around the fetus, and then used a laser to cut the tumor from the child's lips, the British news organization added.

The entire operation took slightly more than an hour to complete.

"They are her saviors. She wouldn't be here without them," 39-year-old Tammy Gonzalez said, according to Richard Luscombe of the Guardian. "You can imagine what goes through your head. 'What is this?' Nobody could really give me an answer because it's so rare."

"If she was ultimately delivered alive, there was no guarantee that she would be normal, she'd have a tracheotomy, numerous surgeries, she'd have deformities," she added. "I thought: 'There has to be a way to save her.' We started doing research, a lot of heartache and emotional distress. I asked my gynecologist if there's another way, if somebody could do surgery on her while she's inside."

Long a staple of science fiction, the notion of autonomous robots that can kill is starting to take root in the U.S. military. It'll only be a matter of time before these "thinking" machines are unleashed on the battlefield - a prospect that's not sitting well with people both inside and outside of the Pentagon.

Is it really ethical to develop and deploy these terrible creations? And what, if anything, can we do to prevent it?

One person who believes that this is an issue that needs to be addressed immediately is Wendell Wallach, a scholar and consultant at Yale's Interdisciplinary Centre for Bioethics and coauthor of Moral Machines: Teaching Right From Wrong. io9 recently spoke with Wallach to get a better understanding of this issue, and to find out why he feels that autonomous killing machines should be declared illegal.

But first, it's worth doing a quick overview to get a sense of just how close the U.S. military is to deploying such weapons.

In nascent form

Autonomous killing machines aren't anything new. We already have various levels of autonomy in a number of weapons systems, including cruise and patriot missiles. The Aegis Combat System, which is found aboard naval ships, has an autonomous mode in which it uses powerful computers and radars to track and guide weapons to destroy enemy targets.

But these are largely defensive systems with limited intelligence. They typically find their way to a target, or take certain action without human oversight - but only after being launched or triggered by a human.

As time passes, however, these systems are getting more sophisticated, and their potential for increased autonomy is growing. Take Samsung Techwin's remote-operated sentry bot, for example, that works in tandem with cameras and radar systems. Working in the Korean DMZ, the device can detect intruders with heat and motion sensors and confront them with audio and video communications. They can also fire on their targets with machine guns and grenade launchers. As of right now, the robots cannot automatically fire on targets, requiring human permission to attack. But a simple change to engagement policy could override all that.

For nearly 35 years, NASA's Voyager 1 probe has been hurtling toward the edge of the solar system, flying through the dark void on a mission unlike anything attempted before. One day, mission controllers hope, Voyager 1 will leave the solar system behind and enter the realm of the stars - interstellar space.

That day may be upon us.

"The latest data from Voyager 1 indicate that we are clearly in a new region where things are changing quickly," says Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. This is very exciting. We are approaching the solar system's final frontier."


The "frontier" he's referring to is the edge of the heliosphere, a great magnetic bubble that surrounds the sun and planets. The heliosphere is the sun's own magnetic field inflated to gargantuan proportions by the solar wind. Inside lies the solar system - "home." Outside lies interstellar space, where no spacecraft has gone before.

A telltale sign of the frontier's approach is the number of cosmic rays hitting Voyager 1. Cosmic rays are high energy particles such as protons and helium nuclei accelerated to near-light speed by distant supernovas and black holes. The heliosphere protects the solar system from these subatomic bullets, deflecting and slowing many of them before they can reach the inner planets.

As Voyager approaches the frontier, the number of cosmic rays has gone up.

Discovery Date: June 10, 2012

Magnitude: 18.5 mag

Discoverer: Lincoln Laboratory Near-Earth Asteroid Research project

The orbital elements are published on M.P.E.C. 2012-L43.

An asteroid that recently passed by Earth is about twice as large as originally estimated, and it would have had serious global consequences if it had impacted Earth. Asteroid 2012 LZ1 was only discovered on June 10, 2012 by Rob McNaught at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia. This Near Earth Object was thought to be fairly large, 502 meters (1,650 feet) wide, and quite bright. But astronomers using the planetary radar system at Arecibo Observatory were able to better determine the asteroid's size, rotation rate and shape and found it to be about 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) wide and actually quite dark.

Scientists consider a kilometer-wide asteroid is at the size threshold that could set off an extinction-level event if it were to hit Earth.

"This object turned out to be quite a bit bigger than we expected, said Dr. Ellen Howell from Arecibo, "which shows how important radar observations can be, because we're still learning a lot about the population of asteroids."

2012 LZ1 sneaked by our planet at about 5.3 million km (3.35 million) miles away, or about 14 times the distance between Earth and the Moon on June 14, and it won't be back in Earth's vicinity again until June 12th, 2053, and then will be about 3 times as distant.

The Arecibo astronomers have determined it won't be a threat to Earth for at least 750 years.

On a recent sunny afternoon in Iceland, a group of scientists filed off a bus and took in a view of geological grandeur that, nearly everywhere else on Earth, would require a deep-diving submersible.

They were standing in Thingvellir, a sweeping valley surrounded by majestic cliffs; the valley is one tiny portion of a long seam between tectonic plates that runs the length of the Atlantic Ocean.

In Iceland, this seam, called the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, takes a brief jog over land before disappearing again beneath the sea. The ridge is essentially a volcanic seam many thousands of miles long, where magma is belched from deep inside the Earth, creating new crust and pushing tectonic plates apart. It moves at a rate of about 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) per year.

"You stand there, and you can imagine you're on the floor of the ocean," said Ken Verosub, a distinguished professor of geology at the University of California, Davis. He and other scientists were attending a geology conference; a field trip brought them to the only dry site that marks the meeting place of the North American plate and the Eurasian plate.

Until now, Earth was the only planet known to have vast reservoirs of water in its interior. Scientists analyzed the water content of two Martian meteorites originating from inside the Red Planet. They found that the amount of water in places of the Martian mantle is vastly larger than previous estimates and is similar to that of Earth's. The results not only affect what we know about the geologic history of Mars, but also have implications for how water got to the Martian surface. The data raise the possibility that Mars could have sustained life.

The research was led by former Carnegie postdoctoral scientist Francis McCubbin, now at the University of New Mexico. The analysis was performed by Carnegie Institution investigator Erik Hauri and team and is published in the journal Geology.

The scientists analyzed what are called shergottite meteorites. These are fairly young meteorites that originated by partial melting of the Martian mantle - the layer under the crust - and crystallized in the shallow subsurface and on the surface. They came to Earth when ejected from Mars approximately 2.5 million years ago. Meteorite geochemistry tells scientists a lot about the geological processes the planet underwent.

"We analyzed two meteorites that had very different processing histories," explained Hauri. "One had undergone considerable mixing with other elements during its formation, while the other had not. We analyzed the water content of the mineral apatite and found there was little difference between the two even though the chemistry of trace elements was markedly different. The results suggest that water was incorporated during the formation of Mars and that the planet was able to store water in its interior during the planet's differentiation."

A family that struggles to recall words could provide a window into the biology of language cognition.

Ten years ago, psychiatrist David Skuse met a smart, cheery five-year-old boy whose mother was worried because her son had trouble following conversations with other kids at school. He struggled to remember names and often couldn't summon the words for simple things such as toothpaste.

Skuse is an expert on language development at the Institute of Child Health at University College London, but he had never encountered anything like the boy's condition. His scientific curiosity was piqued when the mother, who is bilingual, mentioned her own difficulties remembering words in English, her native tongue. Her mother, too, had trouble recounting what had happened in television shows she had just seen. "The family history of this word-finding problem needs further investigation," Skuse noted at the time.

About half the members of this family, dubbed JR, share similar language deficits and brain abnormalities. These deficits seem to be inherited across at least four generations, Skuse and his colleagues report today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B¹. Identifying the genetic basis of the family's unique trait - which they call the 'family problem' - could help to explain how our brains link words to objects, concepts and ideas.