Last May a seemingly commonplace meeting kicked off a firestorm of controversy. More than 100 experts in genetics and bioengineering convened at Harvard Medical School for a meeting that was closed to the public — attendees were asked not to contact news media or to post about the meeting on social media.

The same group is getting back together in New York City next week.

To the meeting organizers, last year's secretive measures were, counterintuitively, to make sure as many people heard about the project as possible. They were submitting a paper about the project to a scientific journal and were discouraged from sharing the information publicly before it was published.

But there's another reason why this group of scientists, while encouraging debate and public involvement, would be wary of attracting too much attention. Their project is an effort to synthesize DNA, including human DNA. Researchers will start with simpler organisms, such as microbes and plants, but hope to ultimately create strands of human genetic code. One of the group's organizers, Jef Boeke, director of the Institute for Systems Genetics at NYU School of Medicine, told CNBC that incorporating synthesized DNA into mammalian (or even human) cells could happen in four to five years.

Tiny meteoroids can not only punch holes in a spaceship but also produce potentially catastrophic electromagnetic pulses. Andrew Masterson reports.

The cause of several mysterious satellite failures may have been discovered, if simulations carried out at Stanford University in California hold firm in physical space.

The simulations, published in the journal Physics of Plasmas, promise an answer to a question bothering lead author, aeronautics professor Sigrid Close, for more than seven years.

Everyone in the space business has long recognised that meteoroids - tiny space rocks sometimes no bigger than a grain of dust - can cause severe mechanical damage when they smash into a satellite.

Looking at the records of satellite collision reports, however, Close realised a small number seemed to result in electrical rather than mechanical damage. This meant - logically - the satellites must have encountered another source of electricity. What, she wondered, could that be?

Combining data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory with radio observations and computer simulations, an international team of scientists has discovered a vast wave of hot gas in the nearby Perseus galaxy cluster. Spanning some 200,000 light-years, the wave is about twice the size of our own Milky Way galaxy.

The researchers say the wave formed billions of years ago, after a small galaxy cluster grazed Perseus and caused its vast supply of gas to slosh around an enormous volume of space.

"Perseus is one of the most massive nearby clusters and the brightest one in X-rays, so Chandra data provide us with unparalleled detail," said lead scientist Stephen Walker at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland."The wave we've identified is associated with the flyby of a smaller cluster, which shows that the merger activity that produced these giant structures is still ongoing."

A paper describing the findings appears in the June 2017 issue of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The search for life in the Universe takes many paths. There's SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which is searching for signals from a distant ancient civilization. There's the exploration of our own Solar System, on Mars, or underneath the subsurface oceans of Europa and Enceladus, to see if life can be anywhere there's liquid water and a source of energy. And upcoming space telescopes like James Webb will attempt to directly image the atmospheres of distant extrasolar planets, to see if they contain the distinct chemical signatures of life.

But according to Jason Wright, an astronomer at the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Penn State University, we could consider searching for evidence of ancient civilizations right here on Earth, or across the Solar System. Don't get excited, though, so far "there is zero evidence for prior indigenous species in the Solar System."
In a paper, recently submitted to the arXiv electronic preprint archive entitled Prior Indigenous Technological Species, Dr. Wright describes how we might go about searching for the technological artifacts left behind by ancient civilizations that have evolved in the Solar System. Perhaps on an ancient, cooler Venus, or on Mars in a time when it was wetter and had a thicker atmosphere. Those civilizations could have arisen millions or even billions of years ago, destroyed themselves or left the Solar System, and only ancient traces of their culture and technology would still be around.

If a civilization had reached a high level of technology, where did it go? Wright suggests a variety of catastrophes, like a swarm of comets, self destruction, or even a nearby supernova explosion that irradiated the whole Solar System with high energy gamma rays. Even without a specific event, a civilization might have simply just died out, or became permanently non-technological. Of course, these possibilities face our own human civilization. It's hard to read the paper and not consider the fate of humanity. Will future aliens search for scraps to learn about us?

Warming on the Antarctic Peninsula has long been touted by supporters of the theory man is destroying the planet by using fossil fuels as proof of the dangers of global warming. Al Gore, the face of the world-is-going-to-end climate movement, has visited Antarctica on at least two occasions to highlight the alleged problem.

"This prediction has proven true," Gore wrote about the claim Antarctica would warm faster than the global average. "Today, the West Antarctic Peninsula is warming about four times faster than the global average."

Alarmists say the melting of ice sheets in Antarctica will cause massive problems for the rest of the world. For example, left-wing website ThinkProgress wrote in 2012, "Although the vast ice sheets of the frozen continent are remote from almost all of human civilization, their warming has drastic implications for billions of people. With the melting of those almost inconceivable reserves of ice, the planet's sea levels are rising. Scientists now expect 21st-century sea level rise — on the scale of three to six feet or more — will be dominated by the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps."

Climate realists have rightfully pointed out the evidence shows total ice accumulation on Antarctica has outweighed losses, a claim bolstered by a 2015 NASA study, which found, "An increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers." But even many climate change skeptics have accepted some significant parts of Antarctica are warming.

Though it's not big enough or strong enough to destroy a planet, scientists have developed an amplified laser reminiscent of the Death Star from "Star Wars," according to a new study.

The futuristic superweapon combines multiple laser beams into one destructive blast, the researchers said. The idea of merging laser beams is not new, nor has it been limited to science fiction before now. A decades-old Russian missile defense project looked to use liquid as a beam combiner, but that project was abandoned after it was deemed not practical. A similar project in the U.S. investigated laser fusion, but using different materials. Now, a team of Australian scientists has combined the principles of these two research projects and applied them to a new material: diamond.

An ultrapure diamond crystal is the key to a new proof-of-concept amplified laser. By placing a diamond at the point of convergence of the different laser beams, the power of each individual beam is transferred into one potent laser beam, the researchers said. This power transfer occurs due to Raman scattering — when particles are dispersed and excited to higher energy levels — which is especially strong in diamond, according to the scientists.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft dove between Saturn and its rings yesterday (April 26), snapping the closest-ever views of Saturn's atmosphere. The raw images, which began to stream back early this morning, indicating the probe had survived its journey, show intricate structures and a dark, swirling storm-like feature (which NASA called a "giant hurricane").

SpaceX successfully launched and landed its Falcon 9 rocket in the fifth of 20 scheduled launches in 2017. This was a landmark event for the company, as it was the first launch of a military satellite in its 15-year history.

The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 7:15am local time near the famous NASA launch site. Just nine minutes later, the rocket's main section touched back down on the launch pad.

Today's launch was the first time the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has entrusted anyone other than the United Launch Alliance (ULA) with one of its top-secret payloads.

Your wireless router may be giving you away in manner you never dreamed of. For the first time, physicists have used radio waves from a Wi-Fi transmitter to encode a 3D image of a real object in a hologram similar to the image of Princess Leia projected by R2D2 in the movie Star Wars. In principle, the technique could enable outsiders "see" the inside of a room using only the Wi-Fi signals leaking out of it, although some researchers say such spying may be easier said than done.

The idea came about a few years ago, says Friedemann Reinhard, an expert on quantum sensors at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in Germany. "At lunch we had a discussion about what the world would look through Wi-Fi eyes," he says, "and it became clear that if you want to see the world through Wi-Fi, you could make a hologram."

A camera makes an image by collecting light reflected from an object and focusing it onto a screen to create a 2D pattern of greater or lesser intensity: the image. In contrast, a hologram more fully exploits the wave nature of light. Typically, lasers are used. The laser beam is split, and half of it reflects off the object and onto a photographic plate. The other half—the reference beam—shines directly on the plate. Like evenly spaced water waves lapping on a beach, the light waves in the reference beam arrive in flat wave fronts. In contrast, those reflected by the object are modified by it, and so some parts of the wave front arrive at the plate earlier and others later, depending on where they bounced off the object. The interference of the two sets of waves creates a pattern of bright and dark spots—the hologram.

A new study examining the muscular system of bonobos provides firsthand evidence that the rare great ape species may be more closely linked, anatomically, to human ancestors than common chimpanzees. Previous research suggested this theory at the molecular level, but this is the first study to compare in detail the anatomy of the three species.

"Bonobo muscles have changed least, which means they are the closest we can get to having a 'living' ancestor," said Bernard Wood, professor of human origins at the GW Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology.

Scientists believe that modern human and common chimpanzee/bonobo lineages split about 8 million years ago with the two great ape species splitting about 2 million years ago. As common chimpanzees and bonobos evolved after their split, they developed different traits and physical characteristics, even though they remained geographically relatively close, with their main division being the Congo River. Because of this, researchers have been curious as to what those differences are and how they compare to humans. By studying the muscles of bonobos (which indicates how they physically function), the team was able to discover that they are more closely related to human anatomy than common chimpanzees, in the sense that their muscles have changed less than they have in common chimpanzees.