The U.S. government will help drug companies find treatments for a host of diseases through a new collaboration in which researchers will test experimental drugs provided by manufacturers.

The National Institutes of Health said on Thursday that Pfizer Inc, AstraZeneca Plc and Eli Lilly and Co have agreed to make 24 compounds available for a pilot phase of the project, the biggest of its kind ever launched in the United States.

All of the compounds have been tried in people and found to be safe, but the drugmakers have abandoned them because they did not work for the disease they were intended to treat. The NIH will provide $20 million in grants each year to researchers trying to find new uses for the compounds.

Developers are getting set to begin work on a $1 billion "ghost town" that will be built in the southwestern United States and will serve as a testing ground for a variety of technologies.

According to Associated Press (AP) reports published Saturday, the city will be built in Lea County in southeastern New Mexico, and will be used to conduct trials for intelligent traffic systems, cutting-edge wireless networks, automated appliances and more.

The Center for Innovation, Technology and Testing (CITE) will be located approximately 15 miles west of the nearby town of Hobbs and will be based on a town that is home to approximately 35,000 people, Telegraph reporter Mark Hughes wrote on Wednesday.

"The town... will have roads, houses and commercial buildings, but will have no residents," Hughes continued, adding that the people behind CITE "say they wanted to test the effects of such innovations on a town but without inconveniencing any residents... The project, which will create 350 jobs initially, will see an entire town built. The houses will even have working lavatories and washing machines."

A team of Chinese physicists have shattered the record for quantum teleportation, teleporting photons approximately six times further than the previous best, according to various news reports published Friday.

A team of physicists hailing from the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai were able to teleport particles more than 97 kilometers, or over 60 miles, said Popular Science's Dan Nosowitz.

That smashes the prior standard of more than 10 miles (16-plus kilometers), which had been set by the same team back in 2010, Forbes Staff Writer Alex Knapp added.

Describing their research in a paper posted online, lead researcher Juan Yin and colleagues wrote, "Here, based on an ultra-bright multi-photon entanglement source, we demonstrate quantum teleportation, closely following the original scheme, for any unknown state created outside, between two optical free-space links separated by 97 km."

"Over a 35-53 dB high-loss quantum channel, an average fidelity of 80.4(9) % is achieved for six distinct initial states. Besides being of fundamental interest, our result represents an important step towards a global quantum network. Moreover, the high-frequency and high-accuracy acquiring, pointing and tracking (APT) technique developed in our experiment can be directly utilized for future satellite-based quantum communication," they added.

A 13-meter space rock from the asteroid belt is flying past our planet today midway between Earth and the orbit of the Moon. There is no danger of a collision; at closest approach asteroid 2012 JU will be 190,000 km away.

Imagine being able to control genetic expression by flipping a light switch. Researchers at North Carolina State University are using light-activated molecules to turn gene expression on and off. Their method enables greater precision when studying gene function, and could lead to targeted therapies for diseases like cancer.

Triplex-forming oligonucleotides (TFOs) are commonly used molecules that can prevent gene transcription by binding to double-stranded DNA. NC State chemist Dr. Alex Deiters wanted to find a way to more precisely control TFOs, and by extension, the transcription of certain genes. So Deiters attached a light-activated "cage" to a TFO. When exposed to ultraviolet (UV) light, the cage is removed, and the TFO is free to bind with DNA, inhibiting transcription of the gene of interest.

"In the absence of light, transcription activity is 100 percent," says Deiters. "When we turn on the light, we can take it down to about 25 percent, which is a significant reduction in gene expression."

Antibiotic resistance is often seen as a modern phenomenon - an ability generated by bacteria in order to defend against the challenges of modern medicine. This is supported by the fact that bacteria from before the era of antibiotics are often more susceptible to their use. Which is why I found it intriguing that recent studies (ref below) have unearthed bacteria from 30 000-year old permafrost sediment and have found evidence of genes that provide resistance against three of the most common types of antibiotics used in hospitals: β-lactam, tetracycline and glycopeptide antibiotics.

As every microbiologist knows, a good way to get bacteria to stay in an unchanged state is to freeze them. Digging down beneath the surface in areas such as Dawson City in Yukon, Canada reveals layers that have remained frozen since the ice-age and contain, among all the mammoths and toothy-tigers, frozen and uncontamined samples of bacteria.

The researchers focused on Actinobacteria; a soil bacteria with many strains still around in modern times. As a soil bacteria, modern Actinobacteria carries a whole arsenal of antibiotic and antifungal agents in order to protect itself in the cut-throat world of soil microbiotica. The researchers were looking to see what kind of antibiotic substances this ancient bacteria would have.

I've written before about ancient diseases of the ice age, but this time I'm going even further back in time, to diseases that were present in the first human-like hominids. Although many human infections only developed after human settlements and animal domestication, early human ancestors would still have been fighting off bacteria and other nasty diseases. Some of these diseases are still around today.

So how do you start exploring the age of bacteria, and trying to discover when they developed as a human-infecting species? One way to look for the age and relatedness of strains is by looking at the bacterial DNA and examining the rate of mutations that cause very small differences between bacterial strains (single nucleotide polymorphism - shown in the image below). It is also possible to identify "pseudogenes" within the bacteria - little bits of viral DNA or bacterial genes that became redundant due to a change in the bacterial lifestyle (for example genes for extracellular lifestyle that started decaying and mutating once the bacteria became fully intracellular). These can be dated using the 'molecular clock' - which assumes a steady rate of background mutation and can provide approximations of the age of genes.

Gyani Maiya Sen, a 75-year-old woman from western Nepal, can perhaps be forgiven for feeling that the weight of the world rests on her shoulders.

She is the only person still alive in Nepal who fluently speaks the Kusunda language. The unknown origins and mysterious sentence structures of Kusunda have long baffled linguists.

As such, she has become a star attraction for campaigners eager to preserve her dying tongue.

Madhav Prasad Pokharel, a professor of linguistics at Nepal's Tribhuwan University, has spent a decade researching the vanishing Kusunda tribe.

Professor Pokharel describes Kusunda as a "language isolate", not related to any common language of the world.

"There are about 20 language families in the world," he said, "among them are the Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan and Austro-Asiatic group of languages.

"Kusunda stands out because it is not phonologically, morphologically, syntactically and lexically related to any other languages of the world.

New research findings show that embryonic stem cells unable to fully compact the DNA inside them cannot complete their primary task: differentiation into specific cell types that give rise to the various types of tissues and structures in the body.

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University found that chromatin compaction is required for proper embryonic stem cell differentiation to occur. Chromatin, which is composed of histone proteins and DNA, packages DNA into a smaller volume so that it fits inside a cell.

A study published on May 10, 2012 in the journal PLoS Genetics found that embryonic stem cells lacking several histone H1 subtypes and exhibiting reduced chromatin compaction suffered from impaired differentiation under multiple scenarios and demonstrated inefficiency in silencing genes that must be suppressed to induce differentiation.

"While researchers have observed that embryonic stem cells exhibit a relaxed, open chromatin structure and differentiated cells exhibit a compact chromatin structure, our study is the first to show that this compaction is not a mere consequence of the differentiation process but is instead a necessity for differentiation to proceed normally," said Yuhong Fan, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Biology.

Fan and Todd McDevitt, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, led the study with assistance from Georgia Tech graduate students Yunzhe Zhang and Kaixiang Cao, research technician Marissa Cooke, and postdoctoral fellow Shiraj Panjwani.

Huge sunspot AR1476 poses a threat for strong solar flares, but for the past two days the so-called "active region" has been mostly quiet. What the sunspot lacks in drama, however, it more than makes up for in beauty. Consider this photo of last night's sunset over Paris:
"Shooting from the Bridge of Concorde, I captured the sunspot setting behind the Eiffel Tower," says photographer VegaStar Carpentier. The light of the low-hanging sun was perfectly dimmed for a 1/1000s exposure @ ISO 400. "I used a Canon EOS 1000D."

The quiet is probably temporary. NOAA forecasters estimate a 75% chance of M-class flares and a 20% chance of X-flares during the next 24 hours.