Rice University has concocted the ultimate in high-tech vehicles. They are made of carbon, drive on roads of solid gold, and are made from a relatively small number of atoms. The university's nanocars, which will be described in an upcoming issue of the journal Nano Letters, are actually complex molecules that behave like vehicles. They roll on wheels and can be steered with electrical fields or by other means. There is a nanocar that drives across a thin gold film, as well as a nanotruck that can carry a payload. A future nanocar will be propelled by a photon-powered engine, while another upcoming vehicle, a nanotrain of sorts, will consist of several molecular boxcars. The cars, which took eight years to develop, measure only a few nanometers long and are thinner than human DNA. (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. A human hair is about 80,000 nanometers wide.) "We even have a Mini Cooper. It's two by two nanometers," said James Tour, who is a professor of chemistry, mechanical engineering, materials science and computer science at Rice. "We have a six-wheeled version too." The idea behind the research is to create molecules that will act as tools in the chemical reactions that will be employed to build microprocessors or other components in the future.

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Cows hold grudges, say scientists


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Could the day come when a simple bit of gene threapy might cure infidelity?
Researchers say they were able to perform that bit of molecular magic on the meadow vole, a mouse-like rodent. By transferring a single gene to the pleasure center of the naturally promiscuous vole, researches at yerkes nationial primate research center in atlanta were able to make it happily monogamous, they say in a letter to the journal Nature . . .

NASA has developed a computer program that comes close to reading thoughts not yet spoken,
by analyzing nerve commands to the throat.

It says the breakthrough holds promise for astronauts and the handicapped.

"A person using the subvocal system thinks of phrases and talks to himself so quietly it cannot be heard, but the tongue and vocal cords do receive speech signals from the brain," said developer Chuck Jorgensen, of NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California.

Jorgensen's team found that sensors under the chin and one each side of the Adam's apple pick up the brain's commands to the speech organs, allowing the subauditory, or "silent speech" to be captured.

The team concluded that the method could be useful on space missions or other difficult working conditions, such as air traffic control towers and even to make current voice-recognition software more active.

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Seeds from the garcinia kola tree halt replication ot the ebola virus.

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Dentists from the University of Rochester Medical Center and food scientists at State University of Campinas in Brazil have discovered that a substance that Brazilian honeybees make to protect their hives might prove to be a potent anti-cavity agent. The substance is propolis, a sticky material like glue that bees make to hold their hives together. Bees create the brew by collecting secretions from trees and other plants, carrying them back to the hive, chewing up the materials, then spitting the concoction out and mixing it with beeswax. In a hive, the substance is used to seal holes, keep the hive clean, and even to embalm dead insects. In laboratory tests, the most potent version of the substance, from southern Brazil, cut the cavity rate in rats by about 60 percent, and nearly stopped the activity of a key enzyme that forms dental plaque. Dentists say that since rats get cavities the same way as humans do, and the same substances that prevent cavities in the animals also prevent cavities in humans, they’re enthusiastic about the potential of the substance to prevent cavities in people. Dentists hope to test the substance on human volunteers.

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Scientists have discovered why being cuddled feels so good - human skin has a special network of nerves that stimulate a pleasurable response to stroking. The revelation came after doctors realised that a woman with no sense of touch still felt a "pleasant" sensation when her skin was caressed. Normal touch is transmitted to the brain through a network of fast-conducting nerves, called myelinated fibres, which carry signals at 60 metres per second. But there is a second slow-conducting nerve network of unmyelinated fibres, called C-tactile (CT), the role of which was unknown. The CT network carries signals at just one metre per second. "It must be used for unconscious aspects of touch because it is so slow," says Håkan Olausson, who led the study at the Department of Clinical Neurophysiology at Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Sweden. "It seems the CT network conveys emotions, or a sense of self."

American scientists have discovered they can create orgasms in women at the touch of a button. Clinical trials into the new electronic implants are expected to start in the United States later this year. But Stuart Meloy, a pain relief surgeon at Piedmont Anesthesia and Pain Consultants in North Carolina, said his discovery had been a complete chance. Dr Meloy was performing a routine pain-relief operation on a woman's spine when he made the discovery. "We implant electrodes into the spine and use electrical pulses to modify the pain signals passing along the nerves," he said. Dr Meloy told New Scientist magazine that patients remain conscious throughout the procedure to help the surgeons decide where the best place to put the electrodes are to maximise pain relief. His break through came when he failed to hit the right pain relief spot for a patient. "I was placing the electrodes and suddenly the woman started exclaiming emphatically. "I asked her what was up and she said, 'You're going to have to teach my husband to do that,'" he said. Dr Meloy said the stimulating wires could be connected to a signal generator, smaller than a packet of cigarettes, which could be put under the patient's buttocks. The patient would then be given a hand control to trigger the orgasms. "If you've got a couple who have been together for a while and it is just not happening any more, maybe they'll get through it a bit easier with this," he said. Dr Meloy added though that the device would need to be programmed to limit its use. "But whether its once a day, four times a week - who am I to say," he said.

RAM and human memory have always inhabited entirely separate worlds, but the boundary between them is now blurring. Hardware and wetware may have more in common than you think. The latest issue of the British journal Advanced Materials offers a case in point: Picture grafting a microelectronic circuit directly onto a human brain cell. Do this successfully, and you've opened the floodgates for bioelectronic devices from brain implants, therapies and prosthetics to neural computers.

Drinking black tea may lower the risk of heart disease by preventing the blood from clumping and forming clots, the results of a preliminary study suggest. Investigators found that individuals who drank five cups of black tea daily for a month had lower levels of P-selectin, a blood protein associated with coagulation, compared with a month-long period in which they drank equal amounts of hot water. Other blood compounds associated with clumping were not reduced by drinking tea, however. The study was funded by the Tea Trade Health Research Association and the National Heart Foundation of Australia.

A team of scientists says it has grown everything from human muscle to bone from stem cells taken from fat - a breakthrough that could eliminate the controversial use of fetal cells in the quest to mend damaged, missing or dead tissue. Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Pittsburgh isolated the stem cells - immature cells that can be coaxed into maturing into specific types of tissue - from ordinary fat removed by liposuction. They then grew the cells into bone, cartilage, muscle and fat. Stem cells have been taken previously from bone marrow, brain tissue and aborted fetuses and frozen embryos - a practice opposed by many anti-abortion groups. The use of fat as a source could end such controversy. Researchers predict the first practical use of laboratory-engineered tissue could come within five years.

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The Hubble Space Telescope, peering 10 billion years back in time to when the universe was in its adolescence, has spotted the most distant exploding star ever observed. Researchers said the discovery bolsters the controversial theory that mysterious "dark energy" is accelerating the expansion of the cosmos. Invisible and poorly understood, dark energy might account for as much as two-thirds of space. Proposed a century ago by Einstein, it may counteract more familiar forces such as gravity. The supernova, barely discernible with the most powerful instruments, provides clues to dark energy. While dim, the dying star gleams brighter and moves differently than it would if the universe had expanded at a steady rate since the beginning of time. The Hubble finding is prompting researchers to rethink how the universe works.

A crystal found in a meteorite from Mars could only have been formed by a microbe and may be evidence of the oldest life form ever found, researchers say. Scientists at the Johnson Space Center in Houston say that a crystalized magnetic mineral, called magnetite, found in a Martian meteorite is similar to crystals formed on Earth by bacteria. There is no report of such magnetites being formed by any but biologic means. The magnetite crystal was found in a Mars meteorite called Allen Hills 84001, or ALH84001. Researchers at the Johnson Space Center in 1996 announced that the space rock contained microscopic evidence of life, but their claim has been dismissed by most other researchers. Scientists said the new study strongly supports the original claim and may even suggest that there is still microscopic life on Mars.

Cryptology experts are abuzz over a Harvard professor's claim that he can make an unbreakable code that can be used over and over again. Computer science professor Michael Rabin, with the help of doctoral student Yanzhong Ding, developed a mathematical proof that experts say could be used to make a code indecipherable even by the most powerful computers. Rabin's method uses a stream of randomly generated characters that can be decoded with a mathematical formula. Once the message is decoded, the stream disappears, leaving nothing for hackers to decipher, Rabin said. The key can be reused on a different message. "Unbreakable codes" have been created before, but they were for one-time-use only, experts say. Rabin said he is not yet planning to commercialize the system. If he does, it could be used by corporations, governments or any group that wanted to keep top-secret information secure.

A Japanese study found that skin welts shrank in allergy patients who watched Charlie Chaplin's comedic classic "Modern Times," but not in patients who watched a video on weather. "These results suggest that the induction of laughter may play some role in alleviating allergic diseases," said Dr. Hajime Kimata of Unitika Central Hospital in Kyoto Prefecture. Kimata was influenced by the author Norman Cousins' 30-year-old research suggesting that laughter and a positive attitude can help reduce pain. Cousins suffered from a life-threatening joint disease and reported that 10 minutes of laughter helped reduce his pain. Kimata reported on results found after 87 minutes. Twenty-six men and women with allergic skin rashes and allergies to dust mites were given injections of an allergy-producing substance. Their skin welts were measured before and after the videos. Kimata said exactly how humor might have reduced the welts is not known. But Dr. Margaret Stuber, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA, said his premise "makes a lot of sense from a scientific standpoint." She pointed to a growing body of research suggesting that stress undermines the disease-fighting immune system. Easing stress, which laughter can do, might then have a positive effect.

Researchers have stopped light in its tracks, then released it again, a feat that could ultimately accelerate the speed of computing. Two independent teams of physicists reined in light, reports Thursday's New York Times. One team was led by Lene Vestergaard Hau of Harvard University and the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge, Mass., and the other by Ronald L. Walsworth and Mikhail D. Lukin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in Cambridge. A paper by Walsworth, Lukin and three collaborators, all at Harvard- Smithsonian, is scheduled to appear in the Jan. 29 issue of Physical Review Letters, according to the Times. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. Water, glass and crystal slow the speed of light a little, an effect that bends light rays, allowing, for example, lenses to focus. Using a related effect, the Walsworth-Lukin team stopped the light in containers of gas. In this medium, the light became fainter and fainter, then slowed, then stopped. A second light flashed through the gas revived the original beam, reports the Times. The light then exited the chamber with nearly the same properties it had when it entered. Hau got similar results with her closely related techniques. He said the biggest impact of the experiments could come in quantum computing and quantum communication. Both concepts rely heavily on the ability of light to carry "quantum" information particles that can exist in many places or states at once. Quantum computers, which currently exist only in theory, could accomplish certain operations much faster than existing machines. For such computers, light is needed to form large networks of computers. But the light must be stored at least temporarily a difficult problem that the new work could help solve.

Pushing science to the brink of altering humans, researchers have created the world's first genetically modified primate - a baby rhesus monkey with jellyfish DNA that glows green in the dark. The Oregon Health Science University researchers who created ANDi - for "inserted DNA," spelled backward - said their goal is not to tinker with the human blueprint but to use monkeys in the laboratory to advance medical research and wipe out diseases. The researchers hope to introduce other genes in rhesus monkeys that could trigger diseases like Alzheimer's, diabetes, breast cancer or HIV. Then, those monkeys could be used in experiments aimed at blocking diseases at the genetic level. Mice have been genetically modified in labs and used for medical research for decades, but ANDi proves that scientists can now successfully tinker with the chromosomes of a close genetic cousin to man.

Two "clearly bizarre" planetary systems found in the orbits of distant stars are puzzling astronomers and raising new questions about how planets form. Planet hunters at the University of California, Berkeley reported Tuesday that a star 123 light years away is being circled by two objects, one of which may the biggest planet ever found outside the solar system. Around another star, the astronomers found two planets moving in lockstep, gravitational harmony. Geoffrey Marcy, leader of the planet-searching team, said a star called HD168443 is being circled by a planet about 17 times more massive than Jupiter. It is by far the largest planetary-like object yet found beyond the solar system. The object is big enough to be called a brown dwarf, which is sometimes called a "failed star." Brown dwarfs are usually defined as stellar objects that did not collect enough mass to ignite the nuclear fires that causes a star to shine. Generally, an object must acquire a mass greater than 13 times that of Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, to start the fires burning. Yet, the object orbiting HD168443 is larger.

Astronomers have found what may be the largest structure in the observable universe - an immense concentration of quasars and galaxies clustered across more than 600 million light years. The structure, which would include billions upon billions of stars like the sun, is 6.5 billion light years away, which means the cluster existed when the universe was just a third of its present age of about 10 billion years. The light that revealed the cluster actually started its long journey before formation of the solar system, which includes the Earth. When viewed from Earth, the structure is just below the center of the constellation Leo the Lion. It spans an area of the sky of two degrees by five degrees, an area about forty times that of the full moon as seen from Earth.

Mutation of a gene whimsically named "I'm not dead yet" can double the life span of fruit flies, a laboratory discovery that researchers said may lead to drugs to help people live longer and, perhaps, even lose weight. Researchers at the University of Connecticut Health Center have found that the life span of fruit flies was extended from an average of 37 days to 70 days when a gene was modified on a single chromosome. Some flies in the study lived 110 days. The same long-life gene exists in humans, said Dr. Stephen L. Helfand, senior author of the study, and "offers a target for future drug therapies aimed at extending life." In human terms, a doubled life span would be about 150 years. Helfand said the gene mutation appears to work by restricting calorie absorption on a cellular level - in effect, putting the cells on a diet. This raises the possibility, he said, of one day developing a pill that would both extend life and control weight.

A Turkish study suggests that using honey as an ointment during a certain type of colon-cancer surgery can help prevent tumors from recurring. A Mayo Clinic cancer expert said the results, though preliminary, are too fascinating to be dismissed.

Excavation for the Los Angeles subway turned up more than 2,000 fossils, including previously unknown species of fish. The fossil evidence showed that, tens of thousands of years ago, ground sloths, horses, mastodons and camels roamed among redwood trees in what is now Los Angeles, according to a Metropolitan Transportation Authority summary of a report by paleontologist Bruce Lander. Lander worked with a team of 28 scientists during construction of the 17.4-mile Metro Rail Red Line, completed in June at a cost of $4.5 billion.

Researchers have wired the brains of monkeys to control robotic arms - a feat that could one day allow paralyzed people to move artificial arms and legs merely by thinking. The wires fed electrical impulses from the brains of two monkeys into a computer linked to robotic arms. When the monkeys reached for food or manipulated a joystick, the robotic arms mimicked those motions. For people who are paralyzed because of spinal cord injuries or diseases of the central nervous system, such wiring could one day enable them to bypass the damage and send impulses directly to their muscles. "It is in the realm of reality. It is not science fiction any more," said Duke University researcher Miguel Nicolelis. In the monkey experiments, 96 wires, each half the thickness of a human hair, were connected to six areas of one animal's brain, while 32 wires were connected to two areas of the second monkey's brain. The robotic arms performed simple to-and-fro movements similarly with each monkey. But they performed three-dimensional movements better when directed by the monkey with more implants. The Duke researchers' findings were reported in the journal Nature. They are now working on a chip that could be implanted under the skin, replacing the external computer.

The South's newest weapon against the dreaded fire ant sounds like something out of a sci-fi thriller: An insect whose larvae eat the heads off their prey. The Agriculture Department plans to release hundreds of thousands of tiny ant-eating flies in the South and possibly in California, where the fire ants have now spread. USDA says the gnat-like phorid flies, imported from Brazil, pose no harm to anybody or anything other than fire ants. "It is a self-sustaining biocontrol," said Richard Brenner, who leads a USDA research team in Florida.

A team of Maryland medical researchers found that people with heart disease were 40% less likely to laugh in humorous situations than those with healthy hearts. "The old saying that laughter is the best medicine definitely appears to be true when it comes to protecting your heart," said Michael Miller, director of the Center for Preventative Cardiology at the University of Maryland Medical Center. It is uncertain, however, whether humor helps prevent heart problems or if people with heart problems tend to lose their senses of humor. "That question would be more interesting, but it would also be much harder to answer," said Dr. Rose Marie Robertson, a Vanderbilt University cardiologist and president of the American Heart Association.

Scientists have coaxed new life out of dead brains. It turns out that even cadavers can supply the incredibly versatile brain stem cells - master cells which can turn into different kinds of brain and nerve cells - once thought available only from fetal tissue. So can skin. And it appears that just about every bone stem cell can be tweaked to produce brain cells. Several reports to the Society for Neuroscience seem to offer yet more possible solutions to the ethical dilemma blocking stem cell studies which use human fetal tissue. But they are not yet solutions and may never be. There are big differences among stem cells from embryos, from fetuses and from adult tissue, and scientists don't really know much yet about any of them, they said.

- Artifacts found at the bottom of the Black Sea provide new evidence that humans faced a great flood, perhaps that of the biblical Noah, thousands of years ago, the discoverers say. Remnants of human habitation were found in over 300 feet of water about 12 miles off the coast of Turkey, undersea explorer Robert Ballard said Tuesday. "There's no doubt about it, it's an exciting discovery," Ballard said in a telephone interview from his research ship. "We realize the broad significance the discovery has and we're going to do our best to learn more." Fredrik Hiebert of the University of Pennsylvania, chief archaeologist for the Black Sea project, said from the ship, "This find represents the first concrete evidence for the occupation of the Black Sea coast prior to its flooding".

European scientists searching for answers to some of science's most basic questions plan to build atoms of antimatter and then "cage" them for use in experiments. The researchers at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, or CERN, said they plan to make atoms of antihydrogen. It would be the first time that antiatoms have been slowed down enough to be caught and studied, intensifying global competition between scientists trying to decode the mystery of antimatter. Physicists believe that antimatter is the mirror image of conventional matter in the universe. For every subatomic particle in the universe, there appears to be another identical in appearance and structure, but with its electric or magnetic properties reversed.

Researchers from Bell Labs and the University of Oxford have built a microscopic DNA machine resembling a pair of motorized tweezers -- using DNA from salmon sperm in a procedure the scientists say may one day help them build computers that are 1,000 times faster than today's models.

Scientists have apparently broken the universe's speed limit. For generations, physicists believed there is nothing faster than light moving through a vacuum - a speed of 186,000 miles per second. But in an experiment in Princeton, N.J., physicists sent a pulse of laser light through cesium vapor so quickly that it left the chamber before it had even finished entering. The pulse traveled 310 times the distance it would have covered if the chamber had contained a vacuum.

200 feet below the earth's surface in an abandoned copper mine a Canadian biotechnology company is cultivating genetically altered tobacco. Its seeds are being used to produce a protein that scientists hope to develop into medicine to fight bone marrow cancer.

In what is being hailed as a heroic achievement in physics, scientists have found the first direct evidence of the tau neutrino, an elusive and ghostly subatomic particle that was thought to be the last missing piece in the architecture of matter. The breakthrough was achieved by scientists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago.

Blind people in California and Taiwan are seeing again through eyes refurbished in the laboratory. The experimental technique - which involves transplanting lab-grown cells to replenish the cornea's surface - offers hope to hundreds of thousands of people around the world blinded by fire, chemical burns or certain diseases. So far, the transplants are working for about 60 out of more than 90 patients operated on at Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Taipei and 11 of 15 at the medical school at the University of California at Davis. Doctors do not yet know if the repair is permanent, but the patients' improved sight has lasted up to 15 months so far. Doctors already transplant cells directly from one person's eye to another to refurbish the cornea. But when that is done, the donor must give about half of the cells from the limbus, the circle where the clear cornea turns to white. The new approach requires only a tiny sliver from the donor's limbus; those cells are then grown in a laboratory dish until ready for transplant.

A group of engineers at the International Aerospace Exhibition unveiled a prototype solar sail designed to capture the energy of the sun and transport humans and cargo through space without engines or fuel. It can do it at speeds of 223,220 mph, nearly 10 times as fast as the U.S. space shuttle and quick enough to get you from Los Angeles to New York in a little over a minute.

Genetic researchers have accelerated a plant's growth by making its cells split faster - a technique that could someday lead to heartier crops, shorter growing seasons and less use of herbicides. One outside scientist called the findings astonishing. The experiment, reported in the journal Nature, was carried out by a team at Cambridge University.

A new drug that targets one of the basic genetic flaws in cancer shows promise in early tests on humans, halting the growth of tumors and making them more vulnerable to chemotherapy. The medicine is one of many in development that attempt to shift cancer treatment away from a broad attack on all rapidly dividing cells. The new drugs focus on the precise genetic mutations that make tumors different from healthy tissue. Many of these new drugs attempt to interfere with tumors' use of epidermal growth factor, one of the chemical signals that plays a crucial role in their survival.

Guatemalan archaeologists have unearthed the initial remains of what they believe to be a Mayan city as large as the sprawling, majestic ruins of the country's famous Tikal site. The city is from the post-classic period, and is between 670 to 800 years old, said Salvador Lopez, who headed up the effort. Lopez said preliminary research has revealed that El Pajaral may contain ceremonial temples and other structures taller than Tikal's.

Some brain-injury victims who lose the ability to understand speech develop an uncanny ability to tell when someone is lying. Neurologists realized decades ago that people who suffer a stroke or other trauma to the speech-recognition region in the brain's left hemisphere seem adept at spotting liars by reading facial expressions. In his 1985 best seller "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," neurologist Oliver Sacks recalls watching a ward full of such patients laughing uproariously while watching a televised address by Ronald Reagan. They were picking up on lies amid the Great Communicator's smiles, Sacks writes. Now, scientists have experimental proof of Sacks' observation.

Massachusetts scientists have cloned six cows that show none of the worrisome premature aging reported for Dolly the sheep. In fact, the cows' cells seem to have a surprisingly prolonged youth, a new study shows.

People who were hypnotized while undergoing surgery without a general anesthetic needed less pain medication, left the operating room sooner and had more stable vital signs than those who were not, according to a study in The Lancet medical journal.

Researchers in three countries report encouraging progress in experiments to develop an unbreakable computer code that harnesses the spooky and unpredictable realm of quantum physics. Quantum codes rely on the principles of quantum mechanics, which allow matter and the information it carries to exist in several states simultaneously. Only the sender and the receiver would know the code and agree upon the quantum state in which they would use it. Since quantum states are very fragile, an effort by an outsider to intercept the message and read it would automatically disturb the quantum state. Not only would the information be unreadable, it would alert the receiver that somebody was eavesdropping.

Paleontologists announced the discovery of the most complete ape-man skull ever excavated, a 1.5-million to 2-million-year-old skull of a female Paranthropus robustus, a cousin of early man. The fossil was found beside the lower jaw of a male in "one of the most extraordinary finds that any paleoanthropologist has ever seen," said Lee Berger, director of the paleoanthropology unit at the University of Witwatersrand. The finds, named for the mythological lovers Orpheus and Eurydice, will give researchers their best opportunity to compare the differences between males and females of the species.

A telescope lofted by balloon over Antarctica has captured the most detailed snapshot ever of the early universe, revealing an underlying cosmic geometry and structures that predate the oldest stars and galaxies. The first observations largely match theorists' predictions and suggest scientists are on the right track in their understanding of the earliest moments of the cosmos, its composition and ultimate fate.

A modern medical X-ray of a dinosaur fossil named Willo suggests the extinct animal may have had a four-chambered heart typical of warm-blooded animals instead of the simpler heart of cold-blooded reptiles. If verified by other studies that a rock-hard mass in the fossilized chest is a heart, it will mark the first time that scientists have been able to study the cardiac system of dinosaurs. A four-chambered heart would mean that the blood circulatory system of dinosaurs was much more advanced than previously believed, that the animals were more tolerant of temperature extremes, and that they were capable of rapid and sustained movement typical of modern birds and mammals.

Seven satellite dishes pointing blindly into space is the first demonstration of technology scientists hope will let them eavesdrop on intelligent civilizations thousands of light-years in space. The dishes are the prototype of what is being called the One Hectare Telescope, a joint project of the SETI Institute - for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence - and the University of California, Berkeley. By 2005, the project could include as many as 1,000 of the 6-meter dishes on two acres near Mount Lassen in the rugged hills of Northern California. The dishes, synchronized to shift together, will collect signals from space. The price tag is a relative pittance as scientific endeavors go. The institute's executive director, Thomas Pierson, set the bill at about $25 million.

The government has approved a long-awaited drug called Zyvox, described as the world's first entirely new type of antibiotic in 35 years. Zyvox seems to cure some infections impervious to all other antibiotics, even that longtime drug of last resort called vancomycin. Consequently, Zyvox could help hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of life-threatening infections every year.

Scientists have created a molecule that delivers a knockout punch to deadly, drug-resistant strains of bacteria, which are becoming impervious to just about anything doctors throw at them, a phenomenon blamed on overuse of antibiotics. Now, researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison reported they have created a molecule modeled on peptides, the natural proteins that organisms ranging from plants to humans use to kill bacteria.

Scientists have created strains of mice that can chow down on a high-fat diet without getting chubby. The researchers say their secret - a single gene called HMGIC, might lead to a new obesity treatment for people.

A so-called "smart scalpel" - a computerized fiber-optic laser device - is being developed to analyze cells and determine instantly if they're cancerous, helping patients avoid additional biopsies. Sandia National Laboratories with help from the University of New Mexico medical school is working on the dime-sized device. The device contains a microscopic spectrometer that analyzes protein density in a cell and a tiny vacuum that sucks cells through microchip-connected sensors for analysis during surgery. Fiber-optics feed the information into a computer to provide instant feedback to the surgeon.

Federal researchers say they've created the most robust quantum computer ever, indicating that the concept could create the most powerful computing devices ever dreamed of. If the trend of increasing performance continues, a quantum computer that triples today's fastest computers could be built in five years, according to physicist Raymond Laflamme, who helped build the world's first 7-qubit computer described in the journal Nature.

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For decades after the Civil War ended, the U.S. government and historians believed the Union prisoners at Salisbury prison camp died from malnutrition, unsuitable clothing and lack of shelter. With the help of infrared thermal imaging cameras, history could be rewritten. History buffs using the cameras that can scan objects as deep as 25 feet underground or find moisture seeping into walls took images of the underground features left by the camp.

The fossilized remains of a snake with legs has been sitting in the museum drawer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem since the death in the early 1980s of researcher Georg Haas, said Olivier Rieppel of the Field Museum in Chicago. A team of researchers led by Rieppel rediscovered the fossil and gave it a scientific description and official name - Haasiophis terrasanctus.

A new study indicates cab drivers are working their brains so hard they become enlarged in the zone associated with navigation. It seemed that the drivers' brains adapted to help them store a detailed mental map of the city, shrinking in one area to allow growth in another, according to the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Marijuana-like compounds ease tremors in mice with a condition similar to multiple sclerosis, researchers say in a study that appears to corroborate patients who say pot helps them deal with the disease. The relief apparently wasn't because the mice were stoned, but because the compounds hit the right buttons in the nervous system, the British researchers reported the journal Nature. The compounds tested were synthetic but included the chemical equivalent of THC, the main ingredient in marijuana. Five of the six compounds tested reduced tremors and spasticity.
In addition, marijuana-like drugs eradicated some brain cancers in rats and helped other animals live longer, possibly hinting at a new approach for treating the disease, researchers say. The study dealt with gliomas, the most common category of cancer arising in the brain. The study was published in the March issue of the journal Nature Medicine and was conducted by scientists at the Complutense and Autonoma universities in Madrid, Spain, who injected glioma cells into the brains of rats to produce tumors. Untreated rats died within 18 days. Other rats were treated with drug infusions for seven days through a tube leading to the tumor. Fifteen rats got infusions of THC, the main active component in marijuana. Tumors disappeared in three animals, and nine other rats outlived the untreated ones, surviving up to 35 days.

Scientists have reversed diabetes in mice by generating insulin-producing cells in a laboratory and transplanting them into the animals, an indication of how useful so-called stem cells might be. The mice had a version of Type 1 diabetes, which occurs when the body mistakenly destroys insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. This work suggests a way to overcome that problem: prodding immature stem cells from the pancreas to make abundant quantities of islets in the laboratory.

A project begun in August '98 has been developing ways of using elephant excrement as a low-cost and environmental friendly source of energy. Thai researchers found that when the excrement is fermented, it can produce natural gas suitable for use as cooking gas or feedstock for an electric generator. An elephant produces 88 to 110 pounds of excrement a day - enough to produce cooking gas for a family of two or three.

Thousands of people flocked to the opening of The Museum of Natural History's new $210 million planetarium complex. The seven-story orb appears to hover next to the museum, and at night it is illuminated by a soft blue light. The center replaces the old Hayden Planetarium, a New York City landmark that introduced millions of city kids to the night sky between 1935 and 1997.

Honeybees can detect the vapor that rises from explosives in buried landmines. Traces of the chemicals are then carried by the bee back to its hive. Jerry J. Bromenshenk, speaking at the national meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said researchers now hope to exploit this remarkable talent of the honeybee to pinpoint individual mines. The trick is getting this information from the bees. A group of researchers have already shown that by putting sensors inside beehives they can tell if a bee foraging in the field has detected an explosive compound and carried traces of it back to the hive. The next step is to follow the bee back to the place where it found the explosive. The group has developed tiny antennae that can be placed on individual bees, allowing them to be tracked electronically as far as 900 feet from the hive.

Astronomer Juris Zagars intends repair one of the former Soviet Union's most powerful telescopes. The 50-year-old professor has gone at the task since he and his wife found the 600-ton instrument in a desolate forest in 1994, when Soviet troops finally left this small nation on the Baltic Sea after five decades of occupation. Once an off-limits military outpost manned by 2,000 soldiers, scientists and their families, the area now is occupied by a couple dozen squatters and a few nature lovers.

Demand for one brand of "the pill" is soaring, but not for the reason you think. Sales of Johnson & Johnson's Ortho Tri-Cyclen have tripled in the last three years - making it by far the No. 1 brand - partly because it is the only oral contraceptive that can also be sold as an acne fighter.

A blind man can read large letters and navigate around big objects by using a tiny camera wired directly to his brain, the first artificial eye to provide useful vision. The 62-year-old man perceives up to 100 specks of light that appear and disappear, like stars that come and go behind passing clouds, as his field of vision shifts. That's enough to let him find a mannequin in a room, walk to a black stocking cap hanging on a white wall, and then return to the mannequin to plop the cap on its head. He also can recognize a 2-inch-tall letter from five feet away.

A chimpanzee has shown it can remember the correct sequence of five random numbers - an experiment that adds to the growing body of evidence that animals have some basic numerical ability. A female chimp tested with numbers between zero and nine performed about as well as an average pre-school child would, researchers at Kyoto University in Japan found. The chimp, named Ai, had already demonstrated that she could put five numbers in ascending order when they were scattered across a computer screen. But Kyoto researchers Nobuyuki Kawai and Tetsuro Matsuzawa reported that they took the experiment a step further. When the chimp touched the first number, the four others were covered up behind small white squares on the screen. She then had to touch the squares in the proper order.

Japanese researchers have grown frog eyes and ears in a lab using the animal's own embryo cells.

The bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans already holds the title as the world's toughest organism: It can survive an atomic blast. Now scientists have bioengineered it into a "superbug" that can digest the toxic leftovers of the nuclear age. Government geneticists said they inserted genes from another form of bacteria into Deinococcus, producing a superbug that transforms toxic mercury compounds commonly found at nuclear weapons production sites into less harmful forms. The scientists said the development shows how bacteria can be customized to attack the heavy metals, radioactive wastes and other substances that pollute the soil and groundwater at nuclear sites. The superbug works in laboratory experiments but has not been tested in the field. Details of the research were published in the January issue of the scientific journal Nature Biotechnology.

Ford Motor Co. has built a test car, the Prodigy, with the space and convenience of a Taurus sedan that gets more than 70 mpg. The car, which will be unveiled Jan. 10, at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, "goes a long way toward meeting our goal of an extremely fuel-efficient family vehicle," said Neil Ressler, Ford's vice president of research and vehicle technology. The Prodigy uses video cameras in place of rearview mirrors and sports a smooth underbody, special wheel covers and vents in the front grill that open only when the engine needs extra air.

Scientists have found living bacteria deep beneath the ice of Antarctica, a discovery that bolsters the possibility that life might exist in extremely cold and dark places beyond Earth. The colonies of microbes were found in drilling samples from nearly 12,000 feet below Vostok Station, just above an underground freshwater lake in an area isolated from sunlight, the usual source of energy for life on Earth. If bacteria can survive in frigid temperatures and without sunlight on Earth, similar organisms might exist on Mars or in the ocean that is believed to be deep beneath Jupiter's moon Europa. New data from the Galileo spacecraft suggests the ice covering the suspected ocean may be thin because of tidal forces. If that is the case, the conditions may be very similar to those at Lake Vostok.

A typical house cat gave birth to a rare African wildcat after scientists pulled off what they called the unprecedented feat of transferring a frozen embryo between species. Researchers at the Audubon Institute Center for Research of Endangered Species said the advancement could bolster endangered species or even be used to resurrect entire species. The house cat, Cayenne, acts towards her kitten like any typical feline mother: protecting her, nursing her and objecting loudly when her offspring is picked up. And the baby wildcat, named Jazz, nurses off her surrogate mother. Jazz was born Nov. 24, about 70 days after scientists had taken sperm from a male African wildcat named Sid and the egg of a female named Sheena and implanted the embryo in the domestic cat.

Through the power of Net devices, you never again need you go through the agony of starting a load of wash, leaving the house and realizing you need a longer pre-soak. Italian appliance maker Ariston has released its margherita2000.com. This Internet-connected washing machine that can be controlled with a mobile phone or via a Web interface.

For the first time, scientists have mapped virtually an entire human chromosome, one of the chains of molecules that bear the genetic recipe for human life. The achievement was announced by the Human Genome Project, which is attempting to detail the tens of thousands of genes that carry instructions for everything in a human being

The strongest evidence yet that aging in mammals is controlled by a genetic switch has been found by Italian scientists who engineered mice to live longer by boosting their resistance to the damage oxygen can do to cells. The researchers at the European Institute of Oncology in Milan extended the lifespan of the mice up to 35% by breeding them without a gene that produces a protein vulnerable to so-called cell oxidation. Equally important, the mice suffered no apparent side effects. Other scientists called the study a major step forward in understanding the aging process. The study was published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

Colm Kelleher, a molecular biologist and immunologist, believes that the very experience of mystical moments can change our DNA. For the past ten years, in multiple labs in North America, he has been researching the structure and properties of the 97% of our genetic material that does NOT code for protein. Over a million sequences in human DNA have the amazing property of being able to jump from chromosome to chromosome. These sequences, called transposons, if activated to jump, are capable of large scale genetic change in a very short time. Kelleher recently published a paper hypothesizing that there is a commonality between the intense psychological and behavioral effects reported during heightened spiritual states, shamanic initiations, near death experiences, UFO close encounters and "abductions".

Scientists transplanted scalp cells from one person to another and, for the first time ever, grew new hair on a human without the use of drugs. The approach could someday enable just about any head to sprout hair, researchers said. It also raises hopes of someday spurring the growth of new tissue or even whole organs inside patients, such as cartilage in arthritic joints.

A British study has found that frequent water consumption may reduce breast cancer risk by 79%. A Cancer Research Center in Seattle showed that women who drink 5 glasses of water a day reduce their risk of colon cancer by 45%. Most people need 8 cups of water a day.

Researchers have developed a computer algorithm that imitates a fundamental characteristic of human intelligence - the ability to distinguish patterns within large amounts of data, text, or images. The program, called an algorithm for non-negative matrix factorization, could one day lead to faster and more accurate video conferencing, data storage and transmission, and web searches, scientists said. To test the algorithm, scientists presented the program with 2,400 photographs of human faces. The program figured out that all of the faces had up to 49 elements in common, such as noses, lips, eyes and ears, and looked for similarities between the features. Using the 49 features, the program then recreated all of the faces. In addition to sorting through images, the algorithm is also designed to find patterns within a large cache of texts and documents. The algorithm, which is featured in the current issue of Nature , could be used one day as a more efficient method to compress, transmit, or store video images or other data.

Jawbones of two animals from before the Jurassic period may be the oldest dinosaur fossils ever discovered and could focus new light on an era when mammals, dinosaurs and reptiles were in a frenzy of evolutionary change. The new fossils were found in an ancient riverbed in Madagascar mixed with the remains of other animals that are believed from earlier studies to have lived 227 million years ago. "These are probably the earliest dinosaurs known from anywhere in the world," said Andre Wyss of the University of California, Santa Barbara, co-founder of a research team that is excavating the Madagascar site. A report on the fossil find appears Friday in the journal Science.

A woolly mammoth preserved in ice has been excavated in Siberia and airlifted by helicopter to a cave where it will be kept frozen and studied by scientists. The scientists, including Northern Arizona University mammoth expert Larry Agenbroad, recently excavated the nearly perfectly preserved adult male mammoth from the permafrost. The mammoth was found in 1997 by a 9-year-old nomadic reindeer herder. By studying its teeth, scientists determined the 11-foot-tall mammoth to have been 47 years old. The lifespan of a mammoth is about 60 years. Besides analyzing dirt, pollen, and even its stomach contents, a primary task is to extract DNA for cloning.

A super-fast, minuscule molecular computer driven by gases may be a step closer to reality thanks to research by a Berlin-based chemist. James La Clair, formerly with the Scripps Research Institute in California, had developed a molecule that could be switched on and off by nitrogen and carbon dioxide. "This finding provides a new cornerstone for future electronics," he said. Molecular computing could help to solve a major problem facing the technology industry - the physical limitations of silicon-based transistors. Scientists at Intel, have warned of problems with the further scaling down of transistors

Researchers in the UK have developed an electronic nose for sniffing out infections, borrowing from Chinese doctors' long-held sense for scents. The Diag-Nose, invented by Drs. Selly Saini and Jan Leiferkus of Cranfield University in Bedfordshire, England, may one day become as common as colds in doctors' offices. "The Chinese have done a lot of work in using the sense of smell to diagnose disease," said Saini, head of Cranfield's Centre for Analytical Science . "In Asia, a patient suspected of having tuberculosis would spit into a fire, which gave off a distinctive smell. There's a lot of evidence that a number of diseases give off a characteristic odor."
The Diag-Nose works in the same way as the human nose, Saini said. The device is fitted with a range of electronic sensors tuned to particular chemicals, akin to human smell receptors. If traces of the chemical are present, the sensors send a message to the machine's brain. The brain is a neural network trained to associate certain smells with particular events, in this case the presence of infectious bacteria. The Diag-Nose has been trained to diagnose urinary tract infections but may also be adapted for diagnosing tuberculosis, certain bowel cancers, and infections in wounds.

A drug described as the first entirely new kind of antibiotic in more than 35 years is expected to give doctors a fresh weapon against germs that are resistant to anything science now has. The medicine, called Zyvox, appears to work as well as standard antibiotics against garden-variety germs and can also kill those that are resistant to everything else, including vancomycin, now the drug of last resort for stubborn infections. Researchers presented the results of several large studies on the drug at a conference sponsored by the American Society for Microbiology. Its maker, Pharmacia & Upjohn, plans to seek approval for Zyvox from the Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory agencies around the world by the end of the year.

A religious text that has mysteriously surfaced in Israel and is being billed as one of the "lost" Dead Sea Scrolls uses some of the same phrases and imagery as the other 2000-year-old writings, a scholar said after studying excerpts. But it's too soon to say whether the "Angel Scroll," which describes a believer's trip through the heavens, is a major find that will shed new light on Jewish mysticism and the origins of Christianity, or an elaborate hoax, said Stephen Pfann, president of the University of the Holy Land. The story of the Angel Scroll is shrouded in mystery. Rumors have circulated for years among scholars in the Holy Land that one of the scrolls - the religious writings of the Essenes found in caves near the Dead Sea between 1947 and 1954 - made its way to an antiquities dealer in one of the nearby Arab capitals.

Elderly rats fed the human equivalent of at least half a cup of blueberries a day improved in balance, coordination and short-term memory, a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience said. A cup of blueberries is a normal serving. Like other fruits and vegetables, blueberries contain chemicals that act as antioxidants. Scientists believe antioxidants protect the body against "oxidative stress," one of several biological processes that cause aging.

The smallest motors ever created promise a better understanding of human biology and may one day produce minuscule machines to heal the body and improve the environment. "What we've been able to figure out will hopefully give people who work directly with biological motors some idea of how they might work," said T. Ross Kelly, a professor of chemistry at Boston College and lead author of the research. Nanotechnology, by definition, is the craft of constructing devices smaller than a few hundred nanometers, or billionths of a meter. That equals the span of less than a hundred atoms strung together.
The Boston scientists have spent four years developing their mini-motor, which is made up of only 78 atoms, and works like a ratchet. So far, the ratchet is only able to turn the equivalent of a single click.
But Kelly hopes that soon it will be able to turn automatically and for as long as it receives fuel. If the tiny motors can sustain continuous movement, they could be used to fuel super-efficient computers, build stronger, more efficient vehicles, even build engines that travel through the body to cure disease.
The motor's fuel comes from a small molecule called carbonyl dichloride, unlike natural biological motors, which get their energy from a molecule called ATP. Carbonyl dichloride is a much smaller molecule with only four atoms, compared to ATP's 47. But the two work essentially the same way.

Aged brains have been restored to youthful vigor in a gene therapy experiment with monkeys that may soon be tested in humans with Alzheimer's disease, researchers report. Scientists hope the treatment will reinvigorate thinking and memory. "To our surprise, this technique nearly completely reversed" the effects of aging on a group of key brain cells that had shrunk in elderly Rhesus monkeys, said Dr. Mark H. Tuszynski of the University of California, San Diego. Tuszynski is senior author of a study which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The studies reinforce a new understanding of how the brain ages and suggest that neurons in the older brain don't die at first, but go into shrunken atrophy, he said.

According to an article in the journal SCIENCE, a study found computers showed more creativity than people in dreaming up advertising. Instead of batting around ideas in an atmosphere of tolerant experimentation, the computers worked alone and followed rules. A panel of judges found the computers' work was in the same league with the work of professional ad-makers' and far better than that of amateurs given total artistic freedom.
"The computer-generated ideas ranked significantly higher on a creativity scale than the ideas produced by the human subjects," wrote researchers Jacob Goldenberg, David Mazursky and Sorin Solomon of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Mazursky and his colleagues discovered that rules were essential to producing the ads the judges found creative. Using a simple formula -- present in a small percentage of actual ads -- the computers came up with five ad ideas that judges decided were at least as good as advertisement concepts developed by humans. These include an ad for Apple Computer in which the computer offered flowers to the user to show how user-friendly it was. Another showed a domed mosque with the texture of a tennis ball to promote a tennis tournament in Jerusalem. Other computer-generated ideas included an image of a bullet-shaped car, suggesting the car's speed, and a cuckoo shaped like a jet plane popping out of a cuckoo clock to show an airline's punctuality. The pattern used to generate all these ads was the same: Take a product and a characteristic of the product that needs to be promoted, then substitute another image that has that same characteristic. The researchers found that 89 percent of award-winning ads match as few as six formulas, which they called "creativity templates," and 25 percent of those could follow what they called the replacement template -- the pattern the computer program used to create its ad ideas for this study. A Web site lets visitors try computer-generated ad-making.

Scientists have genetically engineered smarter mice. By inserting an extra gene, researchers produced a strain of mice that excelled in a range of tasks, such as recognizing a Lego piece they had encountered before, learning the location of a hidden underwater platform and recognizing signs that they were about to receive a mild shock. The mice carried their enhanced intelligence into adulthood, when learning ability and memory naturally taper off, and passed it on to their offspring.

California's first attempt to turn rice stubble and tree trimmings into ethanol resembles a scene from "Back to the Future" when trash is dumped into Mr. Fusion at one end and pure energy comes out the other. The proposed "bio-refinery" will convert thousands of tons of rice straw, orchard prunings and other agricultural waste into ethanol, a sort of 200-proof moonshine that state air-pollution fighters hope will soon replace the unpopular additive MTBE in California gasoline.

Russian physicists have created a new, super-heavy element that lasted a surprisingly long 30 seconds before disintegrating - long-sought proof, they say, of the existence of an "island of stability." Using an atom smasher to bombard plutonium with calcium ions, the physicists created an element with an atomic weight of 114. The newest addition to the periodic table has yet to be named.

Drinking at least one cup of tea a day could cut the risk of heart attack by 44%, according to new research. Researchers say the beneficial results probably are due to the powerful amounts of natural substances in tea known as flavonoids, vitamin-like nutrients that make blood cells less prone to clotting.

Scientists have devised a way of hiding a coded message in a dot of human DNA. In the journal Nature, researchers describe how they made and mailed a microdot that contained a secret message hidden amid millions of strands of DNA.

Researchers say they've developed an alternative use for soybeans - as a motor oil. Researchers from Agro Management Group Inc., of Colorado Springs, Colo., who developed and patented the product, drove two trucks on an 18-day tour through 18 states. One was lubricated with conventional motor oil, the other with the new soybean oil. The two materials performed equally well, researchers said.

Experiments conducted by Tom Danley in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid and in Chambers above the King's Chamber suggest that the pyramid was constructed with a sonic purpose. Danley identifies four resident frequencies, or notes, that are enhanced by the structure of the pyramid, and by the materials used in its construction. The notes form an F Sharp chord, which according to ancient Egyptian texts were the harmonic of our planet. Moreover, Danley's tests show that these frequencies are present in the King's Chamber even when no sounds are being produced. They are there in frequencies that range from 16 Hertz down to 1/2 Hertz, well below the range of human hearing. According to Danley, these vibrations are caused by the wind blowing across the ends of the so-called shafts --- in the same way as sounds are created when one blows across the top of a bottle

A study by researchers at Thomas Jefferson University and the University of Auckland in New Zealand showed that rats lost 45 percent fewer brain cells to aging if they had been provided with rubber balls, running wheels, and tunnels to play with and received special treats such as corn chips. Moreover, active rats that also received a brain stimulant called kainic acid showed almost complete protection from brain cell loss.

Strands of DNA might someday be used as wires in computer chips and transistors. Hans-Werner Fink and Christian Schoenenberger of the University of Basel in Switzerland found DNA conducts electricity as well as a good semiconductor.

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A tiny corn kernel is rewriting human history in the New World. The kernel - from a cob about the size of a child's finger - was discovered by University of California, Berkeley archaeologist M. Steven Shackley and two University of New Mexico colleagues last summer in a cave in Arizona. Radiocarbon analysis at the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory shows the kernel is 3,690 years old. That makes it the oldest corn ever discovered in the U.S. and the oldest ever found anywhere outside central Mexico, where corn has been dated back 4,700 years. The discovery has switched archaeology's focus from New Mexico and the Colorado plateau to southern Arizona as the cradle of early farming in the Southwest.

Scientists have developed a way to let paralyzed people use their brain waves to maneuver a ball on a computer screen and spell out messages. Electrodes and wires were attached to the scalp of two patients with advanced Lou Gehrig's disease. They learned to maneuver the ball by varying the strength of a specific kind of brain wave.

An advisory panel to the federal government says the active ingredients in marijuana can help fight pain and nausea and thus deserve to be tested in scientific trials. The Institute of Medicine says there is no conclusive evidence that marijuana use leads to harder drugs.

Tears, saliva and the urine of pregnant women all contain proteins that are potent killers of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, researchers say. The scientists isolated a protein, called lysozyme, and found that it was able to kill the AIDS virus quickly in test-tube experiments.

The Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution is launching a new Web site: "www.at-sea.org" - that will post daily dispatches from its marine expeditions worldwide.

Researchers attempting to relieve chest pain with a genetically engineered drug found that folks who got a medicine called VEGF could exercise longer without being stopped by angina. But it turns out that people who got dummy shots seemed to improve even more. "These early and preliminary results are not exactly what we hoped for," conceded Dr. Timothy Henry of Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis. The development of VEGF - vascular endothelial growth factor - was a high-profile project of Genentech Inc.

NEW HAVEN, Conn - At a top-secret farm hidden in the Northeast, scientists are growing pigs whose DNA has been altered with human genes. It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, yet officials at Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc. say they are close to figuring out how these pigs can figure in the treatment of human organ failures, spinal cord injuries and illnesses such as Parkinson's disease. The idea of transplanting animal parts to humans, called xenotransplantation, isn't new. But, until recently, nobody knew how to keep the human body from rejecting the organs.

An MIT graduate student who developed implants that may give artificial limbs the sense of touch was awarded the prestigious 1999 Lemelson-MIT prize for inventiveness on Thursday. Daniel DiLorenzo was also recognized for his work on patented medical devices, including one that helps break the habit of bed-wetting and another that controls swelling in brain tissue during surgery.

A team of astronomers has created a map of the cosmos that covers the largest area of the universe ever charted. The three dimensional map charting 15,500 galaxies, covers an area so large it would take 500 million years for a light shone on one side to reach the other. Superclusters - gigantic structures made of clusters of galaxies - are charted, and the spaces between them, called voids, offer important information about the expansion of the universe. According to the Big Bang theory, gravity has kept the universe expanding since its creation.

Scientists have made a moving part out of a few strands of DNA, a step toward building incredibly tiny "machines" that could someday perform intricate jobs like building computer circuits and clearing clogged blood vessels in the brain. The hinge-like part, which bends on cue, is just four-ten-thousandths of the width of a human hair. The new work is not the first time scientists have turned chemical compounds into moving parts. But previous examples have been hampered by their floppy nature. The DNA device, however, is particularly rigid and executes motions 10 times bigger, lead researcher Nadrian C. Seeman said.

An 8-week-old girl with a potentially fatal skin disease that causes blistering with the slightest touch received a patch of bio-engineered Monday 1/11. The child is the first newborn to be given the faux skin, called Apligraf, said Dr. Lawrence Schachner, one of the girl's doctors. Since she was 11 days old, doctors at Jackson Children's Hospital have been applying the new skin to Tori Cameron's body, which is now 40% covered. She received a 7-centimeter patch of the elastic, bone-colored laboratory skin Monday on her blistered right calf.

Medical science has accepted that moderate wine consumption is good for the heart, and now there's more good news about vino: Italian researchers writing in the British journal New Scientist say a glass and a half a day could help stave off neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Apparently the natural chemical reservatrol, produced by vines and concentrated in both grapes and wine, stimulates an enzyme called mapkinase, which regenerates nerve cells.

A preliminary study suggests there may be something to one popular folk remedy - magnets really might ease pain in some cases. More research is needed, agree the physician who conducted the small study and an outside observer. Dr. Michael Weintraub, a neurologist at the New York Medical College in Valhalla, said a group of patients with chronic foot pain reported improvement after wearing pads equipped with low-intensity magnets.

Scientists in Thailand want to clone a white elephant that belonged to a 19th century king. The project will take 10 years, the Bangkok Post reported January 1st. The scientists want to use genetic material from a white elephant owned by King Rama III, who ruled from 1824-51, because they believe it possessed the finest characteristics of an elephant. The remains of that elephant have been preserved. Prized for their rarity and a belief they bring good luck, all white elephants in Thailand are the property of the royal family.

Why do you remember prom night so well when you don't have a clue to what you did two nights later? In part, a study says, you can thank a nerve that runs to your brain from deep in your innards. Researchers found that stimulating this nerve in people improves memory. They say the finding might someday help victims of stroke or head injury recover faster. The work helps explain why people remember emotionally charged events - weddings, deaths, insults - better than ordinary happenings.

Antibodies produced by genetically engineered plants seem to work just as well as those naturally produced by the body, researchers reported. The antibodies, nicknamed "plantibodies," worked against the herpes simplex virus 2 (HSV-2), which causes genital herpes, the researchers reported in the journal Nature Biotechnology. Dr. Kevin Whaley and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University used soybeans, genetically engineered to produce the human antibody against HSV-2. The monoclonal antibody they purified from the soybeans was just as effective as one made by mammals for protecting mice against genital herpes, they reported.

Researchers envision the day when every newborn will be issued a genetic patch kit for use in repairing worn or broken body parts.

Danish scientists have created a chip where a single atom jumping back and forth could generate the binary code which is the basis of digital information used by computers. Applying this technique - which might become commercially viable in a decade or two - information stored today on a million CD-roms could be stored on a single disc, said physics doctor Francois Grey, the team leader.


PHYSLINK--your guide to physics on the web


Monkeys can count, at least up to nine. Researchers said their study shows monkeys and other primates are more intelligent than they are usually given credit for, adding it erodes some established barriers that people often think make humans superior to animals. "This finding is important because it shows that monkeys know things about numbers that we haven't taught them," said Elizabeth Brannon, a graduate student at New York's Columbia University who worked on the study.

a new device could make the dental drill and the gum-numbing needle a thing of the past. San Clemente, Calif.-based Biolase Inc. said the Food and Drug Administration approved its "Millennium" device that uses a spray of laser-powered water to cut teeth and repair cavities. The company claims the device is so painless most patients don't need anesthetics. The device helps address two of the greatest fears patients have - the noise and pain of the drill and the needles used to administer local anesthesia, said a dentist in Fort Myers, Fla.

The same trait that makes people love harmonious music may help them choose a beautiful face, researchers said. Recent studies indicate the perception of beauty might not be subjective at all but instead arises from a bias hard-wired into the sensory system. These studies have shown how symmetrical body features, chiefly in the face, are viewed as beautiful, while asymmetrical ones are not. Writing in the journal Science, Michael Ryan, a zoologist at the University of Texas and expert on the subject, said this means the traditional theories about genetic fitness do not tell the whole story about why animals and humans choose "attractive" mates.

Researchers said the first pill designed to treat all common strains of influenza shows real promise, reducing symptoms and helping patients feel better faster. Unlike over-the-counter flu medicines, which just treat the aches and pains of flu and the coughing and other respiratory effects, the experimental new drug actually attacks the virus, its makers said. The drug, called GS4104, was developed by F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. and California biotechnology company Gilead Sciences Inc.

A little piece of genetic material that jumped into animals, perhaps from a microbe, may explain our complex and sophisticated immune system, researchers said. They said they found important evidence of how this so-called "jumping gene" has made it into humans - explaining how our immune systems can fight off a huge array of viruses, bacteria and parasites. Writing in the science journal Nature, David Schatz and colleagues at Yale University said they think the gene, known as a transposon, may have acted like a virus, insinuating itself into the genetic material of whatever animal it infected 450 million years ago.

A Scottish man is to be fitted with the world's first fully mobile electronic arm, an Edinburgh hospital said. Campbell Aird, a hotel owner from Scotland, will be given the new "bionic" arm, developed by the Prosthetics Research and Development Team at Princess Margaret Rose Orthopaedic Hospital."It's bionic because it's restoring a biological function in terms of prosthetic upper limb and it's using electronics to control and power it," said Dr David Gow, head of the team, which has worked on the project for the past 10 years.

Scientists have found what they think to be two dinosaur eggs in southern Bolivia in what could be one of the biggest fossil fields in the world. Team leader Christian Mayer said the eggs dated back some 68 million years. "They were found in green limestone and there may be more in other layers," said the Swiss paleontologist. The eggs were dug up in a fossil field in Cal Ork'o, 440 miles southeast of the capital La Paz and near the city of Sucre. "Of the eggs we found, one measures 10 inches and the other, from a flying reptile, is big and measures 16 inches," Mayer said. The eggs were found after six weeks of digging and will be flown to Switzerland for laboratory analysis.

Scientists are mounting an expedition to Siberia to seek out frozen mammoth sperm and bring the extinct species back to life. The plan is to use the frozen sperm to fertilize elephants' eggs and breed hybrids. Cross-breeding with successive generations would allow the hybrids gradually to become pure genetic copies of their mammoth ancestors.

African healers, once scorned by physicians and scientists, have valuable weapons for the fight against emerging diseases, but religion and suspicion may mean many stay secret. World experts say village doctors' cures for mysterious tropical diseases have already proved useful even though enduring scourges like malaria, yellow fever, river blindness and leprosy continue to ravage the world's poorest continent. European missionary workers like Nosella Domitalla, with 22 years of treating the sick in West Africa, says traditional cures have long been sidelined, often for good reasons.

Astronomers have uncovered a hidden population of distant stars and galaxies that were formed much earlier than scientists had previously thought. They used a new type of camera, called SCUBA, to delve deeper into the distant universe and produce images more accurate than even the most powerful optical telescope. "We looked at the very distant universe to see if we could see dust in galaxies that could be enshrouding hot young stars," said astronomer James Dunlop. "What we found is that optical astronomers seem to be missing about 80% of the star formations in the early part of the universe - the first billion years.


Researchers at Stanford University have developed a new and improved "virtual frog" so that squeamish students can dissect it over the Internet without the blood and gore associated with an actual lab. The so-called "Frog Island" Web site lets users view the computer-simulated frog from any angle, or hit a command that turns its skin transparent so that its internal organs and skeleton are visible. Other commands will peel back the frog's muscles to expose more of the inner anatomy. The frog is the first creation of the Virtual Creatures project at the Stanford University Medical Media and Information Technologies Group.

U.S. and Japanese scientists have evidence tiny sub-atomic particles called neutrinos have mass, a finding that could be key to establishing the Grand Unification theory of physics. Physicists said if the finding is confirmed by future experiments, it will cause a revision of the so-called Standard Model that describes interactions of elementary particle physics. In the Standard Model, neutrinos have no mass. "These new results could prove to be the key to finding the Holy Grail of physics, the unified theory," said John Learned, University of Hawaii Professor of Physics and Astronomy and one of the authors a paper on a neutrinos experiment in Japan.

Western medicine mixed with Eastern meditation as the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, met with top U.S. doctors to trade ideas on health and healing. Taking part in a conference at New York City's Beth Israel Medical Center, specialists in such fields as pediatric neurosurgery and psychoneuroimmunology discussed their highly technical knowledge with the Dalai Lama, who in turn told them about Buddhist thought and meditation techniques. Many of the doctors peppered the Dalai Lama with questions, asking his views on such medical issues as ways to treat children, how much knowledge to give patients about illnesses and the use of behavior modification.

British scientists have developed a safe, effective and painless vaccine to prevent tooth decay. It is a plant-based vaccine that is painted on teeth and produces antibodies that prevent harmful bacteria from sticking to teeth and causing cavities. Dr. Julian Ma and Professor Tom Lehner led the team of researchers at Guys Hospital dental school in London that produced the vaccine by genetically modifying tobacco plants to carry antibodies to Streptococcus mutans, which causes 95% of tooth decay. The tasteless, colorless vaccine was successfully tested on people during a four-month trial.

Researchers at a California company have found a good way to make fuel from methane, an abundant gas found in places ranging from swamps to sewers. Reporting in the journal Science, researchers said they used a platinum catalyst to convert methane into methanol, which can be used to supplement gasoline. Roy Periana and colleagues at Catalytica Advanced Technologies Inc. said their method had an efficiency of 72% - very high for such a process. They noted since the fuel crisis of the 1970s, scientists had looked for ways to convert natural gases into alcohols or similar compounds that could be used to supplement petroleum.

A new approach to fighting toxic bacteria could mean an end to the problem of drug-resistant "superbugs". California researchers have found a single protein that controls production of all the poisons that make staphylococcus bacteria dangerous and also found two ways to stop the protein's action. Naomi Balaban and colleagues at the University of California, Davis, said they hoped their new approach, which uses either a vaccine or a protein molecule, would provide an alternative to antibiotics.

Observations of U.S. satellites orbiting Earth showed a spinning body can curve space - something Albert Einstein predicted in his general theory of relativity. Einstein said the spin of a body must change the geometry of the universe by generating space-time curvature. He called it "frame dragging" but it is also known as the Lense-Thirring effect, after Austrian physicists Josef Lense and Hans Thirring, who said celestial bodies that rotate, such as the Sun, create a force that pulls space towards them.

Scientists in Innsbruck, Austria have destroyed bits of light in one place and caused perfect replicas to appear about three feet away. The phenomenon is called quantum teleportation, a bizzare shifting of physical characteristics between nature's tiniest particles, no matter how far apart they are. The phenomenon is so bizarre that even Albert Einstein didn't believe in it. He called it 'spooky'. In addition to raising the rather fantastic notion of a new means of transportation, the trick could lead to ultra fast computers.

A strange bacterium that is resistant to extremely high doses of radiation has evolved the most powerful gene repair system known in any life form. Scientists are studying the bug to get insights into whether it could be used to repair genetic damage in humans AND clean up radioactive dumps. The bug withstands radiation of up to 3 million rad, at which time it's chromosomes finally shatter into hundreds of fragments. Exposure to only 100 rad is lethal to humans. In 12 to 24 hours it splices it's DNA back together in perfect order.

'Thought phone' could move limbs
New discoveries about how the brain is organized could help paralyzed people move an arm or a leg just by thinking about it, said Richard Andersen of the California Institute of Technology. An electrode implanted in the brain could send a signal to another electrode in the paralyzed muscle. "It would be kind of like a cellular phone," Andersen said Monday. The idea of using electrodes is not new. What is new, Andersen said, is knowing where in the brain they should go to have the best effect. He has been working with monkeys, using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to see how their brains work.

New Zealand scientists said they were synthesizing a protein produced by mussels in the hope it will lead to the closing of human wounds without stitches. The protein forms the strong natural glue that sticks the shellfish to rocks. A chemistry team from Auckland University is investigating the protein, secreted by a gland in the mussel's foot, which gives it sticking power.

Researchers said Wednesday they had found a way to use bugs to make new drugs. The researchers at Cornell University said they could genetically engineer insects and harvest proteins from them for use in medicines. "In effect we are turning insects into little protein factories," said virologist Alan Wood. "These are valuable proteins and they can't be produced in any other way," he added. Wood said his team started out examining ways to use viruses to fight agricultural pests. But then they found moths and caterpillars being killed by the viruses were producing beneficial proteins.