Table of contents for January-February 2014 in Discover

In my inbox this morning, I found a letter from a reader waiting for me, requesting more information about research that appeared in “Doorway to a Cure,” our September feature on cystic fibrosis. We get these sorts of requests all the time. Frankly, I’d be worried if we didn’t. One of the things I admire about all of you is your insatiable curiosity. We strive in every issue to tell complete and satisfying stories, but in some ways I feel we’d be doing you a disservice if you didn’t come away from any given story or issue and ask, “What’s next?” Based on the letters we get, a good number of you even find yourselves thinking about a story you read months or years ago and wondering whatever happened to…

The patent Myriad Genetics filed in 1994, laying claim to the DNA sequence of the gene BRCA1, wasn’t remarkable. It was one in a long line of some 40,000 patents on DNA molecules awarded in the past three decades, covering more than 20 percent of human genes. But that patent took on a new importance last summer, when the Supreme Court ruled that it and untold numbers of other DNA patents are invalid because naturally occurring DNA sequences cannot be patented. The decision has had immediate benefits for researchers and doctors, but creates new worries for the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. Before the ruling, Utah-based Myriad had a legal monopoly in the U.S. on tests for mutations in the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2 that contribute to aggressive forms of breast…

Liver Buds to the Rescue Some 16,000 ailing Americans are waiting to receive a liver transplant. But due to a shortage of viable livers, it’s likely that fewer than 7,000 transplants will be performed in 2013. In Japan, where the shortage is worse, the number of people in need of new livers is 10 times as great as the number of deceased donors who could provide one. That gap motivated stem cell biologist Takanori Takebe and his colleagues at the Department of Regenerative Medicine at Yokohama City University in Japan to find an alternate solution. This year they succeeded in generating mini-livers, or liver buds, from stem cells that were taken from human skin and reprogrammed to an embryonic state. (Embryonic stem cells are notable because they can morph into…

For millennia, the stories of long-extinct species — including our own progenitors — have been buried with their skeletal remains. But in 2013, ultramodern DNA extraction and sequencing techniques enabled researchers to access ancient genetic codes and translate their evolutionary tales: Researchers in Denmark reconstructed a record-breaking 700,000-year-old horse genome, and geneticists in Germany began parsing the DNA of 400,000-year-old hominids. Geologists saw the first glint of the horse’s history in 2003 when they plucked its toe bone from permafrost in a remote Yukon gold mine. The uninterrupted freeze of the permafrost preserved DNA in the horse bone, but since DNA decays into smaller and less intelligible fragments over time, the specimen seemed too ancient to analyze. “When that fossil was found, no one would have believed that we could…

William Sager’s 20-year hunch has paid off in a very big way. In September, the University of Houston geophysicist and his team announced that Tamu Massif, an underwater volcano about a third of the way from Japan to Hawaii, is by far the largest volcano on the planet. For two decades, using sonar and other undersea mapping methods, Sager has been studying an oceanic plateau in the northwestern Pacific called Shatsky Rise. Over several expeditions, he began to suspect that the subtly dome-shaped formation at Shatsky’s south end, which he named Tamu Massif, might be an enormous volcano. To confirm his theory, Sager’s team drilled core samples and bounced seismic waves through Tamu’s layers to determine its composition. They discovered Tamu’s 120,000 square miles were made of massive lava sheets,…

Curing babies born with HIV is no longer out of the question: An HIV-positive newborn treated immediately with antiviral drugs is now 3 years old and free of infection, researchers announced in March and confirmed in a paper in October. The method will be tested in more infants in the hopes of helping the roughly 330,000 babies born worldwide each year with HIV. This baby’s mother was HIVpositive. The newborn also tested positive, but instead of treating with one drug, as is usually done for HIV-positive babies, an HIV specialist began a standard combination of drugs within two days. The mother stopped treating her daughter by the time she was 18 months old, but when doctors examined the child five months later, they saw no sign of HIV. “There was…

Last May, researchers unveiled the chicken-size dinosaur-like Aurornis xui, pictured at left. The fossil depicts the most primitive bird documented so far, though maybe not the oldest, as first suspected. Researchers bought the specimen from a dealer and are determining whether the bird is 160 million years old, as claimed — or if it is actually 35 million years younger. No matter its age, the new fossil sheds light on how dinosaurs evolved into birds, says study co-author Andrea Cau of the Museo Geologico Giovanni Capellini in Italy. Most of its features — the length of its forearms, the shape and details of its skull — “are in fact intermediate between other dinosaurs and more recent birds,” he says. Some are plain surprising: That hookshaped hip bone? “Bizarre,” says Cau,…

If defective genes make someone sick, why not just edit out the malfunctioning versions and add in ones that work? That’s the idea behind gene therapy — but it hasn’t lived up to its promise. For one thing, controlling where a gene is added into the genome is difficult, and randomly inserted genes can disrupt others, fouling up their functions or causing cancers. Also, current gene-editing methods don’t completely shut down bad genes. A technique based on the immune systems of bacteria and archaea, another kind of microorganism, may soon provide solutions. These microbes essentially keep mug shots of dangerous viruses in their DNA, storing snippets of viral genes between certain repeated segments of their own genes in a natural biological process known as CRISPR, for clustered regularly interspaced short…

In the early 2000s, the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum developed resistance to the commonly used antimalarial drug chloroquine. In response, the World Health Organization declared that the treatment of choice should combine the plant-derived drug artemisinin with other antimalarials. The cocktail made a difference: Deaths from the disease — which every year strikes some 219 million people, mostly children — have declined by more than 25 percent since 2000. However, consistent supplies of artemisinin, which is derived from the sweet wormwood plant, are subject to the whims of weather and other growing conditions. Now, a new synthetic biology technique that produces artemisinin in a vat may act as a buffer against potential supply crises. The journey from sweet wormwood seed to harvest to finished drug is slow. Farmers in China,…

Perhaps it’s time to prune the family tree. A 1.8 million-year-old skull suggests several of the half-dozen species of human ancestors and cousins alive then were likely all members of just one species: Homo erectus. The skull was the fifth unearthed at a fossil-rich prehistoric watering hole in Dmanisi, Georgia; together, the specimens provide a vivid picture of the population of human ancestors at that location and place in time — and the variation within it. The remarkably complete “Skull 5” features a big jaw, big teeth and overhanging eyebrows — but the brain was just one-third the size of a modern human’s. “Had Skull 5 been found as an isolated braincase and an isolated face, these parts may have been attributed to distinct species,” says Christoph Zollikofer, a University…

Archaeologist Robin Beck has spent decades puzzling over the missing ruins of North Carolina’s Fort San Juan. Historical records show Spanish explorer Juan Pardo established the fort in 1566 to help build a road to silver mines in Mexico. Yet in excavations, Beck could find no telltale evidence of bastions or palisades — just the remains of five Spanish houses, inexplicably close to a Native American mound. So Beck and colleagues trained magnetometers on the earthen mound, which revealed a startling contrast between the magnetic properties of the soil and unusual structural frames beneath it. By June, the archaeologists realized they’d stumbled on their buried treasure: the makings of a classic European fort, complete with a moat. The 16th-century fortifications survived only a year and a half before a neighboring…

An estimated one in four people are allergic to cats. Now, after learning how felines trigger such potent allergic reactions, researchers say new treatments may emerge. Allergic reactions occur when the body’s immune system targets a normally harmless protein as if it were a dangerous pathogen, leading to inflammation. For people who are allergic to cats, that protein is Fel d 1, found in cat dander and the culprit behind allergy sufferers’ sneezes, wheezes, runny nose and watery eyes. But just how this protein triggers the immune system has been a mystery. Human cells don’t respond to Fel d 1 alone, researchers at the University of Cambridge in England reported in July. It takes a third ingredient to get an inflammatory reaction: lipopolysaccharide, a molecule secreted by many common bacteria…

The HPV vaccine prevents the spread of the cancer-causing human papillomavirus. But because HPV is transmitted through sexual contact, some critics say the vaccine promotes promiscuity; others fret about potential side effects. As a result, only a third of teenage girls in the U.S. have received the three recommended shots. So public health officials were surprised when a nationwide survey revealed in June that infection rates from cancer-causing HPV strains have sharply declined since the vaccine was introduced in 2006. More than 8,000 girls and women between the ages of 14 and 59 were evaluated in the study, which found that infection rates with the strains of HPV that cause cancer had fallen 56 percent for 14-to 19-year-old girls. Among adolescent girls, infection rates fell from 11.5 percent of sexually…

The shadowy area around the supermassive black hole in our galaxy’s center lit up last year as it shredded a cloud of gas and dust called G2, which ventured too close. Black holes are virtually invisible unless they’re actively destroying something. Our black hole’s violent meeting with G2 began last July, and it gave astronomers a chance to peer inside the galactic center — the neighborhood around the black hole — rather than just simulate the swirling disc of gas and dust surrounding it. “What a difference it is when you can watch!” says G2’s co-discoverer Stefan Gillessen, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany. As G2 swung by the black hole’s event horizon — the point past which even light cannot escape — gravity…

Biologists have already cataloged and named nearly 1.2 million species, but they’ve just scratched the surface. Some estimates suggest the planet hosts nearly 7 million more creatures that have yet to be identified. These are just a few of the many species new to science in 2013. — ALLISON WINTER 1. Here comes the sun: An intricate wing pattern that includes orange spheres gave the sun moth, Stenoloba solaris, its name. Researchers from Lithuania and Hungary found the moth in the remote Baime Xue mountain range of China’s Yunnan province. 2. Holy bat genus: The striped bat, Niumbaha superba, found in South Sudan, actually constitutes a new genus: Its slightly shorter wings and more robust teeth earned the bat its own classification, according to a team from Pennsylvania’s Bucknell University.…

Where do cosmic rays come from, and what makes them the highest-energy particles in the universe? Until recently, no one knew for sure. But in February, scientists discovered that stellar explosions known as supernovae act like particle accelerators, boosting protons’ speeds enough to turn them into cosmic rays. The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the Very Large Telescope (VLT) were the first to witness the transformation. The VLT peered inside a supernova’s shock wave — the pileup of matter and magnetism where exploded material collides with interstellar space — and spotted protons moving up to 9.7 million mph, more than four times faster than the gas around them. Something had to be giving them extra energy. Around the same time, astronomers using the Fermi telescope discovered that “something.” Because of…

The moon, long thought to be bone dry, actually contains a surprising amount of water. In the latest twist, these stores turn out to be just like those on Earth, and probably filled by the same source: ancient asteroids. These icy missiles likely bombarded the inner solar system billions of years ago, delivering water to the inner planets. Around this time, scientists believe, a stupendous collision between a Mars-size rock and the young Earth produced debris that eventually coalesced to form our moon. Brown University’s Alberto Saal and colleagues measured the ratio of hydrogen to deuterium (hydrogen with an extra neutron) in lunar rock samples from the Apollo missions. This ratio reflects where in the solar system the material formed. Moon samples had the same hydrogen-deuterium ratio as found in…

In 2013, crack squads of virus detectives zeroed in on the source of a deadly new virus — and where the killer might be headed next — with unprecedented speed. ASSAILANT: The coronavirus Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, also known as MERS-CoV. RAP SHEET: No known priors; the virus is new to humans, who have no acquired immunity to it. BODY COUNT: Since claiming its first known human victim in 2012, MERS-CoV has infected more than 144 people, mostly in Saudi Arabia, killing 62. WILY ADVERSARY: In September, a genome sequencing study of MERS-CoV revealed that the virus did not follow mathematically predicted patterns of transmission; it likely has transmission routes other than sick individuals, such as asymptomatic humans or an as-yet-unknown domestic animal host. BATS: Using a sophisticated sequencing and…

What if doctors could find the source of a heart attack before it happens? Up to 1 million heart attacks occur in the U.S. each year, and “not a single one can be predicted,” says cardiologist Ryan Madder at the Frederik Meijer Heart and Vascular Institute in Grand Rapids, Mich. Most serious heart attacks begin when a plaque — a lipid core packed with cholesterol — literally blows its top inside an artery. The resulting clot blocks the flow of blood. In July, Madder’s research team reported that a novel imaging technique — near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), which uses infrared radiation to peer inside arteries — identified the culprit plaques in 19 of 20 heart attack patients. Previously, such plaques came to light only during autopsies. But here, a catheter fitted…

Jupiter’s frigid moon Europa could be one of the solar system’s best bets to find extraterrestrial life. Scientists have long wondered if the moon’s vast subsurface ocean, sandwiched between a rocky mantle and a global sheet of ice, could prove as habitable as Earth’s early oceans. And now there is further evidence. Caltech astronomer Mike Brown and NASA planetary scientist Kevin Peter Hand have discovered a new chemical “fingerprint” on Europa’s surface indicative of life: magnesium sulfate. The salt likely originated in the moon’s rocky mantle before it migrated through the ocean to the surface. This has two important implications. First, scientists can learn about Europa’s watery depths just by studying its surface. Second, it builds the case that life could swim within this ocean. “Having water interacting with rock…

This buglike contraption won the Igor I. Sikorksy prize as the first human-powered helicopter to hover at least 9.8 feet (3 meters) off the ground for a minute or longer. The $250,000 prize went unclaimed for 33 years as craft after craft failed liftoff or crashed. But Toronto-based AeroVelo’s four-rotor, 115-pound bicycle-powered vessel, dubbed Atlas, stayed aloft for 64.1 seconds thanks to a design by aeronautical engineers and computer modeling that fine-tuned the blueprints. Above, AeroVelo co-founder Todd Reichert (an aerodynamic engineer and competitive speed skater) powers Atlas during its prize-winning flight over an indoor soccer field.…

Somehow, we find our way in the world — but how we do it has remained a mystery. Nearly a decade ago, researchers discovered that rodents rely on navigational neurons called grid cells. As the animal moves, different subpopulations of these cells become active depending on distance and direction, creating an internal map of its trajectory. In 2013, neuroscientists finally found similar cells in humans. Drexel University’s Joshua Jacobs and colleagues studied patients who were awaiting surgery for epilepsy. Each had dozens of electrodes implanted in the brain, to record the electrical activity of seizures. While the patient navigated through a virtual environment on a computer, the team tracked more than 800 neurons, finding two clusters that acted like rodent grid cells. This neural machinery may be involved in learning…

Thousands of U.S. research and grant programs related to science stuttered, stopped or never even got a chance to begin in 2013 because of federal funding shortfalls and a partial government shutdown. The spending cuts known as “sequestration” that were triggered in March sliced $9.3 billion from federal research and development projects, according to an analysis from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In response, the 24 federal agencies that conduct research — from the Department of Defense to the U.S. Department of Agriculture — slowed the pace of lab work, instituted hiring freezes and cut grant programs. At the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the country’s largest financial supporter of basic medical research, the sequester led to $1.6 billion in cuts (a 5 percent reduction from…

Breast cancers that metastasize to the brain are usually deadly, but a team based at the University of Mississippi Medical Center has discovered a possible fix: a tiny fragment of genetic material known as microRNA. The cells of every plant and animal contain millions of different types of microRNAs, which help to regulate and transcribe genes. In February, researchers learned that one such microRNA, named miR-7, shuts down a protein found in breast cancers that helps them travel through the bloodstream to the brain. Other evidence shows that miR-7 can halt cancer cells that operate like stem cells, turning them into new kinds of tissue before they spread. MiR-7 also activates some cancer genes, so it is unlikely to be a treatment by itself. But understanding how it works may…

Despite all we know about individual brain cells, neurobiologists can’t explain how it all fits together — how each cluster of cells communicates with the others. But in hopes of drafting better wiring diagrams of the brain, European and U.S. governments in 2013 made big commitments toward studying how nerve cells link up and synchronize. In January, the European Commission pledged 1 billion euros for the Human Brain Project consortium to build a functioning digital version of a whole brain. And in April, President Barack Obama announced the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative, a plan to fund new research exploring how neural regions link up. One potential BRAIN goal is to inventory, for the first time, all the types of neural cells — there may be as…

It’s time to set yet another place at the periodic table: In 2013, an international team of nuclear physicists and chemists found new and confirming evidence that establishes another new chemical element — one of the growing family of superheavy substances. The team created 30 atoms of element 115 by firing a beam of calcium atoms at a piece of americium foil. The radioactive ununpentium (a temporary name meaning “one-one-five”) existed for only a fraction of a second before decaying into other elements. Next, physicists and chemists will try to make more of the mysterious metal to explore its “table manners” — its properties and structure.…

As long suspected, the solar system has an entourage: Charged particles trail it, cometlike, as it zooms through the Milky Way. This so-called heliotail, which stretches for tens of billions of miles, is made of protons and electrons streaming from the sun. Last year, NASA’s Earth-orbiting Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) satellite provided the first real view of this tail and its surprising shape. By sensing the trajectories of neutrally charged heliotail atoms that are aimed at Earth, IBEX maps the tail’s general form. In cross-section, it has a lobed structure like a four-leaf clover. Slow-moving particles from the sun’s equator flow from one flank across to the other, and fast, higher-energy particles from the poles flow through the top and bottom. The satellite shows how the solar system interacts with…

Chicken nuggets may soon log more miles than you realize: In September, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said it would, for the first time, allow poultry raised and slaughtered in the U.S. to be shipped to China, processed, and shipped back to be sold to U.S. consumers. The move touched a nerve with a public already unsettled by repeated food safety scandals in China — notably, the discovery in 2008 that baby formula manufacturers there had deliberately laced their products with toxic melamine to lower costs, sickening thousands of children and killing at least six. Nonetheless, food imports from China to the U.S. have ticked up, growing by 7 percent between 2009 and 2012. Between 2008 and 2011, Chinese imports made up two-thirds of the apple juice sold in the…

When the sun rises over the Mojave Desert near the California-Nevada border, its rays now warm a cluster of more than 170,000 mirrors at the world’s largest solar thermal power plant. The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, spread across 3,500 acres of federal land, started feeding power to the grid in September. Its mirrors tilt to follow the sun’s arc, redirecting light to water boilers that produce superhot steam at high pressure. As in a conventional fossil fuel or nuclear power plant, that steam spins turbines, which generate electricity. Ivanpah can produce up to 377 megawatts annually — enough to power about 140,000 homes. Challenges ranging from environmental concerns to a dramatic drop in prices for competing solar technologies have meant that “concentrating solar thermal has not yet lived up…

Low-tech, open-source innovation had a watershed year. Here are just a few of the simple, life-saving products that made a splash in 2013. If you want to appreciate the benefits of these DIY technologies, just pay a visit to rural Africa. — JONATHON KEATS Evocam Endoscope This simple camera and light source allows diagnosis and treatment of vesicovaginal fistula, a complication of childbirth among more than 2 million women in the developing world and common in sub-Saharan Africa, that results in a potentially deadly opening between the bladder and vagina. A traditional endoscope — a flexible fiber-optic tube used to look inside the body — costs as much as $70,000 and must be plugged in. San Francisco biomedical engineer Moshe Zilversmit’s Evocam costs less than $2,500 and runs off a…

Geologists mapping seismic activity and underwater topography off the coast of Portugal say the tectonic forces that once split and spread the ancient supercontinent Pangea across the surface of the globe appear to be shifting into reverse, setting our existing continents on an eventual collision course. While constructing a new tectonic map of the area, Monash University geologist João Duarte observed an inkling of a fracture in the normally intact and inactive plate that underlies the Atlantic Ocean. Such a fracture, says Duarte, is evidence of an “embryonic subduction zone,” where a new edge is formed, then forced under the remainder of the plate, into the Earth’s molten mantle. This process pulls the continents on the surface closer together. His findings, published in Geology in June, provide a possible explanation…

Earth’s magnetic field normally gathers energetic particles from the sun into two doughnut-shaped regions circling our planet. Called the Van Allen Belts, the inner one ranges from about 400 to 4,000 miles above Earth’s surface, and the outer one from 6,250 to as far as 40,000 miles. But in February 2013, NASA announced it had, briefly, observed a third belt. On Aug. 30, 2012, NASA launched the twin Van Allen Probes (formerly known as the Radiation Belt Storm Probes) to study the belts. Between Sept. 3 and 6, the probes’ instruments detected particles making up a third belt forming between the known two, only to disappear in early October. Scientists think a shock wave (an energetic disturbance) from the sun disrupted the outer belt, moving particles lower and forming the…

In May, veteran storm chaser Tim Samaras — along with longtime colleague Carl Young and son Paul Samaras — was killed by a twister that tore through Oklahoma, killing 22 people. Known for his appearances on the Discovery Channel’s Storm Chasers, the 55-year-old self-taught engineer traveled about 35,000 miles each summer, tracking tornados. He designed and built innovative probes that he placed on the ground just before tornados barreled through — often at grave personal peril — to measure storm conditions. Samaras’ work detailing the thermodynamic mechanisms that transform a thunderstorm into a tornado contributed to increased warning times ahead of tornadoes. Using a 1,600-pound Cold War-era camera (originally used to film nuclear tests) retrofitted with digital sensors and special software, Samaras strove to capture the dazzling moment a lightning…

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) gave Pluto two more underworld companions in 2013. The ex-planet’s moons P4 and P5, discovered in 2011 and 2012 and both less than 25 miles wide, are now officially known as Kerberos, after the mythological multiheaded “hellhound” that guards the gates of Hades, and Styx, after the goddess who watches over the underworld river of the same name. The IAU, perhaps seeking to improve its reputation after demoting Pluto to a dwarf planet, chose the names based on a 2013 Internet poll.…

(and what they hope misses us!) Don’t be shy about sharing your opinions, whether via letters, email or our social media communities. Here’s what you’ve been telling us lately. Holes in Hot Science The Hot Science section is “Your guide to cool culture, new tech and what’s next” in each issue. I think Hot Science is a great section; however, I’m surprised that there is no subsection on sciencefiction literature! In my opinion, reading books does the mind more good than watching movies, and you certainly dedicate a good portion of the section to films. Science-based nonfiction is awesome, too, but let’s get some sciencefiction novels in there! Even mentioning/recommending some older science fiction, like Isaac Asimov’s 1972 The Gods Themselves, would be excellent. Derek Saballos Dunedin, FL Under Surveillance…

On May 9, instruments atop Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano pegged the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) — the gas that contributes most to global warming — at slightly above 400 parts per million (ppm). Pieter Tans, senior scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and his colleague Ralph Keeling, director of the CO2 program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, had been watching the concentration climb ever closer to 400 ppm — a level not seen in millennia. They realized that reaching such a big, round number was “an opportunity to remind the world that CO2 is rising fast, and that the rate of rise in the last decade has been the fastest recorded,” Tans says. They also knew that “the press was looking over our shoulders,…

It took more than 35 years and a journey over 15 billion miles, but: “Voyager 1 is the first human-made object to make it into interstellar space — we’re actually out there,” says Don Gurnett, lead author of a September Science paper announcing the feat. The probe first gained fame in the 1970s and ’80s with visits to the solar system’s outer planets; it’s been racing toward this next milestone ever since. In recent years, various scientists had prematurely trumpeted Voyager 1’s crossing into interstellar space, the area dominated by gas ejected from other stars. This time, however, NASA’s scientists are sure, thanks to three key pieces of evidence — two of which were published earlier in 2013. First, astronomers announced that Voyager 1 had recorded a steep drop in…

Public health officials call it an epidemic. The American Medical Association calls it a disease. During the past 30 years, obesity rates in the U.S. have more than doubled among adults (to 35 percent) and tripled among children and adolescents (to 17 percent). The problem seemed unstoppable — until this year. For the first time in decades, reported the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), obesity rates declined among low-income preschool children, a particularly vulnerable demographic group. No magic diet was involved: This public health success seems to be the result of promoting healthier foods and physical activity. Between 2008 and 2011, the CDC measured the weights and heights of about 12 million children between the ages of 2 and 4 in 40 states, two territories and the District…

In January, climatologist Vladimir Lipenkov laid a disk of ice onto a light box in an Antarctic lab. The ice sparkled in a kaleidoscope of reds, blues and yellows as light scattered through trapped gas bubbles. His Russian scientific team had finally accomplished its elusive goal: retrieving the purest sample yet from Lake Vostok, an Antarctic body of water that has likely been locked beneath thousands of feet of ice for up to 15 million years. They are now testing that frozen water — which comes from a place Lipenkov says is unlike “any other environment on our planet” — for signs of life. For years, teams of scientists in the Antarctic have plotted to drill into the continent’s vast subglacial lakes, hoping to find life that has been isolated…

Gastric bypass surgery, in which the stomach is stitched into a tiny pouch, has long been seen as a last resort for the dangerously obese. Doctors attributed rapid post-surgical weight loss to reduced hunger and restricted eating resulting from the smaller stomach. But new evidence suggests weight loss may result when the procedure alters the types of microbes in the gut. Scientists reached this conclusion by transferring microbes from bypass-treated obese mice to a group of lean mice raised in sterile conditions that left them with no intestinal bacteria at all. Two weeks after the transfer, recipient mice had lost considerable weight; another group that received microbes from obese mice in a placebo group — undergoing surgery without gastric bypass — stayed the same. The new microbiota may trigger weight…

Cosmologists have long had a fuzzy view of the newborn universe and its basic components. But in March, the European Space Agency announced that its orbiting Planck telescope had taken the temperature of 50 million tiny patches of sky, creating the highest-resolution baby picture of the whole universe ever taken, and allowing astronomers to better understand the first moments after the Big Bang. The Planck telescope observes light waves that date back to just 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when the universe had cooled enough for stable atoms to form, and light could finally escape the fog of free-floating particles as microwaves. Today this light, called the cosmic microwave background, or CMB, fills the sky with an almost uniform glow — almost, because some pockets of the sky are…

WITH SARA SEAGER In the mid-1990s, the discovery of worlds beyond our solar system changed astronomy forever. At the time, Sara Seager was slogging through graduate school, unhappy and unsure she even wanted a career in science. She decided to go for broke and devote her career to the new exoplanets, even though some doubted they were even real. Soon, the published pioneering papers exploring the likely atmospheres of these exotic worlds and how we might identify an Earth-like “twin.” Exoplanet research now turns up new wonders nearly every week, and in 2013 Seager won a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship for her discoveries. Discover talked with Seager, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about what’s next in planet hunting. Kepler’s Life After Death What a run it was: For…

As with the space race and the nuclear arms race, the United States and Russia have long competed to be the world’s largest producer of natural gas and petroleum — crude oil and other hydrocarbons trapped underground. Russia had been first for the past decade, but the U.S. took the title this year by a wide margin, thanks to a boom in hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking. This extraction method, which cracks open shale rock to access hard-to-reach gas and oil reserves, has made U.S. production soar. How long will we be No. 1? In the Marcellus region, the nation’s biggest shale formation (in Pennsylvania and neighboring states), gas production is still increasing. But two of the geographic areas that kicked off the shale gas boom — Texas’ Barnett…

Mapping the structure of the human brain is a daunting task: Billions of cells make vast numbers of connections, and tracing these tangled fibers is so labor-intensive that analyzing just one square millimeter of tissue takes years. Into this murky mess, Stanford University neurobiologist Karl Deisseroth has brought CLARITY, a technique that turns brain tissue transparent while maintaining its structure. The method, described in Nature in April, makes it possible to inspect the 3-D architecture of an intact mouse brain in microscopic detail. Traditionally, scientists explore neuroanatomy in animals by injecting dyes or stains that illuminate specific nerve cells and connections. They then kill the animal and slice its brain tissue thin enough so that light can shine through it under a microscope, revealing the structure within each slice. But…

Light travels up to 186,000 miles per second — a speed so constant it is used to measure space. But in July, scientists reported that they’d brought a beam of light to a halt for a full minute. Researchers at Germany’s Technical University of Darmstadt shone a laser onto a tiny opaque crystal studded with electrically charged atoms of praseodymium, a rare earth element. The “control beam” changed the crystal’s atomic and optical properties, making it transparent for some frequencies of light and drastically slowing their speed. After shining a weaker “probe beam” into the crystal, the team turned off both lasers. The original optical properties of the crystal that made it opaque were restored, and the probe beam’s light was trapped. When they turned the control beam back on…

Scientists sequenced the entire genomes of 32 children with autism, revealing the condition’s genetic underpinnings in unprecedented detail. The study, published in July, showed that half had genetic variants linked to social anxiety, epilepsy and other signs and symptoms of the disorder, which impacts social interaction, language and behavior. The analysis also identified four genes never before connected to autism. Many genes seem to be involved in autism, which has a variety of subtypes. As techniques to analyze whole genomes improve, more autismassociated mutations will be discovered, clarifying the genetic basis of the disease, says Stephen Scherer, a geneticist at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto who helped run the international study. — VALERIE ROSS…

Scientists can affect an animal’s behavior using a technique called optogenetics: They beam light onto genetically modified neurons, stimulating the production of dopamine and rewarding the animal for specific actions. But the necessary machinery, including unwieldy helmets wired to a nearby light source, restricts the animal’s movement, impeding the complex behaviors researchers want to study most. To get around the problem, University of Illinois materials scientist John Rogers in 2013 developed a smaller, lighter, wireless system. The new micron-scale headgear, embedded with four minuscule light-emitting diodes (LEDs), is just big enough to support a tiny antenna that powers the setup from afar. When Rogers tested the device on mice, he found that, just like larger equipment, it triggered them to prefer one location over another — but without weighing the…

We’re all born with an innate number sense — that seemingly effortless knack to roughly estimate and compare quantities without counting, which we do automatically when choosing the shortest checkout line at the supermarket or ballparking how many apples are in a bowl. But some people’s number sense is better than others, and several studies published in 2013 suggest this inborn capacity, believed to be an essential building block for learning arithmetic, can be bolstered with instruction. Researchers also identified structural differences in the brains of children who responded best to tutoring. Together, the new findings may eventually lead to better ways of helping kids master math, says psychologist Elizabeth Brannon of Duke University. In a study published in October, Brannon and colleagues from Duke and from Johns Hopkins University…

Two of the world’s most feared viral villains may have met their match. Rabies, with a nearly 100 percent mortality rate, and the gruesome hemorrhagic virus Ebola belong to a particularly nasty family — and neither disease has a cure. In March, John Connor, a virologist at the Boston University School of Medicine, and his team identified a synthetic compound that appears to shut down replication in Ebola and other members of the nonsegmented, negative strand (NNS) RNA virus family. Based on a plant-based class of molecules known as indoline alkaloids, the compound inhibits an enzyme called polymerase, which enables a virus to make thousands of copies of itself and cause disease, explains Claire Marie Filone, the study’s lead author. Unlike the existing rabies vaccine, which is administered shortly after…

“Genetic Adam” is the popular term for the common male ancestor of all humanity. Clues to his identity lie within the Y chromosome, a stretch of genes that fathers pass down nearly intact to their sons. Over generations, slight genetic changes occur in Y chromosomes that can be read, like a timepiece, to estimate the age of this original forebear. Three new studies calculated that our progenitor lived about 150,000 years ago — much earlier than prior estimates suggested. The most comprehensive of these, published in August by a Stanford team, analyzed men from nine widely spaced populations, covering 10 million bases (DNA letters) on their Y chromosomes. The name “genetic Adam” is somewhat misleading, says David Poznik, lead author of the Stanford study: The more precise term is “most…

If members of Archicebus achilles were alive today, they would fit in the palm of your hand. But the little creatures lived 55 million years ago. In June, paleomammalogist Xijun Ni and his team presented the new species. “Archie,” as it’s dubbed by some, is the oldest primate skeleton to date. Found in China, Archie is very close to a common ancestor of humans, monkeys and the bigeyed, nocturnal South Asian tarsiers. To discover Archie’s place in the primate family tree, the research team spent 10 years developing and using the world’s largest phylogenetic data matrix. This system to analyze evolution allowed them to compare the skeleton’s characteristics with 1,844 features of other primates and their relatives. The extensive analysis of a near-complete skeleton provides a detailed view into Archie’s…

Scientific advancements rarely become the crux of diplomacy. But in September, labs working with the United Nations used faster and more sophisticated analytic techniques to show that Syrian civilians were killed by the chemical weapon sarin on Aug. 21 — evidence crucial to debates about whether the global community should intervene. U.N. inspectors were not able to visit the attack sites in Damascus until five to eight days after rockets struck. In the past, this delay could have made the poison difficult to detect. But today’s mass spectrometers, which determine the molecular makeup of a sample by exactly measuring the mass of its components, are roughly 1,000 times as sensitive as those used in 1995, when sarin was released in a Tokyo subway, says Maarten Nieuwenhuizen, a senior chemical, biological,…

Current brain maps are low resolution; it’s as if you can see major landmarks, but not local streets. In June, a Canadian and German team introduced what is arguably the most detailed 3-D atlas of the brain so far. Called BigBrain, the map took 10 years to complete. It is made of digital images of a 65-year-old woman’s brain at 20-micron increments, about twice the width of a red blood cell. That’s 1 terabyte (or 1 trillion bytes) of images — a veritable Google Earth inside your head. SERIOUSLY, SCIENCE? Lights, Camera, Puke! 3-D Movies Make Many of Our Heads Spin Despite their popularity, 3-D movies are not for everyone. Some find them dizzying and even nauseating. To find out how common this reaction may be, public health researcher Angelo…

Emotions can be as clear-cut as a bolt of rage or as hard to pin down as Jane Austen’s “half agony, half hope.” People often struggle to name their emotions, are torn by conflicting feelings, or conceal their true state of mind, leaving scientists stumped for ways to measure emotion in the lab. But in June, Carnegie Mellon University researchers reported they had identified, for the first time, unique brain activity patterns for nine specific emotions and could correctly guess which one a person was feeling — essentially reading the mind. The researchers asked 10 method actors, trained to generate emotional responses on demand rather than just mimic them, to write vignettes that evoked each of nine feelings: disgust, anger, fear, happiness, lust, envy, pride, sadness and shame. Actors imagined…

The rains pouring down on the eastern slope of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains kept coming, day after day, for an entire week in September. Fueled by tropical moisture drawn north and pinned over the area by a stalled weather pattern, the amount of precipitation between Sept. 9 and 15 in some areas was more than what typically falls in an entire year. The ordinarily staid National Weather Service described it as “biblical.” And weather statistics for this semi-arid region suggest that the odds of such a deluge occurring in this region are about once every thousand years. The resulting floodwaters killed eight people, destroyed more than 1,800 homes and damaged at least 200 miles of roads across 1,918 square miles. On the high plains, more than 48,000 gallons of oil from…

Amyloids have long been considered the rogues of neuroscience. In the brain, these sticky barnacle-like proteins are believed to be the culprits behind the memory-robbing ravages of Alzheimer’s disease. But some startling discoveries are fueling a counterintuitive view of amyloid proteins. Perhaps they aren’t the villains scientists once thought they were. In a surprising new study out of Stanford published in 2013, researchers reported that amyloids actually relieved paralysis in mice suffering from a rodent version of multiple sclerosis (MS), in which immune cells go haywire, attacking the fatty myelin sheathing that insulates nerves and causing cognitive defects and loss of motor control. The research was inspired by a chance observation a few years ago. In examining autopsy samples from MS patients, the researchers detected an abundance of amyloids in…

About 15 years ago, physicists discovered that the neutrino, a subatomic particle, seems to be able to switch from one type, or flavor, to another while in flight. Last year, an international coalition called the Tokai to Kamioka (T2K) collaboration produced new evidence for this strange phenomenon, which may lead to insights about why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe. Neutrinos come in three flavors: electron, muon and tau. All of them interact with other matter in different ways. In the experiment, researchers in Tokai, Japan, used a particle accelerator to shoot beams of muon neutrinos to the Super-Kamiokande detector some 185 miles away. En route, some muon neutrinos transformed into electron neutrinos. “It’s like throwing vanilla ice cream a long distance and seeing some of it…

Copies of the September Vogue dot the reception area of Google Basecamp on the San Francisco waterfront, where you go to become one of the select few to experience Glass, the first mass-market computer worn like a pair of spectacles. Inside the magazine, expressionless models wearing Glass wander a retrofuturist landscape. Waiting for your 30-minute fitting, you sip champagne while you decide whether you want your frame color to be shale, charcoal or cotton. As Google sells the first 10,000 of the gadgets to developers and handpicked members of Glass’ Explorers program for $1,500 apiece, the company takes every precaution to ensure that the device is considered hip. During my fitting, a publicist tells me Glass was developed in the secretive Google X lab to fundamentally change our relationship with…

Some 15 years ago, scientists realized that the rice plant was unusually effective at absorbing toxic forms of arsenic from soil and water — but no one had directly connected eating rice with actual harm to health. That changed in July when U.K. and Indian scientists reported that daily consumption of arsenic-tainted rice is linked to genetic damage in humans. Experts say the result will be increased pressure on public health agencies to set safety limits for rice consumption. Even in low doses, arsenic poisoning is linked to cancer, heart disease and diabetes.…

When paleontologist Scott Sampson dug up a nearly 6-foot Nasutoceratops titusi skull in Utah in 2006, he also uncovered hints of what life was like 76 million years ago for creatures on the hot, half-flooded landmass called Laramidia. “Nasutoceratops represents not just a new dinosaur, but a previously unknown branch of the horned dinosaur family tree,” Sampson says. That family, including the well-known Triceratops, had knobby noggins thought to attract mates and keep competitors at bay. Nasutoceratops titusi’s simple frill, stout snout and unusually long horns contrast sharply with the “elaborate bony bells and whistles” of its contemporaries, says Sampson, who published a description of the species in July. Sampson says such variation was probably prodded by sexual selection, which can drive big, fast-paced evolutionary changes to increase a male’s…

Scientists have found a way to turn off the extra chromosome that causes Down syndrome. The technique, reported in July, isn’t a cure, but it could help researchers better understand the condition’s effects on cells and design treatments for some of its symptoms. The body already has a way to silence an extra chromosome: a gene called XIST, which turns off the second X chromosome in females. The gene essentially shutters the chromosome, covering it with other molecules so it can’t produce proteins. In Down syndrome, patients have three rather than the usual two copies of chromosome 21, causing problems in the way the body and brain develop. Using cells from Down patients, scientists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School transplanted the XIST gene into that third copy. Sure…

For decades, the computer chip industry has steadily improved devices’ performance by cramming ever more, ever tinier silicon transistors — the components that make up circuits — onto each chip. But the unreliability of silicon transistors smaller than about 10 nanometers means the pace of progress in silicon-based computing will soon slow. The implications of that slowing could be dramatic, says Stanford University circuit designer Subhasish Mitra. Imagine, he says, an alternate reality where silicon hit its limits in 2001: In this world, smartphones don’t exist. In September, Mitra and materials scientist Philip Wong demonstrated a longsought alternative: the first carbon nanotube (CNT) computer, built from transistors made not from silicon, but from single-atomthick straws of carbon, called carbon nanotubes. Carbon nanotubes are only about 1 or 2 nanometers in…

In describing the two-stranded structure of DNA, Cambridge University biologists James Watson and Francis Crick gave us the image of a twisting ladder they called a double helix. The rungs were connected by pairs of chemical bases called nucleotides: Adenine (A) paired with thymine (T), and cytosine (C) with guanine (G). Now, 60 years later, researchers from the same institution have found a quadruple helix — previously described only in microorganisms — in human cells. In place of rungs, the twisting, four-sided tower has platforms with a guanine nucleotide on each of four corners, hence the name G-quadruplex. Chemist Shankar Balasubramanian and colleagues found the structures by engineering a special, fluorescent antibody that binds specifically to the four-stranded form. Initial results, published in January, trace the structures to cellular regions…

With a whirl of color, a massive hurricane-like system swirls over Saturn’s north pole in a video released by NASA in April. Although the Cassini spacecraft first detected the ongoing weather phenomenon shortly after arriving at the planet in 2004, a visible-light view had to wait until after August 2009, when sunlight returned to Saturn’s north hemisphere after the long winter. The false-color images show a monstrous storm 20 times as large as an average Earth hurricane — the eye alone is 1,250 miles across — with winds reaching 300 mph.…

Astronomers can measure a galaxy’s mass by how stars move within it: The faster they move, the more massive it is. With this knowledge, a University of California, Irvine, team found that Segue 2, discovered in 2009, weighs at most 150,000 times more than our sun — the puniest galaxy known. (Our normal-size Milky Way is 10 million times more massive.) Segue 2 is probably just one of many such astronomical miniatures orbiting the Milky Way, says UCI astronomer Evan Kirby: “Simulations predict that there should be tens of thousands of these things.”…

The apparent bagging of the Higgs boson — the long-sought “God” particle that endows all matter with mass, as well as its hypothesizers with a Nobel prize — topped Discover’s 2012 Year in Science list. But it wasn’t until 2013 that physicists at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) confirmed that the elusive particle they’d nabbed was in fact a Higgs. To ascertain its identity, they analyzed 2.5 times more LHC data than they needed for the particle’s discovery. The results revealed that the particle discovered in 2012 has the quantum properties predicted for the Higgs: zero spin (a measure of angular momentum) and positive parity (a measure of how the particle’s mirror image behaves).…

Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes? In August, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk announced his vision for Hyperloop, a levitating train that would shoot through a low-pressure, above-ground tunnel at 760 mph. Musk is famous for futuristic transit, such as his electric car company Tesla Motors and commercial space travel business SpaceX. But he has no intention of building a functional Hyperloop. His aim was to generate buzz with the idea, in the hope that others would develop and build it. The technology itself is old news. In 1972, Rand scientist R.M. Salter Jr. proposed a magnetically levitated train to blast through an airless underground tunnel from Los Angeles to New York at thousands of miles per hour. As far back as 1904, rocket inventor Robert Goddard outlined a…

In 1976, the Viking spacecraft gave us the first clear picture of the Martian surface — and sparked hopes that the barren, toxic planet once hosted life. In 2013, the rover Curiosity found the most convincing evidence yet that the planet was once habitable, as well as clues about why life there might have died out. The $2.5 billion rover, roughly the size of a Mini Cooper automobile, discovered an ancient streambed soon after landing — evidence that water once flowed there. Next, Curiosity used its considerable payload of geologic tools to dig up further proof. Its robotic arm drilled a 2.5-inch borehole in mudstone bedrock. The robot fed the resulting rock powder into its Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument, which heated the sample, vaporizing it into gases that…

Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, writing in the Harvard Law Review, expressed concern over privacy infringements threatened by new technology: “Recent inventions and business methods call attention to the next step which must be taken for the protection of the person, and for securing to the individual . . . the right ‘to be let alone,’” they wrote. The year was 1890, and the inventions Warren and Brandeis cited were “instantaneous photographs” and devices for “reproducing scenes or sounds.” Those innovations now sound quaint, but the concerns they raised are fresher than ever. In 2013, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden created an international firestorm when he leaked top-secret documents detailing the U.S. government’s surveillance activities. In addition to providing details on foreign eavesdropping of private citizens and leaders,…

Prime numbers — those divisible only by 1 and the number itself, like 5, 11 or 37 — are like the atoms of mathematics: All numbers are formed by multiplying these building blocks together. But what happens when you add a number to a prime number? When will the sum be prime? Or, conversely, when is a number a sum of primes? Mathematicians have been working to answer these fundamental questions for centuries, and on the same day in May, two mathematicians finally found tantalizing partial answers to both of them. To imagine the answer to the first question, start by adding the number 2 to a prime. When the sum is also prime, the pair is called a “twin prime,” like 5 and 7. As numbers get bigger, primes…

Physicists have long struggled to understand exactly what happens after subatomic particles collide. For decades, the best tool involved basic sketches (called Feynman diagrams) of each possible result. For all but the simplest scenarios, this method fills pages with drawings and equations. A new computational insight in 2004 dramatically reduced the amount of paper required to describe a collision, and these new formulas combined multitudes of Feynman diagrams into a single mess of math. Last year, Princeton physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed was analyzing the formulas in search of a better way to simplify these quantum calculations. Using only pen and paper, he discovered a new kind of geometric shape called an amplituhedron — one that hints at a new way of seeing the universe. Arkani-Hamed noticed the formula could be rearranged…

The Vulcan characters in Star Trek were able to perform “mind melds,” wordlessly passing their thoughts into the brains of other people. This year saw three demonstrations of mind melding, although the information transmitted was simple motor commands. In February, Duke University researchers reported they had linked the brains of two pairs of lab rats. When the first rat pressed one of two levers, either right or left, an electrode in its cortex picked up a signal. The researchers converted that signal to a set of pulses, which were transmitted over the Internet to an electrode implanted in the cortex of the second rat. That animal, already trained to differentiate between the two types of pulses, pressed one lever or another depending upon the signal it received. The receiving rat…

At about 9:20 A.M. local time Feb. 15, a fireball brighter than the sun streaked across the sky near Chelyabinsk, Russia, in southwestern Siberia. It exploded half a minute later, creating a powerful shock wave that destroyed about 4,000 buildings and shattered some 328,000 square feet of windows. Flying glass injured more than 1,500 people. The destruction was the result of a small asteroid that entered Earth’s atmosphere over the Russia/Kazakhstan border, about 60 miles south of the city. The intense heat generated by its 42,000-mph free fall caused it to blow up in midair; much of the explosion’s energy struck Chelyabinsk, 14.5 miles below. After reviewing the space rock’s speed and other data, NASA researchers estimated that its energy was equivalent to nearly 30 Hiroshima-style atomic bombs. They estimate…

Global fuel supplies may soon be dramatically enlarged thanks to new techniques to tap into huge reserves of natural gas trapped under the seafloor. In March, Japan became the first country to successfully extract methane from frozen undersea deposits called gas hydrates. These lacy structures of ice, found around the globe buried under permafrost and the oceanfloor, have pores filled with highly flammable gas. By some estimates, hydrates could store more than 10 quadrillion cubic feet of harvestable methane — enough to fulfill the present gas needs of the entire United States for the next 400 years. During the past decade, researchers have conducted exploratory drilling and extraction of onshore hydrates locked in permafrost. But offshore deposits, where most of the reserves exist, had never been tapped before Japan’s Oil,…

It began somewhere in Mongolia, or the Korean peninsula. Researchers aren’t certain. A migratory waterfowl carrying multiple influenza strains nudged another bird, one with a different cocktail of influenza, and the viruses swapped pieces of genetic code in a process called reassortment. In that moment, a new and particularly worrisome influenza strain, H7N9, was born. Researchers aren’t sure when the reassortment occurred, or when exactly H7N9 hit the poultry markets of eastern China, but by February it had leaped into humans. By October, the World Health Organization had documented 137 cases of H7N9 in China and Taiwan, with 45 deaths. Influenza strains often mutate and reassort — it’s why creating the annual flu shot is a tricky process of guessing, months ahead, what viruses we’ll actually face. But H7N9 is…

Einstein called the phenomenon “spooky action at a distance.” Today’s physicists call it entanglement. Whatever term you use, the descriptor refers to the ghostly link between subatomic particles that act in tandem no matter the distance between them. Already, researchers have tapped entanglement to teleport information instantly over hundreds of miles. But the most pragmatic application could be quantum computing, so-called because such computers would operate according to the physics of subatomic particles, known as quantum mechanics. Computers that can teleport information could work orders of magnitude faster than today’s machines and perform tasks in parallel, a necessary trick for cracking the most difficult security codes or parsing reams of genomic data in minutes, tasks that might take ordinary computers years. Teleporting information within the restricted space of a computer,…

What if woolly mammoths once again roamed Earth? It may not be so farfetched. Last year, an Australian team of scientists took a big step toward resurrecting a long-gone species. Using cloning technology, their “Lazarus Project” created an embryo of the extinct gastric-brooding frog. With more-than-30-year-old frozen tissues from a preserved frog, the team extracted and implanted the nucleus of a dead cell into a fresh host egg from a distantly related species. The result: “It’s not a tadpole, it’s not a frog, but it’s a long way toward bringing it back,” says Mike Archer, a professor of biology at the University of New South Wales, who led the research. The original frog, which disappeared in 1983, was a genuine freak of nature. Mothers swallowed their eggs, transformed their stomachs…

Immediately after co-discovering Comet ISON the night of Sept. 21, 2012, Russian astronomer Vitali Nevski trumpeted it as a “comet of the century.” Although it initially fell short as visual spectacle, Comet ISON has fully lived up to its billing as a scientific sensation. “It’s letting us look at material that formed 4.56 billion years ago and learn about the initial conditions that helped lead to the planets,” says Comet ISON Observing Campaign (CIOC) leader Carey Lisse, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory. Comet ISON originated in the deep freeze of the distant Oort Cloud, then took a flaming plunge almost straight into the sun. “It came close enough to boil off everything that’s in comets: water, methane, ammonia, even rock and metal,” Lisse says. Analysis of…

Today, leather workers for the luxury brand Hermès use a tool called a lissoir to transform animal hides into lustrous bags. It turns out the tool has a long history: About 51,000 years before the expensive Birkin bag, Neanderthals were crafting and using similar lissoirs to soften and waterproof skins. Researchers reported in August that they had found four examples of the leather-working tool at two sites in southwestern France. Neanderthals fashioned them by grinding pieces of reindeer ribs against rocks, leaving a rounded tip that could be rubbed against a hide to polish it. Traditional accounts hold that Homo sapiens arrived in Europe about 43,000 years ago, and some archaeologists believe they taught the supposedly dim-witted Neanderthal locals how to use specialized bone tools. These newfound examples suggest different…

Since the days of Isaac Newton, physicists have sought to describe all the possible ways that three objects can orbit each other regularly in empty space. Solutions to the “three-body problem” could predict the dynamics of real-life planetary and stellar systems. It is also a fiendishly difficult mental puzzle: In more than 300 years, physicists had found only three solutions. Then last year, using computer simulations of three objects in motion, physicists Milovan Šuvakov and Veljko Dmitrašinovic´ from the Institute of Physics Belgrade found 13 new solutions. The researchers began by plotting hypothetical masses with specific locations and velocities, then simulated their possible orbits, looking for periodic orbits (ones that repeat). The simple-sounding procedure eventually yielded the new solutions (examples above). If computer modeling proves such orbits are stable, it…

In September, modern technology applied to a centuries-old technique raised the wreck of the luxury liner Costa Concordia in an unprecedented engineering feat. The massive cruise ship ran aground in a marine reserve off Italy’s Giglio Island in January 2012, killing 32. It settled on its starboard side on two undersea rock ledges. Salvage experts turned to parbuckling — using a sling to right a vessel on an inclined plane. The technique dates to the 17th century and has been used on other modern ships: The USS Oklahoma was parbuckled after sinking at Pearl Harbor. But never have engineers attempted it on this scale. Size matters: To right the Concordia — more than twice the size of the Titanic — engineers built platforms, which together were longer than a football…

When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated last summer that the number of people diagnosed with Lyme disease each year was 300,000 — 10 times as high as the official counts — the agency must have expected headlines, and it got them. The alarmingly high figure justified assertions by patient advocacy groups that the 30,000 cases reported annually were just the tip of the iceberg. Lyme disease is caused by a bacterium, Borrelia burgdorferi, which is transmitted by blacklegged ticks. Infection results in fever, headache, fatigue and, in many cases, a distinctive oval rash called an erythema migrans. Untreated, Lyme may advance to painful complications of the joints and nervous system. The disease is concentrated in the Northeast and upper Midwest, and in parts of the Pacific…

WITH BRIAN NOSEK In 2011, Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel was revealed as a charlatan who had published dozens of fraudulent scientific papers. The shocking thing was that no one in his field had noticed until courageous students in his lab reported their suspicions. Within a year, two more fraudulent psychologists were outed. This spate of misconduct happened in tandem with many failed attempts to replicate some of the field’s classic results, prompting its acolytes to question whether psychology was being polluted by quirky and attention-grabbing findings that might not actually be true. This issue applies to every field of science, from physics to medicine. But psychologists, spurred by a growing crisis of faith, are tackling it head-on. Psychologist Brian Nosek at the University of Virginia is at the forefront…

On May 3, Swiss psychiatrist and adventurer Bertrand Piccard settled into the one-man cockpit of a spindly plane with the wingspan of a 747. The propellers started, and he eased down the runway near San Francisco Bay. As the sun rose, he turned southeast toward Phoenix, 18 hours and 18 minutes away. Piccard could have driven to Phoenix faster. But his plane, the Solar Impulse HB-SIA, is meant to go slow, averaging just 43 mph. The low speed saves energy, which it gets from the sun. Solar panels on the wings feed four electric motors, and batteries store enough energy to allow the plane to fly through the night, something no other solar plane can do. Last spring and summer, beginning on that May morning, Piccard — known for his…

By duplicating the extreme heat and pressure at the Earth’s core, a European research team has determined that the temperature of the center of our planet is close to 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit — nearly 2,000 degrees hotter than previously thought. Earth’s solid inner core is surrounded by a fluid outer core, with the boundary between the two expected to be the temperature of the melting point of highly pressurized iron — the primary ingredient of both layers. Researchers placed a speck of iron between two small conical diamonds and applied laser-beam heat and 200 gigapascals of pressure. As the iron changed from solid to molten, they measured the temperature by noting a change in how X-rays were diffracted — a faster, more precise method than the simple visual techniques used…

In August, the family of the late Henrietta Lacks finally got a seat at the table of science. Lacks died from cervical cancer in 1951. Her cancer cells, kept alive in the lab, became the first immortal human cell line, growing and dividing indefinitely. They soon became a research blockbuster. Easy-to-grow “HeLa” cells have been used in more than 76,000 studies. Lacks’ family was never asked for permission to harvest her cells, an ethical violation made worse in March when German researchers published the sequence of the HeLa genome without asking. Since Lacks’ descendants share many of her genes, the publication compromised their privacy. After outcry from the Lacks family and some researchers, the team withdrew the publication and apologized. Next came an unprecedented arrangement: Two Lacks descendants will join…

In August, three people shared a $330,000 hamburger that could redefine meat as we know it. The 5-ounce patty — which took three months and a slew of technicians to produce — was the world’s first labgrown “cultured beef” burger. The protein product began with tissue samples from two donor cows in Belgium. Their stem cells, which can mature into any type of tissue, were isolated and cultured in a dish around dots of gel-like growth medium. Over time, the cells divided and developed into noodle-shaped muscle fibers — 20,000 of which were pressed into the final patty. The labburger debuted at a glitzy launch event in London, where its funder was revealed: Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Environmentalists warn the planet is nearing “peak meat” production, as global demand strains…

“It was like sci-fi really happening inside my own lab,” said physicist Tomas Ciemár, describing the first tractor beam to pull an object with light, Star Wars-style. Normally, photons push matter away from a light source — picture the sun’s rays pushing away a comet’s tail. But Ciemár and colleagues at the Czech Institute of Scientific Instruments reported in January that they had figured out how to pull microscopic Styrofoam particles with light. They directed a laser beam through a lens and onto a mirror, which reflected back a second beam. The opposing beams canceled out one another, creating a light field with uniform intensity that allowed the field’s photons to pass through the Styrofoam particles instead of bouncing off their surface. As a result, the tiny Styrofoam particles recoiled…

With persistence — and advances in DNA sequencing — researchers conclusively identified the long-lost skeleton of Richard III, former King of England and one of Shakespeare’s more infamous villains. Richard, who usurped the throne, was killed in battle in 1485. He was buried under a church in Leicester, and historians disagreed about whether his remains were later dug up and discarded in the river, destroyed with the church or left to decay. Researchers at the University of Leicester and a group of Richard III enthusiasts spent two years scouring ancient maps and excavating what is now a parking lot to find a skeleton they thought to be his. Radiocarbon dating and skeletal analysis confirmed basic facts: Died around 1485? Check. Death from a blow to the skull? Check. The skeleton’s…

Extreme drought in the Colorado River Basin last summer forced the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which manages river flows in the Western U.S., to make a historic announcement: For the 2014 water year (October 2013 through September 2014), the agency will reduce releases of water from Lake Powell — the gargantuan reservoir on the Colorado River that parts of Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah rely on for water — by more than 750,000 acre-feet. (An acrefoot is roughly the amount of water an American household uses in a year.) That’s the lowest release level since the reservoir began to fill in the 1960s. Since 1999, Colorado River Basin flows have been among the lowest in more than 1,200 years. As of late September, the river’s major reservoirs were, on…

Fear keeps us alive, but it can also ruin our lives: Survivors of traumatic accidents or attacks may be haunted by terrifying memories, and those with phobias are tormented by irrational fears. Exposure therapy, in which a patient repeatedly relives a painful memory or confronts a fear, may eventually help to reduce or extinguish symptoms — but can be so grueling that people quit before finding relief. Now, a team from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine finds that it may be possible to sleep your fears away. The group, led by cognitive neuroscientist Katherina Hauner, first created fearful memories in 15 volunteers. They were subjected to mild shocks while smelling a distinctive fragrance, such as lemon or clove, and looking at images of particular faces. The volunteers formed…

WITH ELAINE MARDIS Elaine Mardis lives for dream machines, from her glossy red Audi S5 to the roomful of shiny new DNA sequencers housed at the Genome Institute at Washington University in St. Louis. As co-director of the institute and director of technology development, Mardis leads teams that are using genome science to transform the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. A self-professed tech geek, Mardis has been a pioneer of the technological breakthroughs that made it possible to decrypt the 3 billion-plus A’s and T’s, G’s and C’s that make up the human genome. Since the 1990s, her team has often been the first to testdrive new sequencing machines. They sequenced the first whole animal, the flatworm, in 1998, and then pushed the systems to handle big chunks of bigger…

Citizen science became a driving force for serious results in 2013, with an exponential increase in the number of mentions in published research: from fewer than 50 citations in 2009 to nearly 600 in 2013. Increasingly, scientists are seeing potential in people power. “It would have taken our researchers 18 months to do what citizen scientists did in just three months,” says Amy Carton, citizen science lead at Cancer Research UK. Volunteers helped her team identify cancerous cells by looking at slides from drug trials in the online collaboration Cell Slider, results of which were presented in November at the National Cancer Research Institute’s annual conference. Federal agencies including NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), as well as nongovernment platforms such as the new open-source site CrowdCrafting, substantially expanded…

Determining a molecule’s 3-D structure — important for drug development, forensic science and food production, among other fields — has never been easy. A popular method is a technique known as X-ray crystallography: Compounds are placed in a solution that promotes crystal growth. A single crystal is isolated and bombarded with X-rays, and the resulting patterns of diffraction are analyzed for clues about the molecule’s architecture. Some substances resist crystallization, but a technique introduced in March may help chemists map their dimensions as well. Makoto Fujita and his team from Japan’s University of Tokyo created scaffolding-like crystalline structures known as metalorganic frameworks, or MOFs, whose empty spaces can soak up molecules and provide an ordered array that enables the molecules to then be characterized by X-ray analysis. The discovery was…

An updated psychiatric guidebook meant to improve the process of diagnosing mental illnesses makes matters worse, charged critics after the book debuted in May. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association, is supposed to provide state-of-the-art definitions of psychiatric disorders to guide diagnosis and treatment. The fifth edition of the DSM, known as DSM-5, was 14 years in the works. Like its predecessors, it relies on subjective descriptions of symptoms rather than on data-driven measurements to define mental disorders. But many observers say this system is no longer adequate. The way we diagnose psychiatric problems is “beyond fixing,” says Temple University psychologist Frank Farley, former president of the American Psychological Association. “It’s time to rethink the whole concept.” National Institutes of Mental…

A microscope powerful enough to capture a single molecule has taken the clearest picture yet of the immune system in action. The technique, called superresolution single-molecule fluorescence microscopy, recently helped scientists at the University of Manchester in England track natural killer (NK) cells, which help destroy cancer and viruses. NK cells have receptors that are clustered together at their surface, and these receptors target proteins on another cell’s surface to tell whether the contacting cell is diseased or healthy. When the NK cell is activated, the receptor clusters change in size and density, which could help NK cells recognize and eliminate infected cells — but spare healthy ones — next time around.…

"Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves." The opening sentence of the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto captured the worldview of its author, Aaron Swartz, the computer programmer and activist for open access to information who killed himself in January 2013 at age 26. Whereas national security leakers Julian Assange and Edward Snowden publicized government secrets, Swartz focused on information that was already public, but only available for a price. Swartz thought it should be free. He used library accounts to obtain and then make available millions of court records from the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system, which charges for access to documents. When he did the same with JSTOR, a digital repository for scholarly articles, federal authorities began…

Police chiefs have long observed that on sweltering summer nights, crime rates go up. Now a University of California, Berkeley study links climate-changeinduced weather patterns — sizzling heat, droughts, torrential rains — with increases in ethnic clashes, riots and wars. Agricultural economist Marshall Burke and his colleagues conducted a meta analysis of 60 previous studies that looked at climatic events and their link to human conflict, including the fall of the Mayan Empire, civil conflicts in Africa, ethnic clashes in India, road rage in the U.S. and even the type of pitches thrown during Major League Baseball games when temperatures rise. The researchers then used a mathematical model that combined the conflict data with temperature and rainfall projections through 2050 to come up with predictions about the likelihood of climate-related…

Until recently, scientists trying to understand why we itch had barely scratched the surface. In the past few years, studies have shown that the sensation of itch, once believed to be just a milder version of pain, actually involves its own neural circuitry. However, what triggers the cascade of biological responses that results in the maddening sensation has remained, for the most part, a mystery. But in May, molecular geneticists Santosh Mishra and Mark Hoon of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research in Bethesda, Md., reported they had found specialized neurons that produce a chemical, called Nppb, that sets off the body’s itch response. Mice that were genetically altered to lack Nppb or in which the receptor for the chemical was damaged were impervious to itch-inducing chemicals —…

Charles Darwin established the idea of competition between organisms to ensure the survival of the fittest. In July, researchers in Spain reported the same competition happening within an organism. During the early days of a mouse embryo’s development, cells with higher levels of a protein called Myc outdo cells expressing lower amounts of Myc. All the cells are healthy, emphasizes first author Cristina Clavería of the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares in Madrid. But after the cells come in contact, the “losers” die, donating their biochemical innards to their presumably fitter counterparts. “There’s communication between winners and losers, but which way the signal goes, we’re not sure,” she says. The contest ends after a week; at that time, Clavería predicts, surviving cells produce uniform (and higher) levels of Myc. Myc…