Atlas V rocket launch a classified reconnaissance satellite.

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Scientists Have Found a Way to Rapidly Thaw Cryopreserved Tissue Without Damage

Researchers have developed a technique that allows them to rapidly thaw cryopreserved human and pig samples without damaging the tissue - a development that could help get rid of organ transplant waiting lists.

Cryopreservation is the ability to preserve tissues at liquid nitrogen temperatures for long periods of time and bring them back without damage, and it's something scientists have been dreaming about achieving with large tissue samples and organs for decades.

Not only for the life-extending applications we've read about in sci-fi novels, but, more feasibly, because the technology could allow hospitals to safely store organs for long periods of time.

Aritcle
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DNA could be the future of data storage

The world is churning out so much data that hard-drives may not be able to keep up, leading researchers to look at DNA as a possible storage medium. DNA is ultra compact, and doesn’t degrade over time like cassettes and CDs. In a new study, Yaniv Erlich and Dina Zielinski demonstrate DNA’s full potential and reliability for storing data. The researchers wrote six files—a full computer operating system, a 1895 French film, an Amazon gift card, a computer virus, a Pioneer plaque, and a study by information theorist Claude Shannon—into 72,000 DNA strands, each 200 bases long. They then used sequencing technology to retrieve the data, and software to translate the genetic code back into binary. The files were recovered with no errors. We spoke with Erlich about the results, and what they mean for the future of data storage.

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First hint of how DNA calculators could supercharge computing

By making DNA endlessly change, researchers have shown how a biological computer might one day solve problems much faster than conventional computers or even quantum computers. It’s still a long way from being functional though.

The DNA-based system is an experiment in how it may be possible to make a theoretical type of computer known as a non-deterministic universal Turing machine.

Such a machine could solve tricky problems much faster than existing computers. Imagine that a computer is trying to find the centre of a maze and has a choice between left and right. A conventional computer would turn in one direction and follow that path to the end, then try a different route if that one leads nowhere.

But a non-deterministic universal Turing machine would explore both paths simultaneously, and do so again every time the path splits until it has found the right route to the maze’s heart.

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First Solid Sign that Matter Doesn't Behave Like Antimatter

One of the biggest mysteries in physics is why there's matter in the universe at all. This week, a group of physicists at the world's largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, might be closer to an answer: They found that particles in the same family as the protons and neutrons that make up familiar objects behave in a slightly different way from their antimatter counterparts.

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Cells adapt ultra-rapidly to zero gravity

Mammalian cells fully adapt to zero gravity in less than a minute. Real-time readings on the International Space Station (ISS) reveal that cells compensate ultra-rapidly for changes in gravitational conditions, an international team of scientists has found.

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This is a clear image of the Nervous System without the body.
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NASA Considers Magnetic Shield to Help Mars Grow Its Atmosphere

The Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop is happening right now at NASA headquarters in Washington DC. The workshop is meant to discuss ambitious space projects that could be realized, or at least started, by 2050.

One of the most enticing ideas came this morning from Jim Green, NASA's Planetary Science Division Director. In a talk titled, "A Future Mars Environment for Science and Exploration," Green discussed launching a "magnetic shield" to a stable orbit between Mars and the sun, called Mars L1, to shield the planet from high-energy solar particles. The shield structure would consist of a large dipole—a closed electric circuit powerful enough to generate an artificial magnetic field.

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To advance science we need to think about the impossible

HOW does science advance? The number of papers published annually doubled every 9 years in the second half of the 20th century; the number of working scientists now doubles roughly every 18 years. So we might expect science today to be advancing at a breakneck pace. And so it is, but in a great many small steps, rather than giant leaps of understanding.

That’s fine: science has always advanced in small steps, paving the way for occasional leaps. But sometimes fact-collecting yields nothing more than a collection of facts; no revelation follows. At such times, we need to step back from the facts we know and imagine alternatives: in other words, to ask “what if?”

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Good for Life? Megatelescope Will Probe Newfound Worlds' Atmospheres

Telescopes around the world (and orbiting it) have turned their gazes to the seven Earth-size planets of the TRAPPIST-1 star system — but it's an upcoming megatelescope that could reveal whether any of them have life-friendly atmospheres.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), set to launch in 2018, is sensitive enough to identify the chemical components of the planets' atmospheres as the worlds pass in front of their star, NASA officials said.

Aritcle
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We're on the Verge of a Gravitational Wave Astronomy Boom

A prototype space-based gravitational wave detector performed far better than expected during its trial run, raising prospects that a follow-on observatory to listen for echoes from the biggest crashes in the cosmos will be launched ahead of schedule.

LISA Pathfinder, which has been in orbit for a little more than a year, was intended to test if two small cubes could be kept in an extremely steady and measurable state of free fall. If successful, scientists could use the technique to detect ripples in space, a phenomenon first envisioned by Albert Einstein 100 years ago.

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NASA Is About to Create the Coldest Place in the Known Universe

NASA is about to launch the coldest place on Earth - the Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) - into orbit, where astronauts will use it to create never-before-seen conditions with temperatures 100 million times colder than the depths of space.

The Cold Atom Lab will hitch a ride on a SpaceX rocket to the International Space Station, where it's hoped the super-chilled box will reveal strange new physics when atoms are cooled to a mere billionth of a degree above absolute zero.

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Inside NASA’s daring $8 billion plan to finally find extraterrestrial life

DEEP IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM—A darkness has spread over the grim, airless field of ice that threatens to swallow us. Night has come to the nightmare glacier. But then we see the shiny spacecraft, with its four gangly legs extending outward to find purchase on the jagged ice. Within, scientific instruments begin to blink on, one by one. Soon, they will start sniffing for any hint of life on this most alien and mysterious of worlds in the Solar System: the Jovian moon Europa.

Through the HoloLens each of us wears, we watch this simulation of what might happen about 15 years from now on the icy, forbidding moon. The otherworldly illusion is shattered when a voice booms out; it's John Culberson, a conservative Republican politician from Texas. He wants to know what happens if one of the blinking instruments fail. Not to worry, he is told, all of the spacecraft systems are redundant. “Good,” Culberson replies. “The immensity of what you’re doing is too important in human history. You don’t want to miss this chance.”

Europa truly does represent a singular chance. Crossing 800 million kilometers with a sizable, robust payload will require vast sums of money—there won’t be a second chance. But Europa represents a gamble in another sense, too. No one knows whether NASA will discover a frozen, dead world far from the Sun or if the organization will make the most profound of discoveries just below the ice.

Aritcle
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Test Track for Ultra-Fast 'Hyperloop' Transit System Unveiled

Though it sounds like a transportation system straight out of a science-fiction novel, the "Hyperloop" is inching closer to reality, and new images offer a first look at the Hyperloop One project's test track.

First envisioned by SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk, the Hyperloop is a transportation concept in which passenger-filled pods are accelerated through a low-pressure tube to their destination. The startup Hyperloop One (which is not affiliated with Musk) has begun construction of a full-scale test track, known as the DevLoop, in the Nevada desert.

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It's Official: Time Crystals Are a New State of Matter, and Now We Can Create Them

Earlier this year, physicists had put together a blueprint for how to make and measure time crystals - a bizarre state of matter with an atomic structure that repeats not just in space, but in time, allowing them to maintain constant oscillation without energy.

Two separate research teams managed to create what looked an awful lot like time crystals back in January, and now both experiments have successfully passed peer-review for the first time, putting the 'impossible' phenomenon squarely in the realm of reality.

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Brainlike computers are a black box. Scientists are finally peering inside

Last month, Facebook announced software that could simply look at a photo and tell, for example, whether it was a picture of a cat or a dog. A related program identifies cancerous skin lesions as well as trained dermatologists can. Both technologies are based on neural networks, sophisticated computer algorithms at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence (AI)—but even their developers aren’t sure exactly how they work. Now, researchers have found a way to "look" at neural networks in action and see how they draw conclusions.

Aritcle
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In an Unexplained Case, Brain Activity Has Been Recorded as Much as 10 Minutes After Death

Doctors in a Canadian intensive care unit have stumbled on a very strange case - when life support was turned off for four terminal patients, one of them showed persistent brain activity even after they were declared clinically dead.

For more than 10 minutes after doctors confirmed death through a range of observations, including the absence of a pulse and unreactive pupils, the patient appeared to experience the same kind of brain waves (delta wave bursts) we get during deep sleep. And it's an entirely different phenomenon to the sudden 'death wave' that's been observed in rats following decapitation.

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Harvard Physicists Just Proposed That Mystery Radio Bursts Are Powering Alien Spaceships

Are alien radio beams causing one of the most mysterious signals from space? A new study by Manasvi Lingam and Avi Loeb at Harvard says that fast radio bursts (FRBs) could come from extraterrestrial radio beams being used as beacons or to power alien light sails.

The source of FRBs, which are milliseconds-long but incredibly bright pulses of radio waves, have intrigued and mystified astronomers for years – and this isn’t the first time aliens have been suggested.

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Special steel inspired by bone is more resistant to cracking

Getting close to the bone is sometimes exactly the right strategy. Mimicking the crack-resistant properties of bone has delivered two new types of steel, which could improve safety in construction and transport applications.

Steel is ubiquitous: we use it in everything from cars and aircraft to power plants and bridges. It’s affordable and its alloys can be easily tailored for specific applications.

But it is also vulnerable to scratching, which can lead to the development of microcracks that spread over time until the material fails. The changes in air pressure that an airplane is subjected to over its lifetime, for example, can lead to metal fatigue, with potentially catastrophic consequences.

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