Scientists turn food poisoning microbe into powerful cancer fighter

Scientists have modified Salmonella bacteria to trigger a particularly powerful immune response against human cancer cells implanted in mice, shrinking the tumors and—for the first time—preventing them from metastasizing.

 Genetically modified Salmonella bacteria target tumors and make the immune system extra aggressive toward cancer         cells. Photo courtesy: Younghee Lee/CUBE3D Graphic/ via Science

Cancer tends to stick around because it’s practically invisible to the body’s own defenses: The immune system doesn’t recognize the rogue cells because they aren’t foreign invaders. To activate the immune system to attack cancer, scientists had tried all sorts of tricks, including infecting cancerous tissue with bacteria. Now, if this technique of modified Salmonella bacteria can be replicated in humans, it would be a significant step forward for the field of bacterial cancer therapy.

“This team did very solid work, very rigorous,” says Roy Curtiss III, an infectious diseases researcher at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who has pioneered similar bacterial techniques to combat cancer.

Because bacteria often home in on necrotic, oxygen-depleted tissue—present in most solid tumors—scientists can easily “target” cancerous tissue with the microbes. Only one such treatment has so far received Food and Drug Administration approval (a therapy to treat bladder cancer), though others are in the pipeline. But even with the most effective of these techniques, tumors tend to come back and the bacteria themselves can be toxic.

Enter Salmonella, a rod-shaped microbe notorious for causing most cases of food poisoning. In 2006, researchers at Chonnam National University in Gwangju, South Korea, were looking to create a new cancer-fighting agent. They were also searching for a vaccine for the bacterium Vibrio vulnificus, which infects shellfish off the South Korean coast. As they worked with Vibrio, they noticed that a protein in its flagellum—a whiplike tail used for swimming—triggered a particularly strong response from immune cells. So they took a harmless version of Salmonella typhimurium and “weaponized” it, genetically modifying it to secrete the protein, known as FlaB.

The team, led by biologists Jung-Joon Min and Joon Haeng Rhee, then set out to test the effects of the modified Salmonella on cancer. In one set of experiments, they injected it into 20 mice with human colon cancers. Three days later, the scientists discovered that although the mice had cleared the bacteria from their livers, lungs, and spleens, the tumorous tissue in their colons was crawling with Salmonella. After 120 days, tumors were undetectable in 11 of the 20 mice, which remained healthy throughout the experiment. Control mice, infected with bacteria that did not secrete FlaB, eventually succumbed to their cancers.

Next, the researchers transplanted metastasizing human colon cancer cells into a different set of mice. They treated eight with the FlaB-secreting Salmonella and six with a non-FlaB version. An additional seven mice went untreated. After 27 days, both the untreated mice and those with the non-FlaB version of S. typhimurium had dozens of metastases. But the eight mice that got the FlaB-secreting bacteria had just four secondary tumors in total, with several showing no evidence of metastasis, the researchers report today in Science Translational Medicine.

The FlaB protein probably gets the credit for halting the spread of the cancer, Min and Rhee wrote in an e-mail. FlaB appears to be especially good at activating a secondary molecule, TLR5, that seems to make immune cells more aggressive, “changing them from Dr Jekyll to Mr Hyde,” the researchers wrote.

For now, the team will continue to refine the technique with animal models. But sometime within the next few years, Min and Rhee plan to run clinical trials in humans to see whether FlaB-enhanced bacteria could work as a safe, effective anticancer therapy.

Fossils point to life on Earth 4 billion years ago

The start of life on Earth.                  

The oldest fossils ever found are "direct evidence" of life on Earth 3.8 to 4.3 billion years ago when our planet was still in its infancy, researchers reported yesterday.

Even at the lower end of the spectrum, "the microfossils we discovered are about 300 million years older" than any runners-up, said Dominic Papineau, a professor at University College London who made the discovery.

The dating puts the fossils "within a few hundred million years of the accretion of the solar system," he said in a video statement.

The results were published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.

The fact that life kick-started not long after Earth formed suggests it could also emerge on watery worlds outside our Solar System at comparable stages of formation, the scientists said.

"If life happened so quickly on Earth, then could we expect it to be a simple process that could start on other planets?", asked lead author Matthew Dodd, a graduate student at the London Centre for Nanotechnology.

Earth and Mars had liquid water on their surfaces at the same time, he noted.

"We could expect to find evidence for past life on Mars four billion years ago," Dodd said.

It may also be true, he added, that Earth was "just a special case."

The tiny fossils -- half the width of a human hair and up to half-a-millimetre in length -- take the form of blood-red tubes and filaments formed by ocean-dwelling bacteria that fed on iron.

Locked inside white, flower-like quartz structures known to harbour fossils, they were found along what were once warm-water vents on the ocean floor, most often in deep waters.

ron-carbonate(white)rosette with concentric layers of quartz iclusions(grey)and

 a core of a single quartz crystal with tiny(nanoscopic)inclusions of red

 hematite from the Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt are 

seen in Quebec, Canada.

Such iron-rich, hydrothermal systems exist today, and are home to bacteria that may be similar to those unearthed by Dodd and his colleagues.

Known as the Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt, the site of the discovery contains some of the oldest sedimentary rocks known on Earth.

Strong evidence of life

They formed between 3.77 and 4.29 billion years ago, and may have been the habitat for the planet's first life forms.

It is still not known when, or where, life on Earth began, but these deep-sea vents are seen as a good candidate.

Earth is thought to be about 4.57 billion years old.

Previous claims of super-ancient fossils have been challenged by scientists asking whether they are, in fact, natural mineral formations of some kind.

"One of the big questions when it comes to early life studies is whether or not the organic carbon we find in these rocks is actually biological in origin," explained Dodd.

The researchers used several methods to check, including laser-imaging to analyse the minerals associated with the organic material.

The presence of two in particular -- apatite and carbonite -- provide strong evidence for life, they said.

Moreover, the flower-like quartz structures in which the tubes and filaments are embedded have often been found in younger rock to contain traces of bacteria that consumed iron for energy.

The possibility that the microfossils were forged by temperature and pressure changes as the sediment formed were also examined, and excluded.

The new fossil find complements the recent discovery of 3.7-million year geological structures in Greenland called stromatolites.

While not fossils, stromatolites are made by microbial colonies, and form in the sunlit surface waters of the ocean.

The oldest microfossils previously reported were found in Western Australia and dated to 3.46 billion years ago, though some scientists say that these are not biological in origin.

Several other research institutions contributed to the new study, including the Geological Survey of Norway, the US Geological Survey, and the University of Ottawa.

NASA discovers 10 new Earth-size exoplanets

NASA revealed Monday 10 new rocky, Earth-sized planets that could potentially have liquid water and support life.

 NASA’s Kepler space telescope team has identified 219 new planet candidates, 10 of which are near-Earth size and in the habitable zone of their star. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The Kepler mission team released a survey of 219 potential exoplanets -- planets outside of our solar system -- that had been detected by the space observatory launched in 2009 to scan the Milky Way galaxy.

Ten of the new discoveries were orbiting their suns at a distance similar to Earth's orbit around the sun, the so-called habitable zone that could potentially have liquid water and sustain life.

Kepler has already discovered 4,034 potential exoplanets, 2,335 of which have been confirmed by other telescopes as actual planets.

The 10 new Earth-size planets bring the total to 50 that exist in habitable zones around the galaxy.

"This carefully-measured catalog is the foundation for directly answering one of astronomy's most compelling questions -- how many planets like our Earth are in the galaxy?" said Susan Thompson, a Kepler research scientist and lead author of the latest study.

The latest findings were released at the Fourth Kepler and K2 science conference being held this week at NASA's Ames research center in California.

The Kepler telescope detects the presence of planets by registering minuscule drops in a star's brightness that occurs when a planet crosses in front of it, a movement known as a transit.

The findings were compiled from data gathered during the first four years of the mission, which scientists processed to determine the size and composition of the planets observed.

The scientists found that the newly discovered planets tended to fall into two distinct categories -- smaller, rocky planets that are usually around 75 percent bigger than Earth, and much larger, gaseous planets similar in size to Neptune.

NASA said the latest catalog is the most complete and detailed survey of potential exoplanets yet compiled. The telescope has studied some 150,000 stars in the Cygnus constellation, a survey which NASA said is now complete.

“The Kepler data set is unique, as it is the only one containing a population of these near Earth-analogs -- planets with roughly the same size and orbit as Earth,” said Mario Perez of NASA's Astrophysics Division. “Understanding their frequency in the galaxy will help inform the design of future NASA missions to directly image another Earth.”

The mission ran into technical problems in 2013 when mechanisms used to turn the spacecraft failed, but the telescope has continued searching for potentially habitable planets as part of its K2 project.

As of next year, NASA will continue its scan of the galaxy using Kepler's successor, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, which will spend two years observing the 200,000 brightest nearby stars for Earth-like worlds.

Scientists also hope the James Webb Space telescope, which will replace the Hubble telescope in 2018, will be able to detect the molecular make-up of atmospheres of exoplanets, including the possibility of finding signatures of potential life forms.

Scientists create paper that can be erased and reprinted up to 80 times

Scientists in California have created rewritable paper, printed using light instead of ink.

Despite the rise of e-readers and smartphones, the United States still uses 70 million tonnes of paper each year. The chemists at the University of California, Riverside, hope their new paper, which can be erased and reused up to 80 times, can help cut down that amount.

At the heart of the new technology are nanoparticles, materials thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair.

Chemistry student Rashed Al Eisa, who worked on reprintable paper, said: "So this is actually the nanoparticles that I'm talking about. So what we do is we mix this one with this dye, which has the blue color and then we coat it on any kind of substrate we want. We can coat it on paper, we can coat it on glass or plastic. And then we can use some sort of mask with the writings we want, and when we shine a light on top of it, then after a couple of minutes, then we can see that the writings remain on this material."

The writing fades in five days, as oxygen in the air takes electrons from the dye nanoparticles and turns them back to their original color. The process can be accelerated by heating the paper, making it reusable in a matter of minutes.

Thus the idea of a paperless society gets one step closer to reality.

Scientists dim sunlight, suck up carbon dioxide to cool planet

Scientists are sucking carbon dioxide from the air with giant fans and preparing to release chemicals from a balloon to dim the sun's rays as part of a climate engineering push to cool the planet.

A facility for capturing CO2 from air of Swiss Climeworks AG is placed on the roof of a waste incinerating plant in Hinwil, Switzerland July 18, 2017.          

Backers say the risky, often expensive projects are urgently needed to find ways of meeting the goals of the Paris climate deal to curb global warming that researchers blame for causing more heatwaves, downpours and rising sea levels.

The United Nations says the targets are way off track and will not be met simply by reducing emissions for example from factories or cars - particularly after US President Donald Trump's decision to pull out of the 2015 pact.

They are pushing for other ways to keep temperatures down.

In the countryside near Zurich, Swiss company Climeworks began to suck greenhouse gases from thin air in May with giant fans and filters in a $23 million project that it calls the world's first "commercial carbon dioxide capture plant".

Worldwide, "direct air capture" research by a handful of companies such as Climeworks has gained tens of millions of dollars in recent years from sources including governments, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the European Space Agency.

If buried underground, vast amounts of greenhouse gases extracted from the air would help reduce global temperatures, a radical step beyond cuts in emissions that are the main focus of the Paris Agreement.

Climeworks reckons it now costs about $600 to extract a tonne of carbon dioxide from the air and the plant's full capacity due by the end of 2017 is only 900 tonnes a year. That's equivalent to the annual emissions of only 45 Americans.

And Climeworks sells the gas, at a loss, to nearby greenhouses as a fertilizer to grow tomatoes and cucumbers and has a partnership with carmaker Audi, which hopes to use carbon in greener fuels.

Jan Wurzbacher, director and founder of Climeworks, says the company has planet-altering ambitions by cutting costs to about $100 a tonne and capturing one percent of global man-made carbon emissions a year by 2025.

"Since the Paris Agreement, the business substantially changed," he said, with a shift in investor and shareholder interest away from industrial uses of carbon to curbing climate change.

But penalties for factories, power plants and cars to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere are low or non-existent. It costs 5 euros ($5.82) a tonne in the European Union.

And isolating carbon dioxide is complex because the gas makes up just 0.04 percent of the air. Pure carbon dioxide delivered by trucks, for use in greenhouses or to make drinks fizzy, costs up to about $300 a tonne in Switzerland.

Other companies involved in direct air capture include Carbon Engineering in Canada, Global Thermostat in the United States and Skytree in the Netherlands, a spinoff of the European Space Agency originally set up to find ways to filter out carbon dioxide breathed out by astronauts in spacecrafts.

Not Science Fiction

The Paris Agreement seeks to limit a rise in world temperatures this century to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), ideally 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial times.

But UN data show that current plans for cuts in emissions will be insufficient, especially without the United States, and that the world will have to switch to net "negative emissions" this century by extracting carbon from nature.

Riskier "geo-engineering" solutions could be a backstop, such as dimming the world's sunshine, dumping iron into the oceans to soak up carbon, or trying to create clouds.

Among new university research, a Harvard geo-engineering project into dimming sunlight to cool the planet set up in 2016 has raised $7.5 million from private donors. It plans a first outdoor experiment in 2018 above Arizona.

"If you want to be confident to get to 1.5 degrees you need to have solar geo-engineering," said David Keith, of Harvard.

Keith's team aims to release about 1 kilo (2.2 lbs) of sun dimming material, perhaps calcium carbonate, from a high-altitude balloon above Arizona next year in a tiny experiment to see how it affects the microphysics of the stratosphere.

"I don't think it's science fiction ... to me it's normal atmospheric science," he said.

Some research has suggested that geo-engineering with sun-dimming chemicals, for instance, could affect global weather patterns and disrupt vital Monsoons.

And many experts fear that pinning hopes on any technology to fix climate change is a distraction from cuts in emissions blamed for heating the planet.

"Relying on big future deployments of carbon removal technologies is like eating lots of dessert today, with great hopes for liposuction tomorrow," Christopher Field, a Stanford University professor of climate change, wrote in May.

Jim Thomas of ETC Group in Canada, which opposes climate engineering, said direct air capture could create "the illusion of a fix that can be used cynically or naively to entertain policy ideas such as 'overshoot'" of the Paris goals.

But governments face a dilemma. Average surface temperatures are already about 1C (1.8F) above pre-industrial levels and hit record highs last year.

"We're in trouble," said Janos Pasztor, head of the new Carnegie Climate Geoengineering Governance Project. "The question is not whether or not there will be an overshoot but by how many degrees and for how many decades."

Faced with hard choices, many experts say that extracting carbon from the atmosphere is among the less risky options. Leaders of major economies, except Trump, said at a summit in Germany this month that the Paris accord was "irreversible."

Barking Mad

Raymond Pierrehumbert, a professor of physics at Oxford University, said solar geo-engineering projects seemed "barking mad".

By contrast, he said "carbon dioxide removal is challenging technologically, but deserves investment and trial."

The most natural way to extract carbon from the air is to plant forests that absorb the gas as they grow, but that would divert vast tracts of land from farming. Another option is to build power plants that burn wood and bury the carbon dioxide released.

Carbon Engineering, set up in 2009 with support from Gates and Murray Edwards, chairman of oil and gas group Canadian Natural Resources Ltd, has raised about $40 million and extracts about a tonne of carbon dioxide a day with turbines and filters.

"We're mainly looking to synthesize fuels" for markets such as California with high carbon prices, said Geoffrey Holmes, business development manager at Carbon Engineering.

But he added that "the Paris Agreement helps" with longer-term options of sucking large amounts from the air.

Among other possible geo-engineering techniques are to create clouds that reflect sunlight back into space, perhaps by using a mist of sea spray.

That might be used locally, for instance, to protect the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, said Kelly Wanser, principal director of the US-based Marine Cloud Brightening Project.

Among new ideas, Wurzbacher at Climeworks is sounding out investors on what he says is the first offer to capture and bury 50 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air, for $500 a tonne.

That might appeal to a company wanting to be on forefront of a new green technology, he said, even though it makes no apparent economic sense.

NASA captures images of strong solar flares

Two high-intensity solar flares were emitted Wednesday, the second of which was the most intense recorded since the start of this sun cycle in December 2008, NASA said.

This animation shows both the X2.2 and the X9.3 flares that the Sun emitted on Sept. 6, 2017.  The imagery was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory and shows light in the131 angstrom wavelength. Photo: NASA/Goddard/SDO 

These radiation flares, which can disrupt communications satellites, GPS and power grids by reaching the upper Earth atmosphere, were detected and captured by the US Space Agency's Solar Dynamics Observatory.

According to the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), these so-called category X eruptions disrupted high-frequency radio communications for one hour on the Earth's side facing the sun and low-frequency communications used in navigation.

The two eruptions occurred in an active region of the sun where an eruption of average intensity occurred on September 4. The current cycle of the sun, which began in December 2008, saw the intensity of solar activity decline sharply, opening the way to the "solar minimum."

Solar cycles last on average eleven years. At the end of the active phase, these eruptions become increasingly rare but still can be powerful. 

Solar storms result from an accumulation of magnetic energy in some places.

These jets of ionized matter are projected -- at high speed into and beyond the crown of the sun -- hundreds of thousands of kilometers outward.

Astronomers bid farewell to Saturn spacecraft

Global astronomers bid farewell Friday to NASA's famed Cassini spacecraft, which launched 20 years ago to circle Saturn and transformed the way we think about life elsewhere in the solar system.

     Photo credit: NASA

Cassini, an international project that cost $3.9 billion and included scientists from 27 nations, has run out of rocket fuel as expected after a journey of some 4.9 billion miles (7.9 billion kilometers).

Its death plunge into the ringed gas giant -- the furthest planet visible from Earth with the naked eye -- is scheduled for shortly after the spacecraft's final contact with Earth at 7:55am (1155 GMT).

Cassini's well-planned demise is a way of preventing any damage to Saturn's ocean-bearing moons Titan and Enceladus, which scientists want to keep pristine for future exploration because they may contain some form of life.

"It will be sad to see Cassini go on Friday, especially as the instrument we built is still working perfectly," said Stanley Cowley, professor of solar planetary physics at the University of Leicester.

"But we recognize that it is important to bring the mission to an end in a tidy and controlled manner."

Three other spacecraft have flown by Saturn -- Pioneer 11 in 1979, followed by Voyager 1 and 2 in the 1980s.

But none have studied Saturn in such detail as Cassini, named after the French-Italian astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini, who discovered in the 17th century that Saturn had several moons and a gap in between its rings.

Discoveries

Cassini launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida in 1997, then spent seven years in transit followed by 13 years orbiting Saturn.

In that time, it discovered six more moons around Saturn, three-dimensional structures towering above Saturn's rings, and a giant storm that raged across the planet for nearly a year.

The 22 by 13 foot (6.7 by four meter) spacecraft is also credited with discovering icy geysers erupting from Saturn's moon Enceladus, and eerie hydrocarbon lakes made of ethane and methane on Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

In 2005, the Cassini orbiter released a lander called Huygens on Titan, marking the first and only such landing in the outer solar system, on a celestial body beyond the asteroid belt.

Huygens was a joint project of the European Space Agency, Italian Space Agency and NASA.

"The mission has changed the way we think of where life may have developed beyond our Earth," said Andrew Coates, head of the Planetary Science Group at Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London.

"As well as Mars, outer planet moons like Enceladus, Europa and even Titan are now top contenders for life elsewhere," he added.

"We've completely rewritten the textbooks about Saturn."

Some 4,000 scientific papers have been based on data from the mission, said Mathew Owens, professor of space physics at the University of Reading.

And its final plunge will reveal even more about the make-up of Saturn's atmosphere before Cassini disintegrates like a meteor.

"No doubt scientists will be analyzing the information from its final, one-way trip into Saturn's atmosphere for years to come," Owens said.

Human eggs grown to maturity in lab: Researchers

February 09, 2018

Scientists have grown human egg cells to full maturity in the lab in a potential breakthrough for fertility treatment, they announced in a study published Friday.

Researchers in New York and Edinburgh developed a new method to grow eggs from very early-stage cells obtained from ovary tissue, a team reported in the journal Molecular Human Reproduction.

The eggs were grown to the point at which they could be fertilised.

This had previously been achieved with mouse egg cells, while human eggs had been successfully cultivated starting from a much later stage of development.

"The latest study is the first time a human egg has been developed in the lab from its earliest stage to full maturity," said a statement from the University of Edinburgh.

Experts who did not take part in the research hailed the achievement as promising, but stressed it would take years to translate into a safe and proven therapy.

The technique holds promise specifically for women who have to go through sterilising treatments such as chemotherapy.

It would allow them to freeze early-stage egg cells before undergoing treatment, to be matured in the lab at a later time to be fertilised with sperm to make a baby.

Traditionally, cancer patients can have a piece of ovary removed before chemotherapy, but reimplanting the tissue later may risk reintroducing cancer.

"This is an elegant piece of work, demonstrating for the first time that human eggs can be grown to maturity in a laboratory," Channa Jayasena of the Imperial College London said in a comment on the study results.

"It would take several years to translate this into a therapy. However, this is an important breakthrough, which could offer hope to women with infertility in the future."

Azim Surani of the University of Cambridge pointed out that the eggs yielded by the research were smaller than normal, and "it might be of interest to test the developmental potential of these eggs".

And Robin Lovell-Badge of The Francis Crick Institute said the procedure was "really quite inefficient", with only nine out of dozens of early-stage cells becoming mature eggs.

Study co-author Evelyn Telfer of the University of Edinburgh said the team was now studying how healthy the eggs are.

"We also hope to find out, subject to regulatory approval, whether they can be fertilised," she said.

Flies can help in public health surveillance

Science could soon unleash a most incongruous army in the war against disease - one composed of filthy flies.

Researchers have found that because flies are the very vessels that transport harmful and sometimes deadly bacteria, the insects can also be used to monitor the diseases circulating in the environment.

Research led by Professor Stephan Schuster, a geneticist at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) of Singapore, found that houseflies and blowflies - the most common flies here, which love to feed on rotting meat - carry hundreds of species of bacteria, mostly concentrated on their legs and wings. He found that they even carry the pathogen Helicobacter pylori, which causes stomach ulcers in humans and is the most common risk factor for gastric cancer.

“Our study shows how bacteria can ‘fly’ around, hitching a lift on common flies,” said Prof Schuster, a research director at the Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering at NTU. “They pick up the microbiome (micro-organisms in a particular environment) on their feet, spread them across their wings in a similar way to how we might comb our hair, and then proceed to contaminate every surface that they land on.”

He believes the flies can be used in public health surveillance programmes, where they can uncover the types of bacteria present in a particular environment.

Prof Schuster and his team of international researchers suggest that sterile flies, bred in the absence of any micro-organisms, will be able to effectively pick up the latent microbiomes present when they are released into any environment.

After the flies are collected using bait traps, their microbiomes would then be sequenced, giving a picture of what diseases are spreading, thereby acting as an early warning system, the researchers said.

This could be particularly useful in agriculture, Prof Schuster added. "Through regular monitoring, if we knew that a particular pathogen is affecting the crops and is becoming an outbreak, then farmers could organise a targeted treatment that eradicates only that pathogen, leaving the other parts of the ecosystem intact."

He and his team sequenced the genetic material of 116 houseflies and blowflies from Brazil, the United States and Singapore, along with all the micro-organisms they were carrying. Their findings were published in scientific journal Scientific Reports yesterday (Nov 24).

The flies were lured with a piece of rotting fish. Then a piece of dry ice was held close to them, causing them to freeze, falling untouched and uncontaminated into a container. Once in a sterile environment, each fly was defrosted and its various body parts separated, crushed and put into a gene sequencing machine. The resulting data was then sorted out by a supercomputer.

Dr Ana Carolina Martins Junqueira, first author of the paper and an entomologist (insect expert) at NTU, said flies are an important part of nature's ecosystem as they are also pollinators like bees.

"Carrion flies have microscopic hairs on every part of the body, excluding the eye, and these bristles make them the perfect carrier for pollen and also bacteria. It is an evolutionarily optimised vehicle for the dispersal of micro-organisms in the environment," added Dr Junqueira, who is also a faculty member at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Top 10 science breakthroughs in 2017

In 2017, science saw different major breakthroughs which hold the potential to enhance the advancement of human civilisation and change our very understanding of the universe as a whole.

Here are the top ten scientific discoveries of this year.

                1. Discovery of neutron star collision

The world's first-ever detection of two faraway neutron stars colliding, causing a massive blast that rippled through the fabric of space and time, was judged one of the major scientific breakthroughs of 2017.

Collision of two neutron stars. Image courtesy: European Space Agency

The smashup of the two ultra-dense stars observed on August 17 "confirmed several key astrophysical models, revealed a birthplace of many heavy elements, and tested the general theory of relativity as never before," the journal Science said in a report.

The blast, which occurred 130 million light-years away, is the kind of event that produces as much as half of the universe's gold, platinum, uranium and mercury, experts said.

Shockwaves ran through the scientific community when the discovery was announced in October, after being detected by gravitational wave sensors in the US and Europe, and some 70 telescopes and observatories around the world.

Scientists witnessed the smashup of two ultra-dense neutron stars in August 2017. AFP file photo

Bangalore Sathyaprakash from Cardiff University's School of Physics and Astronomy recalled the moment as "the most exciting of my scientific life."

     2. Artificial womb keeps fetal lambs alive

Scientists at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia successfully built an artificial “womb” in 2017, which  kept fetal lambs alive and developing normally, a breakthrough that could someday lead to saving premature babies born as early as 23 weeks.

The “womb” has been made of a clear plastic bag (dubbed a Biobag) filled with synthetic amniotic fluid.

A machine outside the bag attaches to the lamb’s umbilical cord, serving as a placenta by providing nutrition and oxygen and removing waste.

The research team of the hospital hopes to test the artificial womb on premature human babies within five years. 

                         3. Discovery of ‘Super-Earth’

A group of scientists at Harvard’s MEarth Project in April announced the discovery of an exoplanet that gives the best opportunity yet to find existence of life.

Artist's impression of exoplanet LHS 1140b and the red dwarf LHS 1140 it orbits. Photo taken from Wikipedia

Artist's impression of exoplanet LHS 1140b and the red dwarf LHS 1140 it orbits. Photo taken from Wikipedia

Planet LHS 1140b is rocky, temperate, and just 40 light-years away (practically next door in astronomical terms), where it transits a star smaller than Earth.

Among other factors, astronomers believe the planet could have liquid water on its surface, a necessity for life (as we know it) to exist.

                            4. Reversing paralysis

French neuroscientist Grégoire Courtine is now developing a revolutionary technology that will connect the part of the brain that controls movement to the spinal cord.

In the next 10-15 years, scientists are hoping to reverse paralysis caused by spinal cord injuries, thanks to the work of Grégoire Courtine.

An experiment was conducted on a partially paralysed macaque monkey. The results were hopeful. As the chip interpreted the monkey’s intentions to move, the paralysed leg began to extend and flex. From there, he was able to walk.

When interviewed by the MIT Technology Review, Courtine said, “The monkey was thinking, and then boom, it was walking.” After testing on the monkey was successful, the researchers wanted to test the process on a human subject.

A quadriplegic patient (a person who is unable to move anything below the shoulders) volunteered for the experiment. The doctors put two recording implants into the man’s brain, as well as several electrodes into his arm and hand. He was able to slowly raise and lower his arm, while clenching and releasing his hand.

Swiss based research company École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne says “The brain-spine interface bridges the spinal cord injury in real-time and wirelessly.”

The neuroprosthetic system decodes spiking activity from the brain’s motor cortex and then relays this information to a system of electrodes located over the surface of the lumbar spinal cord, below the injury.

Electrical stimulation of a few volts, delivered at precise locations in the spinal cord, modulates distinct networks of neurons that can activate specific muscles in the legs, according to the research company.

       5. New gene that causes heart disease

South African researchers have made a huge breakthrough identifying a new gene called CDH2, which is responsible for causing arrhythmogenic right ventricle cardiomyopathy (ARVC), a genetic disorder of the heart that causes cardiac arrest.

Illustration of a heart with arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC). The right ventricular myocytes are replaced with fibro-fatty tissue leading to the arrhythmias characteristic of the disease. Image courtesy: Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research.

Researchers at the University of Cape Town’s Hatter Institute for Cardiovascular Research in Africa (HICRA), with global collaboration, have identified the new gene that is a major cause of sudden death among young people. Although everyone has the CDH2 gene, a mutation of it causes the genetic disorder that leads to ARVC.

  6. Leaf transformed into human heart tissue

The scientists at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts have successfully transformed a spinach leaf into beating human heart tissue, a significant proof of concept that could lead to major breakthroughs, such as grafting damaged heart tissue. 

Photo courtesy: Worcester Polytechnic Institute

To create the spinach-heart hybrid, the team stripped green spinach leaves with detergent, which left behind a cellulose matrix loosely similar to the vascular structure of the heart.

Then they seeded the vacated areas with cardiac muscle cells, and waited. Five days later, the cells began to beat.

           7. Secret void detected in great pyramid at Giza

Scientists have found a previously unknown area in the Great Pyramid at Giza in Egypt for the first time since the 1800s, thanks to high-energy particle physics.

Photo courtesy: The ScanPyramids Project

To create the spinach-heart hybrid, the team stripped green spinach leaves with detergent, which left behind a cellulose matrix loosely similar to the vascular structure of the heart.

Then they seeded the vacated areas with cardiac muscle cells, and waited. Five days later, the cells began to beat.

The ScanPyramids project team detected a 100-foot-long cavity that could be a chamber, a ramp used to move blocks, or any number of other spaces.

The scientists used muon radiography, which detects the subatomic particles called muons that are constantly raining down on Earth, in their project.

Muon particles pass through empty spaces more easily than they do solid areas, so muon detectors allow researchers to map solid and empty spaces inside a structure.

          8. Gravitational waves prove Einstein's theory of                          general relativity

Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity states that space and time are unified into one continuum: space-time. Objects in the universe, no matter their size, warp space-time as they move, creating ripples known as gravitational waves.
Until this year, there was no enough evidence of measuring the massive gravitational waves. But thanks to the new technological advancements, astrophysicists measured the massive gravitational waves created by huge objects in deep space.
Usually these come from black holes and neutron stars millions and millions of light years away, so their waves are incredibly faint by the time they reach Earth.
In September 2017, gravitational waves were detected by three separate observatories at once. With all that data, scientists are better able to pinpoint where the waves are coming from, and learn more about them and the universe at large. Better yet, it proves the existence of gravitational waves – and therefore space-time – once and for all.

         9. Scientists figure out how to turn                     hydrogen into metal

Harvard University scientists figured out how to turn hydrogen - the lightest of all elements - into a metal, a feat studied by researchers for nearly 100 years.

The properties of metallic hydrogen could lead to faster super computers, levitating railways, and advances in energy that could literally power rocket ships deep into our solar system, paving the way for revolutionising the modern world.
"It takes a tremendous amount of energy to make metallic hydrogen," said Professor Isaac Silvera. "And if you convert it back to molecular hydrogen, all that energy is release, so it would make it the most powerful rocket propellant known to man and could revolutionise rocketry. That would easily allow you to explore the outer planets."But don't get too excited - while scientists say the discovery is a huge step, the sample size they used is extremely small. More tests will determine whether larger quantities of hydrogen can be transformed into metal.

              10. Success in embryo gene editing

Researchers are getting closer to using gene editing for disease treatments and organ transplants.

They injected CRISPR into embryos that carried a genetic mutation responsible for an often fatal hereditary heart condition.

CRISPR was able to correct the mutation in about three-quarters of the embryos. Researchers in China had previously edited human embryos with CRISPR, but this was the largest attempt at altering embryos to date.