Newsdesk Archive

Every move you make, every step you take, you can generate electricity. By cramming 20,000 nanowires into three square centimeters, scientists from Georgia Tech have created the world's first device powered solely by piezoelectric materials.

Excavations began in the various archaeological sites that once housed farming communities, including Tel al-Abar 3 sites on the left bank of the Euphrates River (northern Syria) which dates back to the 10th millennium BC.Assistant Director of the Syrian Department of Archaeology and Museums Thaer Yerte said excavations at the site revealed information about the communities that settled on the banks of the Euphrates, uncovering two different areas that include three communal buildings and dozens of circular houses built from limestone and paved with pebbles from the river.

PARIS - A French-funded archaeology team is working on the first excavations in Iraq's northern Kurdish areas after seven years of conflict, the latest effort to save the country's treasures from ruin.Iraq, which the ancient Greeks called Mesopotamia or 'land between the rivers' because of the Tigris and Euphrates that flow through it, is regarded by archaeologists as a cradle of civilization.

Shells from mollusks presented to the dead during ancient funeral ceremonies are keys to helping a geologist gauge ocean movements near the Peruvian coast from as much as 13,000 years ago.

When the Berlin Wall began to crumble in 1989, East Germany's Ministry for State Security, the Stasi, decided to destroy all the evidence of 40 years of spying on fellow countrymen. But, like something out of a Cold War comedy, the Stasi's cheap shredders broke soon after they started, leaving agents to use their hands to tear the records into 600 million pieces, some as small as a fingernail. The pieces were supposed to be destroyed, but the Stasi never got around to incinerating them. To this day, they fill around 16,000 garbage bags stored in the basement of the former state security headquarters in Berlin, their secrets lost in a pile of millions of tiny shreds of paper.

Sardinia is an Italian island known mainly among archaeologists for its nuraghes - ancient towers somewhat reminiscent of Scottish brochs, but far more numerous and quite elaborate. On the island you will find a great number of other ancient wonders: from the so-called 'giants tombs' to the rock-cut tombs locally known as 'domus de janas' (houses of the fairies).

Using cutting-edge microscopy techniques, researchers have gained insight into how human mummies can be extremely well-preserved for thousands of years. A team of scientists from Germany and Italy has investigated skin samples from Europe's oldest natural mummy, the 5,300-year-old "Iceman" who was buried in a glacier shortly after death in the Otzal Alps between Italy and Austria. The researchers found that the underlying structure of the mummy's skin is largely unaltered compared with the skin of a modern living human, likely maintaining its protective function due to dehydration.

Anyone who has peered into the eyes of a chimpanzee knows that our closest relatives in the animal kingdom are intelligent and thoughtful creatures.And now an extraordinary study has shown just how alike we are.For the first time, scientists have captured on video a group of captive chimps caring for a dying elderly female, Pansy.

Japan is to launch a "space yacht" propelled by solar particles that bounce off its kite-shaped sails, the country's space agency said Tuesday.A rocket carrying the Ikaros -- an acronym for Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation of the Sun -- will blast off from the Tanegashima space centre in southern Japan on May 18.

Out of seven of the most heavily forested nations on Earth, the United States experienced a greater percentage of forest loss from 2000 to 2005 than did any of the other countries, a study said Monday.The United States lost more than 46,000 square miles of forest in those years, a size roughly equivalent to the state of Pennsylvania. That's about 6% of the nation's forested land.

It's a plant that might just be the cure to substance abuse, and even though there are entire clinics built around it in Canada, here in the U.S. it remains both illegal and ignored.Ibogaine is an alkaloid derived from the iboga plant, a perennial rainforest shrub and hallucinogen native to western-central Africa. According to some former slaves to heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, alcohol and even nicotine, it also breaks the virtually endless cycle of addiction.Canada isn't the only place where ibogaine is unregulated and available. Clinics there, as well as in Mexico, parts of Europe and dozens of other countries offer a supervised medical setting for the use of ibogaine in addiction withdrawal.

A substance similar to capsaicin, which gives chili peppers their heat, is generated at the site of pain in the human body. Scientists at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio have discovered how to block these capsaicin-like molecules and created a new class of non-addictive painkillers.The findings were published April 26 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The senior investigator was Kenneth Hargreaves, D.D.S., Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of Endodontics in the Dental School at the UT Health Science Center. Amol M. Patwardhan, M.B.B.S., Ph.D., a graduate of the Health Science Center's Department of Pharmacology who worked under Dr. Hargreaves' supervision, is the lead author.

"This study was just routine," said Russian biologist Alexey V. Surov, in what could end up as the understatement of this century. Surov and his colleagues set out to discover if Monsanto's genetically modified (GM) soy, grown on 91% of US soybean fields, leads to problems in growth or reproduction. What he discovered may uproot a multi-billion dollar industry.After feeding hamsters for two years over three generations, those on the GM diet, and especially the group on the maximum GM soy diet, showed devastating results. By the third generation, most GM soy-fed hamsters lost the ability to have babies. They also suffered slower growth, and a high mortality rate among the pups.

A garbage dump in Catalonia, Spain, has just yielded an eleven-million-year-old new primate, according to the science news service SINC.Named Pliopithecus canmatensis, after the site (Can Mata in the Vallès-Penedès basin), the primate belonged to an extinct family of Old World monkeys, Catarrhini, which dispersed from Africa to Eurasia.The scientists were able to ID the monkey from fragments of its jaw and molars.

They paved paradise and, it turns out, actually did put up a parking lot. A big one. Some 700 feet deep in the waters off California's jewel of a coastal resort, Santa Barbara, sits a group of football-field-sized asphalt domes unlike any other underwater features known to exist.About 35,000 years ago, a series of apparent undersea volcanoes deposited massive flows of petroleum 10 miles offshore. The deposits hardened into domes that were discovered recently by scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and UC Santa Barbara (UCSB).

UBC researchers have proffered a new mathematical model that seeks to unravel a key evolutionary riddle--namely what factors underlie the generation of biological diversity both within and between species.Evolutionary biologists have long recognized that the emergence of rare traits within a population can spur diversity. For example, being one of a few under-sized predators in a population dominated by larger-sized predators can offer advantages--access to an abundance of small prey--and increase the likelihood of that trait prospering in the population.

Scottish scientists have made cancer tumours vanish within 10 days by sending DNA to seek and destroy the cells.The system, developed at Strathclyde and Glasgow universities, is being hailed as a breakthrough because it appears to eradicate tumours without causing harmful side-effects. A leading medical journal has described the results so far as remarkable, while Cancer Research UK said they were encouraging.

Google's roving Street View spycam may blur your face, but it's got your number. The Street View service is under fire in Germany for scanning private WLAN networks, and recording users' unique Mac (Media Access Control) addresses, as the car trundles along.Germany's Federal Commissioner for Data Protection Peter Schaar says he's "horrified" by the discovery.

Switching from creating non-fiction books to works of fiction is not necessarily a good move for any author, as it might lead to aspersions being cast on your previous portrayals of true life adventure. That is what I have always believed, which is why I shall never write a novel. Better to do it the other way round - write non-fiction after years of writing fantasy thrillers. Just ask Whitley Strieber, whose book Communion, about his UFO experiences, was a worldwide bestseller back in 1987.

This article introduces the two intimately related books of over 500 pages each by Harry Sivertsen and Stephen Redman which under the project name of Megalith, Masonry, Myth and Measure are individually titled- 'Deluge:From Genesis to Atlantis' and Measurements of the Gods.Harry Sivertsen & Steve Redman will be Authors of the Month for May.

NASA has unveiled the first images from a new satellite designed to predict disruptive solar storms, and scientists say they're already learning new things.Researchers showed off brightly colored images and short movie clips of the sun from the Solar Dynamics Observatory in a webcast Wednesday.

For once lice are nice, at least for scientists investigating the origins of garments.Using DNA to trace the evolutionary split between head and body lice, researchers conclude that body lice first came on the scene approximately 190,000 years ago. And that shift, the scientists propose, followed soon after people first began wearing clothing.

Tree-ring data from more than 300 sites in Asia have allowed scientists to piece together a year-by-year history of the region's monsoon rains as far back as 1300 AD.The new database, called the Monsoon Asia Drought Atlas, is important because the summer monsoon, which affects half of the world's population, is little understood by climate modellers. In fact, says tree-ring expert Edward Cook, the models are poor enough that they don't even agree on whether global climate change will strengthen the Asian monsoon or weaken it. "That gives you an idea of just how difficult the problem is," he says.

A well-preserved, priceless marble head of Octavius Augustus - part of a sculpture from the early Roman period - and a small torso were excavated Friday at Stobi archaeological site, which was visited by Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski together with Culture Minister Elizabeta Kanceska-Milevska and the director of the Department for Cultural Heritage Protection, Pasko Kuzman.

To be in with a chance of winning a copy, simply enter your email address into the box provided.See the official Entangled site here: http://www.entangledthebook.com/

At last. We were beginning to wonder when a full-scale, no-holds barred cell phone study would be launched to investigate the pros (but mostly cons) of using a mobile long-term, and it seems that 2010 is the year. Small-scale studies have been conducted ever since wireless phones became a commodity, but up until now, no company had decided to study things long-term. It's being called the biggest study on cell phone health effects ever, and any study that will take three decades to complete probably qualifies for "biggest."

There is enough magnesium to meet the world's energy needs for the next 300,000 years, says Dr. Takashi Yabe of the Tokyo Institute of Technology.Magnesium is abundant in the world; however the production of magnesium is neither cheap or clean. There are various ways of extracting magnesium, ranging from an electrolytic process to high temperature method called the Pidgeon process.

Over the past decade, those who wished to contribute to SETI's mission of locating life elsewhere in the universe could leave their computers on running a special screensaver and donate their unused computing power to the cause. Now, SETI director Jill Tarter is asking people around the globe to get more involved in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence by opening up SETI's servers to the public calling for a worldwide, open source contribution to the search.

When we think of farming energy, we generally think of feedstocks like corn that can be processed into ethanol, or perhaps other plant life we can culture and harvest like algae. But don't underestimate the livestock; we've recently seen methane-trapping schemes that can power farms and giant cattle treadmills that turn idle dairy drones into power-producing machines. Now, a team of Stanford researchers wants to use a protein found in cow brains to make better batteries.

Cassini arrived in Saturn's neighborhood in 2004 for a four-year mission, but it performed so well and remained in such good shape, its mission was extended for two more years. In that time it's made countless discoveries, generated a wealth of scientific data and spawned well over 1,000 academic papers. It's also burned three quarters of its fuel.

The MIT-designed SPHERES (that's Synchronized Position, Hold, Engage, and Reorient Experimental Satellite) aboard the ISS -- those little globes that fly around like tiny satellites even though they are confined to the station's interior -- are in line for some big upgrades from DARPA. And in true DARPA fashion, the hardware updates are bold: aside from designing the next generation of spheres, DARPA wants the current models to be fitted with vision-based autonomous navigation and force fields.

DEEP in the western Amazon lies the Yasuni National Park. Packed within an average hectare of this dense, steamy Ecuadorian rainforest are more species of tree than are native to the US and Canada combined, as well as 150 types of amphibian and an estimated 100,000 insect species. "It's hard to get very far, because every few minutes you see or hear something new," says Matt Finer of Save America's Forests, based in Washington DC. According to work by Finer and others, published in January, there are more different life forms in Yasuni than anywhere else in South America. It may well be the most biodiverse place in the world.

IN THE beginning there were Ida and Luca. The initial Darwinian ancestor - Ida - and the last universal common ancestor - Luca - assembled themselves from the spare parts sloshing around on the early Earth. Once all the ingredients were in place, it looks like life was all but inevitable.The finding comes from recent discoveries about the behaviour of chemicals thought to have been present on the primordial Earth, relating to two key stages in the evolution of life. Ida was the first molecule that was able to self-replicate. Once it was around, busy making copies of itself, it somehow evolved the ability to store information in the form of the genetic code. That led to the life form from which we all descended: Luca.

Printmaker Audrey Sochor is showing "Bioluminescent Seas" at Print Arts Northwest Gallery at the Washington County Museum starting this week.Sochor's choice of the ocean as subject matter is based on change as epitomized by the movement of water. Her is to bring art off the wall and put the viewer into a physically experiencing mode.

British RAF pilots in the early 20th century were the first to spot the strange kite-like lines on the deserts of Israel, Jordan and Egypt from the air and wonder about their origins. The lines are low, stone walls, usually found as angled pairs, that begin far apart and converge at circular pits. In some places in Jordan the lines formed chains up to 40 miles long.Were they made by some weird kind of fault? Ancient astronauts?.

Why are humans the only species capable of having a verbal conversation? New research indicates the answer may involve more than the presence of specialized vocal cords. Neurobiologist Genevieve Konopka and her lab group at the University of California--Los Angeles examined a gene called FOXP2, which is linked to human language. But FOXP2 is also found in other animals, and the human version of the gene produces proteins that differ from the chimp's in only two out of 715 locations. To determine the influence of these two mutations, Konopka's team first grew human brain cells in cultures, then injected some samples with human FOXP2 and others with chimp FOXP2. The human FOXP2 led to the expression of a set of different genes than the chimp FOXP2--proving that the two mutations have functional consequences.

Nearly 1000 years after the last of the great Polynesian migration journeys across the Pacific, a group of descendants have set sail in a fleet of replica canoes to relive the voyages.Four double-hulled canoes with crews of up to 16 people left Auckland yesterday to sail 4000 kilometres to the French Polynesian island of Raiatea.

Dinosaurs may have roamed and mingled more freely in the western interior of North America than previously thought, according to a new study.For decades, many paleontologists believed that during the Late Cretaceous period, from about 100 million to 65 million years ago, dinosaur species occupied relatively restricted ranges in the West. At the end of this period, Leptoceratops, with its beaked snout and neck frill, inhabited the northern part of the West, the long-necked Alamosaurus resided in the south and the triple-horned Triceratops meandered through the western interior.

London-based architectural research firm Facility: Innovate is developing an energy harvester for crowded areas such as sports arenas and shopping centres.The technology will be invisible to the people it feeds on: they will simply walk over what looks like a normal floor tile. But their steps will push down on a pneumatic device that drives air through a turbine to generate electricity, says managing director Oliver Schneider. People will feel only a slight movement at most, like stepping on an entrance mat, he says.

THERE goes another sophisticated mental feat once thought to be uniquely human. Apes may be sufficiently self-aware to doubt their own knowledge.Josep Call of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, put food in one of two opaque plastic pipes and had watching bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans pick the one with the food. If they were made to wait, the apes sometimes forgot where the food was, but by and large they did well on the task.

THE physicist Richard Feynman said, "It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvellous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama."

An experiment is gearing up in Texas to take on one of the universe's biggest mysteries by compiling a three-dimensional map of the early cosmos. The hope is that the survey will help inform astronomers and cosmologists about the nature of dark energy, a mysterious and hypothetical agent thought to constitute nearly three quarters of the universe's mass.

Imagine the marriage of hard metals or semiconductors to soft organic or biological products. Picture the strange, wonderful offspring -- hybrid materials never conceived by Mother Nature.The applications in medicine and manufacturing are staggering, says biologist Steven Lenhert, the newest faculty face of nanoscience at The Florida State University.How about a mobile phone fitted with a "lab on a chip" that can diagnose illness? That and much more are real possibilities, according to Lenhert.

Mexico's president Felipe Calderon has made a military campaign against the country's ascendant drug-trafficking gangs the centerpiece of his presidency. After thousands of fatalities, many of them due to retaliatory strikes by the cartels ? including the murders of United States consulate workers last month -- the battle remains unresolved.

One of the basic components of a functional, cooperative society is a code of law, where the laws are usually enforced by some kind of incentive. Social incentives can either be positive (rewards) or negative (punishments), and a society must decide which combination to use to achieve the greatest efficiency, or the highest level of cooperation at the lowest cost. Using a game theoretic model, a new study has analyzed this social dilemma in order to investigate how individuals are swayed by incentives, and how cooperation can emerge due to various incentive strategies.

Modern-day Chinese pigs are directly descended from ancient pigs which were the first to be domesticated in the region 10,000 years ago, a new archaeological and genetic study has revealed.An international team of researchers, led by Durham University (UK) and the China Agricultural University, in Beijing, say their findings suggest a difference between patterns of early domestication and movement of pigs in Europe and parts of East Asia.The research, published today (Monday, April 19) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, looked at the DNA sequences of more than 1,500 modern and 18 ancient pigs.

A tiny fossil thumb bone provides a gripping look at the early evolution of human hands, according to a study presented April 16 at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.An upright gait and a relatively sophisticated ability to manipulate objects apparently evolved in tandem among the earliest hominids at least 6 million years ago, said Sergio Almécijaof the Autonomous University of Barcelona. That's well before the earliest evidence of stone toolmaking, about 2.6 million years ago, arguing against the idea that fine motor skills for toolmaking drove the evolution of opposable thumbs.

Intensive therapy using a robot has helped patients improve arm movement years after having a stroke, according to a US study.Researchers from Brown University, in Rhode Island, used the machine to provide three months of training.The New England Journal of Medicine reported that many patients had improved quality of life.UK stroke experts said the advance was "exciting" but added that robots were still at early stages of development.

Another ancient centre of learning was discovered at Telhara village in Nalanda district in Bihar during excavations.The state is already known worldwide for its Buddhist study centres- the famous Nalanda University, Udwantpuri near Biharsharif and Vikramshila University near Bhagalpur.

A team of archaeologists use a variety of methods, tools and old clues to get to the bottom of the mysterious building at the Wye House farm in Maryland. Discovery News' Jorge Ribas reports from the site.

Authorities in several Midwestern states were flooded Wednesday night with reports of a gigantic fireball lighting up the sky, the National Weather Service said.The fireball was visible for about 15 minutes beginning about 10 p.m., said the National Weather Service in Sullivan, Wisconsin, just west of Milwaukee."The fireball was seen over the northern sky, moving from west to east," said the NWS in the Quad Cities area, which includes parts of Iowa and Illinois.

Benjamin L. Hooks, a civil rights leader who led the NAACP from 1977 to 1992, has died, said the vice president for communication at the NAACP.The cause of death was not immediately known, the NAACP's Leila McDowell said Thursday.Hooks was "a vocal campaigner for civil rights in the United States," said the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The Smithsonian Institution has more than 137 million artifacts in its collection. But the American History Museum is thrilled to be getting a few items that have sat for years in a safe deposit box in Sacramento."This is the exact original picture that I took of Jack Kennedy out there," said retired Navy Captain Ted Robinson. During World War Two, Robinson took what has become a rather famous photo, showing a frail, but smiling future president, John F. Kennedy, leaning on a cane.

It's 7:30 a.m. on a wintry morning in downtown Stockholm and a sea of Swedes are flooding Central Station to catch a train to work. The station is toasty thanks to the busy shops and restaurants and the body heat being generated by the 250,000 commuters who crowd Scandinavia's busiest travel hub each day. This heat used to be lost by the end of the morning rush hour. Now, however, engineers have figured out a way to harness it and transfer it to a newly refurbished office building down the block. Unbeknownst to them, these sweaty Swedes have become a green energy source: "They're cheap and renewable," says Karl Sundholm, a project manager at Jernhusen, a Stockholm real estate company, and one of the creators of the system.

President Obama pledged his full commitment to the space program Thursday, outlining a new strategy that ends current programs while funding new initiatives intended to propel humankind farther into the solar system.In a speech at the Kennedy Space Center, Obama outlined his proposal to pump an additional $6 billion into NASA's budget over the next five years while halting a project to resume lunar missions.The new spending would be for research on a propulsion breakthrough to travel deeper into space, as well as development of technologies to allow humans to transport necessary supplies to work and stay longer, Obama said.

A deadly, airborne new strain of fungus has emerged in Oregon. It has killed nearly one out of four known affected people so far and might also attack animals ranging from dogs to dolphins. And it is likely to spread, researchers now warn.The new strain known as VGIIc of the fungus Cryptococcus gattii not only targets humans but has also proven capable of infecting dogs, cats, alpacas, sheep and elk. Other strains have even infected porpoises.Although it can spread to mammals, it does not jump from animal to animal. Instead, people and other animals get it from inhaling spores released by samples of the fungus that infect trees.

Michael Bledsoe's story begins like that of many other Iraqi war veterans. In 2007, he was chasing insurgents through Anbar province when a roadside bomb exploded, breaking Bledsoe's back and both his feet. A former Army Ranger working as a security contractor, Bledsoe soon knew his high-paying military career was over.Back home, Bledsoe (not his real name) felt angry almost constantly. Nightmares haunted him. He withdrew and became isolated. "It was a serious sense of loss," he says. His psychiatrist quickly diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).Despite months of talk therapy, the nightmares continued, and Bledsoe grew desperate. Then "something almost miraculous" happened, he says. An online search brought him to a unique study of the banned drug MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine), well known as the street drug ecstasy. The 21-patient study, sponsored by the nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), launched in 2004 as the first U.S. clinical trial of a psychedelic drug in 35 years.

When you go to a restaurant in the near future, you might order your food by poking at icons on your table -- they'll vanish when the plates arrive, and spilled drinks won't do them any harm. Light Blue Optics's pico projector is the first to turn any flat surface into a computer touchscreen. It beams a 10-inch display, which can show photos, videos, Web sites or apps running on its simple interface, and uses an infrared sensor to track your fingers' movements. Done browsing? Tap a virtual off button to make the screen disappear. Look for the Light Touch, in a form similar to the current 6.5-inch prototype, in retail stores or restaurants later this year. Next, a smaller version will show up inside portable gadgets, so when you tire of a cellphone's tiny buttons, you can project yourself a keyboard.

Supercomputers and massive data centers carry huge energy costs when it comes to keeping their electronic components chilly. Now IBM is set to unveil its next big supercomputer, Aquasar, which keeps cool with a constant circulation of water at 140 to 160 degrees F, according to TechNewsDaily.A system of tiny capillary-like micro-channels feeds the water through the IBM blade servers. Even better, some of the collected heat from the water will end up being released into the building heating system at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich. IBM teamed up with the university to develop Aquasar, which is set to debut next month.

Space station residents could soon get a new choice for drinking water beyond urine, sweat, and vapor. A water generation system which can extract water from hydrogen and carbon dioxide waste products has reached the space station, according to Aviation Week.The Sabatier Reactor System could create as much as 2,000 pounds of water per year when it officially goes online in several months. It uses the chemical process discovered by French Nobel laureate and chemist Paul Sabatier, who found that elevated temperatures and pressures could turn hydrogen and carbon dioxide into methane and water.

DARPA's ardent desire to realize every sci-fi concept ever dreamed of continues with a biologically-inspired computer project which aims for feline brain functionality. But this time it's pinning its hopes on memristor devices which can simulate the behavior of biological synapses in the brain.Memristors can take on the role of traditional transistors in such computers by opposing the flow of current. They can also remember the last voltage they experienced, not unlike the brain's synapses. Those signal junctions build stronger connections among neurons based on the strength and timing of signals, and form a basic part of how the brain's memory and learning processes work.

Good things come to those who wait, particularly when it comes to 50-million year-old fossils. For one paleontologist, the wait took 15 years."Southwestern Wyoming once was similar to the swamps in Florida and Georgia today," says Robert Anemone of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. "Crocodiles and turtles are the fossils you'll usually find.".

In 2007, MIT researchers announced that they had discovered a novel way of transmitting electricity without the use of wires. Now, the researchers have demonstrated that the system?s efficiency at transmitting energy improves significantly when it is used to charge multiple devices at the same time.

Imagine if you could generate electricity using nuclear power that emitted no radioactivity: it would be the answer to the world's dream of finding a clean, sustainable energy source.That is the great hope raised by researchers who believe they have found a radical new path to the ultimate goal of solving the world's energy crisis through nuclear fusion power, as detailed in a paper published in the journal Energy and Environmental Science.

A startup company, CardioHeal, based in Brookline, MA has developed peptide drugs that can speed up the growth of new heart muscle cells.The startup is headed by Roger Hajjar, director of the Cardiovascular Research Center at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, in New York, and Bernhard Kuhn, a cardiologist at Children's Hospital Boston, both aim to change the way how heart disease is treated.

In a multidisciplinary approach, Professor Yves Barral, from the Biology Department at ETH Zurich and the computer scientists Dr. Gina Cannarozzi and Professor Gaston Gonnet, from the Computer Science Department of ETH Zurich and the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, joined forces to chase possible sub-codes in genomic information. The study, which will be published in today's issue of the journal Cell, led to the identification of novel sequence biases and their role in the control of genomic expression.

Spinal injuries are some of the most debilitating that anyone can suffer. However, Richard Borgens and his team from the Center for Paralysis Research at the Purdue School of Veterinary Medicine can now offer spinal cord damage sufferers some hope. They publish their discovery in the Journal of Experimental Biology that chitosan, a sugar, can target and repair damaged spinal cord nerve membranes and restore nerve function.

Jason Salavon is a new-media artist whose solo show at Ronald Feldman Gallery opened last week in New York. He is also a research fellow in the Computation Institute and assistant professor in Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. I asked him last week about his image, Generic Mammal Skull, featured in the current show.