Scientists at the IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory have captured the highest energy neutrinos that have ever been seen. And to find them, they used faster-than-light particles and a hole drilled 1.5 miles under the Antarctic ice.

Neutrinos are those spooky massless subatomic particles that can pass through normal matter like a ghost. They can pull off this trick because they don’t carry an electric charge, thus making them immune to electromagnetic forces that influence charged particles like electrons and protons.

These particles come into existence in a number of ways, including the nuclear reactions of stars. And in fact, the sun is where most of the neutrinos that pass through the Earth come from. But the discovery of two ultra-high-density neutrinos in Antarctica (dubbed “Bert” and “Ernie”) indicates they may also originate from supernova gamma-ray bursts or active galactic nuclei (the jets that spew out from supermassive black holes) — and that they can reach Earth after traveling spectacularly long distances.

To make this discovery, the scientists used IceCube, the world’s largest neutrino detector — a facility that encompasses an entire cubic kilometer of ice. By drilling to a depth of 1 to 1.5 miles, it’s easier for the scientists to see the flash of light from a neutrino reaction.

Phil Plait explains:

This [detector] relies on the idea that a neutrino passing through ice can create a shower of subatomic particles, like shrapnel. These particles scream out from the collision and can actually travel faster than light through the ice. I know, this sounds impossible, but light speed is the Universal limit when it’s traveling through a vacuum. Light slows down when passing through air, or liquid, or matter. So a subatomic particle can travel faster than light through matter, while still traveling slower than light does in a vacuum.

When this happens, the particle creates a shock wave, just like a sonic boom is created when something travels faster than sound. In this case, though, it’s not a sonic boom, but a photonic boom, a shock wave of light. This creates a faint blue flash called Cherenkov radiation, and that can be seen using very sensitive detectors.

The scientists say they’re 99% certain that these neutrinos are not from some background source; ideally, they’d like to be at least 99.7% sure — so work continues.

Check out the entire paper, “First observation of PeV-energy neutrinos with IceCube.” Oh, and as you can see from this screen grab of the paper, several people collaborated on the project:

Sources: Nature News, Slate.

Images: IceCube Project.

In the first three days of accepting applications, the Mars One project has received a whopping 20,000 applications, with more than 600 coming from China alone. The project plans to send a select group of colonists to the Red Planet for permanent settlement — with permanent being the key word.

The Dutch aerospace project, which is aiming to put four humans on Mars by 2023, started accepting applications and audition tapes early last week. Co-founder Bas Lansdorp is hoping to receive anywhere from 500,000 to a million sign-ups — and if the first three days were of any indication, that seems entirely plausible. There is an application fee (the amount varies according to a country's per capita GDP), with the proceeds paying for the ongoing selection process and technology studies.

The final stage of the process will involve a short-list of 24 to 40 fully-trained candidates, with the final group being selected by a TV audience.

In regards to Chinese enthusiasm, China Daily reports:

Lansdorp said Mars One chose Shanghai as the second stop for the application press conference after New York because he believes many Chinese, including youngsters, are very interested in becoming astronauts, especially as the country already has its own astronauts.

Ma Qing, a 39-year-old bookseller, said, "I think the chance to be part of the project is a cool way for me to change a dull daily life. Besides, the air on Mars must be much cleaner and easier to breathe."

But Chang Tianxing, a space-lover from Shenzhen, Guangdong province, said, "I think such a task is only suitable for senior, experienced astronauts. Exploring life on Mars, with everything starting from scratch, is mission impossible for us."

A new theory proposed by two computer scientists suggests that animals can still experience significant evolutionary changes over time, even in the absence of selectional pressures.

Image: "Practice Run" by Grégoire Bouguereau.

Evolutionary potential, or what’s simply called evolvability, is a crucial attribute for a species to have. If the opportunity for physical mutations is limited or constrained, it can be exceptionally difficult for a species to adapt to its ever-changing environment.

Traditionally, evolvability has been linked to selectional pressures and the endless struggle for organisms to adapt. This notion basically says that it’s the ongoing presence of competition that spurs evolvability — that animals become increasingly capable of evolving as a response to these pressures (like competing for food, habitat, etc).

But researchers Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman say this isn’t the whole story, and that evolvability can increase without the pressure to adapt. By using a computer model to simulate the flow of evolution, they witnessed increasing evolvability without having to introduce competition into the mix.

Image: Evolvability heat map for the abstract model with limited capacity niches: "The average evolvability of organisms in each niche at the end of a simulation is shown. The lighter the color, the more evolvable individuals are within that niche. The overall result is that...evolvability increases with increasing distance from the starting niche in the centre." Credit: Lehman and Stanley.

What their models showed was that evolvable organisms separate themselves naturally from less evolvable organisms over time by becoming increasingly diverse.

They theorize that, if evolvability is heritable, then an unbiased (or passive) drifting process can still occur across a species — one that still pushes it towards evolvability. The reason, they say, is that evolvable organisms spread more quickly through the space of all evolutionary possibilities (i.e., more “experimentation” leads to more opportunities for adaptation). So, in order for new species to emerge in the future, it helps to be descended from those who were evolvable in the past. Thus, evolvable species accumulate over time — even without the need to adapt.

Fascinatingly, their simulations revealed that, because highly evolvable species spread more quickly, they also tend to spread to different ecological niches. And in fact, this is a good evolutionary strategy; evolvability correlates nicely with distance to original ecological niche. Niche founders, therefore, are more evolvable on average.

The timing of this paper is interesting given that Alex Wissner-Gross just posited his Maximum Causal Entropy Production Principle — the idea that intelligent behavior spontaneously emerges from an agent’s effort to ensure its freedom of action in the future. Though Stanley and Lehman aren’t talking about intelligence per se, their paper suggests that evolvability may be favored as a way to ensure future evolutionary options (i.e., the tendency is for species to maintain a certain degree of evolvability so as to not paint itself into an evolutionary dead-end).

Read the entire study at PLOS One: “Evolvability Is Inevitable: Increasing Evolvability without the Pressure to Adapt.”

Imagine downloading an app that can change the shape of your mobile phone. Researchers from the University of Bristol are looking to make it happen.

The concept is called shape resolution, and a research team led by Anne Roudaut and Sriram Subramanian have added 10 of these new features to its six flexible prototypes. The devices are given their extraordinary fungibility by virtue of advanced shape-changing materials, such as memory alloy and electro active polymer.

In the future, users will download apps to their devices and embed a dedicated form factor — like a stress ball app, for instance, which would cause the device to collapse in on itself. Other apps could give the device a console-like shape.

The researchers will be making their formal presentation this week: Morphees: Toward high "shape resolution" in self-actuated flexible mobile devices, Anne Roudaut, Abhijit Karnik, Sriram Subramanian, ACM CHI 2013, Saturday 27 April to Thursday 2 May 2013, Paris, France.

Astronomers studying an absolutely enormous neutron star and its white dwarf companion have shown that Einstein’s calculations still work even under the most extreme gravitational conditions.

And indeed, extreme is the word to use when describing this binary system. Located 7,000 light years away, the neutron star has twice the mass of our sun — but it’s only 12 miles (20 km) across. This means that its surface gravity is 300 billion times stronger than Earth’s, and that each cubic centimeter of the neutron star contains more than a billion tons of matter.

What’s more, this way heavy neutron star — the remnant of a mass accretion supernova explosion — spins around 25 times every second, and a lingering white dwarf star rapidly orbits around it once every 2.46 hours.

The neutron star is a pulsar, called PSR J0348+0432, that gives off radio waves that can be picked up here on Earth. Specifically, astronomers used the Aricebo and Effelsberg telescopes to make their radio-timing observations.

Now, because this binary system offers such unprecedented data (it’s only the second neutron star discovered with this kind of mass), the astronomers were curious to see if their real-world measurements would deviate from the math produced by Einstein’s equations; they calculated the amount of gravitational radiation emitted to see if the theory could accurately predict the rate of orbital decay.

They independently measured the rate of decay at 8 millionths of a second per year (yes, that’s the degree of preciseness offered by the pulsar’s emissions).

The figures matched.

"We thought this system might be extreme enough to show a breakdown in General Relativity, but instead, Einstein's predictions held up quite well," said Paulo Freire of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy in a statement.

Interestingly, the astronomers predict that the system will eventually change into an ultracompact X-ray binary, possibly leading to a pulsar-planet system — or even the formation of a black hole.

Check out the entire study in Science: “A Massive Pulsar in a Compact Relativistic Binary.”

Image: ESO.

Thanks.

NYU psychologist Gary Marcus has penned an interesting article for The New Yorker in which he complains that some scientists are using science itself as a way to rekindle beliefs in the supernatural.

The two thinkers in particular that Marcus has chosen to pick on include artificial intelligence researcher Jürgen Schmidhuber, who has talked about "computational theology," and neuroscientist David Eagleman, who has proposed a quasi-religious view he calls "Possibilianism."

Marcus writes:

Schmidhuber, in a post on Ray Kurzweil’s A.I. blog, ”In the beginning was the code,” begins with the premise that there “is a fastest, optimal, most efficient way of computing all logically possible universes, including ours—if ours is computable (no evidence against this).” Schmidhuber further elaborates on a “God-like ‘Great Programmer,’ ” and a method by which it would “create and master all logically possible universes.” From this follows what Schmidhuber describes as “Computational Theology,” a component of which is the undeniably heartening claim that “your own life must be very important in the grand scheme of things.” Over all, suggests Schmidhuber, Computational Theology “is compatible with religions claiming that ‘all is one’ and ‘everything is connected to everything.’ ”

If Schmidhuber’s logic is hard to follow, Eagleman’s is not; there is no allusion to computing logically possible universes, nor is there technical-but-nebulous talk of quantum computation. Instead, Eagleman is interested in the limits of our own knowledge, and what we can infer from what we do not know...Eagleman aims to “make the case that our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism.” According to Eagleman, his invention, Possibilianism, ”emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities,” and is “comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story.” Eagleman’s poster child is the Hubble Ultra Deep Field experiment; in a 2010 PopTech talk, Eagleman begins by standing in front of a cloud of stars and describing an experiment that revealed that there were a “thousand trillion stars” in a tiny corner of universe that was previously thought to be dark, “all of them with the potential to house unknown forms of biology.” Eagleman concludes, “This is a good conscious-raiser to think about the size of the mysteries that surround us.” In other words, if we didn’t know what was hiding out there, who’s to say there isn’t a divine creator after all?

Among his many concerns, Marcus had this to say:

Any agnostic is free to believe that his favorite religion has not yet been completely disproven. But anyone who wishes to bring science into the argument must acknowledge that the evidence thus far is weak, especially when it is combined statistically, in the fashion of a meta-analysis. To emphasize the qualitative conclusion (X has not been absolutely proven to be false) while ignoring the collective weight of the quantitative data (i.e., that most evidence points away from X) is a fallacy, akin to holding out a belief in flying reindeer on the grounds that there could yet be sleighs that we have not yet seen.

Scientists and non-scientists alike are still free to believe whatever they want, but the grounds for religion have to be the same as they ever were: faith, not science. Science cannot absolutely prove that there is no divine creator, but the tools of science do allow us to weigh the existing evidence, and assign likelihoods to those hypotheses; by ignoring those tools, Eagleman does science a disservice.

I think Marcus is being a bit too harsh and constrictive, here (not to mention that his view smacks of old-time logical positivism). Eagleman is not making any extraordinary claims. He's simply saying that there's a lot we don't know about what we don't know, and that new information could eventually come to light that could paradigmatically change our perspective of our place in the universe. Like this for example.

If anything, to deny this possibility — and the right to speculate about such matters — is a kind of extraordinary, unproven claim that Marcus himself is railing against.

Be sure to read the entire article as I've only skimmed the surface.

Image: NASA/Hubble.

A little too close for comfort? A tiny space rock, or possibly a piece of space junk, has ripped through the International Space Station's solar array, narrowly missing the hull.

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield tweets:

Bullet hole - a small stone from the universe went through our solar array. Glad it missed the hull. twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/…

— Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) April 29, 2013

A close-up view of the hole:

So just how dangerous was this incident? Jason Major from Universe Today explains:

While likened to a bullet hole, whatever struck the solar panel was actually traveling much faster when it hit. Most bullets travel at a velocity of around 1,000-2,000 mph (although usually described in feet per second) but meteoroids are traveling through space at speeds of well over 25,000 mph — many times faster than any bullet!

Luckily the ISS has a multi-layered hull consisting of layers of different materials (depending on where the sections were built), providing protection from micrometeorite impacts. If an object were to hit an inhabited section of the Station, it would be slowed down enough by the different layers to either not make it to the main hull or else merely create an audible “ping.”

Unnerving, yes, but at least harmless.

Now, it's also quite possible that the small object was space junk. According to planetary scientist Jim Scotti, "It's unlikely this was caused by a meteor, more likely a piece of man-made space debris in low Earth orbit."

This is our first close-up view of the massive hurricane swirling at the northern tip of Saturn, a storm that features winds travelling at a rate of 150 meters per second and an eye that’s 20 times larger than the average hurricane on Earth.

The unprecedented high-resolution images were made possible for two reasons. First, spring has finally arrived at the North Pole, lifting the dark cloak that had obscured the area for years. And second, the NASA team changed Cassini’s angle of orbit to allow for the view.

Image: A false color image taken at a distance of ~261,000 miles (419,000). Red indicates low clouds and green indicates high ones.

The eye of the hurricane is about 1,250 miles (2,000) wide, and it swirls inside a large hexagon-shaped weather pattern. It’s located at the very tip-top of the planet where it’s locked in place and unable to migrate.

Image: A natural color view of the storm as it's illuminated by the sun. Check out Saturn's rings at top right.

"We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth," said Andrew Ingersoll through a statement, who is a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "But there it is at Saturn, on a much larger scale, and it is somehow getting by on the small amounts of water vapor in Saturn's hydrogen atmosphere."

Image: False-color image. The eye is featured in red, while the fast-moving hexagonal jet stream appears in yellowish green. Low lying clouds are featured in muted orange. The rings of Saturn are shown in vivd blue at top right.

The hurricane is a bit of a mystery as it’s somehow being fueled by the gasses and jet streams underneath and around it. Hurricanes on Earth are driven by warm ocean water.

All images via NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI.

A Korean-Canadian girl born without a trachea has undergone successful surgery to implant an artificial windpipe grown from her own stem cells.

2 ½-year-old Hannah Warren’s condition is extremely rare and is fatal in 99% of cases. She had been living in an intensive care unit since her birth in a South Korean hospital, where she breathed through a tube inserted into her mouth. The condition also prevents her from speaking and she cannot eat normally.

It’s been three weeks since the complex nine-hour operation, and she’s now recovering at the Children’s Hospital of Illinois.

Because regenerative medicine is still in its formative stages, and because similar efforts have not proven successful in the long run, Hannah’s surgery was ethically justified by the Food and Drug Administration as a kind of last-ditch effort to save her life (doctors didn’t think she would live past the age of six). Ideally, experimental procedures like this one are developed and refined through clinical trials.

To make the bioengineered windpipe, the Karolinska Institute’s Dr. Paolo Macchiarini and his team made a half-inch diameter tube out of plastic fibers, bathed it in a solution containing stem cells taken from Hannah’s bone marrow, and incubated it in a bioreactor.

Stem cells are undifferentiated cells that can develop into virtually any other kind of cell. Why it works is still a bit of a mystery, but scientists suspect that the stem cells signal the body to send other cells to the windpipe, which are then properly sorted so that tissues can grow inside and outside the tube.

And because the windpipe is made from Hannah’s very own cells, there’s no need to suppress her immune system to avoid rejection.

The New York Times tells us about Hannah’s recovery:

Nearly three weeks after the surgery, the girl is acting playfully with her doctors and nurses, at one point smiling and waving goodbye to a group of visitors. Dr. Mark Holterman, a pediatric surgeon at the hospital, said that Hannah was breathing largely on her own, although through a hole in her neck, not through her mouth yet. “She’s doing well,” he said. “She had some complications from the surgery, but the trachea itself is doing great.”

Dr. Macchiarini described a look of befuddlement on the child’s face when she realized that the mouth tube was gone and she could put her lips together for the first time. “It was beautiful,” he said.

Hannah’s recovery will be slow as she learns to breathe normally for the first time. She also faces future surgeries, including operations that will allow her to eat through her mouth and speak. She may also require a new, larger trachea in about four years.

Prior to this surgery, the youngest recipient of a tissue-engineered organ was a 4-year-old spina bifida patient who received a bladder.

Source: New York Times.

Images: Jim Carlson/OSF Saint Francis Medical Center.

Biologists have successfully extended the life spans of some mice by as much as 70%, leading many to believe that ongoing experimentation on our mammalian cousins will eventually lead to life-extending therapies in humans. But how reliable are these studies? And do they really apply to humans? We asked the experts.

Before we get into the scientific evidence, it’s important that we do a bit of reality check. Animal models, and mouse models in particular, don’t always translate well to the human realm.

Of mice and humans

In 2006, a JAMA study concluded that, "patients and physicians should remain cautious about extrapolating the findings of prominent animal research to the care of human disease," and that "even high-quality animal studies will replicate poorly in human clinical research."

What’s more, mice are used in nearly 60% of all experiments — and perhaps even more so in life extension research. As Slate's Daniel Engber has argued, mice are among the most unreliable test subjects when it comes to approximating human biological processes. "It's not at all clear that the rise of the mouse — and the million research papers that resulted from it — has produced a revolution in public health," he has said.

Indeed, comparing the aging processes of mice to humans is a precarious proposition at best. Mice, even under the best conditions, don’t tend to live past two to three years. Clearly, humans and mice are prone to significant variations in terms of how and why they age.

And to further complicate the issue, there’s also the mice themselves to consider. As TeloMe’s Preston Estep told me, the typical lab mouse — a strain called Black 6 (C57BL/6) — is by far the most widely used, and they are very different from wild mice in ways likely to be important for life-extension experiments. Further, most lab strains are very inbred and homozygous across large stretches of the genome. These inbred strains have very long telomeres relative to wild mice (a significant factor in biological aging); the average telomere length of Black 6 is many times longer (50 kilobases) than in wild mice (12 kilobases).

“Some important findings have come from experimenting on Black 6 and other inbred strains, but many scientists are choosing an organism that doesn't suit the experiment,” Estep told io9. “Researchers only use these strains in life-extension-related experiments because they are cheap and widely used, which are very bad reasons to use a model organism that produces questionable data.”

Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey is also concerned about the use of mouse models.

“A mouse lives so much shorter than a human because it has much less thorough automatic, in-built damage repair machinery,” he told io9. “Mice have bigger gaps in that machinery that medicine has to fix.” Achieving radical life extension, or even indefinite aging, in a mouse, therefore, may prove to be substantially more difficult than achieving it in, say, dogs, cats, or humans.

“We may never have a non-aging mouse,” says de Grey, “And I'm sure we won't have one for a long time after we have a non-aging human.

Reason, an expert in longevity research and a blogger at Fight Aging!, agrees with de Grey’s assessment.

“A mouse’s life span is very plastic,” he told me. “It is to be expected that short-lived species have plastic life spans because of evolutionary selection due to famine and similar adverse circumstances. A long-lived species does not need to have as plastic a life span, because that famine lasts just as long whether you are a human or a mouse.”

He points to research in caloric restriction, for example, a dietary regimen that (arguably) confers life extending benefits. The present consensus is that caloric restriction extends life in mice, but not very much in primates.

Moreover, according to Estep, food fed to mice in the labs is basically junk food — about 70% of calories from starch and sugar. “I sometimes call typical caloric restriction experiments in mice "Cookie Restriction," he says. “It’s not surprising that some mice live longer if fed less of this stuff.”

I also spoke to Kevin Perrott, a scientific advisor for the Methuselah Foundation, an organization that seeks to encourage life extension research, including those done on mice.

“Many scientists will tell you that ‘mice are not people’ which is true of course,” he says. “It is also true that we have cured cancer many times in mice with therapies that do not work in humans, so we must be careful about saying that interventions that work in mice will be directly translatable to humans.”

But at the same time, Perrott argues that functional life extension therapies in mice do hold prospects for human longevity. Extending the lifespan of a mouse that normally lives only three years to five by applying a treatment late in its life could capture the imagination of many.

“In this day of the Internet, everyone would be able to view video clips of mice the equivalent of 120 human years in age — healthy, active and being social with their fellows,” he told me. “This would do something, I think, to the human psyche that would enable much more rapid development of interventions for humans, hence the reason for the Methuselah Mouse Prize which is designed to create this result.”

Also called the Mprize, this is a science contest designed to accelerate the development of revolutionary new life extension therapies by offering cash prizes to researchers who have made breakthroughs in longevity and rejuvenation research.

Extending life spans

Okay, now that I’ve gone out of my way to demonstrate the limitations of experimenting on mice, here are some of the most significant life-extending interventions made to date:

Calorie restriction, intermittent fasting, and methionine restriction: Studies have shown that calorically restricted mice can have their life spans extended by as much as 40% even when the restriction is started late in life. Diets artificially low in methionine, an amino acid, produce extended longevity in mice, though not to the same extent as calorie restriction.

Telomerase enhancement: Researchers have produced several demonstrations of extended life and reduced cancer rates in mice, through the use of various gene therapy combinations involving increased telomerase expression and extra copies of cancer suppression genes such as P53. Estep pointed me to several experiments, including Blasco's telomerase overexpression and TA-65-treated mice, and van Duersen and colleagues' clearance of senescent cells. But as he reminded me, these experiments were done on Black 6 mice.

“Consider one example of how this might create a problem,” says Estep. “Van Duersen’s mouse was a progeria model with super-long telomeres. They have a switch that clears senescent cells and delays age-related decline, but this might not occur to the same degree, if at all, in an organism with normal length telomeres, because unnaturally high levels of stem cell proliferation are required to replace the cleared senescent cells.”

A good follow-up experiment, he says, would be to use a wild-type mouse with a switch to remove senescent cells, plus and minus a telomerase activator, to determine whether or not telomere length plays a limiting role in a mouse model with greater human relevance.

You can read more about extending life spans in mice via telomerase expression here and here.

Over-expression of PEPCK-C: Emily Anthes, the author of Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling Up To Biotech’s Brave New Beasts, brought this one to my attention. She wrote to me in an email:

Essentially, what scientists did was engineer mice that made elevated levels of PEPCK-C, a metabolic enzyme involved in glucose production, in their muscles. The most noticeable effect was the rodents' supercharged endurance — the animals were dubbed "marathon mice" because they could run 25 times farther than their unmodified counterparts. But this single genetic tweak had other effects, as well, including adding two years to the animals' life spans — a significant boost for creatures that normally only live a few years to begin with. And interestingly, the modified female mice also remained fertile for twice as long as "normal" mice.

Growth hormone knockout, IGF-1 and insulin signalling manipulation: A breed of dwarf mouse that entirely lacks growth hormone is the present winner of the Mprize for longevity, living 60-70% longer than the competition's standard laboratory mouse species. This may be a demonstration that insulin signalling and IGF-1 — intimately bound up with growth hormone — are very important to the operations of metabolism that determine life span. Unfortunately, these dwarf mice are not very robust; they’re healthy and active, but they wouldn't survive outside the laboratory or without good care due to their low body temperature.

Inactivating the CLK-1 gene: By reducing the activity of the mitochondria-associated gene CLK-1 (thereby lowering the amount of protein generated) mice longevity was boosted by about 30%. This may be one of the many interventions to work through its effects on mitochondria, the cell's power plants — and a very important factor in aging. In another mitochondria-related study, Russian researchers demonstrated a form of antioxidant, SkQ, that can be targeted to the mitochondria even when ingested, again boosting life span in mice by about 30%.

Genetic manipulation to target catalase to the mitochondria: By using either gene therapy or genetic engineering, researchers have shown that levels of a naturally produced antioxidant catalase can be increased in the mitochondria. This increases mouse life span, presumably by soaking up some portion of the free radicals produced by mitochondria before they can cause damage.

In addition to these experiments, researchers have also extended the lives of mice via:

• Genetic deletion of pregnancy-associated plasma protein A (PAPP-A)
• Knockout of the adenylyl cyclase type 5 (AC5) gene
• Metformin used as a calorie restriction mimetic drug
• FIRKO, or fat-specific insulin receptor knock-out mice
• Removal of visceral fat by surgery

Looking ahead

Now, as interesting as these studies appear, and after considering the limitations of mouse models, such approaches are unlikely to herald the future of life-extending therapies in humans.

“Virtually everything demonstrated to date to extend life in mice has been a form of gene therapy or metabolic manipulation,” says Reason, “It changes the pace of aging, but isn't rejuvenation.”

His conjecture is that the research community will never get much past the 100% life extension for mice, with the current outer limit settling around 60-70% for growth hormone receptor knockout mice.

“To create longer lives, you need to work on rejuvenation attainted by repairing the cell- and tissue-level damage that causes aging, not just finding ways to gently slow aging by slowing down the pace at which that damage accumulates,” he told me. “The future of mouse longevity is SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence), which is a radically different approach to any of the work currently extending life in mice.”

Indeed, Aubrey de Grey, the scientist who devised the SENS model, has isolated seven basic areas:

• Cell loss or atrophy (without replacement)
• Oncogenic nuclear mutations and epimutations
• Cell senescence (Death-resistant cells)
• Mitochondrial mutations
• Intracellular junk or junk inside cells
• Extracellular junk or junk outside cells
• Random extracellular cross-linking

So, when working with mice, de Grey talks about applying this approach to the “robust mouse rejuvenation” model — a kind of bootstrapping technique to radical life extension.

“This could be done by taking a naturally long-lived strain of mice — let’s say with an average longevity of three years — doing nothing at all to them until they are already two, and then doing stuff that adds two more years of healthy life, so that they die at five on average,” he told io9.

“Eight or nine years ago I used to say that that was probably 10 years away, subject to funding,” he says. “Now I think it's maybe seven years away. So we've gone roughly a third as fast as I'd hoped — but actually we've gone about as fast as I'd have expected with the funding that has actually been available.”

Kevin Perrott agrees.

“The barriers to radical human life-extension are not technological, nature has already engineered organisms able to live centuries so the methods are there to be found,” he says. “The main barrier is lack of public awareness of the pace of development and what is possible in the lifetimes of many alive today. Those of us who are aware of the exponential progress that could lead to interventions in degenerative disease and their applicability to the suffering of our fellows, need to communicate what we know to others and share our thoughts on the possibilities. Hope leads to action, and hope for a better world is not something we should keep to ourselves.”

More cautiously, Estep believes that some important findings have come from experimenting on mice like Black 6 and other inbred strains, but he feels that many biologists aren’t going about it in the right way.

“This and other complications make the Mprize fraught with many difficulties and challenges,” he says. “It would be ideal to limit the competitions (both longevity and rejuvenation) to wild strains that have been engineered using methods that at least might be used directly in humans, but this is a very tough call.

Estep, who appreciates the work being done by the Mprize, understands the motivation to keep it more open but, as one example, the switch used in the van Duersen mice can't be used in already living humans.

“I fear that over time the prize might get an increasing number of entries that feature engineered mechanisms that aren't portable to people already alive.”

Special thanks to Aubrey de Grey, Reason, Preston Estep, Kevin Perrott, and Emily Anthes for helping me with this article.

Images: Screen grab from Aronofsky's The Fountain. Jackson Laboratory. Creations/Shutterstock.

Okay, stop what you're doing and hit the play button on this unspeakably beautiful new time-lapse video filmed last month in Death Valley.

The video was produced by Sunchaser Pictures and it's the sequel to their wildly popular Death Valley Dreamlapse. This new video showcases the floating stones of Racetrack Playa, gorgeous star trails, a beautiful Milky Way pass over a lakebed — and even a hot-pink aurora uncommon at such low latitudes (at 1:36 and 2:22), which were likely caused by the coronal mass eruption of March 17, 2013.

Watch Death Valley Dreamlapse I:

H/t Wired.

I love how the ball bounces off the left side of the frame a la pong.

What you’re about to watch here is the smallest stop-motion movie ever made. Called “A Boy and His Atom,” the one-minute clip was compiled by manipulating a few dozen carbon atoms on a copper surface.

We’re having a hard time getting our heads around just how astoundingly small the scale is, here. Each frame of the IBM video measures a paltry 45 x 25 nanometers. A single inch measures 25 million nanometers across. Putting that into perspective, one nanometer is a thousandth of a thousandth of the size of a piece of rice. So, it would take about 1,000 frames of the film laid side-by-side to extend across a single human hair. Needless to say, this video is HUGELY magnified.

In light of the achievement, Guinness World Records has certified the 250 frame film as the “Smallest Stop-Motion Film.” The project showcases IBM’s efforts to design advanced data storage solutions based on single atoms.

IBM did it by moving atoms with a scanning tunneling microscope (STM). The computer-controlled device weighs two tons, operates at a temperature of -268 degrees Celsius (to make the atoms hold still), and magnifies surfaces over 100 million times. The microscope allows scientists to control temperature, pressure, and vibrations at extremely exact levels, thus making it possible to move atoms with great precision.

When making the stop-motion film, the researchers used the STM to control a super-sharp electrically charged needle along a copper surface. The needle was positioned a mere one nanometer away from the surface, from where it could physically pull atoms and molecules to an exact location. At such a close distance to the surface, the charge can “jump the gap” — an effect in quantum physics called tunnelling.

Interestingly, the atoms made a unique sound when they were moved, allowing the scientists to know how many positions they actually moved.

As the process moved along, the researchers rendered still images of the individually arranged atoms, creating the remarkable 242 frame movie. It took the IBM team two weeks of 18-hour days to complete.

“This movie is a fun way to share the atomic-scale world,” said IBM’s Andreas Heinrich. “The reason we made this was not to convey a scientific message directly, but to engage with students, to prompt them to ask questions.”

Yes, IBM has made both claims, but the STM does in fact allow for the manipulation and "visualization" of atoms.

With the help of Commander Chris Hadfield aboard the ISS, the Bank of Canada yesterday launched its new robot- and astronaut-themed five dollar bill. Hadfield had been keeping the new bill under wraps for months.

The new polymer $5 bill shows the Canadarm2 and Dextre manipulator robots, along with an ambiguous astronaut meant to symbolize all Canadians who have contributed to its space program.

The new bill, along with a new $10 note, will enter into circulation this coming November, joining the recently updated $20, $50 and $100 bills. The polymer series is being hailed as Canada's most secure bank notes ever, owing to state-of-the-art security features like holography and transparency.

"By giving prominence to Canadian achievements in space, this banknote reminds us that not even the sky is the limit," said Hadfield.

Of course, as we geek-out over how cool this new bill is, a Canadian focus group complained that it's cartoonish and out-of-step with modern Canada. Most did not recognize Dextre.

The flipside of the bill features Canadian Prime Minister Sir Wilfred Laurier.

For those of you with nothing better to do, here's the 15-minute long ceremony aboard the International Space Station.

This six-inch-long skeleton was discovered 10 years ago in Chile’s Atacama Desert, but it has only recently been examined by scientists — and it’s totally legit. Sure, it looks like something from a dark corner of the Gamma Quadrant, but the remains actually belonged to a severely deformed human child.

As Jeanna Bryner reports in LiveScience, the mummified remains recently underwent an examination by Garry Nolan, professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford School of Medicine. The bizarre skeleton was recently featured in film "Sirius," a crowd-funded documentary we recently warned, er, told you about. Predictably, UFOlogists think it’s some kind of human-alien hybrid.

But genetic analysis of the bones indicate that they belonged to a human girl or boy who died between the age of six and eight — a very odd result given that it looks more like a fetus or a very young deformed child. DNA tests indicated that it was indeed human, and not some kind of South American nonhuman primate. That said, 9% of the genes didn’t match with the reference human genome — which Nolan attributes to factors like degradation, insufficient data, or lab contamination.

Cue the ongoing UFOlogist speculations...

At any rate, and in addition to having a severely elongated head, the child had an undeveloped mid-face and jaw, and just 10 ribs as opposed to the usual 12. It’s likely that it suffered from turricephaly (a.k.a. oxycephaly), a birth defect which causes a cone-shaped skull. It’s very unlikely that the child underwent head binding, a feature recently discovered in skulls dug up in Mexico.

Bryner writes:

The team also looked at mitochondrial DNA, or the DNA inside the cells' energy-making structures that gets passed down from mothers to offspring. The allele frequency of the mitochondrial DNA suggested that the individual came from the Atacama, specifically from the B2 haplotype group. A haplotype is a long segment of ancestral DNA that stays the same over several generations and can pinpoint individuals who share a common ancestor way back in time. In this case, the B2 haplotype is found on the west coast of South America.

The data from the mitochondrial DNA alleles point toward "the mother being an indigenous woman from the Chilean area of South America," Nolan wrote in an email.

In addition, Nolan suspects that the child died at least a few decades ago, and that the mutations are not consistent with primordial dwarfism or other forms of dwarfism.

Read all of Bryner's report here.

I'm curious to know if the mummification process had anything to do with it.

Crap. Snuggles is onto us...

"This rhino is delicious, but I think we just f*cked ourselves."