Aestus Ajith

Life - but not as we know it.. Scientists have managed to coax living cells into making carbon-silicon bonds, demonstrating for the first time that nature can incorporate silicon - one of the most abundant elements on Earth - into the building blocks of life. While chemists have achieved carbon-silicon bonds before - they’re found in everything from paints and semiconductors to computer and TV screens - they’ve so far never been found in nature, and these new cells could help us understand more about the possibility of silicon-based life elsewhere in the Universe. After oxygen, silicon is  the second most abundant element  in Earth’s crust, and yet it has nothing to do with biological life.  Why silicon has never be incorporated into any kind of biochemistry on Earth has been a long-standing puzzle for scientists, because, in theory, it would have been just as easy for silicon-based lifeforms to have evolved on our planet as the carbon-based ones we know and love. Not on

Antoine Louveau was looking through his microscope at thin membranes that protect the brain when he saw something that absolutely shouldn't be there: a lymphatic vessel. The lymphatic system is part of the circulatory system but, instead of blood, it carries lymph — a clear liquid that ferries immune cells and rids the body of toxins and waste. As a  2009 research review  notes,  it is "an undisputed anatomical fact" that the brain is the only major organ that lacks a direct connection to the lymphatic system. Now that claim  is  disputed. If confirmed, the discovery may have huge implications for studying brain diseases like Alzheimer's and multiple sclerosis (MS). "All the textbooks said there were not supposed to be any lymphatic vessels in that area," said Louveau, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Virginia. But after he and UVA neuroscientist Jonathan Kipnis ran a battery of tests, they discovered Louveau had been right. "It wa

For the first time, researchers have probed the energy difference between two states of the antimatter atom. The best known research at CERN centers on collisions of particles accelerated to higher and higher energies. But for the past 30 years, the lab has also hosted several research teams working to decelerate antiprotons, combine them with positrons, and cool and trap the resulting atoms of antihydrogen. A main goal of that research is to perform precision spectroscopic measurements that might reveal differences between matter and antimatter—and help to explain why the universe contains so much more of the former than the latter. (See the Quick Study by Gerald Gabrielse,  Physics Today , March 2010, page 68 .) Now CERN’s  ALPHA collaboration  has achieved the first spectroscopic success: observing the transition between antihydrogen’s 1S and 2S states. The standard technique for atomic spectroscopy—exciting atoms with a laser and detecting the photons they emit—is unsuitabl

The virus is adapting to new hosts. One person has been infected with a rare form of bird flu after catching the virus from a shelter cat in New York City.  According to the NYC Department of Health,  this is the first reported case of a human contracting  H7N2  - a strain of influenza A virus - due to exposure from an infected cat. While the risk to humans is extremely low, officials advise that local cat owners be on the look-out for symptoms. "Every time a virus adapts in a new animal, like a bird to a cat, we get concerned about the health of the cats and the humans who care for those cats," Jay Varma, deputy commissioner for disease control at the NYC Department of Health,  told NPR. The virus has infected  at least 45 cats  in a Manhattan animal shelter, and this increased exposure is how one of the shelter's veterinarians caught the disease. Since last week,  more than 100 cats have tested positive for H7N2 across all NYC shelters, and while the virus is