NASA plans to use Orion, the Space Shuttle replacement, for a three to six month round-trip to an asteroid, with astronauts spending a week or two on the rock's surface. The mission will give space officials a taste of more complex missions, and samples taken from the rock could help scientists understand more about the birth of the solar system and how best to defend against asteroids that veer into Earth's path. (Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/may/07/starsgalaxiesandplanets.spaceexploration)

SGI and Intel Corp. are teaming up to build a supercomputer for NASA that they expect will hit 10 PFLOPS by 2012. A petaflop is a quadrillion floating-point operations per second. The system will be used for NASA's next-generation rocket for getting to the moon and then eventually to Mars, and to model the ocean, study global warming, and build the next-generation engine and aircraft. (Source: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9084238)

The world's climate modellers are drawing up plans for a global supercomputing center with computing power of 100 petaflops that would provide detailed local forecasts of future climate change, with the intent of generating useful forecasts of water supply, droughts, health, and future food supply. (Source: http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn13855-climate-scientists-call-for-their-own-manhattan-project.htmlcientists)

Florida Atlantic University scientists have invented a unique robotic device to assist with the physical rehabilitation process of patients suffering from neurological damages to their upper extremities such as those due to stroke or Parkinson's disease. (Florida Atlantic University) The invention is composed of motors, cables and spools enclosed within an acrylic case with a joystick that is indirectly connected to the system through magnetic attraction. This device is the first-known cable-driven robot to utilize a barrier between the operator and the moving mechanisms of the system. The system does not contain any rigid parts that could suddenly harm or injure the user, and the device can be used in a physical therapy office or at home without supervision. (Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080505223023.htm)

Pennsylvania State University chemists have built micro/nanofluidic pumps that transduce energy catalytically. The catalytic conversion of chemical to mechanical energy is ubiquitous in biology, powering such important and diverse processes as cell division, skeletal muscle movement, protein synthesis, and transport of cargo within cells. The chemists have demonstrated that one can build nanomotors from scratch that mimic biological motors by using catalytic reactions to create forces based on chemical gradients. These motors are autonomous--they do not require external electric, magnetic, or optical fields as energy sources. Instead, the input energy is supplied locally and chemically. (American Chemical Society) (Source: http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=5628.php)

Scientists at Harvard University and the German universities of Jena, Gottingen, and Bremen have developed a new technique for fabricating nanowire photonic and electronic integrated circuits that may one day be suitable for high-volume commercial production. By incorporating spin-on glass technology (used in silicon integrated circuits manufacturing) and photolithography (transferring a circuit pattern onto a substrate with light), the team demonstrated a reproducible, high-volume, low-cost fabrication method for integrating nanowire devices directly onto silicon. (Source: http://www.nanowerk.com/news/newsid=5657.php)

MIT researcher Seth Lloyd believes that a new architecture for low-energy quantum access memory (QRAM) could be used to reduce the energy wasted by RAM, and also for completely anonymous Internet search. (Source: http://www.physorg.com/news129289258.html)

Players of a new online game called Foldit will help design three-dimensional protein structures for HIV vaccines, and enzymes for repairing DNA in diseased tissues. David Baker, a leading protein scientist at the University of Washington, teamed up with computer scientists to create the game. (Foldit) (Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20738/?a=f)

A WiMAX network to be deployed across the United States by a joint venture between Sprint Nextel and Clearwire dubbed "Clearwire" may render cable or phone line Internet obsolete and set the stage for free Google mobile telephones supported by advertising. The WiMAX wireless data-streaming format quickly moves large amounts of digital data such as video or picture files across kilometers, compared to Wi-Fi connections, where signals reach a few hundred meters or less. WiMAX is deployed in 110 countries, with Asia Pacific leading in adoption. (Source: http://www.physorg.com/news129462906.html)

University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia researchers found that taking the SSRI antidepressant citalopram improves natural killer (NK) immune cell activity in both depressed and non-depressed women with HIV. NK cells, a type of white blood cell, are part of the body's first line of defense against infections such as HIV. The researchers had previously found that stress and depression impair NK cell function and accelerate the course of HIV/AIDS. (Source: http://www.physorg.com/news129463411.html)

Researchers at the Oklahoma University Cancer Institute have identified a new gene that causes cancer. The gene and its protein, both called RBM3, are vital for cell division in normal cells. In cancer cells, low oxygen levels in the tumors cause the amount of RBM3 to go up dramatically, leading to uncontrolled cell division, in turn leading to more tumors. They found RBM3 protein in every stage of many cancers, and the amount of protein increased as the cancer grew. When they genetically "silenced" the protein--thus reducing the level of RBM3 in cancerous cells--the cancer cells stopped growing and died. They tested this technique on several types of cancers, including breast, pancreas, colon, lung, ovarian and prostate, showing that targeting RBM3 may a useful tool against many types of solid tumors. University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center News Release (Source: )

Northwestern University researchers have found that in the worm C. elegans, specialized neurons organize and control how cells respond to environmental stress, rather than the cells responding individually. The researchers suggest that other organisms, including humans, may have a similar central neuronal control switch for regulating temperature and the expression of genes, which protects the health of proteins. The results may lead to new ways to study stress response and diseases that affect the stress pathway. (Source: http://www.physorg.com/news129475602.html)

An international team led by scientists at the Arthritis Research Campaign has profiled how injuries change gene expression in cartilage cells. They used microarray technology, PCR, and immunohistochemistry to compare gene expression in injured and uninjured cartilage. They found 690 genes whose expression was increased or decreased at least 2-fold in injured cartilage compared with uninjured samples. The may lead to finding out why injuries to joint cartilage increase the risk of developing osteoarthritis (worn down cartilage) and find which of these 690 genes (and their products) promotes repair or causes additional damage. Over 20 million Americans have osteoarthritis, with half of adults over 65 showing signs of it in one or more joints. Blackwell Publishing News Release (Source: )

University of Wisconsin, Madison and Dartmouth College researchers found that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) results could predict whether venlafaxine (an antidepressant that also treats anxiety) would be effective in patients with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). They found that the larger the prefrontal cortex reaction, and the smaller the amygdala reaction, the more likely it was that the patient had a positive response to the venlafaxine. There are no current biomarkers for predicting how well a patient will respond to anti-anxiety medicines. Patients often have to go through multiple medications and dosages to find one that works. Elsevier News Release See Also This Is Your Brain on Drugs (Source: )

In trying to understand why some animals have evolved to be better at learning than others, Dr. Tadeusz Kawecki, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Fribourg, finds that one reason for the difference is that being smart can be bad for an animal's health. His studies found that the very act of learning takes a toll: forming neuron connections may cause harmful side effects. It is also possible that genes that allow learning to develop faster and last longer may cause other problems, like choosing the wrong food. (Source: http://www.nytimes.com/glogin?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/science/06dumb.html)

MIT students are developing a prototype for a low-cost concentrating solar power system they think could revolutionize the field. It's a 12-foot-square mirrored dish capable of concentrating sunlight by a factor of 1,000, built from simple, inexpensive industrial materials selected for price, durability and ease of assembly rather than for optimum performance. They believe that in mass production, the dishes can be competitive in cost with other energy sources and could produce heat for space heating and electric power at the same time. (Source: http://physorg.com/news129389932.html)

Loughborough University Sleep Research Centre researchers found that delta waves (in the range of one to four Hz) remained dampened for nearly one hour after a nearby cell phone was shut off. These brainwaves are the most reliable and sensitive marker of stage two sleep. Although the test subjects had been sleep-deprived the night before, they could not fall asleep for nearly one hour after the phone had been operating (without their knowledge). In another study, Swinburne University of Technology researchers found that cell-phone radiation boosts alpha waves (eight to 12 Hz) in the brain. (Source: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=mind-control-by-cell)

CircuLite, an Australian company, is developing an implantable pump that weighs just one-sixth as much as its smallest predecessor. About the size of a AA battery, it could ultimately be implanted through a catheterization procedure that is far less invasive than the operations used to place today's pumps. It could thus be used to treat patients in earlier stages of heart failure, for whom implantation surgery had previously been too risky. (Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20739/?a=f)

Construction has started on a city in Abu Dhabi that will house 50,000 people and 1,500 businesses but use extremely little energy, and what it does use will come from renewable sources. The city, which is expected to cost $22 billion, will implement an array of technologies, including thin-film solar panels that serve as the facades and roofing materials for buildings, ubiquitous sensors for monitoring energy use, and driverless vehicles powered by batteries that make cars unnecessary. The city's founders hope that it will serve as a test bed for a myriad of new technologies being proposed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. (Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/20740/?a=f)

Scientists at UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara and MIT have developed nanometer-sized "nanoworms" that can cruise through the bloodstream without significant interference from the body's immune defense system and home in on tumors, reminiscent of the science fiction movie, Fantastic Voyage. The scientists constructed their nanoworms from spherical iron oxide nanoparticles that join together, like segments of an earthworm, to produce tiny gummy worm-like structures about 30 nanometers long. Their iron-oxide composition allows the nanoworms to show up brightly in MRI diagnostic devices. Using nanoworms, doctors should eventually be able to target and reveal the location of developing tumors that are too small to detect by conventional methods. Carrying payloads targeted to specific features on tumors, these microscopic vehicles could also one day provide the means to more effectively deliver toxic anti-cancer drugs to specific tumors, organs and other sites in the body, in high concentrations without negatively impacting other parts of the body. University of California, San Diego news release (Source: )