Biggest Scientific Breakthroughs of 2013

SEXPAND

From intergalactic neutrinos and invisible brains, to the creation of miniature human "organoids," 2013 was an remarkable year for scientific discovery. Here are 17 of the biggest scientific breakthroughs, innovations and advances of 2013.

Voyager I Leaves the Solar System

SEXPAND

Escaping the solar system is no mean feat. For 36 years, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has putting distance between itself and the Sun at speeds approaching 11 miles per second. At a pace like that, scientists knew Voyager was approaching the fringes of the heliosphere that surrounds and defines our solar neighborhood – but when would it break that barrier? When would it make the leap to interstellar space? After months of uncertainty, NASA finally made the news official this September. "Voyager 1 is the first human-made object to make it into interstellar space," said Don Gurnett, lead author of the paper announcing Voyager's departure; "we're actually out there."

The CRISPR Craze Takes Off

1SEXPAND

Bacteria have their own version of an adaptive immune system; but "CRISPR," as the system is known, does not target protein antigens they way your immune system does. Instead, CRISPR works by targeting and eliminating specific DNA sequences with matching strands of RNA. What's more, the system is easily manipulated – since researchers first reported harnessing the system in January,writes Elizabeth Pennisi in a perspective piece for Science, "various groups have used it to delete, add, activate or suppress targeted genes in human cells, mice, rats, zebrafish, bacteria, fruit flies, yeast, nematodes and crops, demonstrating broad utility for the technique." For scientists in search of new tools, few qualities are more important than versatility and ease of use. CRISPR has both – and, some say, the potential to revolutionize the field of molecular biology.

The Milky Way is Brimming with Habitable Worlds

SEXPAND

Planet-hunting scientists announced in November that 22% of sunlike stars in the Milky Way are orbited by potentially habitable, Earth-size worlds. This remarkable finding suggests there could be as many as two-billion planets in our galaxy suitable for life — and that the nearest such planet may be only 12 light-years away. Is Earth 2.0 out there? With figures like that, it's hard to imagine otherwise. Who knows – with all the Kepler data we've got to sift through, there's a chance we've already found it. [Image Credit M. Kornmesser/ESO]

Brain-to-Brain Interfaces Have Arrived

Back in February, researchers announced that they had successfully established an electronic link between the brains of two rats, and demonstrated that signals from the mind of one could help the second solve basic puzzles in real time — even when those animals were separated by thousands of miles. A few months later, a similar connection was established between the brain of a human and a rat. Just one month later, researchers published the results of the first successful human-to-human brain interface. The age of the mind-meld, it seems, is near at hand.

There is Life at the End of the World

SEXPAND

There is life in Lake Whillans. For millions of years, the small body of liquid water has lurked hundreds of meters below Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf, sealed off from the outside world and the scientists who would explore its subglacial depths. Earlier this year, a team of researchers led by Montana State University glaciologist John Priscu successfully bored a tunnel to Whillans and encountered life, making Priscu and his colleagues the first people in history to discover living organisms in the alien lakes at the bottom of the world. [Photo by Alberto Behar, JPL/ASUM]

Doctors Cure HIV in a Baby Born With the Disease

SEXPAND

In a monumental first for medicine, doctors announced in March that a baby had been cured of an HIV infection. Dr. Deborah Persaud, who presented the child's case at the 20th annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infection, called it "definitely a game-changer."

Newly Discovered Skulls Could Prune Humans' Evolutionary Tree

SEXPAND

An incredibly well-preserved, 1.8-million-year-old skull from Dmanisi, Georgia suggests the evolutionary tree of the genus Homo may have fewer branches than previously believed. In a report published in October, a team led by Georgian anthropologist David Lordkipanidze writes that it is "the world's first completely preserved hominid skull." And what a skull it is. When considered alongside four other skulls discovered nearby, it suggests that the earliest known members of the Homo genus (H. habilis, H.rudolfensis and H. erectus) may not have been distinct, coexisting species, at all. Instead, they may have been part of a single, evolving lineage that eventually gave rise to modern humans.

Curiosity Confirms Mars Was Once Capable of Harboring Life

SEXPAND

In March, NASA scientists released perhaps the most compelling evidence to date that the Red Planet was once capable of harboring life. Earlier this year, Curiosity drilled some samples out of a sedimentary rock near an old river bed in Gale Crater. This geological area used to feature a series of stream channels, leaving behind finely grained bedrock indicative of previously wet conditions. Using the rover's onboard instrumentation, NASA scientists analyzed these samples to detect some of the critical elements required for life, including sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and carbon. The rover is currently on a trek to its primary scientific target – a three-mile-high peak at the center of Gale Crater named Mount Sharp – where it will attempt to further reinforce its findings.

Neuroscientists Turn Brains Invisible

SEXPAND

Gaze upon the stunning effects of CLARITY, a new technique that enables scientists to turn brain matter and other tissues completely transparent. It's been hailed as one of the most important advances for neuroanatomy in decades, and it's not hard to see why.

The Death of Genomic Anonymity

SEXPAND

Few things in this world are more personal than your DNA. For this reason, databases like the Human Genome Project have always respected the privacy of their participants. By separating individuals' identities from their donated DNA samples, researchers have upheld a standard of "genomic anonymity." Those days are now officially over. In January, researchers at MIT demonstrate that the identities of volunteers who donate personal genome sequence data can be revealed using only publicly available information. In an interview with io9, lead researcher Yaniv Erlich discussed how the team's search method works, the implications of the method's discovery, and why this could change the way we deal with genetic data.

Researchers Detect Neutrinos from Another Galaxy

SEXPAND

By drilling a 1.5 mile hole deep into an Antarctic glacier, physicists working at the IceCube South Pole Observatory this year captured 28 neutrinos, those mysterious and extremely powerful subatomic particles that can pass straight through solid matter. And here's the real kicker: the particles likely originated from beyond our solar system – and possibly even our galaxy. "This is a landmark discovery," said Alexander Kusenko, a UCLA astroparticle physicist who was not involved in the investigation, "possibly a Nobel Prize in the making."

400,000-Year-Old DNA Muddles Humanity's Origin Story

3SEXPAND

DNA recovered from a 400,000-year-old thigh bone has complicated our view of human evolution. The oldest-known human DNA discovered to date, the genetic material preserved within the bone – which anatomists first identified as Neanderthal-like – is thought to belong not to a forerunner to Neanderthals, but that of a little-understood branch of hominins known as Denisovans. The discordant findings are leading anthropologists to reconsider the last several hundred thousand years of human evolution. "It is possible," writes Carl Zimmer, in his coverage of the discovery for the New York Times, "that there are many extinct human populations that scientists have yet to discover. They might have interbred, swapping DNA." [Image Credit: Javier Trueba, Madrid Scientific Films]

Dawn of the Mini-Organ

SEXPAND

Lab-grown organs-in-miniature are providing scientists with new ways to study therapies and diseases as they play out in human tissues. The so called "organoids" are generated by coaxing pluripotent stem cells into a variety of specialized tissues, giving rise to "liver buds," "mini-kidneys," and itty-bitty human brains like the one pictured above, which grow no bigger than an apple seed.

A Long-lost Continent is Discovered Beneath the Indian Ocean

SEXPAND

For ages, Mauritia has been hiding. The small, precambrian continent once resided between Madagascar and India, before splitting off and disappearing beneath the ocean waves in a multi-million-year breakup spurred by tectonic rifts and a yawning sea-floor. But now, volcanic activity has driven remnants of the long-lost continent right through to the Earth's surface.After millions of years, and some incredible geologic sleuthing, it seems Mauritia has been found, as researchers reported in Nature Geoscience back in February.

Giant "Pandoravirus" Could Redefine Life as we Know it

SEXPAND

Scientists in July announced the discovery of a pair of viruses that defy classification. Bigger and more genetically complex than any viral genus known to science, these so-called "pandoraviruses" could reignite a longstanding debate over the classification of life itself.

NASA Discovers "A Previously Unknown Surprise Circling Earth"

SEXPAND

NASA's recently deployed Van Allen probes — a pair of robotic spacecraft launched in August 2012 to investigate Earth's eponymous pair of radiation belts — turned out out some very unexpected findings in February, when they spotted an ephemeral third ring of radiation, previously unknown to science, surrounding our planet.

Human Cloning Becomes a Reality

SEXPAND

A scientific milestone 17 years in the making, researchers announced in May that they had derived stem cells from cloned human embryos.The controversial technology could lead to new treatments for diseases like Parkinson's and diabetes — while bringing us one step closer to human reproductive cloning.

Going into space accelerates the aging process

As if astronauts didn't already have enough health-related concerns to be worried about, a new study shows that microgravity environments speed up biological aging and the onset of cardiovascular disease by affecting blood vessel cells.

Simply put, humans are not built for space. Even after short bursts of exposure to microgravity, astronauts suffer muscle atrophy, bone density loss, immune response impairments, and cardiovascular deconditioning. We know that microgravity screws up organisms at the cellular level, inhibiting gene expression (including cell signalling, response to stress, and changes in temperature). Exposure to microgravity also damages our eyes and brain, including a condition similar to idiopathic intracranial hypertension (the swelling of the brain).

RELATED

  

Microgravity screws us up at a cellular level

One of the great fearsof the early space race was what effect microgravity would have on human explorers — and while we know it won't instantly … Read…

Long space journeys could wreck your eyeballs... and brain

Fresh off the news that microgravity screws us up on a cellular level comes word that it also damages our eyes and brain. Researchers from the… Read…

But wait, there's more! A new study published in the Journal of Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology shows that microgravity also induces endothelial dysfunction — the accelerated aging of endothelial cells which line the inner surfaces of blood vessels.

A research team from the Institute of Molecular Science and Technologies in Milan determined this by analyzing experiments conducted on the International Space Station. They compared space-flown endothelial cells to cells cultured under normal gravity. They looked for differences in gene expression and in the profile of secreted proteins. The researchers discovered that the space-flown cells differentially expressed more than 1,000 genes and secreted high amounts of pro-inflammatory cytokines which induced significant oxidative stress — a key factor in human aging.

Yet more evidence that space is hazardous to humans — and that we seriously need to get going on creating artificial gravity environments. Or the genetic/cybernetic redesign of humans for space.

Read the entire study at FASEB: "The challenging environment on board the International Space Station affects endothelial cell function by triggering oxidative stress through thioredoxin interacting protein overexpression: the ESA-SPHINX experiment."

From One Collapsing Star, Two Black Holes Form and Fuse

 Black holes -- massive objects in space with gravitational forces so strong that not even light can escape them -- come in a variety of sizes. On the smaller end of the scale are the stellar-mass black holes that are formed during the deaths of stars. At the larger end are supermassive black holes, which contain up to one billion times the mass of our sun. Over billions of years, small black holes can slowly grow into the supermassive variety by taking on mass from their surroundings and also by merging with other black holes. But this slow process can't explain the problem of supermassive black holes existing in the early universe -- such black holes would have formed less than one billion years after the Big Bang.

Now new findings by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) may help to test a model that solves this problem.

Certain models of supermassive black hole growth invoke the presence of "seed" black holes that result from the deaths of very early stars. These seed black holes gain mass and increase in size by picking up the materials around them -- a process called accretion -- or by merging with other black holes. "But in these previous models, there was simply not enough time for any black hole to reach a supermassive scale so soon after the birth of the universe," says Christian Reisswig, NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow in Astrophysics at Caltech and the lead author of the study. "The growth of black holes to supermassive scales in the young universe seems only possible if the 'seed' mass of the collapsing object was already sufficiently large," he says.

To investigate the origins of young supermassive black holes, Reisswig, in collaboration with Christian Ott, assistant professor of theoretical astrophysics, and their colleagues turned to a model involving supermassive stars. These giant, rather exotic stars are hypothesized to have existed for just a brief time in the early universe. Unlike ordinary stars, supermassive stars are stabilized against gravity mostly by their own photon radiation. In a very massive star, photon radiation -- the outward flux of photons that is generated due to the star's very high interior temperatures -- pushes gas from the star outward in opposition to the gravitational force that pulls the gas back in. When the two forces are equal, this balance is called hydrostatic equilibrium.

During its life, a supermassive star slowly cools due to energy loss through the emission of photon radiation. As the star cools, it becomes more compact, and its central density slowly increases. This process lasts for a couple of million years until the star has reached sufficient compactness for gravitational instability to set in and for the star to start collapsing gravitationally, Reisswig says.

Previous studies predicted that when supermassive stars collapse, they maintain a spherical shape that possibly becomes flattened due to rapid rotation. This shape is called an axisymmetric configuration. Incorporating the fact that very rapidly spinning stars are prone to tiny perturbations, Reisswig and his colleagues predicted that these perturbations could cause the stars to deviate into non-axisymmetric shapes during the collapse. Such initially tiny perturbations would grow rapidly, ultimately causing the gas inside the collapsing star to clump and to form high-density fragments.

These fragments would orbit the center of the star and become increasingly dense as they picked up matter during the collapse; they would also increase in temperature. And then, Reisswig says, "an interesting effect kicks in." At sufficiently high temperatures, there would be enough energy available to match up electrons and their antiparticles, or positrons, into what are known as electron-positron pairs. The creation of electron-positron pairs would cause a loss of pressure, further accelerating the collapse; as a result, the two orbiting fragments would ultimately become so dense that a black hole could form at each clump. The pair of black holes might then spiral around one another before merging to become one large black hole. "This is a new finding," Reisswig says. "Nobody has ever predicted that a single collapsing star could produce a pair of black holes that then merge."

Reisswig and his colleagues used supercomputers to simulate a supermassive star that is on the verge of collapse. The simulation was visualized with a video made by combining millions of points representing numerical data about density, gravitational fields, and other properties of the gases that make up the collapsing stars.

Although the study involved computer simulations and is thus purely theoretical, in practice, the formation and merger of pairs of black holes can give rise to tremendously powerful gravitational radiation -- ripples in the fabric of space and time, traveling at the speed of light -- that is likely to be visible at the edge of our universe, Reisswig says. Ground-based observatories such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), comanaged by Caltech, are searching for signs of this gravitational radiation, which was first predicted by Albert Einstein in his general theory of relativity; future space-borne gravitational-wave observatories, Reisswig says, will be necessary to detect the types of gravitational waves that would confirm these recent findings.

Ott says that these findings will have important implications for cosmology. "The emitted gravitational-wave signal and its potential detection will inform researchers about the formation process of the first supermassive black holes in the still very young universe, and may settle some -- and raise new -- important questions on the history of our universe," he says.

if you are interested to know how the Riddles of Black hole 

appeared watch out video 

Through the wormhole with Morgan Freeman  The riddle of Black Holes....awesome video will fascinate you toward Black hole

These findings were published in Physical Review Letters the week of October 11 in a paper titled "Formation and Coalescence of Cosmological Supermassive-Black-Hole Binaries in Supermassive-Star Collapse." Caltech coauthors authors on the study include Ernazar Abdikamalov, Roland Haas, Philipp Mösta. Another coauthor on the study, Erik Schnetter, is at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Sherman Fairchild Foundation.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTlF_0rJF8Y

"Higgsogenesis" Proposed to Explain Dark Matter

Word of the day: HIGGSOGENESIS.

Two physicists suggest that the Higgs boson had a key role in the early universe and may have produced the observed difference between the number of matter and antimatter particles, therefore determining the density of dark matter that makes up five-sixths of the matter in the universe. They’ve called this idea Higgsogenesis 

Read more: http://bit.ly/1idiy65 via Scientific American magazine

Astronomers have discovered a seven planet system

Astronomers may have identified one of the richest planetary systems yet.

The planetary system lies 2,500 light-years away from Earth and may be the most crowded found so far. The seven planets orbit the dwarf star KIC 11442793 at a closer range than found in our system. One of the identifications was made by volunteers using the PlanetHunters website.

Read more: http://bbc.in/1c2LWdP

The Cosmos Is Cracked :A computer simulation of the universe shows that it may be filled with “defects in spacetime”

According to a popular theory, in the hot and dense universe three of the four forces of nature (weak, strong and electromagnetic) were unified but in the cooler universe they separated. When this symmetry among the forces broke, it might have created topological defects in the form of strings, so named because they would be long, thin fissures in space. (Despite the similar names, cosmic strings may or may not be related to the strings predicted to make up fundamental particles in string theory .)
These strings would have started off tangled and wrinkly when the universe was in its hot, dense state but would have stretched out over time as space itself expanded. This movement would cause some strings to cross others. “When they wind back on themselves they break so that the wrinkles snap off as closed loops, like little rubber bands.” The loops are what astronomers might be able to detect because they would oscillate, producing measurable ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves. 

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=cosmic-strings-cracked-cosmos

If astronomers on Earth notice a change in the arrival time of light from pulsars, it could mean a gravitational wave has hit our planet. The fact that no evidence for gravitational waves has yet been found already eliminates the possibility of cosmic strings with a given range of tensions.