Even though a public outcry has prompted Homeland Security to move away from adding X-ray machines to airports--it purchased 300 body scanners last year that used alternative technology instead--it appears to be embracing them at U.S.-Mexico land border crossings as an efficient way to detect drugs, currency, and explosives.
Imagine computer-designed viruses that cure disease, new bacteria capable of synthesizing an unlimited fuel supply, new organisms that wipe out entire populations and bio-toxins that target world leaders. They sound like devices restricted to feature-film script writers, but it is possible to create all of these today, using the latest advances in synthetic biology.
Just as the personal computer revolution brought information technology from corporate data centers to the masses, the biology revolution is personalizing science.
Scientific papers get retracted all the time for problems ranging from honest mistakes to outright fraud. The most common reason for discovering a problem is a failure to produce similar data as part of a follow-up experiment. Today's issue of Science contains a retraction that came about because key work couldn't be reproduced, as the facility in which it was done has shut down.
Tomorrow, researchers from CERN will be releasing experiment results that suggest neutrinos, the lightest particles we're aware of, may be moving slightly faster than the speed of light. Although the results have not yet been made public (a webcast will accompany the release of the paper), rumors of the finding have spread far and wide, leading to coverage by the BBC and the AP. Still, because the findings would seem to violate relativity, the authors are being very cautious about their results, and many in the physics community are expressing skepticism.
Signals reported in July seemed to indicate that the Higgs boson - a long-theorised particle seen as a missing link in our current understanding of physics - might have been detected among data the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva.
But since then, those signals - hinting that the theoretical 'God' particle might have a mass between 120 and 140GeV - looked much less conclusive among new statistics received from the experiment.
Although the human brain is a very complex structure, it's still not big or efficient enough to process every single thing we see, hear, and do. Sometimes this limitation is a good thing, since it forces our brains to filter out minor details that we don’t need to dwell on. Other times it's more of a hassle, since it interferes with how we process information.
While in principle unbreakable, quantum cryptography is known to have weaknesses in practice. One shortcoming has now been graphically illustrated by physicists in Singapore and Norway, who have been able to copy a secret quantum key without revealing their presence to either sender or receiver. The researchers are now working to remove the loophole they have exposed.
Did scientists running the massive Large Hadron Collider finally discover what Einstein eloquently hypothesized was the "mind of God" for the last 30 years of his life? Possibly, yes, if a memo leaked this week turns out to be legitimate.
A 12-year-old child prodigy has astounded university professors after grappling with some of the most advanced concepts in mathematics.
Jacob Barnett has an IQ of 170 - higher than Albert Einstein - and is now so far advanced in his Indiana university studies that professors are lining him up for a PHD research role.
