Science

Have you ever picked up a cold, frosty beer on a hot summer's day and thought that it simply couldn't get any better? Well, you may have to think again.

A team of researchers at Rice University in Houston is working to create a beer that could fight cancer and heart disease. Taylor Stevenson, a member of the six-student research team and a junior at Rice, said the team is using genetic engineering to create a beer that includes resveratrol, the disease-fighting chemical that's been found in red wine.

In 1893, Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen and his ship Fram were victims of a strange phenomenon as he sailed past the Nordenskiöld Archipelago, north of Siberia.

Nansen wrote afterwards: "Fram appeared to be held back, as if by some mysterious force, and she did not always answer the helm … We made loops in our course, turned sometimes right around, tried all sorts of antics to get clear of it, but to very little purpose." Nansen called the effect "dead water", reporting that it slowed Fram to a quarter of her normal speed.

IF YOU discovered that your genes made you prone to obesity, would you eat dessert as usual or rush to the gym? It's not a trick question. Whether people act on news of their genetic fate or simply ignore it is the subject of a 20-year study of 10,000 Americans.

Announced last week, the study was prompted by the recent launch of a clutch of companies offering genetic tests directly to consumers. The study will be partly funded by one of these firms - Navigenics of Redwood Shores, California.

Increasing numbers of people are using prescription drugs like Ritalin to boost alertness and brain power, say experts.

Up to a fifth of adults, including college students and shift workers, may be using cognitive enhancers, a poll of 1,400 by Nature journal suggests. Neuropsychologist Professor Barbara Sahakian of Cambridge University said safety evidence is urgently needed.

Searching the Internet may help middle-aged and older adults keep their memories sharp, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

Researchers at the University of California Los Angeles studied people doing Web searches while their brain activity was recorded with functional magnetic resonance imaging scans.

It makes for one heck of a project mission statement. Explore the nature of dark matter, chart the Solar System in exhaustive detail, discover and analyze rare objects such as neutron stars and black hole binaries, and map out the structure of the Galaxy.

A new space race is officially under way, and this one should have the sci-fi geeks salivating. The project is a "space elevator," and some experts now believe that the concept is well within the bounds of possibility -- maybe even within our lifetimes.

A conference discussing developments in space elevator concepts is being held in Japan in November, and hundreds of engineers and scientists from Asia, Europe and the Americas are working to design the only lift that will take you directly to the one hundred-thousandth floor.

Phoenix has found minerals on Mars that suggest the craft's bone-dry landing site may once have been quite wet, researchers announced on Monday. The lander has also spotted the first hints of snowfall, in clouds high above the ground.

Since the 1970s, spacecraft have beamed back images of deep channels and canyons that suggest water once flowed across the Red Planet. More recently, both orbiting spacecraft and NASA's rovers have also found mineralogical evidence of liquid water on the planet's surface.

NASA said Monday that it is delaying its mission to the Hubble Space Telescope until next year because of a serious breakdown of the observatory in orbit.

Space shuttle Atlantis had been scheduled to blast off in just two weeks, but an unexpected problem with the Hubble appeared Saturday night, when the telescope stopped sending science data.

The world's largest atom smasher, which was launched with great fanfare earlier this month, is more badly damaged than previously thought and will be out of commission for at least two months, its operators said Saturday.

Experts have gone into the 17-mile (27-kilometer) circular tunnel housing the Large Hadron Collider under the Swiss-French border to examine the damage that halted operations about 36 hours after its September 10 startup, said James Gillies, spokesman for CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.