Physicist Isamu Akasaki, a co-winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in physics for inventing the world's first efficient blue light-emitting diodes, has died, Meijo University said Friday. He was 92. The Japan Times reports: Akasaki, born in Kagoshima Prefecture, graduated from Kyoto University in 1952 before working at Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., now Panasonic Corp. He started working at Nagoya University as a professor in 1981 and was later given an honorary title. In 2014, he shared the Nobel Prize with physicist Hiroshi Amano, professor at the university, and Japan-born American Shuji Nakamura, professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Akasaki, when he was a professor at Nagoya University, worked with Amano to produce gallium nitride crystals, and succeeded in 1989 in creating the world's first blue LED. Akasaki was honored in 1997 by the Japanese government with the Medal with Purple Ribbon, an honor bestowed on those who have made contributions to academic and artistic developments.

New submitter v1 writes: "Governor Ron DeSantis issued an executive order Friday forbidding local governments and businesses from requiring proof of a COVID-19 vaccine," reports WTXL-TV. In addition to local businesses and governments, this move is certain to rub the restarting cruise ship businesses the wrong way. Let the lawsuits begin! The executive order reads, in part: "No Florida government entity, or its subdivisions, agents, or assigns, shall be permitted to issue vaccine passports, vaccine passes, or other standardized documentation for the purpose of certifying an individual's COVID-19 vaccination status to a third party, or otherwise publish or share any individual's COVID-19 vaccination record or similar health information."

The full executive order can be found here (PDF)

Both monsters have grown in size over the years, and they reach new heights in Godzilla vs. Kong. But could they ever exist in real life? From a report: The last time the pair squared off, in the 1962 Japanese stop-motion release King Kong vs. Godzilla, Kong was 148 feet tall, compared to just 25ft tall in Peter Jackson's 2005 film King Kong, according to online estimates. In 2017's Kong: Skull Island, the great primate was around 104ft; almost four times smaller than the current iteration of Godzilla, who clocks in at 393ft. While the skeletons of Kong's parents in Skull Island suggest 100ft is roughly their species' genetic limit, the producers of the series have retconned the franchise by explaining that Kong is an adolescent in that film, leaving room for him to grow into a worthy opponent for Godzilla some 40 years down the movie timeline. Scaling up Kong to match Godzilla makes sense. It would be a short film if Godzilla stomped the big ape to death in the opening minutes. But how does that explain Godzilla's own growth spurt from 328ft in 2014 to 393ft today? And, crucially, is any of this based in science?

There are some things the films get right. James Rosindell from the faculty of natural sciences at Imperial College London points to a theory called 'Cope's Rule' which holds that evolution will increase a species body size over time. "[Being larger] gives competitive advantages and is often naturally selected for," he explains. However, larger creatures need more food and typically reproduce at a slower rate, meaning few individuals can be supported by any one ecosystem. So Kong and Godzilla being the last of their species -- and Kong slowly maturing over 40 years -- fits the science. But that's about the only thing that holds together. It turns out that Godzilla and Kong's biggest foe may not be each other, but physics. Specifically, the laws of gravity and biomechanics. The largest animal alive today, the blue whale, is found in our oceans. "The size limit of aquatic animals is closely tied to the ability to eat enough food to sustain their chonky bodies," explains David Labonte, a researcher in the department of bioengineering, also at Imperial College. Labonte has a specific interest in the interaction between physical laws and body size. For example, why there are no climbing animals heavier than geckos that can cling upside down to smooth surfaces? When it comes to the blue whale, Labonte explains that their large mouths and a technique known as 'lunge feeding' enables them to obtain enough food to sustain their bodies. This has allowed some blue whales to grow up to 180 tonnes (Kong was around 158 tonnes in his last film). An aquatic environment bestows other advantages, namely, buoyancy. Having its weight suspended in water is one of the key reasons why the blue whale is able to grow so large. It's also the reason that when whales beach, the most common cause of death is internal damage from the weight of their own bodies. Gravity, then, is a problem our terrestrial animals are yet to overcome. It's the reason our largest land animal, the African elephant tips the scales at a relatively puny six tonnes.

In major international tests, the physics-defying EmDrive has failed to produce the amount of thrust proponents were expecting. In fact, in one test at Germany's Dresden University, it didn't produce any thrust at all. Is this the end of the line for EmDrive? Popular Mechanics: The crux of the EmDrive is if you bounce microwaves around inside the tube, they exert more force in one direction than the other, creating a net thrust without the need for any propellant. And when NASA and a team at Xi'an in China tried this, they actually got a small-but-distinct net force. Now, however, physicists at the Dresden University of Technology (TU Dresden) are saying those promising results showing thrust were all false positives that are explained by outside forces. The scientists recently presented their findings in three papers at Space Propulsion Conference 2020 +1, with titles like "High-Accuracy Thrust Measurements of the EmDrive and Elimination of False-Positive Effects." (Other two studies here and here)

Using a new measuring scale and different suspension points of the same engine, the TU Dresden scientists "were able to reproduce apparent thrust forces similar to those measured by the NASA team, but also to make them disappear by means of a point suspension," researcher Martin Tajmar told the German site GreWi. The verdict: "When power flows into the EmDrive, the engine warms up. This also causes the fastening elements on the scale to warp, causing the scale to move to a new zero point. We were able to prevent that in an improved structure. Our measurements refute all EmDrive claims by at least 3 orders of magnitude."

Facing a brutal new wave of coronavirus cases, India on Thursday made anyone over 45 eligible for vaccination. But the scramble to vaccinate as many people as possible has also meant sharply curtailing exports. From a report: The hopes of vaccinating the world have largely fallen on the shoulders of India, a vaccine manufacturing powerhouse and home to the world's largest producer, the Serum Institute. Until recently, India was exporting most of the doses it was producing -- a mix of donations to neighbors and other friendly nations, sales to countries like Saudi Arabia and the U.K., and contributions to the global COVAX initiative. Indian-made vaccines have gone to 82 countries. Then, after a long lull, cases began to surge. They are now at their highest point since mid-October and are continuing to climb precipitously. Vaccine exports, which had been ramping up, suddenly fell sharply. Rather than supplying the world, the Serum Institute appears to have redirected nearly its entire supply to the homefront.

A new NASA mission, called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission due for launch this summer, aims to launch a spaceship that will directly punch an asteroid. Motherboard reports: The mission's target is an asteroid system called Didymos, which contains two space rocks that orbit each other. In late 2022, DART will forcefully impact the smaller asteroid in this system, a tiny moon called Dimorphos, so that scientists can assess the feasibility of knocking any space rocks that threaten Earth off course in the future. [...] DART will pioneer a subtler form of planetary defense, in which the trajectory of an asteroid is changed by a very small amount that becomes significant over time. Late next year, the mission will crash into Dimorphos at about seven kilometers per second. Shortly before the collision, the spacecraft will deploy a small satellite provided by the Italian Space Agency that is tasked with watching "the mess we make," [said Andy Rivkin, a planetary astronomer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and the investigation team lead for DART].

Observations from the Italian satellite, as well as from powerful telescopes on Earth, will reveal just how much Dimorphos was affected by the crash. Rivkin and his colleagues expect the change in orbital speed to be small -- about one millimeter per second -- which would add up to a shortening of the orbital period by about 10 minutes. But even this very slight shift would be enough to redirect the trajectory of a hazardous asteroid that threatened Earth, provided scientists have a lead-time of a decade or two before the projected impact.

hackingbear shares a report from The Guardian: Residents [in the Canadian province of New Brunswick] first learned of the investigation last week after a leaked memo from the province's public health agency asked physicians to be on the lookout for (neurological) symptoms similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). For more than a year public health officials have been tracking a "cluster" of 43 cases of suspected neurological disease in the province with no known cause. Despite the initial similarities, screening produced no confirmed cases of CJD, a rare, fatal brain disease caused by misformed proteins known as prions. Only a single suspected case was recorded in 2015, but in 2019 there were 11 cases and 24 in 2020. Researchers believe five people have died from the illness. Health officials have refused to disclose the precise locations of the cases. "The majority of cases are linked to the Acadian peninsula, a sparsely populated region in the north-eastern part of the province," the report says. Some of the symptoms include memory loss, vision problems, abnormal jerking movements, unexplained pains, spasms and behavioral changes.

The advisory committee for a Harvard University geoengineering research project is recommending that the team suspend plans for its first balloon flight in Sweden this summer. From a report: The purpose of that initial flight was to evaluate the propelled balloon's equipment and software in the stratosphere. In subsequent launches, the researchers hope to release small amounts of particles to better understand the risks and potential of solar geoengineering, the controversial concept of spraying sulfates, calcium carbonate or other compounds above the Earth to scatter sunlight and ease global warming. These would mark the first geoengineering-related experiments conducted in the stratosphere. But the committee has determined that the researchers should hold off on even the preliminary equipment tests until they've held discussions with members of the public in Sweden. David Keith, a Harvard climate scientist and member of the research team, said they will abide by the recommendations.

The decision is likely to push the launch into 2022, further delaying a project initially slated to begin as early as 2018. It also opens up the possibility that the initial flights will occur elsewhere, as the researchers had selected the Esrange Space Center in Kiruna, Sweden in part because the Swedish Space Corporation could accommodate a launch this year. Moreover, that company said in its own statement that it decided not to conduct the flights as well, following recent conversations with geoengineering experts, the advisory board and other stakeholders. Harvard set up the advisory committee in 2019 to review the proposed experiments and ensure the researchers take appropriate steps to limit risks, seek outside input, and operate in a transparent manner. In a statement, the committee said it has begun the process of working with public engagement specialists in Sweden and looking for organizations to host conversations.

In a crowded field of wrongness, one person stands out. From a report: The pandemic has made fools of many forecasters. Just about all of the predictions whiffed. Anthony Fauci was wrong about masks. California was wrong about the outdoors. New York was wrong about the subways. I was wrong about the necessary cost of pandemic relief. And the Trump White House was wrong about almost everything else. In this crowded field of wrongness, one voice stands out. The voice of Alex Berenson: the former New York Times reporter, Yale-educated novelist, avid tweeter, online essayist, and all-around pandemic gadfly. Berenson has been serving up COVID-19 hot takes for the past year, blithely predicting that the United States would not reach 500,000 deaths (we've surpassed 550,000) and arguing that cloth and surgical masks can't protect against the coronavirus (yes, they can). Berenson has a big megaphone. He has more than 200,000 followers on Twitter and millions of viewers for his frequent appearances on Fox News' most-watched shows. On Laura Ingraham's show, he downplayed the vaccines, suggesting that Israel's experience proved they were considerably less effective than initially claimed. On Tucker Carlson Tonight, he predicted that the vaccines would cause an uptick in cases of COVID-related illness and death in the U.S.

The vaccines have inspired his most troubling comments. For the past few weeks on Twitter, Berenson has mischaracterized just about every detail regarding the vaccines to make the dubious case that most people would be better off avoiding them. As his conspiratorial nonsense accelerates toward the pandemic's finish line, he has proved himself the Secretariat of being wrong:
* He has blamed the vaccines for causing spikes in severe illness, by pointing to data that actually demonstrate their safety and effectiveness.
* He has blamed the vaccines for suppressing our immune systems, by misrepresenting normal immune-system behavior.
* He has suggested that countries such as Israel have suffered from their early vaccine rollout, even though deaths and hospitalizations among vaccinated groups in Israel have plummeted.
* He has implied that for most non-seniors, the side effects of the vaccines are worse than having COVID-19 itself -- even though, according to the CDC, the pandemic has killed tens of thousands of people under 50 and the vaccines have not conclusively killed anybody.

Usually, I would refrain from lavishing attention on someone so blatantly incorrect. But with vaccine resistance hovering around 30 percent of the general population, and with 40 percent of Republicans saying they won't get a shot, debunking vaccine skepticism, particularly in right-wing circles, is a matter of life and death.

The Crew Dragon capsule poised to fly four civilian astronauts to space this year is getting an upgrade: a glass dome will be added at the top to give space tourists a 360-degree view of the cosmos. MSN reports: The glass dome-shaped window replaces Crew Dragon's docking adapter at its nose since the spacecraft won't be docking to the International Space Station. It's similar to the famed cupola aboard the International Space Station, but Crew Dragon's appears to be an uninterrupted sheet of glass, with no support structures dividing the window's view. Crew Dragon's protective aerodynamic shell that shields the hatch door area during launch will pop open to expose the glass dome once the craft is safely in orbit. Based on the rendering SpaceX tweeted, the cupola would fit at least one crew member from the chest up, revealing panoramic views of space.

NASA, which certified Crew Dragon for astronaut flights last year, said it doesn't plan to use the cupola version of Crew Dragon for NASA astronaut missions and that the window's installation doesn't require NASA safety approval. "We've done all the engineering work, we continue to go through all the analysis and testing and qualification to ensure everything's safe, and that it doesn't preclude any use of this spacecraft for other missions," Benji Reed, SpaceX's director of Crew Dragon mission management, said during a press conference on Tuesday.

Five years ago, scientists created a single-celled synthetic organism that, with only 473 genes, was the simplest living cell ever known. However, this bacteria-like organism behaved strangely when growing and dividing, producing cells with wildly different shapes and sizes. Now, scientists have identified seven genes that can be added to tame the cells' unruly nature, causing them to neatly divide into uniform orbs. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) reports: Scientists at JCVI constructed the first cell with a synthetic genome in 2010. They didn't build that cell completely from scratch. Instead, they started with cells from a very simple type of bacteria called a mycoplasma. They destroyed the DNA in those cells and replaced it with DNA that was designed on a computer and synthesized in a lab. This was the first organism in the history of life on Earth to have an entirely synthetic genome. They called it JCVI-syn1.0.

Since then, scientists have been working to strip that organism down to its minimum genetic components. The super-simple cell they created five years ago, dubbed JCVI-syn3.0, was perhaps too minimalist. The researchers have now added 19 genes back to this cell, including the seven needed for normal cell division, to create the new variant, JCVI-syn3A. This variant has fewer than 500 genes. To put that number in perspective, the E. coli bacteria that live in your gut have about 4,000 genes. A human cell has around 30,000.

NIST's role was to measure the resulting changes under a microscope. [...] The result was stop-motion video that showed the synthetic cells growing and dividing. This video shows JCVI-syn3.0 cells -- the ones created five years ago -- dividing into different shapes and sizes. Some of the cells form filaments. Others appear to not fully separate and line up like beads on a string. Despite the variety, all these cells are genetically identical. These videos and others like them allowed the researchers to observe how their genetic manipulations affected the cell growth and division. If removing a gene disrupted the normal process, they'd put it back and try another. Of the seven genes added to this organism for normal cell division, scientists know what only two of them do. The findings have been published in the journal Cell.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Adolescents ages 12 to 15 were completely protected from symptomatic COVID-19 after being vaccinated with the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccine in a small Phase III clinical trial, Pfizer reported in a press release Wednesday. The company also said that the vaccine was well-tolerated in the age group, spurring only the standard side effects seen in people ages 16 to 25. The vaccine is already authorized for use in people age 16 and over.

The vaccine appeared more effective at spurring defensive immune responses in adolescents ages 12 to 15 than in the 16- to 25-year-old group, producing even higher levels of antibodies that were able to neutralize SARS-CoV-2. In a measure of neutralizing antibodies, vaccinated youths in the new trial had geometric mean titers (GMTs) of 1,239.5, compared with the GMTs of 705.1 previously seen in those ages 16 to 25, Pfizer noted. The trial involved 2,260 adolescents ages 12 to 15, of which 1,131 were vaccinated and 1,129 received a placebo. There were 18 cases of symptomatic COVID-19 in the trial, all of which were in the placebo group. In today's press release, the company trumpeted that the vaccine demonstrated "100 percent efficacy." The trial was not primarily designed to assess efficacy, however. It was primarily assessing relative immune responses, so it will require more data to fully evaluate efficacy. Additionally, Pfizer and BioNTech have only released top-line trial results, not the full data from the trial, which has not been peer-reviewed.

Hmmmmmm writes: Russia has registered the world's first coronavirus vaccine for dogs, cats, minks, foxes and other animals, the country's agriculture safety watchdog said Wednesday. Called Carnivak-Cov, the vaccine was developed by scientists at the Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Surveillance, also known as Rosselkhoznadzor, Russia's Tass News Agency said.

Rosselkhoznadzor deputy head Konstantin Savenkov said Wednesday that this would be the world's first authorized for widespread animal inoculations. The vaccine could be mass produced as soon as April, although the agency did not say when it would be on the market. 'Carnivak-Cov, a sorbate inactivated vaccine against the coronavirus infection is the world's first and only product for preventing covid-19 in animals,' Savenkov told Tass News. Two U.S. companies, New Jersey-based veterinary pharmaceutical company Zoetis and the North Dakota-based Medgene Labs, have also been developing coronavirus vaccines for use among minks and other animals. Scientists in Russia launched clinical trials in October and tested the vaccine on dogs, cats, foxes, including Arctic foxes, and minks, among other animals. Mass production of the vaccine could begin in April, according to Savenkov.

One of our most precise mechanisms for controlling matter has now been applied to antimatter atoms for the first time. From a report: Laser cooling, which slows the motion of particles so they can be measured more precisely, can make antihydrogen atoms slow down by an order of magnitude. Antimatter particles have the same mass as particles of ordinary matter, but the opposite charge. An antihydrogen atom is made out of an antiproton and a positron, the antimatter equivalent of an electron. Makoto Fujiwara at TRIUMF, Canada's national particle accelerator centre, and his colleagues used an antihydrogen trapping experiment called ALPHA-2 at the CERN particle physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, to create clouds of about 1000 antihydrogen atoms in a magnetic trap. The team developed a laser that shoots particles of light called photons at the right wavelength to slow down any anti-atoms that happen to be moving directly towards the laser, slowing them down bit by bit. "It's kind of like we're shooting a tiny ball at the atom, and the ball is very small, so the slowing down in this collision is very small, but we do it many times and then eventually the big atom will be slowed down," says Fujiwara. The group managed to slow the anti-atoms down by more than a factor of 10.

Steve Kirsch has been interested in repurposing drugs since he was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer years ago. In an interview with IEEE Spectrum, he talks about his efforts to raise funds for Covid research, to get the word out about promising drugs, and to light a fire under the FDA. "If these guys were [working] in Silicon Valley, they'd be fired," he says. Specifically, Kirsch believes that fluvoxamine will be a game changer for treating Covid-19, as it's an inexpensive, easy-to-take pill with few side effects and has proven to prevent severe illness and death from the coronavirus. Here's an excerpt from the interview he had with IEEE Spectrum: Kirsch: We applied for an Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA [for fluvoxamine] in late January. Lately, we've been just trying to find out how that's going, like, 'What do you guys think? Can we have a conversation? We've got new data.' But they won't talk to us, they say it's in process, that we'll hear from them soon, likely in five weeks from submitting our request. But five, six weeks have come and gone, and we've heard nothing back on our application. Meanwhile, people are dying. If these guys were [working] in Silicon Valley, they'd be fired.

Spectrum: And you got banned from Medium for writing about it.

Kirsch: It's a Catch-22, you can't talk about it until it works but it can't work until you talk about it. I wrote on my Medium blog that fluvoxamine was successful in treating Covid, and that doxazosin [another drug, used to treat high blood pressure among other things] has a 75 percent chance of preventing hospitalization. I was reporting actual results of peer-reviewed studies. In response, Medium removed six years of blogs that I'd written about technology and banned me for life. In my appeal, I said there was no evidence that disputed what I said, and Medium never produced any evidence in response.

Spectrum: You did get covered on 60 Minutes. [On March 7, the news magazine reported on the successful use of fluvoxamine off label to treat a COVID-19 outbreak at the Golden Gate Fields thoroughbred racetrack, with lots of puns about long shots and dark horses.]

Kirsch: Yes, but you could easily watch that 60 Minutes story and believe that we need more data before people should start using fluvoxamine. But a panel of key opinion leaders from the NIH, CDC, and academia met in January and recommended that fluvoxamine be added to the NIH guidelines. They also recommended that doctors should talk to patients about using fluvoxamine for COVID in a process known as "shared decision making." And If you look at the website c19early.com, which rates the drugs with the best evidence, you'll see that the highest-rated FDA-approved drug is fluvoxamine. We shouldn't be ignoring it. Instead of doing nothing, we should be using the drug with the best evidence so far. If you were drowning and someone threw you a life preserver that had only been used 20 times, you don't throw it back complaining there isn't enough evidence that it works.

"SpaceX's fourth attempt to successfully launch and land its Mars rocket prototype has once again gone up in flames," writes smooth wombat. CNN reports: SpaceX engineer John Insprucker, who hosted a webcast of the test launch, said the rocket, known as SN11, had a normal ascent and that all appeared to be well before on-board cameras lost signal and the vehicle was subsumed by fog moments before landing. Insprucker said the company will share updates on social media once SpaceX engineers are able to check out the landing site. The area surrounding the vehicle must be cleared before liftoff for safety reasons.

Insprucker said the company is not expecting to recover video footage. "Don't wait for landing," he advised webcast viewers. Independent video streamers that recorded the flight did not capture the last stretch of the flight either due to fog, but NASASpaceflight -- a media site -- reported that one of the outlet's cameras may have been struck by debris from the rocket. Footage of the launch pad showed SN11 was nowhere in sight after the rocket's descent. For his part, Musk tweeted: "At least the crater is in the right place!" He later added: "Looks like engine 2 had issues on ascent & didn't reach operating chamber pressure during landing burn, but, in theory, it wasn't needed. Something significant happened shortly after landing burn start. Should know what it was once we can examine the bits later today."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: In a world-first, a team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology has developed a small, 3D-printed rectifying antenna that can harvest electromagnetic energy from 5G signals and use it to power devices, in a way turning 5G networks into "a wireless power grid," according to a press release by the university. As explained in the Jan.12 issue of the journal Scientific Reports, the flexible Rotman lens-based rectifying antenna, in other words, rectenna, system can perform millimeter-wave harvesting in the 28-GHz band. Commonly used in radar surveillance systems to see multiple directions without moving the antenna system, the Rotman lens is especially important for beamforming networks. However, larger antennas, which unfortunately have a narrowing field of view, are needed to harvest enough power to supply devices, and this limits the usage.

The researchers solved this problem by using a system that has a wide angle of coverage. The Rotman lens provides 6 levels of view at the same time in a pattern shaped like a spider. By enabling this structure to map a set of selected radiation directions to an associated set of beam-ports, the lens is used as an intermediate component between the antennas and the rectifiers. This way, the electromagnetic energy collected by the antenna arrays from one direction is combined and fed into a single rectifier. This maximizes efficiency, enabling a system with both high gain and large beamwidth. The system achieved a 21-fold increase in harvested power compared with a referenced counterpart in demonstrations. It was also able to maintain identical angular coverage.

PolygamousRanchKid shares a report from Motherboard: In November 2019, twelve bottles of Chateau Petrus 2000 -- a rare and expensive red wine from Bordeaux, France -- hitched a ride to the International Space Station aboard a Northrop Grumman spacecraft. It was followed several months later by 320 snippets of grapevine, or canes, of Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon. For a year, both viticultural products were exposed to the unique stress of the station's microgravity environment. On January 1st, the wine bottles and canes returned to earth aboard a SpaceX cargo vessel, and were hurried back to the Institute of Vine and Wine Science (ISVV) at the University of Bordeaux. Researchers have already begun analyzing the changes they underwent while in orbit, and during a press conference on Wednesday, revealed their preliminary findings. They had also, of course, tasted the wine.

To the surprise of researchers, all 320 vine snippets survived the stay in space. Some have since been replanted, and the results have been astounding. "They are developing much, much faster than the normal canes -- the ones that are coming back from space," said Dr. Michel Lebert, SCU's Chief Science Officer. The wine, to the delight of the experiment's organizers, also appears to have undergone significant changes. "With the one that had been in space, I would say the differences that I found most were with heightened floral characteristics," said Jane Ansen, a wine writer with a diploma in wine-tasting from ISVV. "I would probably say that the Petrus 2000 that had been on the ISS was maybe one, two, even three years further evolved that you would expect compared to the one that had remained on earth,"; she said.

"When the Earth environment is recreated in space, like on the ISS, the only parameter that changes from Earth is near-zero gravity," said Nicolas Gaume, CEO of Space Cargo Unlimited. "This exposes life on the ISS to immense stress." The researchers hypothesize that this stress, promoted by microgravity, expedited the natural aging process taking place in the wine bottles, and led the canes to develop a resiliency that is contributing to their rapid growth back on earth. If their theory is correct, the implications could be significant for a future in which climate change threatens to disrupt agricultural production. "If the vines find a way to evolve so that they are more naturally resistant to stress on Earth, then that opens very exciting possibilities for all of us," said Gaume.

Scientists are inching one step closer toward redefining the length of a second. NPR reports: Atomic clocks, which look like a jumble of lasers and wires, work by tapping into the natural oscillation of atoms, with each atom "ticking" at a different speed. The worldwide standard atomic clocks have for decades been based on cesium atoms -- which tick about 9 billion times per second. But newer atomic clocks based on other elements tick much faster -- meaning it's possible to divide a second into tinier and tinier slices. These newer atomic clocks are 100 times more accurate than the cesium clock. But it was important to compare them to each other -- to "make sure that a clock built here in Boulder is the same as a clock built in Paris, as in London, as in Tokyo," [Colin Kennedy, a physicist at the Boulder Atomic Clock Optical Network (BACON) Collaboration] says.

"Ultimately, the goal is to redefine the second in terms of a more accurate and precise standard, something that we can make more accurate and more precise measurements with," Kennedy says. As the scientists with BACON [...] wrote in the science journal Nature last week, they compared three next-generation atomic clocks that use different elements: aluminum, strontium and ytterbium. The scientists shot a laser beam through the air in efforts to connect their clocks, which are housed in two separate laboratories in Boulder, Colo. They also used an optical fiber cable. What resulted is a more accurate comparison of these types of atomic clocks than ever before. [N]etworks of clocks like this could also be used as super-sensitive sensors -- to possibly detect a passing wave of dark matter, and to test Einstein's theory of relativity.

According to a report in the journal iScience, octopuses may have short dreams during their alternating periods of sleep. NPR reports: [Sidarta Ribeiro, a neuroscientist at the Brain Institute at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil] and some colleagues decided to video-record four adult octopuses in the lab to monitor their sleep. And to make sure the animals were genuinely sleeping, the researchers checked to see if they would respond to a video of a swimming crab, a favorite food item, or to a vibration made by a hammer tapping on the tank. The octopuses remained indifferent and difficult to arouse while sleeping, instead of reacting as they normally would when awake. The scientists found that the octopuses had periods of quiet sleep, when they were pale and still, followed by short bursts of active sleep. This cycle repeated every 30 to 40 minutes. The active sleep periods were brief but obvious; the octopuses' skin darkened and their bodies and suckers contracted.

"For around 40 seconds, they dramatically change their color and their skin texture. Their eyes are also moving," says Sylvia Medeiros, a graduate student at the Brain Institute of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. "All of this happens very conspicuously." Their dreams, if they have them, can't be terribly complex or symbolic, given how short these active phases are, says Medeiros. Octopuses are known to be problem solvers, however, so maybe dreams help their impressive, unusual brains consolidate memories and improve on tasks.