The prospect of using the popular genome-editing tool CRISPR to treat a host of diseases in people is moving closer to reality. From a report: Medical applications of CRISPR-Cas9 had a banner year in 2019. The first results trickled in from trials testing the tool in people, and more trials launched. In the coming years, researchers are looking ahead to more sophisticated applications of CRISPR genome editing that could lay the foundation for treating an array of diseases, from blood disorders to hereditary blindness. But although the results of clinical trials of CRISPR genome editing so far have been promising, researchers say that it is still too soon to know whether the technique will be safe or effective in the clinic. "There's been a lot of appropriate caution in applying this to treating people," says Edward Stadtmauer, an oncologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. "But I think we're starting to see some of the results of that work."

It has only been seven years since researchers discovered that a molecular defence system called CRISPR-Cas9, which microbes use to fend off viruses and other invaders, could be harnessed to rewrite human genes. Since then gene-editing has attracted attention for its potential to modify embryos -- an application that is ethically and legally fraught if those embryos are destined to become human beings. But in parallel, scientists have been testing CRISPR's much less controversial ability to disable or correct problematic genes in other cells in order to treat a host of diseases.

Breakthrough treatments for lung cancer and melanoma have driven down cancer mortality overall -- and from 2016 to 2017 spurred the largest-ever decline. schwit1 shares a report: The cancer death rate in the United States fell 2.2 percent from 2016 to 2017 -- the largest single-year decline in cancer mortality ever reported, the American Cancer Society reported on Wednesday. Since 1991 the rate has dropped 29 percent, which translates to approximately 2.9 million fewer cancer deaths than would have occurred if the mortality rate had remained constant. "Every year that we see a decline in cancer mortality rate, it's very good news," said Rebecca Siegel, director of surveillance research at the American Cancer Society and lead author of the organization's report, which was published online in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. Experts attributed the decline to the reduced smoking rates and to advances in lung cancer treatment. New therapies for melanoma of the skin have also helped extend life for many people with metastatic disease, or cancer that has spread to other parts of the body. Progress has slowed for colorectal, breast and prostate cancers, however. The rising rate of obesity among Americans, as well as significant racial and geographic disparities, likely explain why the decline in breast and colorectal cancer death rates has begun to taper off, and why the decrease in rates of prostate cancer has halted entirely.

sciencehabit writes: Academic journals in Russia are retracting more than 800 papers following a probe into unethical publication practices by a commission appointed by the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). The moves come in the wake of several other queries suggesting the vast Russian scientific literature is riddled with plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and so-called gift authorship, in which academics become a co-author without having contributed any work. The RAS commission's preliminary report documenting the problems and journals' responses to them is "a bombshell," says Gerson Sher, a former staffer at the U.S. National Science Foundation and the author of a recent book on U.S.-Russia science cooperation. The report, released yesterday, "will reinforce the suspicions and fears of many -- that their country is not going down the right path in science and that it's damaging its own reputation," says Sher, who applauds RAS for commissioning the investigation.

Russia's roughly 6000 academic journals, the vast majority published in Russian, are popular among the country's academics. A 2019 study found that Russian authors publish far more in domestic journals than, for instance, their counterparts in Poland, Germany, or Indonesia. But standards are often low. In March 2018, for instance, Dissernet, a network aimed at cleaning up the Russian literature, identified more than 4000 cases of plagiarism and questionable authorship among 150,000 papers in about 1500 journals. And Russian authors frequently republish their own work, says Yury Chekhovich, CEO of Antiplagiat, a plagiarism detection company.

Astronomers have discovered a gigantic, undulating wave of dust and gas where newborn stars are forged over a 50 million billion mile stretch of the Milky Way. The Guardian reports: The gaseous structure, which holds more mass than 3 million suns, runs directly behind our solar system as viewed from the heart of the galaxy, but has eluded observation until now. The spectacular string of stellar nurseries forms the largest known wave in the Milky Way and was announced, appropriately, at a scientific conference a stone's throw from the surf mecca of Waikiki beach in Hawaii.

Measurements of the wave show that it stretches over 9,000 light years and makes up what is known as the "local arm" of the Milky Way. Looking down on the flat disc of the galaxy, the wave appears as a straight line about 400 light years wide. But from the side, it rises and falls 500 light years above and below the plane of the galaxy. For comparison, the width of the solar system is about half a light day -- the distance light travels in 12 hours. The discovery has thrown up a raft of questions, not least around how the wave formed. One idea is that a much smaller galaxy clattered into that part of the Milky Way in the far-flung past, setting off ripples that spread like those from a stone tossed into a pond. A more exotic hypothesis sees a role for the mysterious dark matter that lurks unseen around galaxies. The astronomers published their findings in the journal Nature.

What's next after you've successfully imitated the look, taste and smell of real beef? For Impossible Foods, the choice is obvious: move on to pork and sausage. From a report: Like the faux burger that was introduced in 2016, how the meatless pork tastes obviously depends on the chef's abilities. But at Kumi in Las Vegas' Mandalay Bay, there was something for everyone, and apparently, the Input team was among the "first people in the world to try it." So naturally, we ate enough to make ourselves sick (OK maybe just Cheyenne). We had Bahn mi, meatballs, noodles, spring rolls (swoon), and shumai -- and it was all absolutely bomb. Again, credits to the chef, but a lot of this is Impossible, too. In each case, the texture was spot on and absorbed flavor much like the real meat would. As someone who isn't a vegetarian, one of the things I loved the most about the Impossible Burger is that the texture of Impossible's plant-based ingredient is akin to that of real meat. And the same goes for the Impossible Pork. We tried the Impossible Pork in a variety of different dishes and, let me tell you, every single one of them was delicious. The flavor is tasty, the texture is as crispy and slightly rough as traditional pork, and all I kept thinking was how insane it is that Impossible can make this happen.

SpaceX launched its third batch of internet-beaming satellites Monday evening, kicking off what is expected to be a remarkably busy year for the company as it readies its new broadband business. From a report: About 60 small satellites were fired into orbit atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Liftoff occurred at 9:19 pm ET from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. This batch of satellites will join more than 100 others that SpaceX deployed last year. And -- if all goes as planned -- there will be 23 more launches by the end of this year, growing SpaceX's Starlink constellation to more than 1,500 satellites. Starlink is already the largest telecom satellite constellation in existence, and SpaceX has regulatory approval to launch a total of more than 10,000 satellites. The company is also seeking approval to deploy another 30,000 on top of that. The goal is to offer affordable internet service to parts of the United States and Canada by mid-2020, and eventually to beam cheap high-speed broadband across the globe. When Starlink service launches, SpaceX says it plans to go directly to market. That means the space-based internet service will compete directly with ground-based providers that dominate the industry with services like U-Verse, Fios and others.

Wave723 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: Only in the past five years has it become possible to raise thousands of healthy fish so far from the shoreline without contaminating millions of gallons of fresh water. A technology called recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) now allows indoor aquaculture farms to recycle up to 99 percent of the water they use. And the newest generation of these systems will help one biotech company bring its unusual fish to U.S. customers for the first time this year.

For AquaBounty Technologies [...] this technology couldn't have come at a better time. The company has for decades tried to introduce a transgenic salmon it sells under the brand name AquAdvantage to the U.S. market. In this quest, AquaBounty has lost between $100 million and $115 million (so far). In the final months of 2020, the company will harvest its first salmon raised in the United States and intended for sale there. Thanks to modifications that involved splicing genetic material into its salmon from two other species of fish, these salmon grow twice as fast and need 25 percent less food to reach the same weight as salmon raised on other fish farms. The report says Costco, Target, Trader Joe's, Walmart, Whole Foods, and roughly 80 other North American grocery store chains don't plan to carry it, but that could certainly change. "As of December, AquaBounty was unable to name any restaurants or stores where customers would be able to buy its salmon," the report adds.

sciencehabit writes: Millions of years from now, advanced humans -- or perhaps visiting aliens -- may dig up the remnants of today's civilizations. What are they likely to find, and how will they interpret our relationship with the creatures around us? A new study reveals that archaeologists will need to rely on bones, not any of our former technology. "If you read a lot of postapocalyptic science fiction, one of the things that disappears in almost all cases is written records, computer records, things like that," says one of the scientists. "There are computer records and code from decades ago that modern computers can't recognize because it's so far out of alignment. So imagine two million years from now... So what are we left with? It's whatever is buried in the ground."

And what will that be? Well, lots of humans, cows, and chickens. And, of course, tons of cats and dogs. "Of all the animals, dogs and cats are more likely to be buried in a manner similar to people," says another scientist. "There are pet cemeteries that are set up similar to human memorial parks. So if anything like that is stumbled upon, that's going to say something different than a pit that people threw a bunch of pigs into randomly. I think it's going to be obvious that we felt differently about dogs and cats versus pigs and cows and chickens."

The UK's National Health System is getting £40m (about $52.3 million) to try reducing login times on its IT systems, "a move the government says could free up thousands of staffing hours a day as the saved seconds add up," according to the Guardian.

They note estimates that switching to a "single sign-on" system reduced login times from 105 seconds to just 10 at one hospital, ultimately saving them 130 staffing hours a day.

TheNinjaCoder shared their report: In a typical hospital, staff need to log in to as many as 15 systems when tending to a patient. As well as taking up time, the proliferation of logins requires staff either to remember multiple complex passwords or, more likely, compromise security by reusing the same one on every system. The health secretary, Matt Hancock, said: "It is frankly ridiculous how much time our doctors and nurses waste logging on to multiple systems. As I visit hospitals and GP practices around the country, I've lost count of the amount of times staff complain about this. It's no good in the 21st century having 20th-century technology at work.

"This investment is committed to driving forward the most basic frontline technology upgrades, so treatment can be delivered more effectively and we can keep pace with the growing demand on the NHS."

An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica: The next big thing in 3D printing just might be so-called "4D materials" which employ the same manufacturing techniques, but are designed to deform over time in response to changes in the environment, like humidity and temperature. They're also sometimes known as active origami or shape-morphing systems. MIT scientists successfully created flat structures that can transform into much more complicated structures than had previously been achieved, including a human face. They published their results last fall in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...

MIT mechanical engineer Wim van Rees, a co-author of the PNAS paper, devised a theoretical method to turn a thin flat sheet into more complex shapes, like spheres, domes, or a human face. "My goal was to start with a complex 3-D shape that we want to achieve, like a human face, and then ask, 'How do we program a material so it gets there?'" he said. "That's a problem of inverse design..." van Rees and his colleagues decided to use a mesh-like lattice structure instead of the continuous sheet modeled in the initial simulations. They made the lattice out of a rubbery material that expands when the temperature increases. The gaps in the lattice make it easier for the material to adapt to especially large changes in its surface area. The MIT team used an image of [19th century mathematician Carl Friedrich] Gauss to create a virtual map of how much the flat surface would have to bend to reconfigure into a face. Then they devised an algorithm to translate that into the right pattern of ribs in the lattice.

They designed the ribs to grow at different rates across the mesh sheet, each one able to bend sufficiently to take on the shape of a nose or an eye socket. The printed lattice was cured in a hot oven, and then cooled to room temperature in a saltwater bath.

And voila! It morphed into a human face.
"The team also made a lattice containing conductive liquid metal that transformed into an active antenna, with a resonance frequency that changes as it deforms."

An anonymous reader quotes Gizmodo: When the Greenland ice sheet went into a record meltdown in the summer of 2019, it raised a very terrifying specter of the future. Here was a 12.5-billion-ton mass of ice -- one that's been melting at a quickening pace since the 1980s -- melting in a way scientists didn't expect to happen for decades. While the ice sheet won't completely disappear for centuries, any further increase in its melt will put coastal communities at risk of inundation.

There's an argument to be made that we should do everything possible to save the ice, and a new study explores a very controversial idea to that end: cooling the planet.

The findings, published last month in Earth's Future, explore what would happen if the world pumped particles high into the atmosphere that would reflect sunlight back into space. This high-altitude air conditioning scheme, known as solar radiation management or SRM, would bring down the global average temperature. The paper's results show that cooling would help slow -- though not stop -- the melting of the ice sheet. That could buy coastal regions time but also change the climate in other ways that may end up hurting other regions around the world...potentially pitting nations against each other.

An anonymous reader quotes Space News: The SpaceX launch of Starlink satellites scheduled for January 6 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on the Florida Space Coast will be first launch of 2020 and also the 45th Space Wing's inaugural launch as part of the U.S. Space Force.

The 45th Space Wing, headquartered at Patrick Air Force Base, Florida, oversees the preparation and launching of U.S. government and commercial satellites from Cape Canaveral and operates the Eastern Range. It is one of five Air Force space wings that have been assigned to the U.S. Space Force effective December 20, when President Trump signed the National Defense Authorization Act that created the U.S. Space Force as the sixth branch of the armed forces. "I'm excited for the 45th Space Wing to be a part of the U.S. Space Force," wing commander Brig. Gen. Doug Schiess said in a statement Jan. 3.

The 45th Space Wing will continue to do what it has been doing and the transition to the Space Force will not change that, Schiess said. The details of how the U.S. Space Force will be structured and staffed will take at least 18 months to sort out... Air Force Space Command personnel have been assigned to the Space Force but still remain airmen within the U.S. Air Force...

"The effects the new Space Force will have on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and Patrick Air Force Base has not been announced yet, but continuing to successfully accomplish the mission without interruption is our top priority," Schiess said.

"NASA has a lot of high-tech hardware cruising around in space right now, but one of the space agency's pint-sized exoplanet hunters appears to have gone dark," reports BGR: In a post by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the group explains that its ASTERIA satellite has been failing to return attempts to contact it for about a month now.

ASTERIA is a tiny satellite capable of observing some very big things. The spacecraft was sent into Earth orbit in late 2017, and it spent several months studying nearby stars for changes in their brightness. These brightness dips are the telltale signs that a planet is orbiting those stars. Much of NASA's exoplanet-hunting hardware is big and beefy, but the ASTERIA mission proved that spotting hints of exoplanets is indeed possible using much smaller devices. CubeSats, which are only about the size of a briefcase, are easier to deploy than their larger counterparts, and ASTERIA showed that CubeSats can make for good planet hunters.

"The ASTERIA project achieved outstanding results during its three -month prime mission and its nearly two-year-long extended mission," Lorraine Fesq of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement. "Although we are disappointed that we lost contact with the spacecraft, we are thrilled with all that we have accomplished with this impressive CubeSat."
NASA adds that "Attempts to contact it are expected to continue into March 2020."

"Injecting the flu vaccine into a tumor gets the immune system to attack it," reports Ars Technica.

Joe_NoOne (Slashdot reader #48,818) shared their report: This is one of those ideas that seems nuts but had so many earlier results pointing toward it working that it was really just a matter of time before someone tried it. To understand it, you have to overcome the idea that the immune system is always diffuse, composed of cells that wander the blood stream. Instead, immune cells organize at the sites of infections (or tumors), where they communicate with each other to both organize an attack and limit that attack so that healthy tissue isn't also targeted.

From this perspective, the immune system's inability to eliminate tumor cells isn't only the product of their similarities to healthy cells. It's also the product of the signaling networks that help restrain the immune system to prevent it from attacking normal cells... A number of recently developed drugs help release this self-imposed limit, winning their developers Nobel Prizes in the process. These drugs convert a "cold" immune response, dominated by signaling that shuts things down, into a "hot" one that is able to attack a tumor...

[More recently] researchers identified over 30,000 people being treated for lung cancer and found those who also received an influenza diagnosis. You might expect that the combination of the flu and cancer would be very difficult for those patients, but instead, they had lower mortality than the patients who didn't get the flu. For more detailed tests, the researchers moved to mice, using melanoma cells that can form tumors when transplanted into the lungs of the mice... Having an active influenza virus infection reduced the ability of the melanoma cells to establish themselves in the lung. The effect isn't limited to the location of the infection, though, as tumors in the lung that wasn't infected were also inhibited. The effects were similar when breast cancer cells were placed into the lung, as well. All of this is consistent with the immune stimulation provided by a pathogen. The stimulation causes a general activation of the immune system that releases it from limits on its activity that prevent it from attacking tumor cells....

[T]he researchers obtained this year's flu vaccine and injected it into the sites of tumors. Not only was tumor growth slowed, but the mice ended up immune to the flu virus.... [T]he story does fit in well with the general consensus that the immune system can be a powerful tool against cancer, provided it can be mobilized properly. And, in at least some cases, a flu vaccine just might do the trick.

A reader shares a report from SciTechDaily: MIT mathematicians and engineers have developed a mathematical model that predicts how stable a knot is, based on several key properties, including the number of crossings involved and the direction in which the rope segments twist as the knot is pulled tight. "These subtle differences between knots critically determine whether a knot is strong or not," says Jorn Dunkel, associate professor of mathematics at MIT. "With this model, you should be able to look at two knots that are almost identical, and be able to say which is the better one." "Empirical knowledge refined over centuries has crystallized out what the best knots are," adds Mathias Kolle, the Rockwell International Career Development Associate Professor at MIT. "And now the model shows why."
[...]
In comparing the diagrams of knots of various strengths, the researchers were able to identify general "counting rules," or characteristics that determine a knot's stability. Basically, a knot is stronger if it has more strand crossings, as well as more "twist fluctuations" -- changes in the direction of rotation from one strand segment to another. For instance, if a fiber segment is rotated to the left at one crossing and rotated to the right at a neighboring crossing as a knot is pulled tight, this creates a twist fluctuation and thus opposing friction, which adds stability to a knot. If, however, the segment is rotated in the same direction at two neighboring crossing, there is no twist fluctuation, and the strand is more likely to rotate and slip, producing a weaker knot. They also found that a knot can be made stronger if it has more "circulations," which they define as a region in a knot where two parallel strands loop against each other in opposite directions, like a circular flow.

By taking into account these simple counting rules, the team was able to explain why a reef knot, for instance, is stronger than a granny knot. While the two are almost identical, the reef knot has a higher number of twist fluctuations, making it a more stable configuration. Likewise, the zeppelin knot, because of its slightly higher circulations and twist fluctuations, is stronger, though possibly harder to untie, than the Alpine butterfly -- a knot that is commonly used in climbing. The findings have been published in the journal Science.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: "We want to miniaturize accelerator technology in a way that makes it a more accessible research tool," explained project lead Jelena Vuckovic in a Stanford news release. But this wasn't designed like a traditional particle accelerator like the Large Hadron Collider or one at collaborator SLAC's National Accelerator Laboratory. Instead of engineering it from the bottom up, they fed their requirements to an "inverse design algorithm" that produced the kind of energy pattern they needed from the infrared radiation emitters they wanted to use. That's partly because infrared radiation has a much shorter wavelength than something like microwaves, meaning the mechanisms themselves can be made much smaller -- perhaps too small to adequately design the ordinary way. The algorithm's solution to the team's requirements led to an unusual structure that looks more like a Rorschach test than a particle accelerator. But these blobs and channels are precisely contoured to guide infrared laser light pulse in such a way that they push electrons along the center up to a significant proportion of the speed of light.

The resulting "accelerator on a chip" is only a few dozen microns across, making it comfortably smaller than a human hair and more than possible to stack a few on the head of a pin. A couple thousand of them, really. And it will take a couple thousand to get the electrons up to the energy levels needed to be useful -- but don't worry, that's all part of the plan. The chips are fully integrated but can be put in a series easily to create longer assemblies that produce larger powers. These won't be rivaling macro-size accelerators like SLAC's or the Large Hadron Collider, but they could be much more useful for research and clinical applications where planet-destroying power levels aren't required. For instance, a chip-sized electron accelerator might be able to direct radiation into a tumor surgically rather than through the skin. The findings have been published in the journal Science.

By the end of August 2019, the entire pig population of China had dropped by about 40 percent. China accounted for more than half of the global pig population in 2018, and the epidemic there alone has killed nearly one-quarter of all the world's pigs. From a report: By late September, the disease had cost economic losses of one trillion yuan (about $141 billion), according to Li Defa, dean of the College of Animal Science and Technology at China Agricultural University in Beijing. Qiu Huaji, a leading Chinese expert on porcine infectious diseases, has said that African swine fever has been no less devastating "than a war" -- in terms of "its effects on the national interest and people's livelihoods and its political, economic and social impact." "We lost hundreds of thousands of yuan," my sister-in-law bemoaned, several tens of thousands of dollars. "Haven't you been compensated by the government for the dead pigs?" I asked. "Only 100 yuan per head," less than $15, she said, "That didn't help."

Tens of thousands of Australians are fleeing their homes as hundreds of fires rage across the continent's southeast coast. And yes, climate change is almost certainly to blame for the extent of the disaster. From a report: With more than a thousand buildings destroyed and 17 deaths since October, it already ranks as one of the worst fire seasons in Australia's history -- and summer there has barely begun. What's driving the fires? Summer wildfires are common in Australia, but climate change is making them worse. Spring rainfall has declined in recent decades, even as temperatures rise, extreme heat events become more common, and droughts turn more severe, according to a 2018 report by Australia's Bureau of Meteorology. Those forces have contributed to a greater number of days with "very high fire dangers," and helped extend the fire season into spring.

Music is an ideal medium for interstellar communication. From a report: Each summer for the past 25 years, tens of thousands of people have flocked to Barcelona, Spain, to witness Sonar, a three-day festival dedicated to electronic music, art, and design. To celebrate Sonar's 25th anniversary in 2018, the festival partnered with the Catalonia Institute for Space Studies and the nonprofit METI International to send a series of interstellar messages to Luyten's star, a red dwarf about 12 light-years from Earth. Although red dwarfs are the most common stellar objects in our galaxy, Luyten's star is remarkable for hosting GJ237b, the closest potentially habitable planet outside of our own solar system. No one knows for sure whether GJ237b hosts life, intelligent or otherwise, but if ET does call the planet home, Sonar wants to rock its socks off. Over the course of several nights in late 2017 and early 2018, a radar system in Tromso, Norway, blasted a custom message from Sonar toward GJ237b. Like any good correspondence, the message began with a greeting: In this case, the first 33 prime numbers repeated on two alternating radio frequencies functioned as a stand-in for "hello."

This was followed by a brief tutorial that the message designers hoped would teach ET to extract the music written by Sonar-affiliated musicians and embedded in the message. [...] The Sonar messages are unique insofar as they are the only interstellar transmissions to use songs designed by musicians specifically for communicating with ET. That the messages include a substantial information content places them firmly in the tradition of messaging extraterrestrial intelligences, or METI, a term coined by the Russian radio astronomer Alexander Zaitsev to differentiate the practice from other modes of interstellar communication. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, is focused on listening for ET signals rather than sending them, and "active SETI" is about creating beacons that lack information but signal to alien intelligences that we exist.

A computer made from strands of DNA in a test tube can calculate the square root of numbers up to 900. New Scientist reports: Chunlei Guo at the University of Rochester in New York state and colleagues developed a computer that uses 32 strands of DNA to store and process information. It can calculate the square root of square numbers 1, 4, 9, 16, 25 and so on up to 900. The DNA computer uses a process known as hybridization, which occurs when two strands of DNA attach together to form double-stranded DNA.

To start, the team encodes a number onto the DNA using a combination of ten building blocks. Each combination represents a different number up to 900, and is attached to a fluorescence marker. The team then controls hybridization in such a way that it changes the overall fluorescent signal so that it corresponds to the square root of the original number. The number can then be deduced from the color. The DNA computer could help to develop more complex computing circuits, says Guo. Guo believes DNA computers may one day replace traditional computers for complex computations. The findings have been published in the journal Small.