Excellence And Citation Awards

A new biomaterial delivered to the heart soon after a heart attack can heal damaged tissue from the inside out. Heart attacks kill cardiac muscle tissue, scarring the heart and leaving permanent damage after just six hours. The damage prevents the heart from functioning properly. If there was a way to begin healing damaged tissue soon after a heart attack, doctors could prevent scar tissue from developing. “In an ideal world, you treat a patient immediately when they’re having a heart attack to try to salvage some of the tissue and promote regeneration,” says Karen Christman, a bioengineer at the University of California, San Diego. The pursuit of this ideal inspired Christman, along with a team of researchers, to develop the biomaterial. In rodents and pigs, it appears to repair tissue damage and reduce inflammation directly after a heart attack , Christman and colleagues report December 29 in Nature Biomedical Engineering . “I think it has a lot of potential,” Vimala Bharadwaj, a...

The chances of contacting extraterrestrial civilizations seem poor – Science News , February 24, 1973 The possibility of life … on other planets has stimulated many people’s i­maginations…. In the Feb. 9 Nature , James C. G. Walker of Yale University studies the possible parameters of such a search and comes to some pessimistic conclusions. Update Walker estimated it could take 1,400 to 14 million years to contact E.T. with the available technology. That’s way longer than researchers have spent listening for alien radio signals and scouring the sky with telescopes and satellites ( SN: 11/21/20, p. 18 ). Despite the silence, scientists have sent their own messages into the void. In 1974, Earth sent a string of binary code from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Years later, arguably the most famous message — the Golden Record — made its way to space aboard NASA spacecraft ( SN: 8/20/77, p. 124 ). If aliens ever reach out, they may send quantum dispatches , scie...

For the first time, researchers have harnessed the body’s own chemistry to “grow” electrodes inside the tissues of living fish, blurring the boundary between biology and machines. The technique uses the body’s sugars to turn an injected gel into a flexible electrode without damaging tissues, experiments show. Zebrafish with these electrodes grown in their brains, hearts and tail fins showed no signs of ill effects, and ones tested in leeches successfully stimulated a nerve, researchers report in the Feb. 24 Science . Someday, these electrodes could be useful for applications ranging from studying how biological systems work to improving human-machine interfaces. They also could be used in “bioelectronic medicine,” such as brain stimulation therapies for depression , Parkinson’s disease and other conditions ( SN: 2/10/19 ). Soft electronics aim to bridge the gap between soft, curvy biology and electronic hardware. But these electronics typically still must carry certain parts that c...

The Milky Way is churning out far more stars than previously thought, according to a new estimate of its star formation rate. Gamma rays from aluminum-26, a radioactive isotope that arises primarily from massive stars, reveal that the Milky Way converts four to eight solar masses of interstellar gas and dust into new stars each year , researchers report in work submitted to arXiv.org on January 24. That range is two to four times the conventional estimate and corresponds to an annual birthrate in our galaxy of about 10 to 20 stars, because most stars are less massive than the sun. At this rate, every million years — a blink of the eye in astronomical terms — our galaxy spawns 10 million to 20 million new stars. That’s enough to fill roughly 10,000 star clusters like the beautiful Pleiades cluster in the constellation Taurus. In contrast, many galaxies, including most of the ones that orbit the Milky Way, make no new stars at all. “The star formation rate is very important to underst...

No one has ever probed a particle more stringently than this. In a new experiment, scientists measured a magnetic property of the electron more carefully than ever before, making the most precise measurement of any property of an elementary particle, ever. Known as the electron magnetic moment, it’s a measure of the strength of the magnetic field carried by the particle. That property is predicted by the standard model of particle physics, the theory that describes particles and forces on a subatomic level. In fact, it’s the most precise prediction made by that theory. By comparing the new ultraprecise measurement and the prediction, scientists gave the theory one of its strictest tests yet. The new measurement agrees with the standard model’s prediction to about 1 part in a trillion, or 0.1 billionths of a percent, physicists report in the February 17 Physical Review Letters . When a theory makes a prediction at high precision, it’s like a physicist’s Bat Signal, calling out for ...

Homo sapiens who reached Europe around 54,000 years ago introduced bows and arrows to that continent, a new study suggests. Researchers examined tiny triangular stone points and other artifacts excavated at a rock-shelter in southern France called Grotte Mandrin. H. sapiens on the move probably brought archery techniques from Africa to Europe , archaeologist Laure Metz of Aix-Marseille University in France and colleagues report February 22 in Science Advances . “Metz and colleagues demonstrate bow hunting [at Grotte Mandrin] as convincingly as possible without being caught bow-in-hand,” says archaeologist Marlize Lombard of the University of Johannesburg, who did not participate in the new study. No bows were found at the site. Wooden items such as bows preserve poorly. The oldest intact bows, found in northern European bogs, date to around 11,000 years ago, Metz says. Previous stone and bone point discoveries suggest that bow-and-arrow hunting originated in Africa between about...

To shrink error rates in quantum computers, sometimes more is better. More qubits, that is. The quantum bits, or qubits, that make up a quantum computer are prone to mistakes that could render a calculation useless if not corrected. To reduce that error rate, scientists aim to build a computer that can correct its own errors. Such a machine would combine the powers of multiple fallible qubits into one improved qubit, called a “logical qubit,” that can be used to make calculations ( SN: 6/22/20 ).   Scientists now have demonstrated a key milestone in quantum error correction. Scaling up the number of qubits in a logical qubit can make it less error-prone , researchers at Google report February 22 in Nature . Future quantum computers could solve problems impossible for even the most powerful traditional computers ( SN: 6/29/17 ). To build those mighty quantum machines, researchers agree that they’ll need to use error correction to dramatically shrink error rates. While scientist...