The ingenious system called adaptive optics, known for its computer control of subdivided, individually angled mirrors, is an efficient but expensive way to correct distortions in laser beams. The mirrors automatically adjust until an undistorted beam is obtained in a way formerly thought unachievable by a single large mirror.

Now a Sandia National Laboratories’ tool that efficiently but inexpensively uses a single mirror to achieve some of the same effects has received a U.S. patent, issued June 12.

Freeloaders can live on the fruits of the cooperation of others, but their selfishness can have long-term consequences, reports an evolutionary biologist from The University of Texas at Austin in a new study.

“There is a historical dimension to cooperation,” says Dr. Sam Brown, the Human Frontier Science Foundation Fellow in the Section of Integrative Biology. “The act of a cooperator can continue to give benefits even after the cooperator is dead. Conversely, cheating will have consequences in the future.”

I have always loved numbers. My whole life I have manipulated them, caressed them, cared for them.

My friends, I am a six fiend.

And I am not alone. Heck, even among physics gurus I am in pretty good company, including notables such as Paul A.M. Dirac, which, by the way, is his real name and not something he made up just for D&D. That guy lived for number correlations.

Two research studies published today in The New England Journal of Medicine found taking SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), anti-depression drugs, during pregnancy did not significantly increase the overall risk for most birth defects. However, each study found that taking SSRIs during pregnancy was associated with a small increase in the risk of certain rare birth defects – but they were different birth defects.

Dr. Michael Katz, acting Medical Director of the March of Dimes, said the studies show how important post-market surveillance is in assessing the safety of medications in pregnancy. During pre-approval, drugs are tested on relatively few subjects and only side effects with a large frequency are detected.

A scientific indicator of how easily distracted you are has been designed by a UCL (University College London) psychologist. It could be used as another assessment tool during the recruitment process and would have particular benefits in fields where employee distraction could lead to fatal errors.

People who are more easily distracted are at greater risk of being involved in accidents.

Professor Nilli Lavie, UCL Psychology, who led the research published in Psychological Science, said: “When you are easily distracted, you are more liable to do things like put your keys in the fridge or call out ‘come in’ when answering the phone. These are the more amusing consequences of distraction but distraction can have more serious implications.

It doesn't get more self-explanatory than that, does it?

Researchers in Slovakia have been able to derive mesenchymal stem cells from human adipose, or fat, tissue and engineer them into “suicide genes” that seek out and destroy tumors like tiny homing missiles. This gene therapy approach is a novel way to attack small tumor metastases that evade current detection techniques and treatments.

“These fat-derived stem cells could be exploited for personalized cell-based therapeutics,” said the study’s lead investigator, Cestmir Altaner, Ph.D., D.Sc., an associate professor in the Cancer Research Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava.

Anyone can buy a suit that fits - but elite geeks are going to own clothes embedded with tiny electronics that can monitor heart and respiratory functions wirelessly. After three days, whether it needs it or not, they can take it off and throw it in the wash.

At least that's the future researchers from the University of South Australia envision. They have been using integrated electronic technology to develop smart garments that, when placed on electronic hangers, enable monitored data to be downloaded in a heartbeat to a computer in your wardrobe, and then be recharged ready for wearing.

Scientists at Oxford University have come up with a way to make electricity biologically. It’s not an English version of Ed Begley, pedaling his stationary bike attached to a turbine to make tea and crumpets. Nope, two different enzymes (hydrogenase and laccase) work together to kick start the chemical reactions that make electricity from hydrogen. It’s a biological fuel cell.

Traditional fuel cells generally use platinum to catalyze the reactions. The precious metal is scarce and toxic, making it expensive and hardly eco-friendly. The enzymes in bio-fuel cells are ubiquitous, found in plants and micro-organisms. They are pretty much infinitely renewable and completely biodegradable. They effectively make biological batteries that never run out as long as there is some hydrogen around. And what’s more, the hydrogen stream does not have to be pure, as it does for chemical catalysts. The enzymes simply pick and choose the hydrogen atoms from a smorgasbord of gases that would render the traditional fuel cell utterly impotent.

Ain’t life grand!

The university’s commercialization company, Isis Innovations has a couple of bio-fuel cells running a digital watch as a demo, reminiscent of, but a jot more sophisticated than sticking electrodes into a spud. The company hopes the invention will juice up all kinds of small electronics, and eventually more power-hungry gizmos.

However, the Oxford profs have a nagging little problem in common with traditional fuel cell developers.

Artificially replicating the male genome could help men with very low sperm counts become fathers, a scientist told the 23rd annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (Tuesday 3 July). Professor Takumi Takeuchi, of Weill Medical College, Cornell University, New York, USA, said that mouse experiments by his team, led by Professor Gianpiero D. Palermo, had shown that offspring born as a result of such replication had shown a level of abnormalities consistent with that shown in cloned animals.

Hundreds of thousands of vibrant blue and red stars are visible in this new image of galaxy NGC 4449 taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Hot bluish white clusters of massive stars are scattered throughout the galaxy, interspersed with numerous dustier reddish regions of current star formation. Massive dark clouds of gas and dust are silhouetted against the flaming starlight.

NGC 4449 has been forming stars since several billion years ago, but currently it is experiencing a star formation event at a much higher rate than in the past. This unusual explosive and intense star formation activity qualifies as a starburst.