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Scientists from Université Laval’s Faculty of Medicine have succeeded in producing neurons in vitro using stem cells extracted from adult human skin. This is the first time such an advanced state of nerve cell differentiation has been achieved from human skin, according to lead researcher Professor François Berthod. This breakthrough could eventually lead to revolutionary advances in the treatment of neurodegenerative illnesses such as Parkinson’s disease. Berthod and his team described the method used to produce these neurons in a recent issue of the Journal of Cellular Physiology.
The researchers used skin obtained from plastic surgery procedures.

At any given time, most of the roughly 30,000 genes that constitute the human genome are inactive, or repressed, closed to the cellular machinery that transcribes genes into the proteins of the body. In an average cell, only about one in ten genes is active, or expressed, at any given moment, with its DNA open to the cell' transcriptional machinery.
A dynamic cast of gatekeeper enzymes controls this access to the DNA, adding and removing particular molecules to open or close the genome to transcription as needed. Fully explicating the complex interplay among these enzymes and the molecules they manage has been a primary goal for scientists seeking to understand the mechanisms governing gene control.

Drilling is complete on an Alaskan North Slope well, cofunded by the Department of Energy, that could prove to be an important milestone in assessing America's largest potential fossil energy resource: gas hydrate.
Gas hydrate is an ice-like solid that results from the trapping of methane molecules - the main component of natural gas - within a lattice-like cage of water molecules. Dubbed the "ice that burns," this substance releases gaseous methane when it melts.
The size of the global gas hydrate resource is staggering, holding more ultimate energy potential than all other fossil fuels combined, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

Researchers at the University of East Anglia are about to embark on an innovative new project to develop computer lip-reading systems that could be used for fighting crime.
The three-year project, which starts next month, will collect data for lip-reading and use it to create machines that automatically convert videos of lip-motions into text. It builds on work already carried out at UEA to develop state-of-the-art speech reading systems.

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African and African American women are more likely to die of breast cancer than their white counterparts because they tend to get the disease before the menopause, suggests new research from the University of East Anglia and the Children’s Hospital Boston in collaboration with researchers in the US and Italy.
A racial disparity in mortality rates from breast cancer in the US first appeared in the 1970s coinciding with the introduction of mammography.

Bacteria could be used to help steady buildings against earthquakes, according to researchers at UC Davis. The microbes can literally convert loose, sandy soil into rock.
When a major earthquake strikes, deep, sandy soils can turn to liquid, with disastrous consequences for buildings sitting on them. Currently, civil engineers can inject chemicals into the soil to bind loose grains together. But these epoxy chemicals may have toxic effects on soil and water, said Jason DeJong, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis.

Habitual intake of caffeinated beverages provides protection against heart disease mortality in the elderly, say researchers at SUNY Downstate Medical Center and Brooklyn College.
Using data from the first federal National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey Epidemiologic Follow-up Study, the researchers found that survey participants 65 or more years old with higher caffeinated beverage intake exhibited lower relative risk of coronary vascular disease and heart mortality than did participants with lower caffeinated beverage intake.

USC's lego-like autonomous robotic units show off ability to reconfigure into different systems for different tasks.Wei-Min Shen of the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute recently reported to NASA significant progress in developing "SuperBot," identical modular units that plug into each other to create robots that can stand, crawl, wiggle and even roll. He illustrated his comments with striking video of the system in action, video now posted on line. 

A Binghamton University researcher has established a new framework to help determine whether individuals might be at risk for schizophrenia.
In a study published in this month's Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Mark F. Lenzenweger, a professor of clinical science, neuroscience and cognitive psychology at Binghamton University, State University of New York (SUNY), is the first to have found that abnormalities in eye movements and attention can be used to divide people into two groups in relation to schizophrenia-related risk.
"Schizophrenia affects one in every 100 people," said Lenzenweger, who considers it the costliest form of mental illness known to humankind.

The ESO Very Large Telescope Interferometer, which allows astronomers to scrutinise objects with a precision equivalent to that of a 130-m telescope, is proving itself an unequalled success every day. One of the latest instruments installed, AMBER, has led to a flurry of scientific results, an anthology of which is being published this week as special features in the research journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
"With its unique capabilities, the VLT Interferometer (VLTI) has created itself a niche in which it provide answers to many astronomical questions, from the shape of stars, to discs around stars, to the surroundings of the supermassive black holes in active galaxies," says Jorge Melnick (ESO), the VLT Project Scientist.

MOSCOW. (Yury Zaitsev for RIA Novosti) - Thirty years ago the Soviet government issued a resolution on setting up a space-based system to search for ships in distress (known by its initials in Russian, KOSPAS) anywhere in the world.
The quick location of such ships reduced by nearly tenfold the time of rescue operations in comparison with the usual methods and also reduced the risk of accidents involving rescue ships and aircraft themselves. For Russia, with its vast, sparsely populated areas and enormous expanses of ocean, creating an effective search-and-rescue system was of significant importance both socially and economically.

Science doesn’t always happen at a lab bench. For University of Toronto Mississauga physicist Kent Moore, it happens while strapped into a four-point harness, flying head-on into hurricane-force winds off the southern tip of Greenland.
Moore, chair of the Department of Chemical and Physical Sciences, is heading to Greenland from Feb. 18 to March 11 as part of the Greenland Flow Distortion experiment (GFDex), an International Polar Year research project involving Canadian, British, Norwegian and Icelandic scientists. Moore, a professor of atmospheric physics, is leading the Canadian contingent.

Credit: University of Toronto.