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Advances in digital electronic circuits have prompted the boost in functions and ever- smaller size of such popular consumer goods as digital cameras, MP3 players and digital televisions. But the same cannot be said of the older analog circuits in the same devices, which process natural sights and sounds in the real world. Because analog circuits haven't enjoyed a similar rate of progress, they are draining power and causing other bottlenecks in improved consumer electronic devices.
Now MIT engineers have devised new analog circuits they hope will change that. Their work was discussed at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco Feb.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine have derived uniparental embryonic stem cells - created from a single donor's eggs or two sperm - and, for the first time, successfully used them to repopulate a damaged organ with healthy cells in adult mice. Their findings demonstrate that single-parent stem cells can proliferate normally in an adult organ and could provide a less controversial alternative to the therapeutic cloning of embryonic stem cells.
"Creating uniparental embryonic stem cells is actually much more efficient than generating embryonic stem cells by cloning," said K.

In the digital age, organizing a photo collection has gone from bad to worse. The saying used to be that a picture is worth a thousand words. Now the question arises: what are a thousand pictures worth?
"Anyone who has a digital camera has the problem that they have more photos than they can possibly navigate," says Steve Seitz, associate professor of computer science & engineering. "And it's always a problem to find the photo that you're looking for."

Photo Tourism places each photo where the photographer would have been standing. Here, one photo of Trevi Fountain in Rome is enlarged, while other photos appear as pyramids.

With an aging population susceptible to stroke, Parkinson’s disease and other neurological conditions, and military personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with serious limb injuries, the need for strategies that treat complex neurological impairments has never been greater.
One tack being pursued by neuroscientists and engineers is the development of “smart” neural prostheses. These devices are intended to restore function, through electrical stimulation, to damaged motor neural circuits – the long, slender fibers that conduct neurochemical messages between nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord.

A newly designed porous membrane, so thin it's invisible edge-on, may revolutionize the way doctors and scientists manipulate objects as small as a molecule.
The 50-atom thick filter can withstand surprisingly high pressures and may be a key to better separation of blood proteins for dialysis patients, speeding ion exchange in fuel cells, creating a new environment for growing neurological stem cells, and purifying air and water in hospitals and clean-rooms at the nanoscopic level.

Membrane sorts molecules by size. Credit: University of Rochester.

Plants have an immune system that resists infection, yet 10% of the world's agricultural production is lost annually to diseases caused by bacteria, fungi, and viruses. Understanding how disease resistance works may help combat this scourge.
In a new study published online this week in the open-access journal PLoS Biology, Tessa Burch-Smith, Savithramma Dinesh-Kumar, and colleagues show how one aspect of the plant immune system is defined by the gene-for-gene hypothesis: a plant Resistance (R) gene encodes a protein that specifically recognizes and protects against one pathogen or strain of a pathogen carrying a corresponding Avirulence (Avr) gene.
In tobacco and its relatives, the N resistance protein confers resistance to infection by the Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV).

The Allen Brain Atlas, a genome-wide map of the mouse brain on the Internet, has been hailed as “Google of the brain.” The atlas now has a companion or the brain’s working molecules, a sort of pop-up book of the proteins, or proteome map, that those genes express.
The protein map is “the first to apply quantitative proteomics to imaging,” said Richard D. Smith, Battelle Fellow at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who led the mapping effort with Desmond Smith of UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.

Caption: Abundance profiles of four different proteins compiled from 1 millimeter cubes (voxels) in a mouse brain.

Stem cell technique helps women grow their own implants
Daily Mail - Women have grown their own breast implants through pioneering stem cell treatment, it emerged yesterday. Scientists harvested the stem cells from the women's own fat and encouraged them to form breast tissue...
Global-warming skeptics cite being 'treated like a pariah'

There's science in love, you know, and that means there's science in Valentine's Day. Science on Valentine's Day is like cold fusion instead of ethanol. Completely wonderful. And we have it all right here.
Not sure who to date? Garth Sundem answers it in The Valentine's Day Man-O-Meter. Be sure to take it as gospel because he never just makes stuff up.There's science in love, you know, and that means there's science in Valentine's Day. Science on Valentine's Day is like cold fusion instead of ethanol. Completely wonderful. And we have it all right here.

VK Raina, leading glaciologist and former ADG of the Geological Society of India, told the Hindustan Times that out of 9,575 glaciers in India, till date, research has been conducted only on about 50. Nearly 200 years data has shown that nothing abnormal has occurred in any of these glaciers.
It is simple. The issue of glacial retreat is being sensationalised by a few individuals, the septuagenarian Raina claimed.

New research challenges traditional perceptions of contemporary climate as sole determiner of richness of species.
The climate is changing! But how does that affect nature? New research challenges traditional perceptions of contemporary climate as sole determiner of richness of species.
An international research team led by Professor Carsten Rahbek from Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen, questions traditional beliefs that contemporary climate alone determines richness of species, that is, how life is distributed on earth. The current issue of Science magazine highlights the research in Editor’s choice.

An artificial nose could be a real benefit at times: this kind of biosensor could sniff out poisons, explosives or drugs, for instance. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research and the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry recently revealed a technique for integrating membrane proteins into artificial structures.
Membrane proteins have several important functions in the cell, one of which is to act as receptors, passing on signals from molecules in the air, for example, to the cell interior. They are thus ideal biosensors, but until now were difficult to access in the lab.