technologyreview.com: By Emily Singer

Compounds boost endurance and allow mice to run for substantially longer.

The elusive exercise pill just took a step closer to becoming a reality. Scientists have found that two compounds can boost endurance in mice by changing the metabolic properties of the animals’ muscle. One of the drugs appears to mimic some of the benefits of exercise even in sedentary mice. But the most dramatic benefit comes from combining one of the drugs with exercise, enabling mice to run 60 to 75 percent longer. [ read more ]

technologyreview.com: By Alexandra M. Goho

Frances Arnold is designing better enzymes for making biofuels from cellulose.

In December, President Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which calls for U.S. production of renewable fuels to reach 36 billion gallons a year–nearly five times current levels–by 2022. Of that total, cellulosic biofuels derived from sources such as agricultural waste, wood chips, and prairie grasses are supposed to account for 16 billion gallons. If the mandates are met, gasoline consumption should decline significantly, reducing both greenhouse-gas emissions and imports of foreign oil. [ read more ]

seedmagazine.com: by Jonah Lehrer

New research is linking dopamine to complex social phenomena and changing neuroscience in the process.

Read Montague is getting frustrated. He’s trying to show me his newest brain scanner, a gleaming white fMRI machine that looks like a gargantuan tanning bed. The door, however, can be unlocked only by a fingerprint scan, which isn’t recognizing Montague’s fingers. Again and again, he inserts his palm under the infrared light, only to get the same beep of rejection. Montague is clearly growing frustrated — “ I can’t get into my own scanning room!” he yells, at no one in particular — but he also appreciates the irony. A pioneer of brain imaging, he oversees one of the premier fMRI setups in the world, and yet he can’t even scan his own hand. “I can image the mind,” he says. “But apparently my thumb is beyond the limits of science.” [ read more ]

dailygalaxy.com: by Casey Kazan.

“I certainly think that humans are not the limit of evolutionary complexity. There may indeed be post–human entities, either organic or silicon–based, which can in some respects surpass what a human can do. I think it would be rather surprising if our mental capacities were matched to understanding all the levels of reality. The chimpanzees certainly aren’t, so why should ours be either? So there may be levels that will have to await some post-human emergence.” [ read more ]

dailygalaxy.com: by Casey Kazan.

“Everyone has assumed we age by rust. But how do you explain animals that don’t age? Some tortoises lay eggs at the age of 100, there are whales that live to be 200 and clams that make it past 400 years.”

Stuart Kim, PhD, Stanford University professor of developmental biology and genetics

Prevailing theory of aging challenged by Stanford University Medical School researchers. Their discovery contradicts the prevailing theory that aging is a buildup of tissue damage similar to rust. The Stanford findings suggest specific genetic instructions drive the process. If they are right, science might one day find ways of switching the signals off and halting or even reversing aging. [ read more ]

lifeboat.com: By Michael Anissimov

A first-generation commercial brain-computer interface (BCI) is being released by Emotiv Systems later this year. What does the future hold for BCI?

By 2050, and likely sooner, you will be able to buy a BCI device that records all your dreams in their entirety. This will be done in one of two ways. One method would be to use distributed nanobots less than a micrometer in diameter to spread throughout the brain and monitor the activation patterns of neurons. [ read more ]

lifeboat.com: By David Brin, Ph.D.

In order to give you pleasant dreams tonight, let me offer a few possibilities about the days that lie ahead — changes that may occur within the next twenty or so years, roughly a single human generation. Possibilities that are taken seriously by some of today’s best minds. Potential transformations of human life on Earth and, perhaps, even what it means to be human.

For example, what if biologists and organic chemists manage to do to their laboratories the same thing that cyberneticists did to computers? Shrinking their vast biochemical labs from building-sized behemoths down to units that are utterly compact, making them smaller, cheaper, and more powerful than anyone imagined. Isn’t that what happened to those gigantic computers of yesteryear? Until, today, your pocket cell phone contains as much processing power and sophistication as NASA owned during the moon shots. People who foresaw this change were able to ride this technological wave. Some of them made a lot of money. [ read more ]

lifeboat.com:  By Daniel D. Brown.

Ever since the evolution of the sensory neuron, organisms have been using these amazing peepholes into existence to direct the course of their lives. Now, humankind has elevated the role of these senses, and even created technological extensions of them, in order to find order and true knowledge of this Universe in which we exist. We are all scientists looking at the world through our own tiny peepholes, attempting to find our place within it.

We have sought to understand what we are made of, what drives our constant fight against entropy, and what defines us as thinking, living entities. Who knows what the future may hold or what constraints will be placed on our knowledge, whether through considered intellect and experience or through societal and cultural pressures? For the purpose of this article, I am ignoring any social, cultural, or religious implications or constraints that may face the endeavors of science. I simply ask: what questions remain about ourselves and our reality that science may theoretically be able to answer in the future? [ read more ]

wired.com: By Alexis Madrigal

Deep below the sea floor live massive colonies of primitive microbes. Almost like one-celled zombies, these microbes use so little energy that it might be more accurate to call them undead rather than alive.

Yet scientists think that the species might provide a model for life on other planets. Even on this planet, such microbes might account for a whopping 10 percent of the Earth’s biomass. [ read more ]

seedmagazine.com: by PZ Myers

The idea of humankind as a paragon of design is called into question by the puffer fish genome - the smallest, tidiest vertebrate genome of all.

When I mention the Japanese puffer fish, or fugu, to friends and students who are even slightly pop-culture savvy, I get a predictable response: That’s the fish that almost killed Homer Simpson! The fugu is an actual fish, and a beautiful little advanced bony one. Among its claims to fame is that it protects itself from being eaten by secreting a potent neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin that blocks nerve impulses and can kill a person in a high enough dose. That’s part of the reason humans eat it, though: If carefully prepared and not eaten in excess, it can provide a peculiar tingle to the lips—and the thrill of a little danger. In the well-known episode of The Simpsons, Homer discovers the joys of sushi, overindulges in poorly prepared fugu, thinks he has only a day to live, and typical sitcom hijinks ensue (ruined slightly for us science geeks, who know that fugu poisoning leads to rapid paralysis, which would tend to interfere with hijinks).

Fugu has another property of greater interest to evolutionary and developmental biologists, molecular biologists, and geneticists, though: It has an unusual genome. Through genomes, biology organizes genetic material into different forms of life; what we often find is that the real surprises are deep, hidden, and require a delicate sense of appreciation. In order to explain what’s unusual about the fugu’s genome, a comparison with our own human genome is in order. [ read more ]