The United States NAE has made public a list of which would be the main engineering challenges in the 21st century. Here are the 14 challenges:

• Reaching the goal of making solar energy accessible
• Supplying energy from fusion
• Developing methods for capturing carbon dioxide
• Managing nitrogen cycle problems
• Supplying access to drinking water
• Restoring and improving urban infrastructures
• Advancing in computer catalogs in health
• Designing better medicines
• Reverse-engineering the brain
• Preventing nuclear terror
• Protecting cyberspace
• Enriching virtual reality
• Advancing in personalized learning
• Designing tools for scientific discovery

Within these challenges is human learning and artificial intelligence, which awakens a great interest in the general public. Delving into the functioning of the brain will help the development of artificial intelligence, while at the same time new medicines should be developed to check the expansion of new viruses and dangers of terrorist origin. Also, the consequences of natural disasters will have to be confronted and the infrastructures of cities and services will have to be renovated, preserving the fragile ecological equilibrium.

Robert Socolow pointed out that this list has been elaborated in part so that the public could be aware of it and could understand to what point investments in science and engineering can improve human life.

Experiments with blind octopus suggested that these are capable of locating the sounds produced by boats or by tapping on a tank. However, Hong Young Yan, a sensory physiologist of the Taiwan National Academy of Science in Taipei, discovered that octopus and squid could be using another organ called the statocyst – sacs that contain a mineralized mass and sensory hairs – to register sounds.

The team of scientists had to overcome many obstacles during their research. For example, the common way of proving that an organism can hear is by measuring how its nervous system responds electrically to sound. But this can require attaching electrodes directly on the exposed nerves, a procedure that could damage the delicate molluscs.

The next step, Yan said, would be to investigate what types of sounds cephalopods can hear.

Stem cells are cells that have the capacity to self-renovate through mitotitic cell division or to continue differentiating according to its programming and, thus, producing cells of one or more mature, functional and completely differentiated tissues depending on their degree of multipotency.

The mensechymal cells extracted from umbilical cords, dental pulp or adipose tissue can differentiate to turn into muscular, osseous or cartilage cells, as opposed to stem cells. But according to the research report, mensechymal cells extracted from the Fallopian tubes could be isolated and multiplied through in vitro procedures with the capacity of turning into muscular, adipose and osseous cells.

Tatiana Jazedje, head of the scientific team, said, “Besides providing another potential source of regenerative medicine, the results of this study could contribute to reproductive science in general.”

Wong made the discovery public in a discourse titled “Protein Glycosylation: New Challenges and Opportunities” during the 12th International Symposium of the Society of Chinese Bioscientists in America (SCBA) that closes today. The biochemist expert stated that his research team had discovered that most flu viruses use glycoprotein to prevent their detection by the immune system. Additionally, this team has created a molecular vaccine that eliminates the glycoproteinic mask, which allows the immune system to detect and eliminate the virus.

The vaccine would not be available on the market until 10 years from now, as until now it has only been tested on animals, Wong said. The vaccine would be effective for several years, unlike current flu vaccines that need to be renewed every year.

“It can be used to fight a great variety of virus,” said the expert. Taiwan has the technology for the development and commercialization of this vaccine, which could revolutionize protection against flu viruses.

I120IConventional electronic chips are made of a small piece of silicon, which is made by cooling pure melted silicon that then solidifies into a crystal. These plates are chemically “doped” with impurities to improve their ability to conduct electricity.

The type of impurities affects the direction of the electrical charge. However, the weakness of the silicon chips is that they are very sensitive to heat. This is a factor that makes the use of fans and other cooling elements necessary, which in turn limits the future miniaturization of computers.

The physics Yulin Chen and Zhi-Xun Shen tested the behavior of the electrons on bismuth telluride, the previously mentioned compound. The results, published in the last online edition of Science Express, show a clear signature of what is called a topological insulator, a material capable of encouraging the free flow of electrons on its surface without losing energy. The advance is more significant since these researchers have proved that capacity at room temperature.

Through Project Melissa, Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative, this problem would turn into a problem of the past. Melissa is the creation of an artificial ecosystem that generates oxygen, water and vegetable foods by recycling organic residues, urine, feces and CO2. Although Melissa is currently only being used to evaluate the production of oxygen, the complete process will be very long and complex.

This project was inaugurated June 4 at one of Barcelona, Spain’s universities, the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona (UAB. It’s the first laboratory that intends to reproduce this world of total recycling and evaluate the best technologies for obtaining oxygen and food, an initiative of the European Agency of Space, defrayed by the members of the organization, in Spain.

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The molecule compound halofuginone inhibits the development of TH17, a specialized immune cell and important factor in the development of autoimmune diseases, both in mice and humans, without altering the other immune cells.

Mark Sundrud, research director, and the other scientists have also reported that halofuginone activates the response to the deprivation of amino acids (AAR) in live mice, protecting them from autoimmunity in a TH17 mouse model associated with multiple sclerosis.

The discovery of this molecule could lead to clinical applications in the future.

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Hotel Luna Salada was built in 1993 by a salt extraction dealer who observed the growing number of tourists to the area. The hotel is made of salt blocks joined by cement, with concrete-reinforced foundations to withstand the weather, especially rain. The only part of the structure made of a different material is the ceiling, which is made of straw.

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The Uyuni Salt Flats have an extension of 10,582 square kilometers and are found 3,650 meters above sea level in the Andes, in southwest Bolivia. They were part of Lake Minchin 40,000 years ago, but when it dried up, two lakes were formed, the Poopó and the Uru Uru, and two salt deposits, the Coipasa Salt Flats and Uyuni. This hidden area in the Bolivian lithium reserves is awakening the curiosity of many backpackers, while the Bolivian government is beginning to see the area as a great opportunity for tourism.

André Knop, research director, together with the rest of the team, explained that mental arithmetic uses an ancestral neural system whose original function is the understanding and visualization of physical space.

The discovery took place during the use of image data from functional magnetic resonance (IRMf) of people to create a computer program capable of inferring the neural activity of the subjects based on the direction in which the eyes moved. The researchers made the participants perform mental addition or subtraction; then the program could predict which exercise the person had done based only on the registered neural activity.

As more trials were run, it was discovered that eye movement toward the right was related with addition while looking to the left denoted a subtraction.

These discoveries are consistent with the theories that suggest that the development of math in humans was not accompanied by a new part of the brain developed to make these operations but that an existing region was used to codify mathematic operations. In this case, the already-developed circuit of the right-left movements turned out to match the addition and subtraction of numbers.