The first time travellers from the future could materialise on Earth within a few weeks.

Physicists around the world are excitedly awaiting the start up of the £4.65 billion Large Hadron Collider, LHC - the most powerful atom-smasher ever built - which is supposed to shed new light on the particles and forces at work in the cosmos and reproduce conditions that date to near the Big Bang of creation.

Prof Irina Aref'eva and Dr Igor Volovich, mathematical physicists at the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow believe that the vast experiment at CERN, the European particle physics centre near Geneva in Switzerland, may turn out to be the world's first time machine, reports New Scientist.

The debut in early summer could provide a landmark because travelling into the past is only possible - if it is possible at all - as far back as the point of creation of the first time machine.

That means 2008 could become "Year Zero" for temporal travel, they argue.

Time travel was born when Albert Einstein's colleague, Kurt Gödel, used Einstein's theory of relativity to show that travel into the past was possible.

Ever since he unveiled this idea in 1949, eminent physicists have argued against time travel because it undermines ideas of cause and effect to create paradoxes: a time traveller could go back to kill his grandfather so that he is never born in the first place.

But, sixty years later, there is still no fundamental reason why time travellers cannot put historians out of business.

But the Russians argue that when the energies of the LHC are concentrated into a subatomic particle - a trillionth the size of a mosquito - they can do strange things to the fabric of the universe, which is a blend of space and time that scientists called spacetime.

While Earth's gravity produces gentle distortions in spacetime the LHC energy can distort time so much that it loops back on itself. These loops are known to physicists as "closed timelike curves" and they ought, at least in theory, to allow us to revisit some past moment.

The scheme chimes with one laid out in 1988, when Prof Kip Thorne and colleagues at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, showed that wormholes, or tunnels through spacetime, would allow time travel, a scheme popularised by Carl Sagan in his novel - made into a film - Contact.

Prof Aref'eva and Dr Volovich believe the LHC could create wormholes and so allow a form of time travel. "We realised that closed timelike curves and wormholes could also be a result of collisions of particles," Prof Aref'eva says.

There are still plenty of obstacles for the likes of Dr Who, however. Not least of them is the fact that these are mini wormholes, so only subatomic particles are small enough to travel through them.

Sperm cells have been created from a female human embryo in a remarkable breakthrough that suggests it may be possible for lesbian couples to have their own biological children.

British scientists who had already coaxed male bone marrow cells to develop into primitive sperm cells have now repeated the feat with female embryonic stem cells.

The University of Newcastle team that has achieved the feat is now applying for permission to turn the bone marrow of a woman into sperm which, if successful, would make the method more practical than with embryonic cells.

It raises the possibility of lesbian couples one day having children who share both their genes as sperm created from the bone marrow of one woman could be used to fertilise an egg from her partner.

Men and women differ because of what are called sex chromosomes. Both have an X chromosome. But only men possess a Y chromosome that carries several genes thought to be essential to make sperm, so there has been scepticism that female stem cells could ever be used to make sperm.

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Boston (dbTechno) - University of Minnesota researchers made the announcement on Sunday that they have successfully created a beating rat heart in a laboratory.

The dream of being able to create new hearts and other organs is getting more and more a reality than ever before.

How they did it, was they removed all of the cells from a dead rat heart. They then used new heart cells injected from newborn rats, and within a few weeks, the new cells formed a new beating heart. The heart pumped blood as well.

Dr. Doris A. Taylor, the head of the team that created the beating heart, stated that the principle her laboratory followed was to “give nature the tools and get out of the way.”

She stated “We just took nature’s own building blocks to build a new organ.”

She continued, “The heart is a beautiful organ, and it’s not one that I thought I’d ever be able to build in a dish.”

The hope is that this will lead to the creation of hearts, kidneys, livers, lungs, and other organs for humans in the coming years.

The report has been published in the journal Nature Medicine.

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BEIJING - A cloned pig whose genes were altered to make it glow fluorescent green has passed on the trait to its young, a development that could lead to the future breeding of pigs for human transplant organs, a Chinese university reported.

The glowing piglets' birth proves transgenic pigs are fertile and able to pass on their engineered traits to their offspring, according to Liu Zhonghua, a professor overseeing the breeding program at Northeast Agricultural University.

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MOSCOW (AFP) - Russia plans to participate in a European mission to investigate Jupiter's moon Europa and search for simple life forms, the Interfax news agency reported on Monday, quoting a senior researcher.

The head of the Space Research Institute, Lev Zelyony, said a project to explore the giant gaseous planet Jupiter would shortly be included in the programme of the European Space Agency (ESA) for the years 2015 to 2025.

"The main task is to explore its satellite Europa, on which under a thick layer of ice a liquid water ocean has been detected," said Zelyony. Russia is to participate in the programme, called Laplace after French astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace, and has suggested landing a craft in one of the fissures in Europa's icy crust.

Having landed, the craft would melt some of the ice and search for life forms, he said.

"Where there is an ocean, life could arise. In this respect, after Mars, the Europa satellite is probably the most intriguing place in the solar system," said Zelyony.

Russia has gradually been reviving its space research programme, which all but collapsed after the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991. Moscow has been cooperating closely with the ESA as part of this revival.

At the end of this year an upgraded Russian Soyuz rocket is due to be launched for the first time from the ESA's Kourou launchpad in French Guiana.

Last October Moscow also signed a deal with Washington to provide the US space agency NASA with instruments for scanning the Moon and Mars for water.

news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080107/sc_afp/russiaesaspaceresearch

Toshiba Builds Smaller Micro Nuclear Reactor

Toshiba has developed a new class of micro size Nuclear Reactors that is designed to power individual apartment buildings or city blocks. The new reactor, which is only 20 feet by 6 feet, could change everything for small remote communities, small businesses or even a group of neighbors who are fed up with the power companies and want more control over their energy needs.

The 200 kilowatt Toshiba designed reactor is engineered to be fail-safe and totally automatic and will not overheat. Unlike traditional nuclear reactors the new micro reactor uses no control rods to initiate the reaction. The new revolutionary technology uses reservoirs of liquid lithium-6, an isotope that is effective at absorbing neutrons. The Lithium-6 reservoirs are connected to a vertical tube that fits into the reactor core. The whole whole process is self sustaining and can last for up to 40 years, producing electricity for only 5 cents per kilowatt hour, about half the cost of grid energy.

Toshiba expects to install the first reactor in Japan in 2008 and to begin marketing the new system in Europe and America in 2009.

ScienceDaily (Nov. 21, 2007) — MIT scientists have devised remotely controlled nanoparticles that, when pulsed with an electromagnetic field, release drugs to attack tumors. The innovation could lead to the improved diagnosis and targeted treatment of cancer.

In earlier work the team, led by Sangeeta Bhatia, M.D.,Ph.D., an associate professor in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology (HST) and in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, developed injectable multi-functional nanoparticles designed to flow through the bloodstream, home to tumors and clump together. Clumped particles help clinicians visualize tumors through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

With the ability to see the clumped particles, Bhatia's co-author in the current work, Geoff von Maltzahn, asked the next question: "Can we talk back to them?"

The answer is yes, the team found. The system that makes it possible consists of tiny particles (billionths of a meter in size) that are superparamagnetic, a property that causes them to give off heat when they are exposed to a magnetic field. Tethered to these particles are active molecules, such as therapeutic drugs.

Exposing the particles to a low-frequency electromagnetic field causes the particles to radiate heat that, in turn, melts the tethers and releases the drugs. The waves in this magnetic field have frequencies between 350 and 400 kilohertz--the same range as radio waves. These waves pass harmlessly through the body and heat only the nanoparticles. For comparison, microwaves, which will cook tissue, have frequencies measured in gigahertz, or about a million times more powerful.

The tethers in the system consist of strands of DNA, "a classical heat sensitive material," said von Maltzahn, a graduate student in HST. Two strands of DNA link together through hydrogen bonds that break when heated. In the presence of the magnetic field, heat generated by the nanoparticles breaks these, leaving one strand attached to the particle and allowing the other to float away with its cargo.

One advantage of a DNA tether is that its melting point is tunable. Longer strands and differently coded strands require different amounts of heat to break. This heat-sensitive tuneability makes it possible for a single particle to simultaneously carry many different types of cargo, each of which can be released at different times or in various combinations by applying different frequencies or durations of electromagnetic pulses.

To test the particles, the researchers implanted mice with a tumor-like gel saturated with nanoparticles. They placed the implanted mouse into the well of a cup-shaped electrical coil and activated the magnetic pulse. The results confirm that without the pulse, the tethers remain unbroken. With the pulse, the tethers break and release the drugs into the surrounding tissue.

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21886974/

Two research groups have found different genetic recipes to give ordinary skin cells the power to turn into virtually any kind of human tissue, just as embryonic stem cells do.

If the recipes live up to their promise, they could someday end the ethical debate over embryonic stem cell research — and usher in an era when a person's own cells could be manipulated to mend a broken spinal cord, heal a damaged heart or regenerate other failing tissues.

But in their current state, the recipes are too risky for disease treatment, and even the scientists behind the latest studies cautioned that therapies are still years away. In announcing their discoveries, they emphasized that much more research still needs to be done on stem cells that have been derived from human embryos.

"It's not the time to say human embryonic stem cell research is dead," James Thomson, a biologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, who is behind a study appearing in the journal Science, told msnbc.com. Kyoto University's Shinya Yamanaka, the principal author of a study published by the journal Cell, echoed that view, saying it would be "premature" to conclude that the cells created in his lab could replace embryonic stem cells.  The two sets of findings are already stirring up fresh controversy among scientists.

"This work represents a tremendous scientific milestone, the biological equivalent of the Wright brothers' first airplane," Lanza, ACT's chief scientific officer, told msnbc.com. "It's a bit like turning lead into gold. But this is not over by a long shot. It's extremely important to temper this announcement with caution."

Lanza said he would continue his work on a technique to extract stem cells from human embryos without destroying the embryo itself.

No embryos required
The recipes detailed in Cell and Science don't require embryos at all — or even unfertilized human egg cells. Instead, the technique involves slipping a set of four genes into skin cells, in a specially prepared culture that coaxes the cells to behave like an embryonic stem cell.

Like embryonic stem cells, these reprogrammed cells become "pluripotent" — that is, they're capable of turning themselves into virtually any tissue type in the human body, including neurons and heart tissue. They also exhibit many of the other biochemical properties of embryonic stem cells, although they're not genetically identical to stem cells.

news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071112/sc_afp/ussciencefuel

CHICAGO (AFP) - US researchers have developed a method of producing hydrogen gas from biodegradable organic material, potentially providing an abundant source of this clean-burning fuel, according to a study released Monday.

The technology offers a way to cheaply and efficiently generate hydrogen gas from readily available and renewable biomass such as cellulose or glucose, and could be used for powering vehicles, making fertilizer and treating drinking water.

Numerous public transportation systems are moving toward hydrogen-powered engines as an alternative to gasoline, but most hydrogen today is generated from nonrenewable fossil fuels such as natural gas.

The method used by engineers at Pennsylvania State University however combines electron-generating bacteria and a small electrical charge in a microbial fuel cell to produce hydrogen gas.

Microbial fuel cells work through the action of bacteria which can pass electrons to an anode. The electrons flow from the anode through a wire to the cathode producing an electric current. In the process, the bacteria consume organic matter in the biomass material.

An external jolt of electricity helps generate hydrogen gas at the cathode.

In the past, the process, which is known as electrohydrogenesis, has had poor efficiency rates and low hydrogen yields.

But the researchers at Pennsylvania State University were able to get around these problems by chemically modifying elements of the reactor.

In laboratory experiments, their reactor generated hydrogen gas at nearly 99 percent of the theoretical maximum yield using aetic acid, a common dead-end product of glucose fermentation.

"This process produces 288 percent more energy in hydrogen than the electrical energy that is added in the process," said Bruce Logan, a professor of environmental engineering at Penn State.

The technology is economically viable now, which gives hydrogen an edge over another alternative biofuel which is grabbing more headlines, Logan said.

"The energy focus is currently on ethanol as a fuel, but economical ethanol from cellulose is 10 years down the road," said Logan.

"First you need to break cellulose down to sugars and then bacteria can convert them to ethanol."

One of the immediate applications for this technology is to supply the hydrogen that is used in fuel cell cars to generate the electricity that drives the motor, but it could also can be used to convert wood chips into hydrogen to be used as fertilizer.

The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

www.js.chinanews.com.cn/news/2007/2007-10-09/1/28074.html

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Three Transformers fans in China have taken three months to build their own robot out of a Citroen C2 car.

Sui Lulu, Zhang Yiming and Li Wei, from Nanjing city, have named the 15ft Transformer X2, reports the Jinling Evening Post.

"We are huge Transformers fans, and grew up with them on TV and in comic books. We always wanted to have our own transformer, a real one," says graphic designer Sui Lulu.

He says they picked the Citroen C2 because it's small: "We originally wanted to make the figure of Optimus Prime, who is transformed from a truck.

"But we calculated that the final figure would be around seven storeys high, and we couldn't find room for it. So we went with the Citroen C2."

X2 is loosely based on the Bumblebee and Jazz Transformers in the movie.

But Sui added: "We added a lot of our things, like some Chinese elements. The head of X2 is like an ancient Chinese war helmet, simple but beautiful."

He admits that, because of financial constraints, their Transformer can't actually do much transforming.

"The legs bend, since we installed two hydraulic pressure rods, and the finger joints move. Also, we added a pedrail to his feet," he said.

The youngsters are now planning to fulfill their original ambition to make a giant Transformer based on Optimus Prime.