Geneticists Breach Ethical Taboo By Changing Genes Across Generations

by Rob Stein October 24, 2012 3:00 PM Geneticist reported Wednesday that they had crossed a threshold long considered off-limits: They have made changes in human DNA that can be passed down from one generation to the next. The researchers at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland say they took the step to try to prevent women from giving birth to babies with genetic diseases. But the research is raising a host of ethical, social and moral questions. "That kind of genetic engineering has been ruled off-limits," says Marcy Darnovsky of the Center for Genetics and Society. "And it's a very bright line that has been observed by scientists around the world." There have been lots of reasons for that line. One big one is purely practical, says Dartmouth bioethicist Ronald Green. "If we make mistakes, we'll effectively be introducing a new genetic disease into the human population — for generation after generation," Green says. But beyond the risks, Green says taking that step has long raised more far-reaching fears. It's the kind of technology that could be used to try to create genetically superior humans. "It could easily move into the realm of gene enhancement," Green says. "Higher IQ. Improved physical appearance. Athletic ability. That's a worry to some people — to many people." But in this week's issue of the scientific journal Nature, Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health & Science University and colleagues report that they have crossed that line. They have figured out a way to change the DNA in a human egg. Why? Mitalipov says his team is trying to prevent some rare but horrible disorders: genetic conditions caused by defects in a certain kind of DNA known as mitochondrial DNA, which only mothers pass down to their kids. "They are caused by mutations in this mitochondrial DNA, which is pretty small — only encodes 37 genes," Mitalipov says. So Mitalipov's team figured out a way to pluck these little packets of defective mitochondrial DNA out of eggs and replace them with healthy genes from eggs donated by other women. They fertilized the transplanted eggs in the laboratory and showed they could create healthy embryos. "What we showed is that the faulty genes, which are usually passed through the woman's egg, can be safely replaced. And that way, the egg still retains its capacity to be fertilized by sperm and develop," he says. The researchers haven't taken the next step yet: They haven't tried to make babies out of these modified embryos. But they have made baby monkeys this way, increasing their confidence it would work. And some other doctors hope so, too. Mary Herbert of Newcastle University is part of a team that has prompted a national debate in England by doing similar research. She also hopes to help women who have gone through the trauma of giving birth to a baby with one of these genetic conditions. "In severe cases, the child will die in the first days of life, or they might live, you know, a few years and then die," Herbert says. "It's like a game of Russian roulette." But the work raises a long list of questions. One is about the morality of creating embryos in the laboratory for research and destroying them, which some consider immoral. Another is about the safety of the women donating the eggs. And, of course, it's far from clear that the resulting babies will be healthy. But even if they are, there are still more questions. One is about the very genetic identity of any babies made this way. They'd inherit DNA from three separate people instead of the usual two: from the father's sperm; from the egg of the woman whose egg was fixed; and from the egg of the woman who donated some of her DNA to fix the problem. "So yes, we're going to have to, perhaps, get used to the fact that people can have three genetic parents in the future," Dartmouth bioethicist Green says. But beyond that, the move raises those early fears about manipulating DNA to create a brave new world of genetic haves and have-nots, according to Darnovsky. "Socially, what this would mean is we would be moving toward a world in which some people — and it would be people who could afford these procedures — would have either real or perceived genetic advantage," she says. Despite the concerns, Mitalipov and Herbert say the real benefits of preventing genetic diseases outweigh such hypothetical risks. Herbert is awaiting a decision by the British government on whether she can proceed to the next step in her research. Mitalipov has already asked the Food and Drug Administration if he can try to make a healthy baby by genetically altering human eggs.

Discovery of living mammoth cells claimed

YAKUTSK, Russia, Sept. 12 (UPI) -- Researchers with an expedition in Russia's northeastern republic of Yakutia say they've found the "living cells" of a mammoth frozen in permafrost. "In a unique area at the depth of about 100 meters (330 feet) we discovered some rich material for research -- soft and adipose tissues, fur and bone marrow of a mammoth," expedition leader Semyon Grigoryev told a meeting at a university in the region's capital city, Yakutsk. The discovery has attracted the attention of controversial South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk, who has already announced his intention to clone a woolly baby mammoth from a specimen discovered in permafrost on the coast of the Laptev Sea last year, RIA Novosti reported Tuesday. Hwang, the leader of Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, was hailed as a national hero in South Korea until some of his research on human embryos was declared fraudulent in 2006. He received a suspended jail term in 2009 for embezzlement and accepting millions of dollars in grants under fraudulent circumstances. Responding to the reports of the latest discovery, experts from the Institute of Paleontology of the Russian Academy of Sciences said the discovery of living mammoth cells is unlikely. "The cell structure with nucleus can be preserved [only] under special conditions in deep-freeze," Alexander Agadzhanyan, the chief of the Institute's mammal laboratory, said. Cells needed a stable exchange with the environment to stay alive, he said Read more: http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2012/09/12/Discovery-of-living-mammoth-cells-claimed/UPI-68251347486709/#ixzz26uu7qGV4

New theory says Big Bang was more like water freezing to ice

By Natalie Wolchover updated 8/21/2012 9:31:36 PM ET How did the universe begin? The Big Bang is traditionally envisioned as the moment when an infinitely dense bundle of energy suddenly burst outward, expanding in three spatial directions and gradually cooling down as it did so. Now, a team of physicists says the Big Bang should be modeled as a phase change: the moment when an amorphous, formless universe analogous to liquid water cooled and suddenly crystallized to form four-dimensional space-time, analogous to ice. In the new study, lead author James Quach and colleagues at the University of Melbourne in Australia say the hypothesis can be tested by looking for defects that would have formed in the structure of space-time when the universe crystallized. The universe is currently about 13.7 billion years old. "Think of the early universe as being like a liquid," Quach said in a statement. "Then as the universe cools, it 'crystallizes' into the three spatial and one time dimension that we see today. Theorized this way, as the universe cools, we would expect that cracks should form, similar to the way cracks are formed when water freezes into ice." If they exist, these cracks should be detectable, the researchers said, because light and other particles would bend or reflect off of them as they trek across the cosmos. [The History & Structure of the Universe (Infographic)] The notion that space and time are emergent properties that suddenly materialized out of an amorphous state was first put forth by physicists at Canada's Perimeter Institute in 2006. Called "quantum graphity," the theory holds that the four-dimensional geometry of space-time discovered by Albert Einstein is not fundamental; instead, space-time is more like a lattice constructed of discrete space-time building blocks, just like matter looks continuous, but is actually made of building blocks called atoms. Originally, at extremely high temperatures, the building blocks were like liquid water: they contained no structure, "representing a state with no space," the researchers wrote in their paper. At the moment of the Big Bang, when the temperature in the universe dropped to the space-time building blocks' "freezing point," they crystallized to form the four-dimensional lattice we observe today. The math describing the theory checks out, but "the challenge has been that these building blocks of space are very small, and so impossible to see directly," Quach explained. From the human vantage point, space-time looks smooth and continuous. However, while the building blocks themselves might be too small to detect, the physicists hope to observe the boundaries that would have formed as regions of crystallizing building blocks butted against one another at the time of the Big Bang, creating "cracks" in the universe. More work is needed to predict the average distance between the cracks — it isn't known whether they are microscopic, or light-years apart — in order to characterize their effects on particles. The research by Quach and his team is detailed in this month's edition of the journal Physical Review D.

Nazis Planned To Kill Churchill With Exploding Chocolate

A possible plot by the Nazis to use exploding chocolate to kill Winston Churchill during World War II has recently been discovered. As the Telegraph reports, the plan called for Adolf Hitler’s bomb makers to coat explosive devices with a thin layer of chocolate wrapped in fancy expensive looking black and gold paper in order to make it look like the Peters Chocolate brand of premium chocolates. These explosive chocolates (capable of taking out anyone within several meters of the device) incorporated a thin piece of canvas that would trigger the explosion 7 seconds after a piece was broken off. The next step of the plot, reports the DailyMail, involved having secret agents the Nazis had working in Britain to secretly place the sweetly disguised goodies in the dining room being used by the War Cabinet along with other fine luxury items. British spies, however, foiled the exploding chocolate plot. The British found out the chocolate bombs were being produced and contacted Lord Victor Rothschild, one of MI5′s most senior intelligence chiefs. Rothschild typed up a letter from his secret bunker in Parliament Street, London, asking artist Laurence Fish to draw up a poster sized image of the chocolate bombs in order to warn the public. Laurence Fish died in 2009 at the age of 89, leaving behind his wife, Jean Bray. This letter was recently discovered by Jean Bray, a journalist, while going through some of his possessions. The letter, which is marked SECRET, describes how the bombs are activated and gives a description of what to look for with a crude sketch. In the letter Lord Rothschild writes: ‘Dear Fish, I wonder if you could do a drawing for me of an explosive slab of chocolate. ‘We have received information that the enemy are using pound slabs of chocolate which are made of steel with a very thin covering of real chocolate. ‘Inside there is high explosive and some form of delay mechanism… When you break off a piece of chocolate at one end in the normal way, instead of it falling away, a piece of canvas is revealed stuck into the middle of the piece which has been broken off and a ticking into the middle of the remainder of the slab. ‘When the piece of chocolate is pulled sharply, the canvas is also pulled and this initiates the mechanism. ‘I enclose a very poor sketch done by somebody who has seen one of these. ‘It is wrapped in the usual sort of black paper with gold lettering, the variety being PETERS. ‘Would it be possible for you to do a drawing of this, one possibly with the paper half taken off revealing one end and another with the piece broken off showing the canvas. ‘The text should indicate that this piece together with the attached canvas is pulled out sharply and that after a delay of seven seconds the bomb goes off.’

Caravaggio claims spark Italian art world dispute

ROME – Caravaggio was notorious for his brawling, so it might be fitting that a claim by two Italian art historians that they discovered as many as 100 drawings by the painter in his boyhood has sparked an art world uproar. The researchers say they found dozens of early drawings by Caravaggio in the collection of master Milanese artist Simone Peterzano, the painter's teacher from 1584 to 1588. Many experts have responded with skepticism to the startling claim: Over the centuries, art historians have never definitively attributed any drawings to Caravaggio, who shook up 16th-century art by using models from the lower walks of life for religious scenes and dramatically counterpointing light and dark. On Friday, the curator of the drawings collection at Milan's Sforzesco Castle, where the collection of 1,500 painting generally attributed to Peterzano is kept, challenged the seriousness of the researchers' methods and contended that the pair had never set foot in the room to scrutinize the works. "We would be happy to have a Caravaggio," Francesco Rossi said, cautioning that it's difficult to be sure of the works' provenance. Making it especially difficult to pin works on Caravaggio was the artist's habit of not signing his own work. Attempts at fakes and uncertain claims of authenticity have been frequent. He dismissed the historians' methods as naive. "What surprised us about this thing is the fact that these experts never came here in the drawings department to see the works," Rossi told The Associated Press. "They evaluated (the drawings) using black and white photographs." The researchers defended their claim, which they made public on Thursday in an interview with the Italian news agency ANSA. Adriana Conconi Fedrigolli, told the AP in a phone interview that some of their research team studied the drawings firsthand. When pressed to identify the other researchers, she said she wasn't authorized to reveal their names and passed the phone to the other art historian, Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz. "I saw the originals," Bernadelli Curuz said. The art historian said he was able to visit the collection `'after hours," thanks to his contacts with a high-level city official who was authorized to enter the drawings department. He declined to identify the city official. But he insisted that he and Conconi Fedrigolli worked `'in a very scientific way" using photos of the drawings and comparing details to those in well-known Caravaggio works. He said it was not logical that among the Peterzano collection drawings there wouldn't be any by Caravaggio, a star pupil then known as Michelangelo Merisi. The artist is better known by the name of the Italian town where he was born. He contended they were able to distinguish drawings by Peterzano from those of his pupils, including Caravaggio. Among the prominent skeptics was Antonio Paolucci, the director of the Vatican Museums and one of Italy's most esteemed art historians and restoration experts, who pointed out that many experts have seen the drawing and "not one of those experts had come up with the name of Caravaggio." Paolucci described the claim as "pure inductive optimism" in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano on Friday, though he acknowledged it was always possible that "researchers with lesser credentials but with an especially gifted eye, sensitivity and also luck" had pinpointed something new. Paolucci has experienced first-hand the perils of attributing works to great artists, particularly Caravaggio. Two summers ago, the Vatican Museums director wrote an article under the headline "A New Caravaggio? Not really," a week after the Vatican newspaper first suggested that a painting depicting St. Lawrence could be that of Caravaggio -- but then backtracked. Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/07/06/caravaggio-claims-spark-italian-art-world-dispute/#ixzz1zzROzXb0

Mysterious planet-sized object spotted near Mercury

By Eric Pfeiffer | The Sideshow – Thu, Dec 8, 2011

Is a giant, cloaked spaceship orbiting around Mercury?

That's been the speculation from some corners aftera camera onboard NASA's STEREO spacecraft caught a wave of electronically charged material shooting out from the sun and hitting Mercury.

Theorists have seized on the images captured from the "coronal mass ejection" (CME) last week as suggestive of alien life hanging out in our own cosmic backyard. Specifically, the solar flare washing over Mercury appears to hit another object of comparable size. "It's cylindrical on either side and has a shape in the middle. It definitely looks like a ship to me, and very obviously, it's cloaked," YouTube-user siniXster said in his video commentary on the footage, which has generated hundreds of thousands of views this week. Now, how this user was able to determine that the object was "obviously" a cloaked spaceship with no other natural explanation remains as much a mystery as the object itself.



Of course, there's another scientifically sanctioned explanation for the curious images, though we're not certain that skeptics and UFO enthusiasts such as SiniXster will endorse it. Natalie Wolchover of Life's Little Mysteries put the question to scientists in the solar physics branch at the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). They're the people who analyze data from the Heliospheric Imager-1 (HI-1)--better known in this context as the camera that shot the footage in question.



Head NRL group scientist Russ Howard and lead ground systems engineer Nathan Rich say the mysterious object is in fact Mercury itself. And what we're seeing in the footage is the equivalent of Mercury's wake, "where the planet was on the previous day," as it travels through the solar system on its natural gravitational path:


To make the relatively faint glow of a coronal mass ejection stand out against the bright glare of space—caused by interplanetary dust and the stellar/galactic background—the NRL scientists must remove as much background light as possible. They explained that they determine what light is background light, and thus can be subtracted out, by calculating the average amount of light that entered each camera pixel on the day of the CME event and on the previous day. Light appearing in the pixels on both days is considered to be background light and is removed from the footage of the CME. The remaining light is then enhanced.

The analysts say the practice works even better when applied to far-off objects such as stars, which don't move much relative to the sun. But for moving objects, especially planets, the process is a little more complicated. And making matters even trickier is Mercury's staus as the closest planet to the sun.

"When [this averaging process] is done between the previous day and the current day and there is a feature like a planet, this introduces dark (negative) artifacts in the background where the planet was on the previous day, which then show up as bright areas in the enhanced image," Rich explained in an email

Real Jurassic Park? Scientists to bring back woolly mammoth

by Michael Henrich

Doesn't anybody remember Jurassic Park?

Perhaps a certain group of Japanese and Russian scientists does not.

Thanks to the finding of well-preserved bone marrow in a woolly mammoth thigh bone recovered from Siberia, these scientists believe they can clone the long-extinct species and bring it back into existence, according to published reports.

The researchers plan to produce embryos with mammoth DNA by replacing the nuclei of egg cells from an elephant with those taken from the mammoth's marrow cells, the reports state.

Scientists from Russia's Sakha Republic's mammoth museum and Japan's Kinki University are launching the joint research project next year and hope to clone a woolly mammoth within five years.

Mammoths became extinct roughly 10,000 years ago.

NASA Telescope Confirms Alien Planet in Habitable Zone

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has confirmed the discovery of its first alien world in its host star's habitable zone — that just-right range of distances that could allow liquid water to exist — and found more than 1,000 new explanet candidates, researchers announced today (Dec. 5).

The new finds bring the Kepler space telescope's total haul to 2,326 potential planets in its first 16 months of operation.These discoveries, if confirmed, would quadruple the current tally of worlds known to exist beyond our solar system, which recently topped 700.

The potentially habitable alien world, a first for Kepler, orbits a star very much like our own sun. The discovery brings scientists one step closer to finding a planet like our own — one which could conceivably harbor life, scientists said.

"We're getting closer and closer to discovering the so-called 'Goldilocks planet,'" Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., said during a press conference today. [Gallery: The Strangest Alien Planets]

The newfound planet in the habitable zone is called Kepler-22b. It is located about 600 light-years away, orbiting a sun-like star.

Kepler-22b's radius is 2.4 times that of Earth, and the two planets have roughly similar temperatures. If the greenhouse effect operates there similarly to how it does on Earth, the average surface temperature on Kepler-22b would be 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees Celsius).

Hunting down alien planets

The $600 million Kepler observatory launched in March 2009 to hunt for Earth-size alien planets in the habitable zone of their parent stars, where liquid water, and perhaps even life, might be able to exist.

Kepler detects alien planets using what's called the "transit method." It searches for tiny, telltale dips in a star's brightness caused when a planet transits — or crosses in front of — the star from Earth's perspective, blocking a fraction of the star's light.

The finds graduate from "candidates" to full-fledged planets after follow-up observations confirm that they're not false alarms. This process, which is usually done with large, ground-based telescopes, can take about a year.

The Kepler team released data from its first 13 months of operation back in February, announcing that the instrument had detected 1,235 planet candidates, including 54 in the habitable zone and 68 that are roughly Earth-size.

Of the total 2,326 candidate planets that Kepler has found to date, 207 are approximately Earth-size. More of them, 680, are a bit larger than our planet, falling into the "super-Earth" category. The total number of candidate planets in the habitable zones of their stars is now 48.

To date, just over two dozen of these potential exoplanets have been confirmed, but Kepler scientists have estimated that at least 80 percent of the instrument's discoveries should end up being the real deal.

More discoveries to come

The newfound 1,094 planet candidates are the fruit of Kepler's labors during its first 16 months of science work, from May 2009 to September 2010. And they won't be the last of the prolific instrument's discoveries.

"This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth's twin," Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., said in a statement.

Mission scientists still need to analyze data from the last two years and on into the future. Kepler will be making observations for a while yet to come; its nominal mission is set to end in November 2012, but the Kepler team is preparing a proposal to extend the instrument's operations for another year or more.

Kepler's finds should only get more exciting as time goes on, researchers say.

"We're pushing down to smaller planets and longer orbital periods," said Natalie Batalha, Kepler deputy science team lead at Ames.

To flag a potential planet, the instrument generally needs to witness three transits. Planets that make three transits in just a few months must be pretty close to their parent stars; as a result, many of the alien worlds Kepler spotted early on have been blisteringly hot places that aren't great candidates for harboring life as we know it.

Given more time, however, a wealth of more distantly orbiting — and perhaps more Earth-like — exoplanets should open up to Kepler. If intelligent aliens were studying our solar system with their own version of Kepler, after all, it would take them three years to detect our home planet.

"We are getting very close," Batalha said. "We are homing in on the truly Earth-size, habitable planets."

Report: Cancer is the world's costliest disease

By MARILYNN MARCHIONE (AP)
Cancer is the world's top "economic killer" as well as its likely leading cause of death, the American Cancer Society contends in a new report it will present at a global cancer conference in China this week.

Cancer costs more in productivity and lost life than AIDS, malaria, the flu and other diseases that spread person-to-person, the report concludes.

Chronic diseases including cancer, heart disease and diabetes account for more than 60 percent of deaths worldwide but less than 3 percent of public and private funding for global health, said Rachel Nugent of the Center for Global Development, a Washington-based policy research group.

Money shouldn't be taken away from fighting diseases that spread person-to-person, but the amount devoted to cancer is way out of whack with the impact it has, said Otis Brawley, the cancer society's chief medical officer.

Cancer's economic toll was $895 billion in 2008 — equivalent to 1.5 percent of the world's gross domestic product, the report says. That's in terms of disability and years of life lost — not the cost of treating the disease, which wasn't addressed in the report.

The World Health Organization has long predicted that cancer would overtake heart disease this year as the leading cause of death. About 7.6 million people died of cancer in 2008, and about 12.4 million new cases are diagnosed each year.

Tobacco use and obesity are fueling a rise in chronic diseases, while vaccines and better treatments have led to drops in some infectious diseases.

Many groups have been pushing for more attention to non-infectious causes of death, and the United Nations General Assembly has set a meeting on this a year from now. Some policy experts are comparing it to the global initiative that led to big increases in spending on AIDS nearly a decade ago.

"This needs to be discussed at the UN — how we are going to deal with this" rising burden of chronic disease, said Dr. Andreas Ullrich, medical officer for cancer control at WHO....

China Passes Japan as Second-Largest Economy

SHANGHAI — After three decades of spectacular growth, China passed Japan in the second quarter to become the world’s second-largest economy behind the United States, according to government figures released early Monday.

The milestone, though anticipated for some time, is the most striking evidence yet that China’s ascendance is for real and that the rest of the world will have to reckon with a new economic superpower.

The recognition came early Monday, when Tokyo said that Japan’s economy was valued at about $1.28 trillion in the second quarter, slightly below China’s $1.33 trillion. Japan’s economy grew 0.4 percent in the quarter, Tokyo said, substantially less than forecast. That weakness suggests that China’s economy will race past Japan’s for the full year.

Experts say unseating Japan — and in recent years passing Germany, France and Great Britain — underscores China’s growing clout and bolsters forecasts that China will pass the United States as the world’s biggest economy as early as 2030. America’s gross domestic product was about $14 trillion in 2009.

“This has enormous significance,” said Nicholas R. Lardy, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “It reconfirms what’s been happening for the better part of a decade: China has been eclipsing Japan economically. For everyone in China’s region, they’re now the biggest trading partner rather than the U.S. or Japan.”

For Japan, whose economy has been stagnating for more than a decade, the figures reflect a decline in economic and political power. Japan has had the world’s second-largest economy for much of the last four decades, according to the World Bank. And during the 1980s, there was even talk about Japan’s economy some day overtaking that of the United States....

Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age

By Trip Gabriel
At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.

At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.

And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.

Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.

But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.

It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.
Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image....

Big Bang investigators want new atom smasher

By EMMA VANDORE, AP Business Writer
PARIS – Scientists behind the European particle collider aimed at uncovering the secrets of the universe pushed Monday to build an even bigger machine — with money and partners from around the world.

Instead of whirling atoms in giant rings, as existing colliders in Switzerland and the United States do, scientists want a new-generation machine that will shoot them straight.

Depending on who wants to host it — and how much they are willing to pay — the next-generation collider could potentially be built anywhere in the world. Japan, Russia, the U.S. and Switzerland are all potential hosts, although scientists from China, India, Canada and elsewhere also will be associated with it, said Barry Barish, director of one of the proposed new collider projects.

Scientists gathered in Paris on Monday were encouraged by the results of the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider run by CERN, a particle physics laboratory outside Geneva. A smaller collider called Tevatron is run by Fermilab near Chicago. Both are highly complex machines that took years to bring to fruition.

Rolf Heuer, head of CERN, said at a press conference in Paris that he is "pretty happy" about what scientists have so far discovered from the LHC about how the universe was created.

The machine is "opening a new era of research."

But he said there will be a need for a new linear collider. It is the "interplay and combination of results" between the two different types of atom smashers that allows high-energy physics to advance, he said.

More than 1,000 physicists have gathered in Paris to hear the latest results of the LHC — and the preparations for its successor — at the International Conference on High Energy Physics, which runs through July 28.

The experiments are more about shaping our understanding of how the universe was created than immediate improvements to technology in our daily lives.

Scientists are attempting to simulate the moments after the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago, which they theorize was the creation of the universe.

Plans for the next step include a euro10 billion ($12.85 billion), 50-kilometer (31-mile) tunnel called the International Linear Collider, and the Compact Linear Collider, or CLIC, which has not yet been priced.....

iPhone jailbreaking (and all cell phone unlocking) made legal

Owners of iPhones and other smartphones are one step closer toward taking complete control of their gadgets, thanks to a new government ruling Monday on the practice of "jailbreaking."

This weekend has seen a flurry of activity about digital rights, but the biggest news dropped Monday morning, when the Library of Congress announced that it had made the controversial practice of “jailbreaking” your iPhone — or any other cell phone — legal.

Jailbreaking — the practice of unlocking a phone (and particularly an iPhone) so it can be used on another network and/or run other applications than those approved by Apple — has technically been illegal for years. Most jailbroken phones are used on the U.S. T-Mobile network or on overseas carriers, or are used to run applications that Apple refuses to sell, such as Safari ad-blocking apps, alternate keyboard layouts, or programs that change the interface to the iPhone's SMS system and the way its icons are laid out.

While technically illegal, no one has been sued or prosecuted for the practice. (Apple does seriously frown on the practice, and jailbreaking your phone will still void your warranty.) It’s estimated that more than a million iPhone owners have jailbroken their handsets.

Apple fought hard against the legalization, arguing that jailbreaking was a form of copyright violation. The FCC disagreed, saying that jailbreaking merely enhanced the inter-operability of the phone, and was thus legitimate under fair-use rules.

The upshot is that now anyone can jailbreak or otherwise unlock any cell phone without fear of legal penalties, whether you want to install unsupported applications or switch to another cellular carrier. Cell phone companies are of course still free to make it difficult for you to do this — and your warranty will probably still be voided if you do — but at least you won’t be fined or imprisoned if you jailbreak a handset.

In addition to the jailbreaking exemption, the FCC announced a few other rules that have less sweeping applicability but are still significant:

• Professors, students and documentary filmmakers are now allowed, for “noncommercial” purposes, to break the copy protection measures on DVDs to be used in classroom or other not-for-profit environments. This doesn’t quite go so far as to grant you and me the right to copy a DVD so we can watch it in two rooms of the house, but it’s now only one step away....