Happy Friday!  Here’s the week’s roundup, including a short reflection on this past week’s Mooniversaries that have dominated the science headlines…

5) Organ trafficking. My friend Rachel called me last night, irate about the New Jersey corruption sweep that led to the arrests of 44 people, including elected officials and religious leaders for bank fraud, money laundering and cash bribes.  And…organ trafficking.  Individuals were allegedly enticed to sell their own kidneys for $10,000, after which the traffickers sold them for more than $150,000.  The bioethical issues around organ donation are tricky, especially when there is a shortage of available organs and thousands die each year waiting for transplants. But if a person is willing to sell an organ to make some money, should there be a legal market that handles these types of transactions? The idea makes my skin crawl, and not so much about the selling, but the exploitative side of the buying…What do you think?

4) A cosmic gas bubble. I’m not ashamed to admit that some of my favorite findings have little to do with the actual science…sometimes the pictures are just super-cool!  This week, a nebula called the Cygnus Bubble (discovered by yet another amateur astronomer!) was officially classified as nebula PN G75.5+1.7. Nebulae (the plural form) occur when huge stars (release their gasses into a cloud). Almost looks like a sci-fi image, but it’s totally real (check here for more images):

The Cygnus Bubble! Image credit: Keith Quattrocchi and Mel Helm

3) In need of a vacuum repairman. It’s heartbreaking to hear of yet another problem at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, which went live last September and has been broken pretty much ever since. It was reported this week that the world’s largest (and arguably least efficient in producing data) particle accelerator has 2 vacuum leaks that will keep it offline until at least November. And further tests need to be done to ensure there are no more leaks, so it’s possible the LHC won’t be up and running again until even later. Another huge disappointment for those waiting on the huge discoveries expected from the LHC; perhaps not so bad news for our own Fermilab, who’s particle accelerator has produced some pretty amazing findings lately. Not that we’re competing or anything…:-)

2) A bacterium did my math homework! OK, not quite, but a ridiculously cool (and kind of confusing) study published in the Journal of Bioengineering provides new evidence that bacteria can be designed to solve a commonly-recognized math problem – the Hamiltonian Path. You may have seen one in a mind-puzzle book, a problem in which you’re challenged to go from one point to another, touching all points in between only once. I’m terrible at those, but apparently, if you recreate this problem at the DNA level, bacteria are far better at getting it right.

A classic Hamiltonian Path…get from one end to the other, touching each node only once.

In the study, each point, or node, was created as 1/2 of a gene that coded for a function or activity that the scientists could easily measure (like fluorescence under UV light). The DNA was engineered Bacteria are well-known for their ability to move their DNA around, so their ability to solve the Hamiltonian Path was measured by how many of the split genes became intact.  The authors propose that engineered bacteria are potentially capable of solving highly complex problems, but given how late humans were to arrive on the evolutionary tree (especially compared to bacteria), perhaps these findings are just another example of how we are just catching up to what nature invented millions of years ago.

1) A Lunar reflection. You’d have to be living in a cave to have missed that the past couple of weeks have been huge for NASA: July 17th marked the 40th anniversary of the launching of the Apollo 11 lunar mission that landed the first men on the Moon July 20th; the 33rd anniversary of the Viking lander’s operation on Mars as the first lander on the red planet; space shuttle Endeavour finally made liftoff, after 6 technical and weather delays, and allowed celebration of the Mooniveraries by 13 astronauts in space, the most ever in orbit at the same time. Despite a few glitches, like the announcement that NASA lost or erased the original live transmission of the moon landing, there were some pretty awesome moments – 40 year-old foot tracks and a 40 year-old experiment still running on the lunar surface! All this reflection on the past has led to the obvious question – what’s next? With a waning presidential plan to go back to the Moon by 2020, and increased focused on reaching Mars, it’s possible humans have made their last lunar voyages. Which is a bit sad, perhaps, but opens the door even wider for brand-new discoveries.

Have a great weekend,

-Rabiah