Alison Snyder reports via Axios: For more than 15 years, scientists have worked to build a complex cell with an entire genome built from scratch. This week they announced a major milestone: They've created synthetic versions of the 16 chromosomes in a yeast cell and successfully combined some of them in one cell. The feat is revealing new information about fundamental processes in cells, and it is a key step toward some scientists' vision of creating programmable cellular factories to produce biofuels, materials, medicines and other products.

The changes researchers made to yeast chromosomes fall into three main categories: increasing stability of the genome, repurposing codons (genetic sequences that carry instructions for reading DNA or RNA) and introducing a system that allows scientists to make millions of cells, each with different genetic properties. "A big problem is a lot of the things you want to make are actually toxic to the cells," [says Benjamin Blount, a synthetic biologist at the University of Nottingham in the U.K. and co-author of some of the scientific papers in a series published this week in Cell and Cell Genomics detailing the work]. With the system that reshuffles the genome and effectively mimics evolution, scientists can make many variants of yeast and pick the ones "that are really good at growing in the presence of what you're trying to make." Then, they're able to look at what's happened to their genomes to enable that particular strain to grow and make the desired product, and use that genetic information to develop strains of yeast suited for an industrial process.

The chromosomes still have to be combined in one cell that can survive, which means they have to be "basically indiscernible" from natural chromosomes in terms of the cell's fitness, Blount says. That required a lot of debugging of the genome, similar to what's done for computer code. One team was able to combine multiple chromosomes in one cell and it survived and reproduced, demonstrating a mechanism for bringing them together. Building the genomes -- and seeing when the cell doesn't work as expected as the result of one change or another -- has revealed fundamental information about genome biology, Blount says. For example, the team identified sequences in genes that interrupted a key process in the cell and led to mitochondria dysfunction, which is involved in some human diseases.

Long-time Slashdot reader HanzoSpam shares a report from Ars Technica: Frank Borman, an Air Force test pilot, astronaut, and accomplished businessman who led the first crew to fly to the Moon in 1968, died Tuesday in Montana, NASA said Thursday. He was 95 years old. Borman, joined by crewmates Jim Lovell and Bill Anders, orbited the Moon 10 times over the course of about 20 hours. They were the first people to see the Earth from another world, a memory of "wonderment" Borman recalled decades later. Apollo 8 produced one of the most famous photos ever taken, the iconic "Earthrise" showing a blue orb -- the setting for all of human history until then -- suspended in the blackness of space over the charcoal gray of the Moon's cratered surface.

Borman was born in Gary, Indiana, on March 14, 1928, and raised in Tucson, Arizona. He learned to fly airplanes as a teenager, then attended the US Military Academy at West Point before earning his commission in the Air Force to start training as a fighter pilot. Following a similar career path as other early astronauts, Borman became an experimental test pilot, receiving a master's degree in aeronautical engineering from Caltech, and served a stint as an assistant professor at West Point. NASA accepted applications for a second class of astronauts in 1962 to follow the original Mercury Seven. Borman was one of the "New Nine" astronauts, and he reported for training in Houston. "Today we remember one of NASA's best," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement. "Astronaut Frank Borman was a true American hero. Among his many accomplishments, he served as the commander of the Apollo 8 mission, humanity's first mission around the Moon in 1968."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: This week doctors announced they had completed the first successful transplant of a partial face and an entire eye. In May at NYU Langone Health in New York City, the surgery was performed on a 46-year-old man who had suffered severe electrical burns to his face, left eye and left arm. He does not yet have vision in the transplanted eye and may never regain it there, but early evidence suggests the eye itself is healthy and may be capable of transmitting neurological signals to the brain. The feat opens up the possibility of restoring the appearance -- and maybe even sight -- of people who have been disfigured or blinded by injuries. Researchers caution there are many technical hurdles before such a procedure can effectively treat vision loss, however.

"I think it's an important proof of principle," says Jeffrey Goldberg, a professor and chair of ophthalmology at the Byers Eye Institute at Stanford University, who was not involved in the surgery but has been part of a team working toward whole-eye transplants in humans. "I think it points to the opportunity and importance that we really stand on the verge of being able to [achieve] eye transplants and vision restoration for blind patients more broadly."But he cautions that the main obstacle is achieving regeneration of the optic nerve, which carries visual signals from the retina to the brain; this step has not yet been successfully demonstrated in humans.

Scientists have been working toward whole-eye transplantation for many years. "This has been, I would say, science fiction for a long time," says Jose-Alain Sahel, a professor and chair of the department of ophthalmology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, who has been working toward such transplants with Goldberg and others. Progress in surgical techniques and nerve regeneration have made this goal seem more attainable. [...] "The fact that this surgery was successful is wonderful news," Sahel says. He cautions that surgery is only a small part of the issues that need to be addressed in order to restore eye function, however. These include making sure the immune system doesn't reject the donor eye, which is a challenge with any type of transplant. Then the corneal nerve -- which carries sensory signals from the transparent part of the eye -- must be reconnected. Yet the most complex part is regenerating the optic nerve. In order to do so, surgeons have to coax the nerve fibers to grow to the right place, which Sahel says could take months or even years. And complete optic nerve regeneration has not yet been successfully achieved in humans or other mammals.

Scary play lets people -- and other animals -- rehearse coping skills for disturbing challenges in the real world. Scientific American: Our desire to experience fear, it seems, is rooted deep in our evolutionary past and can still benefit us today. Scary play, it turns out, can help us overcome fears and face new challenges -- those that surface in our own lives and others that arise in the increasingly disturbing world we all live in. The phenomenon of scary play surprised Charles Darwin. In The Descent of Man, he wrote that he had heard about captive monkeys that, despite their fear of snakes, kept lifting the lid of a box containing the reptiles to peek inside. Intrigued, Darwin turned the story into an experiment: He put a bag with a snake inside it in a cage full of monkeys at the London Zoological Gardens. A monkey would cautiously walk up to the bag, slowly open it, and peer down inside before shrieking and racing away. After seeing one monkey do this, another monkey would carefully walk over to the bag to take a peek, then scream and run. Then another would do the same thing, then another.

The monkeys were "satiating their horror," as Darwin put it. Morbid fascination with danger is widespread in the animal kingdom -- it's called predator inspection. The inspection occurs when an animal looks at or even approaches a predator rather than simply fleeing. This behavior occurs across a range of animals, from guppies to gazelles. At first blush, getting close to danger seems like a bad idea. Why would natural selection have instilled in animals a curiosity about the very things they should be avoiding? But there is an evolutionary logic to these actions. Morbid curiosity is a powerful way for animals to gain information about the most dangerous things in their environment. It also gives them an opportunity to practice dealing with scary experiences.

When you consider that many prey animals live close to their predators, the benefits of morbidly curious behavior such as predator inspection become clear. For example, it's not uncommon for a gazelle to cross paths with a cheetah on the savanna. It might seem like a gazelle should always run when it sees a cheetah. Fleeing, however, is physiologically expensive; if a gazelle ran every time it saw a cheetah, it would exhaust precious calories and lose out on opportunities for other activities that are important to its survival and reproduction. Consider the perspective of the predator, too. It may seem like a cheetah should chase after a gazelle anytime it sees one. But for a cheetah, it's not easy to just grab a bite; hunting is an energetically costly exercise that doesn't always end in success.

The U.S. Space Force's shadowy X-37B spaceplane is set to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket on Dec. 7. It'll mark the seventh mission for the X-37B, but the first time it'll fly on a heavy-lift launcher. Space.com reports: Little is known about the capabilities and operations of the space plane, but Space Force says the mission will follow previous flights that used the X-37B as a test bed for launching experimental payloads and returning them to Earth. "We are excited to expand the envelope of the reusable X-37B's capabilities, using the flight-proven service module and Falcon Heavy rocket to fly multiple cutting-edge experiments for the Department of the Air Force and its partners," said Lt. Col. Joseph Fritschen, program director for the X-37B, in the statement.

It isn't known why the X-37B is launching atop a Falcon Heavy for the USSF-52 mission. Five of the space plane's previous missions launched on United Launch Alliance Atlas V rockets, while its fifth mission, USA-277, took off on top of SpaceX's smaller rocket, the Falcon 9 (Falcon Heavy consists of three Falcon 9 boosters strapped together). Such a change could suggest that the space plane is carrying heavier payloads or is sporting a new hardware configuration. So far, Space Force has only stated that the mission will "expand the United States Space Force's knowledge of the space environment by experimenting with future space domain awareness technologies," according to the statement. However, Space Force's statement adds that the mission will carry a NASA experiment known as Seeds-2 that will test the effects that space-based radiation has on plant seeds during a long-duration spaceflight.

Long-time Slashdot reader Alain Williams writes: Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is in the hospital in Mexico, according to multiple reports.

It is not currently clear what the cause is. The 73-year-old was in Mexico City attending the World Business Forum (WBF), a business conference. [According to TMZ, Wozniak finished his speech but then told his wife he was "feeling strange." She reportedly insisted he go to the hospital.] An unnamed source from the WBF said that Mr Wozniak fainted on Wednesday at the event [minutes before his participation], according to CNN. TMZ reports that Wozniak was hospitalized after "suffering what appears to be vertigo." Mexican media outlets were reporting that it was due to a possible stroke.

Two million species are at risk of extinction, a figure that is double previous UN estimates, new analysis has found. From a report: While scientists have long documented the decline of species of plants and vertebrates, there has always been significant uncertainty over insects, with the UN making a "tentative estimate" of 10% threatened with extinction in 2019. Since then, more data has been collected on insects, showing the proportion at risk of extinction is much higher than previously estimated. Because there are so many insect species, this doubles the global number of species at risk, according to the paper, published in Plos One on Wednesday.

Lead researcher, Axel Hochkirch, from the Musee National d'Histoire Naturelle in Luxembourg, said: "What our study does is really highlight that insects are as threatened as other taxa. And because they are the most species-rich group of animals on our planet, this is really something which should be addressed." Understanding what is happening to global insect populations has been challenging because of the lack of data - but 97% of all animals are invertebrates. Of that group, about 90% are classified as insects. They provide vital ecosystem services: pollinating crops, recycling nutrients into soils, and decomposing waste. "Without insects, our planet will not be able to survive," Hochkirch said. The team looked at all European species on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's red list of threatened species. This is considered the most comprehensive source of information on species at risk. They found a fifth of European species were at risk of extinction, with 24% of invertebrates at risk, as well as 27% of all plants and 18% of vertebrates.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Amazon Prime members will be able to access US healthcare provider One Medical's suite of benefits, for a fee, as the ecommerce company looks to expand its presence in the $4 trillion American healthcare industry. Prime members in the US who opt in will have access to unlimited, on-demand virtual healthcare via One Medical, the subscription-based group that Amazon acquired last year for $3.9 billion. They will also be able to schedule in-person appointments that they will either pay for themselves or that will be covered by insurance.

The addition to Amazon's flagship Prime membership program comes as the company looks to "stack" healthcare services together and broaden its reach in the sector, which would be "big for us if we do a good job," said Neil Lindsay, senior vice-president of Amazon Health. The subscription will cost Amazon Prime members $9 per month or $99 per year, compared with the standard One Medical subscription fee of $199 per year. That will come on top of the $139 per year, or $14.99 a month, price for a Prime subscription.

The move is Amazon's latest effort to leverage its loyal base of Prime members and become a big player in the healthcare industry. In January, following its 2018 acquisition of mail-order pharmacy PillPack for about $1 billion, Amazon launched RxPass, which allows Prime members to order an unlimited amount of some unbranded prescription medications for $5 a month. It has also rolled out a "Clinic" telehealth service that connects patients with clinicians and a broader mail-order pharmacy service.

The scientific literature is polluted with fake manuscripts churned out by paper mills -- businesses that sell bogus work and authorships to researchers who need journal publications for their CVs. But just how large is this paper-mill problem? From a report: An unpublished analysis shared with Nature suggests that over the past two decades, more than 400,000 research articles have been published that show strong textual similarities to known studies produced by paper mills. Around 70,000 of these were published last year alone. The analysis estimates that 1.5-2% of all scientific papers published in 2022 closely resemble paper-mill works. Among biology and medicine papers, the rate rises to 3%.

Without individual investigations, it is impossible to know whether all of these papers are in fact products of paper mills. But the proportion -- a few per cent -- is a reasonable conservative estimate, says Adam Day, director of scholarly data-services company Clear Skies in London, who conducted the analysis using machine-learning software he developed called the Papermill Alarm. In September, a cross-publisher initiative called the STM Integrity Hub, which aims to help publishers combat fraudulent science, licensed a version of Day's software for its set of tools to detect potentially fabricated manuscripts.

Paper-mill studies are produced in large batches at speed, and they often follow specific templates, with the occasional word or image swapped. Day set his software to analyse the titles and abstracts of more than 48 million papers published since 2000, as listed in OpenAlex, a giant open index of research papers that launched last year, and to flag manuscripts with text that very closely matched known paper-mill works. These include both retracted articles and suspected paper-mill products spotted by research-integrity sleuths such as Elisabeth Bik, in California, and David Bimler (also known by the pseudonym Smut Clyde), in New Zealand.

AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: Europe's Euclid telescope is ready to begin its quest to understand the greatest mysteries in the Universe. Exquisite imagery from the space observatory shows its capabilities to be exceptional. Over the next six years, Euclid will survey a third of the heavens to get some clues about the nature of so-called dark matter and dark energy. The 1.4 billion euro Euclid telescope went into space in July. Since then, engineers have been fine-tuning it. There were some early worries. Initially, Euclid's optics couldn't lock on to stars to take a steady image. This required new software for the telescope's fine guidance sensor. Engineers also found some stray light was polluting pictures when the observatory was pointed in a certain way. But with these issues all now resolved, Euclid is good to go -- as evidenced by the release of five sample images on Tuesday. "No previous space telescope has been able to combine the breadth, depth and sharpness of vision that Euclid can," notes the BBC. "The astonishing James Webb telescope, for example, has much higher resolution, but it can't cover the amount of sky that Euclid does in one shot."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: [A] new tech startup, Prophetic, aims to bring lucid dreams to a much wider audience by developing a wearable device designed to spark the experience when desired. Prophetic is the brainchild of Eric Wollberg, its chief executive officer, and Wesley Louis Berry III, its chief technology officer. The pair co-founded the company earlier this year with the goal of combining technologies, such as ultrasound and machine learning models, "to detect when dreamers are in REM to induce and stabilize lucid dreams" with a device called the Halo according to the company's website. [...]

Prophetic does not make any medical claims about its forthcoming products -- Halo is tentatively slated for a 2025 release -- though Wollberg and Berry both expressed optimism about broader scientific research that suggests lucid dreams can reduce PTSD-related nightmares, promote mindfulness, and open new windows into the mysterious nature of consciousness. To explore those links further, Prophetic has partnered with the Donders Institute, a research center at Radboud University in the Netherlands that is focused on neuroscience and cognition, to generate the largest dataset of electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) observations of lucid dreamers, according to the company. The collaboration will also explore one of central technologies behind Prophetic's vision, known as transcranial focused ultrasound (TUS). This non-invasive technique uses low-intensity ultrasound pulses to probe the brain, and interact with neural activity, with a depth and precision that cannot be achieved with previous methods, such as transcranial electrical stimulation or transcranial magnetic stimulation.

At this point, both the possibilities and limits of Prophetic's concept remain unclear. While ultrasound devices have been widely used in medicine for decades, the process of stimulating parts of the brain with TUS is a relatively new development. Within the past few years, scientists have shown that TUS "has the potential to be used both as a scientific instrument to investigate brain function and as a therapeutic modality to modulate brain activity," according to a 2019 study, and "could be a useful tool in the treatment of clinical disorders characterized by negative mood states, like depression and anxiety disorders," according to a 2020 study. What is not known, yet, is whether TUS can induce or stabilize lucid dreams, though the Prophetic team is banking on a positive answer to this open question. Its wearable headband prototype, the Halo, was developed with the company Card79 and can currently read EEG data of users. Over the next year, Prophetic aims to use the dataset from their partnership with the Donders Institute to train machine learning models that will stimulate targeted neural activity in users with ultrasound transducers as a means of inducing lucid dreams.

Nature has retracted a controversial paper claiming the discovery of a superconductor -- a material that carries electrical currents with zero resistance -- capable of operating at room temperature and relatively low pressure. From a report: The text of the retraction notice states that it was requested by eight co-authors. "They have expressed the view as researchers who contributed to the work that the published paper does not accurately reflect the provenance of the investigated materials, the experimental measurements undertaken and the data-processing protocols applied," it says, adding that these co-authors "have concluded that these issues undermine the integrity of the published paper."

It is the third high-profile retraction of a paper by the two lead authors, physicists Ranga Dias at the University of Rochester in New York and Ashkan Salamat at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Nature withdrew a separate paper last year and Physical Review Letters retracted one this August. It spells more trouble in particular for Dias, whom some researchers allege plagiarized portions of his PhD thesis. Dias has objected to the first two retractions and not responded regarding the latest. Salamat approved the two this year. "It is at this point hardly surprising that the team of Dias and Salamat has a third high-profile paper being retracted," says Paul Canfield, a physicist at Iowa State University in Ames and at Ames National Laboratory. Many physicists had seen the Nature retraction as inevitable after the other two -- and especially since The Wall Street Journal and Science reported in September that 8 of the 11 authors of the paper -- including Salamat -- had requested it in a letter to the journal.

An anonymous reader shares an article: In 1937, a brown, eyeless beetle was found in a few caves in Slovenia. The new species was unexceptional apart from one feature. Its discoverer decided to name it after Adolf Hitler. Anophthalmus hitleri has an objectionable sound to modern ears. Nor is it alone. Many species' names recall individuals or ideas that offend: the butterfly Hypopta mussolinii, for example, while several hundred plant species carry names based on the word caffra which is derived from a racial slur once used in Africa. Similarly Hibbertia, a genus of flowering plants, honours George Hibbert, an English slave owner.

As a result, many scientists are pressing for changes to be made to the international system for giving official scientific names to plants and animals to allow the deletion and substitution of past names if they are deemed objectionable. Current taxonomy regulations, which do not allow such changes, must be altered, they say. Other scientists disagree. Arguing over names that some think are unacceptable while searching for alternatives would waste time and create confusion. Species names should remain inviolate once they have been agreed by taxonomists, they argue, and changes should only be allowed if a mistake in designation has been made or an earlier designation is found to have been overlooked.

The row now threatens to become a major international dispute. "People have very, very strong opinions one way or the other about this," said botanist Sandra Knapp, of the Natural History Museum in London. "There's been a certain amount of shouting about it but we have to discuss issues like this. We cannot avoid them." As a result, Knapp has arranged for a discussion before voting on the issue occurs at the next International Botanical Congress, which will be held in Madrid in July 2024. One motion put forward by a group of botanists calls for a committee to be set up with powers to judge whether scientific names for plants that are now considered unacceptable should be suppressed or changed.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Marc, 63, from Bordeaux, France, was diagnosed with the degenerative disease more than 20 years ago and had developed severe mobility problems, including balance impairments and freezing of gait. After receiving the implant, which aims to restore normal signaling to the leg muscles from the spine, he has been able to walk more normally and regained his independence. "I practically could not walk any more without falling frequently, several times a day. In some situations, such as entering a lift, I'd trample on the spot, as though I was frozen there, you might say," he said. "Right now, I'm not even afraid of the stairs any more. Every Sunday I go to the lake, and I walk around 6 kilometers [3.7 miles]. It's incredible."

The implant is yet to be tested in a full clinical trial. But the Swiss team, who have a longstanding program to develop brain-machine interfaces to overcome paralysis, hope that their technology could offer an entirely new approach to treating movement deficits in those with Parkinson's disease. "It is impressive to see how by electrically stimulating the spinal cord in a targeted manner, in the same way as we have done with paraplegic patients, we can correct walking disorders caused by Parkinson's disease," said Jocelyne Bloch, neurosurgeon and professor at the CHUV Lausanne University hospital, who co-led the work.

First, the team developed a personalized anatomical map of Marc's spinal cord that identified the precise locations that were involved in signaling to the leg to move. Electrodes were then implanted at these locations, allowing stimulation to be delivered directly into the spine. The patient wears a movement sensor on each leg and when walking is initiated the implant automatically switches on and begins delivering pulses of stimulation to the spinal neurons. The aim is to correct abnormal signals that are sent from the brain, down the spine, to the legs in order to restore normal movement. "At no point is [the patient] controlled by the machine," said Prof Eduardo Martin Moraud, of Lausanne University hospital. "It's just enhancing his capacity to walk." The study, published in Nature Medicine, found that the implant improved walking and balance deficits and when Marc's walking was analyzed it more closely resembled that of healthy controls than that of other Parkinson's patients. Marc also reported significant improvements in his quality of life.

A machine-learning tool can easily spot when chemistry papers are written using the chatbot ChatGPT, according to a study published on 6 November in Cell Reports Physical Science. From a report: The specialized classifier, which outperformed two existing artificial intelligence (AI) detectors, could help academic publishers to identify papers created by AI text generators. "Most of the field of text analysis wants a really general detector that will work on anything," says co-author Heather Desaire, a chemist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. But by making a tool that focuses on a particular type of paper, "we were really going after accuracy."

Desaire and her colleagues first described their ChatGPT detector in June, when they applied it to Perspective articles from the journal Science. Using machine learning, the detector examines 20 features of writing style, including variation in sentence lengths, and the frequency of certain words and punctuation marks, to determine whether an academic scientist or ChatGPT wrote a piece of text. The findings show that "you could use a small set of features to get a high level of accuracy," Desaire says. The findings suggest that efforts to develop AI detectors could be boosted by tailoring software to specific types of writing, Desaire says. "If you can build something quickly and easily, then it's not that hard to build something for different domains."