Northwestern University researchers have discovered a new and unexpected mode of self-assembly involving a polymer (hyaluronic acid) and a small molecule (peptide amphiphiles).

When brought together, the two instantly assemble into a flexible but strong sac in which the researchers can grow human stem cells, creating a sort of miniature laboratory. The sacs can survive for weeks in culture, and their membranes are permeable to proteins. The method also can produce thin films whose size and shape can be tailored.

The methodology behind constructing a quantum channel between Space and Earth got a big boost as a research team, led by Paolo Villoresi and Cesare Barbieri from Padova University, have been able to identify individual returning photons after firing and reflecting them off of a space satellite in orbit almost 1,500 kilometres above the earth.

They say their work improves the feasibility of building a completely secure channel for global communication, via satellites in space, using quantum mechanics.

The research team fired photons directly at the Japanese Ajisai Satellite and have been able to prove that the photons received back at the Matera ground-based station, in southern Italy, are the same as those originally emitted.

For the first time scientists have mapped the layers of once molten rock that lie beneath the edges of the Atlantic Ocean and measure over eight miles thick in some locations.

The research gives us a better understanding of what may have happened during the break up of continents to form new mid-ocean ridges. The same volcanic activity in the North Atlantic may also have caused the subsequent release of massive volumes of greenhouse gases which led to a spike in global temperatures 55 million years ago.

In Northern Vietnam, neonatal mortality is almost four times higher than the official figure according to a report published today in the open access journal BMC International Health and Human Rights. This under-reporting could mean neonatal healthcare in the country is massively under-funded.

Lars-Ake Persson, Mats Målqvist and colleagues at Uppsala University, along with researchers at Karolinska University Hospital, Stockholm, Sweden, are working with the Uong Bi General Hospital, in Quang Ninh, and the Vietnamese Ministry of Health, in Hanoi, on the question of unreported births and neonatal deaths.

An international collaboration is creating an innovative "freely-accessible, high resolution" digital interactive archive of William Shakespeare's pre-1641 quartos; living artifacts that tell the story of how Shakespeare's Hamlet, Henry V, King Lear, Midsummer Night's Dream, and Romeo and Juliet, to name just a few, first circulated.

The University of Maryland's Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) Director Neil Fraistat says, "The quartos themselves offer crucial evidence about what actually was performed" by Shakespeare's troupe.

Because Shakespeare himself did not authorize a printed edition of his plays, what was published at the time represented what others heard, memorized or took from the marked-up "foul papers" of a particular production.

Of the almost 25,000 human genes science that have been identified, half are believed to be silent at any particular time and activated only when needed.

Perhaps not, says Andre Ptitsyn, of the Center for Bioinfomatics at Colorado State University. He says he has discovered that current tools cannot measure extraordinarily low levels of gene expression signals so genes may not be turned off, but instead have undetected functioning.

"Genes that we have believed to be silent are actually whispering," said Ptitsyn, who a applied a common physics principle to find oscillating patterns of gene expression in genes previously thought to be shut off.