Each year, technologies initially intended for space exploration come into our everyday lives - if you still haven't tried Tang or pens that write upside down, you are living in a cave.

One innovation, which physicians for astronauts have shared with their terrestrial brethren, is a special suit called “Penguin.” After minor modifications, the “Penguin” suit has become the “Regent” suit and turns out to be an efficient therapeutic agent for rehabilitation of patients after a stroke.

Hypokinetic motor syndrome developed with cosmonauts who stayed for long periods in the weightlessness of orbit.

Bacteria get bad press, with those found in water often linked to illness and disease. But researchers at The University of Nottingham are using these tiny organisms alongside the very latest membrane filtration techniques to improve and refine water cleaning technology.

These one-celled organisms eat the contaminants present in water — whether it is being treated prior to industrial use or even for drinking — in a process called bioremediation.

Ikerlan-IK4 (CIC microGUNE Microfluidics Unit - the Basque Micro and Nanotechnologies Research Centre) has patented a device that enables the verification of the optimum conditions for a human organ prior to its transplant.

By means of a microelectrode that measures the impedance and temperature of the tissues, the system enables the state of any organ to be monitored from the moment of its extraction, during its transport, to the moment of the surgical operation to transplant it into a patient.

Scientists of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) achieved to transfer very small charge "packets", comprising a well-defined number of few electrons, between metallic electrons precisely by using a single-electron pump.

A single-electron transistor, being able to resolve charge variations of a single electron or less, served as a charge detector to monitor the charge movement. The successful experiment is an important milestone on the way to the setup of a new standard for capacitance, where a capacitor is charged by a well-known number of electrons.

When chemists want to measure the bonding forces in molecules or other most minuscule forces very accurately, they have to calibrate their measuring instruments (for example the cantilevers, i.e. the measuring tips, of scanning force microscopes). And if it is a matter of comparing the attained results with other results, one must refer to a common basis.

In the case of scanning force microscopes, the nominal values for bending stiffnesses deviate distinctly from the actual values. With the current devices, calibrations of cantilevers are accurate to > 5%. For forces in the nano- and piconewton range one therefore requires more accurate realisations and stable transfer standards.

Researchers from St. Petersburg State University have designed a brandy analyzing device which can distinguish the ‘young’ drink from the seasoned one and even to distinguish among variants of brandy. This is of great help both to manufacturers and analysts on the hunt for counterfeits.

This ‘electronic tongue’ won't replace the cooper just yet but it is suited for routine work. The fun part - drinking - is still up to people.

From an article in Rolling Stone about mercury and autism:

The CDC “wants us to declare, well, that these things are pretty safe,” Dr. Marie McCormick, who chaired the [Institute of Medicine’s] Immunization Safety Review Committee, told her fellow researchers when they first met in January 2001. “We are not ever going to come down that [autism] is a true side effect” of thimerosal exposure. According to transcripts of the meeting, the committee’s chief staffer, Kathleen Stratton, predicted that the IOM would conclude that the evidence was “inadequate to accept or reject a causal relation” between thimerosal and autism. That, she added, was the result “Walt wants” — a reference to Dr. Walter Orenstein, director of the National Immunization Program for the CDC.

Over the last decade, genetically modified crops have become widespread in agriculture. One of the more successful of these are Bt crops - transgenic plants that express genes derived from Bacillus thuringensis. These genes allow the plants to produce toxins which specifically affect certain groups of insects. Since these plants do not need to be sprayed, and since the toxins are relatively specific, the environmental effects appear to be lower than conventional agriculture.

Cyanide is poison. Detective writers like it. Gold miners like it. The environment; not so much. In the year 2000 cyanide got into the Tisa river and then into the Danube through a small Austrian gold-mining company's efforts using cyanide to extract gold and silver from solutions. Fish, birds and wild animals died and millions of inhabitants in Hungary were deprived of drinking water.

To prevent future occurrences of that kind, Russian researchers from the Krasnoyarsk State University and the Institute of Chemistry and Applied Chemistry have developed an original method for extracting gold and silver from multicomponent solutions.

A team of scientists from the University Paris Descartes has solved the structure of two proteins that allow bacteria to gain resistance to multiple types of antibiotics, according to a report in EMBO reports this month. This work provides new clues as to how bacteria adapt to resist antibiotics and how to design new drugs that counteract this defense mechanism.

Frédéric Dardel and colleagues crystallized both the narrow and broad-spectrum resistance forms of the antibiotic-modifying acetyltransferase enzyme. Their report reveals that the enzyme has a flexible active site that can evolve to accommodate new antibiotics, allowing the bacteria to break them down and render them useless. This explains why this type of enzyme is now carried by many bacteria struggling for survival in the antibiotic age.