Researchers across the world have been trying to answer the question of how RNAi works for many years. A research group headed by Prof. Renée Schroeder (MFPL) and Dr. Javier Martinez (IMBA) based at the Campus Vienna Biocenter says they have come closer to finding an answer.

RNA interference (RNAi) is a natural cellular defence and regulation mechanism which works by eliminating unwanted RNA molecules. Its potential for use in therapy was officially recognised last year with the presentation of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The first treatments to be based on this mechanism are currently undergoing clinical testing.

Our bodies, and the biological brilliance built in, are able to move with elegance and efficiency using a combination of appropriate biomechanics, neuronal control, and adaptivity.

Simulating that with technology has so far eluded technological advances because of the motor coordination of complex multi-joint movements and the complicated nature of their dynamics.

Yet now scientists at the University of Göttingen have simulated the neuronal principles that form the dynamics of human walking in a robot.

"RunBot", as it is called, lives up to its name – it holds the world record in speed walking for dynamic machines. Now its inventors have expanded its repertoire. With an infrared eye it can detect a slope on its path and adjust its gait on the spot.

Scientists say that using data from the Mars Express mission and numerical models they can determine how the orbit of Mars around the Sun accounts for the origin and perennial occurrence of water ice at the Martian South Pole.

The OMEGA instrument on board Mars Express had already found previously undetected perennial deposits of water-ice sitting on top of million-year old layered terrains and those provided strong evidence for recent glacial activity.

A unique set of observations, obtained with ESO's VLT, has allowed astronomers to find direct evidence for the material that surrounded a star before it exploded as a Type Ia supernova. This strongly supports the scenario in which the explosion occurred in a system where a white dwarf is fed by a red giant.

Because Type Ia supernovae are extremely luminous and quite similar to one another, these exploding events have been used extensively as cosmological reference beacons to trace the expansion of the Universe.

Volcanologist Sarah Fagents from the University of Hawaii at Manoa had an amazing opportunity to study volcanic hazards first hand, when a volcanic mudflow broke through the banks of a volcanic lake at Mount Ruapehu in New Zealand.

Fagents and colleagues were there on a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded project to study the long-forecast Crater Lake break-out lahar at Mount Ruapehu.

A research team headed by Yadong Yin at the University of California, Riverside has created a liquid that changes its color “on demand” and can take on any color of the rainbow.

Nanoscopic particles made of tiny magnetic crystals coated with a plastic shell self-assemble in solution to form photonic crystals—semiconductors for light. When a magnetic field is applied, the optical properties of the crystals change, allowing their color to be very precisely adjusted through variation of the strength of the field.

The crystals involved are not “conventional” lattices of ions or molecules like the ones for salt. They are colloidal crystals, periodic structures that form from uniform solid particles that are finely dispersed in a liquid.