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From wire services and other news stories:
Two announcements on Sep.2 reflect the continued breath-taking pace of recent advances in science.
1. One of the most remarkable and unequivocal feats of genetic engineering to date was announced in the current issue of Nature by Ya-Ping Tang (Princeton), Joe Tsien (Princeton), and collaborators at MIT and Washington U.
Gene implants were used to create a strain of mice with double the usual amount of a certain memory protein in the brain. The altered mice learned faster, remembered longer, and did not exhibit the usual rate of decline of mental function with age. The same genes, or very similar ones, are found in a very broad range of animals, including sea slugs and humans.
The mice have been dubbed "Doogie" mice--a reference to a TV series about a very precocious boy.
2. Also in the current issue of Nature is a paper by John Spence, Jian-Min Zuo, Moon Kim, and Michael O'Keeffe at Arizona State U. concerning computer-generated photos of molecules, based on electron microscopy and electron diffraction. A cover photo shows clouds of electrons in cuprite (a copper oxide) indicating covalent bonds.
This work is related to nanotechnology, materials science, and quantum physics. The long-term goal includes the design and fabrication of new materials with just the desired properties for particular applications.