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By Alison Abbott of Nature magazineThe health-research division of the European Commission launches its largest-ever project next week with a €30-million (US$41-million) investment in understanding the human epigenome, the constellation of DNA modifications that shape how genes are expressed.With the project, called BLUEPRINT, Europe intends to become a major player in the International Human Epigenome Consortium (IHEC), set up last year to help biologists understand how the epigenome influences health and disease....

The phone call came on a sunny spring afternoon earlier this year. When Becky Swain answered, it was one of her husband’s fellow police officers. Bob was okay, but he had been in an accident, Becky was told, and he was currently at Scotty B’s, a local diner in Tenino, Washington, known for its down-home cooking and milkshakes. It wasn’t until Becky pulled into the parking lot that she realized her husband had crashed into Scotty B’s itself....

The exoplanet business is booming, with astronomers rolling out newfound planets outside the solar system seemingly every week. There are now more than 400 candidates, or proposed planets, in the extrasolar planet catalogue, and NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, which launched in March, began piling on Monday when the mission’s first results were announced. At a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, mission scientists unveiled five hot, massive planets discovered by Kepler, a space telescope that should in the coming years be able to turn up potentially habitable, Earth-like worlds....

Alfred Leick, author of GPS Satellite Surveying and professor in the department of spatial information science at the University of Maine, provides the following answer. The Global Positioning System (GPS) consists of 24 operating satellites and several spares. Some of these spare satellites are also in use or can readily be activated once an operating satellite becomes dysfunctional. Taking the specific orbits of this many satellites into consideration, an observer can see at least four satellites at any time from any location on the earth....

A few years ago a team of chemists unboiled an egg. Boiling causes protein molecules in the egg to twist around one another, and a centrifuge can disentangle them to restore the original. The technique is of dubious utility in a kitchen, but it neatly demonstrates the reversibility of physics. Anything in the physical world can run both ways—it’s one of the deepest features of the laws of physics, reflecting elemental symmetries of space, time and causality....

Using a special machine that pumps blood and other fluids around the body, researchers restored cells and organs in pigs an hour after the animals’ death by cardiac arrest. The feat holds the potential to one day increase the number of human organs available for transplants. The team hooked up the animals’ circulatory system to OrganEx, a system that pumps a mixture of blood and a “perfusate” of fluid-borne nutrients around the body....

Researchers say they may soon be able to repair injured and worn-out cartilage with the help of nanotubes. Currently, patients must either go under the knife to mend faulty cartilage (connective tissue that normally pads the ends of bones at joints to keep them from grinding against one another). But scientists say they may one day be able to insert microscopic carbon nanotubes into injured joints—such as knees—encouraging new, stronger cartilage cells to grow in place damaged or thinning ones....

Here’s how to make a powerful solar cell from indium and phosphorus: First, arrange microscopic flecks of gold on a semiconductor background. Using the gold as seeds, grow precisely arranged wires roughly 1.5 micrometers tall out of chemically tweaked compounds of indium and phosphorus. Keep the nanowires in line by etching them clean with hydrochloric acid and confining their diameter to 180 nanometers. (A nanometer is one billionth of a meter....

GENEVA (Reuters) - An outbreak of the plague has killed 40 people out of 119 confirmed cases in Madagascar since late August and there is a risk of the disease spreading rapidly in the capital, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday. So far two cases and one death have been recorded in the capital Antananarivo but those figures could climb quickly due to “the city’s high population density and the weakness of the healthcare system”, the WHO warned....

The world’s strongest man needn’t worry about relinquishing his title to a robotic competitor anytime soon, a recent contest indicates. At a conference held by the International Society for Optical Engineers in San Diego on Monday, three robotic arms tested their might against a human opponent in arm wrestling matches, which the flesh-and-blood contestant won handily. Yoseph Bar-Cohen of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., first proposed the idea of a robot-versus-person arm wrestling showdown in 1999 as a means to encourage research into artificial muscles, or electroactive polymers (EAP)....

Cole Skinner was hanging from a wall above an abandoned quarry when he heard a car pull up. He and his friends bolted, racing along a narrow path on the quarry’s edge and hopping over a barbed-wire fence to exit the grounds. The chase is part of the fun for Skinner and his friend Alex McCallum-Toppin, both 15 and pupils at a school in Faringdon, UK. The two say that they seek out places such as construction sites and disused buildings—not to get into trouble, but to explore....

By Jon Cartwright of Nature magazineSound, like light, can be tricky to manipulate on small scales. Try to focus it to a point much smaller than one wavelength and the waves bend uncontrollably–a phenomenon known as the diffraction limit. But now, a group of physicists in France has shown how to beat the acoustic diffraction limit–and all it needs is a bunch of soft-drink cans.Scientists have attempted to overcome the acoustic diffraction limit before, but not using such everyday apparatus....

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to “Intractable Tech Battles!” Today—net neutrality! Yes, net neutrality: it’s in the news, it’s just been in the courts and, sooner or later, it will affect you! It’s my pleasure to introduce Pro, who’s in favor of net neutrality, and Con, who’s against it. Pogue: Now, Pro, whose side do you represent? Pro: Why, nearly every proconsumer organization on earth, including the Consumers Union and Common Cause....

Bees thrum among bright red blossoms on a spring day on Mount Diablo, near San Francisco Bay. Alexandra Harmon-Threatt, a young ecologist just finishing her doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, lovingly identifies an array of native pollinators. She points out three species of bumblebee, each with a unique pattern of black and yellow stripes. There are bee-flies, members of the fly family covered in soft brown fur, which look and act like bees....

Human societies are constantly rearranging themselves, causing profound disruptions in our social lives. The industrial revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries fragmented communities as people moved for work, the decay of empires in the early 20th century reconfigured nations and national identities, and the Great Depression of the 1930s shattered people’s economic security and future prospects. But we are now in what is perhaps a time of unprecedented uncertainty....

LONDON (Reuters) - The head of UK Power Networks, one of Britain’s biggest electricity distributors, said its response to a storm that cut off more than 300,000 customers on Christmas Eve had been too slow because many staff were on holiday at the same time.Basil Scarsella, chief executive of the company owned by Hong Kong’s Cheung Kong Group, was responding to criticism from customers over delays in restoring supply.Around 600 households across Britain, served by various power firms, remained without power on Sunday....

It’s remarkable how often seemingly pedestrian things ultimately spark a sense of wonder when considered through the evidence-based view of research. Take the question of how we see faces, a ho-hum everyday occurrence that we easily do without conscious effort. Yet it is a feat full of puzzling intricacies that investigators are attempting to parse. How do the networks in the brain put various features into recognizable faces and, eventually, assemble a sensible picture of the world?...

Click here to watch a video demonstration of the vest at CES. First-person shooter video games have become immensely popular because of their ability to let players mercilessly mow down digital foes from the comfort of an easy chair. When a new breed of video game technology hits the market next month, the machines will have their day as their flesh and blood opponents gain the ability to feel the impact of bullets, explosions and other blows by donning a specially designed vest rigged with pneumatic actuators and microcompressors....

One cool day in Eugene, Ore., James Meadow, in a tank top and shorts, climbed inside a sealed, sterilized chamber—a former refrigeration unit affectionately called the “pickle box.” The postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oregon’s Biology and the Built Environment Center sat there for four hours, with no bathroom breaks, as 12 air filters collected the microorganisms emanating from his body. “How much are humans giving off just sitting at the desk?...

Scientists have long been in the dark about how deep-diving seals forage for their meals in pitch-black seas, and the answer may have been right under the animals’ nose all along: whiskers. With the help of a group of northern elephant seals in California’s Año Nuevo State Park, researchers have now seen this super specialized sensory system at work in the wild for the first time. By gluing tiny cameras, each about as big as a snack-size candy bar, to the seals’ left cheeks, researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and their colleagues recorded more than nine hours of footage of the animals’ long, flexible whisker hairs in motion while they dove for their dinner....