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First response: Contracting human muscle grown in the laboratory

In a laboratory first, Duke researchers have grown human skeletal muscle that contracts and responds just like native tissue to external stimuli such as electrical pulses, biochemical signals and pharmaceuticals.

The lab-grown tissue should soon allow researchers to test new drugs and study diseases in functioning human muscle outside of the human body.

The study was led by Nenad Bursac, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University, and Lauran Madden, a postdoctoral researcher in Bursac's laboratory.

Sol's first notable solar flare of 2015

The sun emitted a mid-level solar flare, peaking at 11:24 p.m. EST on Jan. 12, 2015. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the sun constantly, captured an image of the event. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel.

A new vision system for household robots

A new algorithm could enable household robots to better identify objects in cluttered environments.

For household robots ever to be practical, they'll need to be able to recognize the objects they're supposed to manipulate. But while object recognition is one of the most widely studied topics in artificial intelligence, even the best object detectors still fail much of the time.

Toxic ingredients or not, quantum dot TVs may be better for the environment

The picture is awesome but are you risking your health? Steve Marcus/Reuter

By Andrew Maynard, University of Michigan

Teixobactin: Newly discovered antibiotic kills pathogens without resistance

For years, pathogens' resistance to antibiotics has put them one step ahead of researchers, which is causing a public health crisis.

In a new Nature paper, Northeastern University Distinguished Professor Kim Lewis and colleagues present a newly discovered antibiotic that eliminates pathogens without encountering any detectable resistance, which holds great promise for treating chronic infections like tuberculosis and those caused by MRSA.

Know when to fold 'em in Texas heads-up limit hold'em

For over a half-century, games have been test beds for new ideas in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the resulting successes have marked significant milestones - Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in chess and Watson defeated Jennings and Rutter on Jeopardy! However, defeating top human players is not the same as actually solving a game, and for the first time researchers in the Computer Poker Research Group at the Faculty of Science, University of Alberta in Canada, have essentially solved heads-up limit hold'em poker.

'Pop-up' fabrication technique trumps 3-D printing

Researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a simple new fabrication technique to create beautiful and complex 3-D micro- and nanostructures with many advantages over 3-D printing.

Affordable emissions-free cars get a little closer

What will it take to create an affordable emissions-free car?

Heavy, expensive batteries and hybrids are not really a solution yet. The rich can buy a Tesla but they also have multiple cars in case it's not charged.

Researchers work to counter the new breed of coffee shop hackers

If you're sitting in a coffee shop, tapping away on your laptop, feeling safe from hackers because you didn't connect to the shop's wifi, think again. The bad guys may be able to see what you're doing just by analyzing the low-power electronic signals your laptop emits even when it's not connected to the Internet.

And smartphones may be even more vulnerable to such spying.

Nanowire clothing: Keep people warm, without heating everything else

To stay warm when temperatures drop outside, we heat our indoor spaces -- even when no one is in them. But scientists have now developed a novel nanowire coating for clothes that can both generate heat and trap the heat from our bodies better than regular clothes. They report on their technology, which could help us reduce our reliance on conventional energy sources, in Nano Letters.

The future is so bright it's ... quantum dot televisions

Pure, bright, quantum colours. Argonne National Laboratory (https://www.flickr.com/photos/argonne/5218967216)

By Laurence Murphy, University of Salford

12-year study confirms overall safety of measles vaccines

A 12-year study of two measles-containing vaccines, published today in Pediatrics, found that seven main adverse outcomes were unlikely after either vaccine.

The study, conducted by the Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center, included children aged 12 to 23 months from January 2000 through June 2012 who received measles-mumps-rubella-varicella (MMRV) or separately administered, same-day measles-mumps-rubella and varicella (MMR + V) vaccines. A total of 123,200 MMRV doses and 584,987 MMR + V doses were evaluated.

Acoustic levitation!

A team of researchers have developed a new levitation device that can hover a tiny object with more control than any instrument that has come before. It can levitate polystyrene particles by reflecting sound waves from a source above off a concave reflector below. Changing the orientation of the reflector allow the hovering particle to be moved around.

OSPREY software prediction plays immunological chess with MRSA Superbugs

With drug-resistant bacteria on the rise, even common infections that were easily controlled for decades -- such as pneumonia or urinary tract infections -- are proving trickier to treat with standard antibiotics.

New drugs are desperately needed, but so are ways to maximize the effective lifespan of these drugs.

To accomplish that, Duke University researchers used software they developed to predict a constantly-evolving infectious bacterium's countermoves to one of these new drugs ahead of time, before the drug is even tested on patients.

Adding Stereotactic body radiation therapy improves survival for stage 4 lung cancer patients

A clinical trial that combined stereotactic body radiation therapy with a specific chemotherapy regimen more than doubled survival rates for certain stage 4 lung cancer patients, UT Southwestern Medical Center cancer researchers report.