Graphic with illustration of a top-security seed bank near the North Pole that will preserve crop diversity in case of global catastrophe, after the project builders unveiled the vault's design.

An Arctic “doomsday vault“ aimed at providing mankind with food in case of a global catastrophe will be designed to sustain the effects of climate change, the project’s builders said as they unveiled the architectural plans.
The top-security repository, carved into the permafrost of a mountain in the remote Svalbard archipelago near the North Pole, will preserve some three million batches of seeds from all known varieties of the planet’s crops.
The hope is that the vault will make it possible to re-establish crops obliterated by major disasters.
“We have taken into consideration the (outside) temperature rising and have located the facility so far inside the rock that it will be in permafrost and won’t be affected“ by the outside temperature, Magnus Bredeli Tveiten, project manager at Norway’s Directorate of Public Construction and Property, told AFP.
Construction on the seed bank, also dubbed the “Noah’s Ark of food“, will begin in March.
The seed samples, such as wheat and potatoes, will be stored in two chambers located deep inside a mountain, accessed by a 120-meter (395-foot) tunnel. The tunnel and vaults will be excavated by boring and blasting techniques and the rock walls sprayed with concrete.
The seeds will be maintained at a temperature of minus 18 degrees Celsius (minus 0.4 Fahrenheit).
The vault is situated about 130 meters (426 feet) above current sea level. It would not flood if Greenland’s ice sheet melts, which some estimate would increase sea levels by seven meters (23 feet).
It is also expected to be safe if the ices of Antarctica completely melt, which experts say could increase sea levels by 61 meters (200 feet).
The entry to the vault, which will shoot out of the mountainside, will be a narrow triangular portal made of cement and steel, illuminated with artwork that changes according to the Arctic light.
In summer, “in the midnight sun, it will look like a large diamond,“ said Tveiten. In winter, when the sun does not rise above the horizon, “it will glow into the darkness,“ he added.
Behind the airlock door, each chamber will measure 375 square meters (4,036 square feet). Corrugated plastic boxes the size of moving boxes will sit on rows of metal shelves.
Each box will contain about 400 samples in envelopes made of polyethelene, and each sample will contain around 500 seeds.
The samples will be stored in watertight foil packages to act as a barrier against moisture should a power failure disable refrigeration systems.
Construction on the three-million-dollar (2.3-million-euro) vault is due to finish in September. It will officially open in late winter 2008.
The design of the structure is “simple, it’s functional, it runs by itself. We can’t have a better design,“ Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust and the brains behind the vault, told AFP.
“It makes use of the natural cold. It’s planned with the climate change factor taken into consideration and it will be frozen 200 years from now. And even in the worst case scenario, if the temperature rises it will still be safe,“ he said.

A robotic exoskeleton controlled by the wearer’s own nervous system could help users regain limb function, which is encouraging news for people with partial nervous system impairment, say University of Michigan researchers.
The ankle exoskeleton developed at U-M was worn by healthy subjects to measure how the device affected ankle function. The U-M team has no plans to build a commercial exoskeleton, but their results suggest promising applications for rehabilitation and physical therapy, and a similar approach could be used by other groups who do build such technology, Eurekalert.org reported.
“This could benefit stroke patients or patients with incomplete injuries of the spinal cord,“ said Daniel Ferris, associate professor in movement science at U-M. “For patients that can walk slowly, a brace like this may help them walk faster and more effectively.“
Ferris and former U-M doctoral student Keith Gordon, who is now a post-doctoral fellow at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, showed that the wearer of the U-M ankle exoskeleton could learn how to walk with the exoskeleton in about 30 minutes. Additionally, the wearer’s nervous system retained the ability to control the exoskeleton three days later.
Electrical signals sent by the brain to our muscles tell them how to move. In people with spinal injuries or some neurological disorders, those electrical signals don’t arrive full strength and are uncoordinated. In addition, patients are less able to keep track of exactly where and how their muscles move, which makes re-learning movement difficult.
Typically, robotic rehabilitative devices are worn by patients so that the limb is moved by the brace, which receives its instructions from a computer. Such devices use repetition to help force a movement pattern.
The U-M robotic exoskeleton works the opposite of these rehabilitation aids. In the U-M device, electrodes were attached to the wearer’s leg and those electrical signals received from the brain were translated into movement by the exoskeleton.
“The (artificial) muscles are pneumatic. When the computer gets the electrical signal from the (wearer’s) muscle, it increases the air pressure into the artificial muscle on the brace,“ Ferris said. “Essentially the artificial muscle contracts with the person’s muscle.“
Initially the wearer’s gait was disrupted because the mechanical power added by the exoskeleton made the muscle stronger. However, in a relatively short time, the wearers adapted to the new strength and used their muscles less because the exoskeleton was doing more of the work. Their gait normalized after about 30 minutes.
The next step is to test the device on patients with impaired muscle function, Ferris said.

New experiments show it is possible for computers to detect, at a higher level of sophistication than ever before, people’s intentions for the future, neuroscientists reported.
The findings could yield a big improvement in brain-computer interfaces, could help the disabled control robotics with their minds and could make it so a computer could read our minds far better than is currently possible LiveScience.com said.
For decades, scientists have investigated ways that people might control machines just by thinking. Neuroscientists have known that brain-computer interfaces can read out motor functions, such as thinking about moving something from left to right, explained researcher John-Dylan Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. These studies have, for instance, led to more advanced prosthetic limbs.
While such findings can help control simple brain-computer interfaces, “if you’re hunting for a letter on a keyboard, it can take quite a while to spell out a whole word just by thinking a cursor up and down,“ Haynes said.
To build a more complex brain-computer interface, scientists would like “to tap into higher-level information. This means more abstract desires, such as ’reply to my email,’“ he explained. “Reading such intentions in the brain was not previously thought possible.“
Now Haynes and his colleagues have for the first time revealed that such wishes in the brain can get read, using a new combination of advanced brain scanners and sophisticated computer algorithms.
The scientists let volunteers freely and secretly choose between two possible tasks, either adding or subtracting two numbers. They were then asked to hold in mind their intention for roughly three to 11 seconds until the relevant numbers appeared on a screen. The subjects did not know which numbers would appear. After the paired numbers were shown, volunteers were then shown four numbers, one being the correct answer for addition, one being the correct answer for subtraction, and two being wrong answers.
The researchers observed brain activity during these experiments using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). They proved able to recognize a person’s intentions with 70 percent accuracy based solely on their brain activity, even before the volunteers had seen the numbers and started to perform the calculation.
“You could imagine a sophisticated controller for a PlayStation that would allow you to think ’do a flip on a snowboard’ instead of just left, right, up, down,“ Haynes told LiveScience. “Of course, an MRI scanner costs $2 million, so don’t expect this to get shipped with the latest Xbox.“

Autism is more common in the United States than anyone had estimated, affecting about one in every 150 children.

The largest US study of autism has found that the troubling condition is more common than previously understood.
About one in 150 American children has autism, U.S. health officials said Thursday, calling the troubling disorder an urgent public health concern that is more common than they once thought, AP said.
The new numbers are based on the largest, most convincing study done so far in the United States, and trump previous estimates that placed the prevalence at 1 in 166.
The difference means roughly 50,000 more children and young adults may have autism and related disorders than was previously thought.
Government scientists declined to call the results a complete surprise: The new estimate is on the high end of a prevalence range identified in other recent studies, they said.
But one advocate said the study should cause policy-makers and the public to revise how they think of autism.
“This is a greater national health care crisis than we thought even yesterday,“ said Alison Singer, spokeswoman for Autism Speaks, the nation’s largest organization advocating services for autistic children.
The study should fuel efforts to get the government to spend hundreds of millions of additional dollars for autism research and services.
“This data today show we’re going to need more early intervention services and more therapists, and we’re going to need federal and state legislators to stand up for these families,“ Singer said.
The study by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was based on 2002 data from 14 states. It calculated an average autism rate 6.6 per 1,000, compared to an estimate last year of 5.5 in 1,000.
The new research involved an intense review of medical and school records for children and gives the clearest picture yet of how common autism is in some parts of the country, CDC officials said.
The results suggest 560,000 children and young adults have the condition.
However, the study population is not demographically representative of the nation as a whole, so officials cautioned against using the results as a national average. The study doesn’t include some of the most populous states, like California, Texas and Florida.
Autism is a complex disorder usually not diagnosed in children until after age 3. It is characterized by a range of behaviors, including difficulty in expressing needs and inability to socialize. The cause is not known.

Skeletal remains from the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins at the American Museum of Natural History, a permanent exhibition hall that presents the remarkable history of human evolution from our earliest ancestors millions of years ago to modern Homo sapiens in New York.

The traditional museum showpieces of human evolution, Lucy and Peking Man, are being nudged aside at the famed American Museum of Natural History by a newcomer that appears to be an empty test tube.
Curators say a display of microscopic 38,000-year-old Neanderthal DNA, which seems to be nothing but a vial in a glass case, marks a symbolic start to a new permanent exhibit which breaks with a tradition of relying on fossil research to educate, Reuters said.
Ellen V. Futter, the museum’s president, called it “the first major exhibit hall of its kind to present the fossil and genomic record side by side, offering new and compelling evidence that tells a grand and sweeping story of man.“
Organizers of the exhibit hall wanted to incorporate genetic research because they said it illustrated links between organisms in ways that are often difficult with fossils.
“There are certain things you can’t do with fossils. DNA can reinforce things and amplify things,“ said Rob DeSalle, co-curator for the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins which opens on Saturday at the museum.
Almost half of Americans believe that humans were created by God in the last 10,000 years, according to a 2006 Gallup Poll, and critics of evolution have focused in part on the relatively thin fossil record.
In the exhibit next to the Neanderthal DNA, for example, a display of a series of primates shows the percentage of genetic material they share with humans, which ranges up to 99 percent for chimpanzees.
“That’s what this hall is all about. It’s about understanding we have common ancestry with other organisms,“ said DeSalle.
The exhibition hall still has the dioramas and extensive archeological discoveries for which the museum is famous, such as casts of Lucy and Peking Man.
Lucy, a 3 million year-old fossil discovered in 1974, is considered one of great discoveries of human origins because it showed she walked upright. Peking Man, a fossil at least 300,000 years old, is considered the first to use tools based on nearby discoveries.
Other highlights include a reconstructed skull of a tiny hominid that has been dubbed the Hobbit after it was discovered in a cave in Indonesia in 2003.
DeSalle said the 9,000-square-foot hall was designed to allow for regular updates with recent genetic discoveries, such as the Neanderthal DNA which was sequenced only a few months ago. A video will provide updates every few weeks on the latest research, including work done in the gene sequencing labs on site at the museum.

Scientists searching for a way to treat the rare but severe childhood neurological disorder Rett syndrome have reversed the disease in mice, raising hopes for doing the same in people.
In a study appearing in the journal Science, researchers led by Adrian Bird of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland switched on a gene called MECP2 in mice with the equivalent of Rett syndrome to make their symptoms vanish, Reuters reported.
The surprising results contradicted the notion that damage to the brain caused by the disease, which occurs nearly exclusively in girls, is permanent.
“It rocked us back on our heels because in a way we were expecting a more disappointing result,“ Bird said in an interview.
About one in every 10,000 to 15,000 girls born have Rett syndrome, which affects all racial and ethnic groups worldwide, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
In their first six to 18 months of life, the children develop apparently normally before the onset of devastating symptoms. Children with Rett syndrome commonly show autistic-like behaviors in the early stages.
It destroys speech, normal movement and functional hand use, and causes breathing difficulties, susceptibility to epileptic fits and tremors like those in Parkinson’s disease. Many patients are confined to wheelchairs. Those who can walk do so with an abnormal, stiff-legged gait.
The disease, first described by an Austrian doctor in 1966, is caused by mutations in the MECP2 gene.
The researchers made the gene fully functional over a four-week span. This eliminated the mice’s tremors, returned their breathing to normal and normalized their mobility and gait--even in animals just days away from dying. Bird’s team also reactivated the gene in mice before the disease was apparent and prevented the development of symptoms.