A researcher holds one of the completed lenses.

If you’ve ever wanted to be the Bionic Woman or a Terminator, new research may at least let you see with their eyes.
Scientists have taken the first step toward creating digital contact lenses that can zoom in on distant objects and display useful facts, LiveScience.com reported.
For the first time, engineers have installed an electronic circuit and lights on a regular contact lens.
The prototype they created does not actually light up or display information. But it proves that it is possible to build an electronic lens that is safe to wear and doesn’t obstruct vision.
“Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside,“ said Babak Parviz, an electrical engineer at the University of Washington who worked on the project. “This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it’s extremely promising.“
The results were presented last week at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ international conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems by Harvey Ho, a former graduate student of Parviz’s now working at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif.
Other co-authors are Ehsan Saeedi and Samuel Kim in the UW’s electrical engineering department and Tueng Shen in the UW Medical Center’s ophthalmology department.
It was difficult for the researchers to graft the tiny electrical circuits, built from layers of metal only a few nanometers thick (for comparison, the width of a typical human hair is about 80,000 nanometers), onto the contact lenses, which are made of organic materials that are safe for the body.
The engineers tested the finished lenses on rabbits for up to 20 minutes and the animals showed no problems.
Eventually, the technique could yield a plethora of gadgets. Perhaps drivers and pilots could see their direction and speed projected across their view, or people could surf the Web without looking at an external device’s screen.
Video gamers could immerse themselves in game landscapes directly in front of their eyes. Maybe the technique could even create sight aids for visually-impaired people.
“People may find all sorts of applications for it that we have not thought about,“ Parviz said. “Our goal is to demonstrate the basic technology and make sure it works and that it’s safe.“

Scientists in California say they have produced embryos that are clones of two men, a potential step toward developing scientifically valuable stem cells. The new report documents embryos made with ordinary skin cells.
But it’s not the first time human cloned embryos have been made. In 2005, for example, scientists in Britain reported using embryonic stem cells to produce a cloned embryo. It matured enough to produce stem cells, but none were extracted, AP said.
Stem cells weren’t produced by the new embryos either, and because of that, experts reacted coolly to the research.
“I found it difficult to determine what was substantially new,“ said Doug Melton of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. He said the “next big advance will be to create a human embryonic stem cell line“ from cloned embryos. “This has yet to be achieved.“
Dr. George Daley of the Harvard institute and Children’s Hospital Boston called the new report interesting but agreed that “the real splash“ will be when somebody creates stem cell lines from cloned human embryos.
Dr. Samuel Wood, a co-author of the new paper and chief executive of Stemagen Corp. of La Jolla, Calif., said he and his colleagues are now attempting to produce stem cell lines from the embryos.
Scientists say stem cells from cloned embryos could provide a valuable tool for studying diseases, screening drugs and, perhaps someday, creating transplant material to treat conditions like diabetes and Parkinson’s disease.
But critics raise objections. The process “involves creating human lives in the laboratory solely to destroy them for alleged benefit to others,“ said Richard Doerflinger, spokesman for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Other objections to cloning include concerns about health risks and exploitation if large numbers of women are asked to provide eggs.
Those objections are one reason that an alternative route to stem cells made headlines last November. Scientists reported a relatively simple way to turn skin cells directly into stem cells.
This direct reprogramming carries a theoretical risk of cancer for the recipients of tissue from these cells, however, and many scientists have urged that work continue on the cloning technique as well.
The cloning approach involves inserting DNA from a person into an egg, and then growing the egg into an embryo about five days old before extracting the stem cells. At that stage, the embryo is a sphere of about 150 cells.
In the new work, researchers took skin cells from Wood and another volunteer and produced three embryos with DNA matching the men’s.

A study by Swiss scientists revealed that the flu virus can nestle and survive on banknotes for more than two weeks.
Scientists from Geneva’s University Hospital were asked by a Swiss bank to carry out the study amid worries that a flu pandemic could be prolonged thanks to the millions of banknotes in circulation, AFP reported.
Between 20 and 100 million banknotes change hands in Switzerland alone each day, it said.
The researchers left small samples of the flu virus on used banknotes which were then left at room temperature. Although the virus only survived in most cases for a few hours, certain highly concentrated samples proved resistant for several days.
In the worst case, if the virus was mixed with human mucus on the banknote, it could survive for two and a half weeks.
“This unexpected resilience of the virus suggests that this sort of inert, non-biological support should not be overlooked in pandemic planning,“ chief researcher Yves Thomas said.
The team will now do further research to see how much of a factor banknotes might be in flu transmission, though Thomas stressed that the main risks remain airborne transmission and direct human contact.

Magnolia is one of hundreds of plants under threat.

Hundreds of medicinal plants are at risk of extinction, threatening the discovery of future cures for disease, according to experts.
Over 50 percent of prescription drugs are derived from chemicals first identified in plants, according to BBC.
But the Botanic Gardens Conservation International said many were at risk from over-collection and deforestation.
Researchers warned the cures for things such as cancer and HIV may become “extinct before they are ever found“.
The group, which represents botanic gardens across 120 countries, surveyed over 600 of its members as well as leading university experts.
They identified 400 plants that were at risk of extinction.
These included yew trees, the bark of which forms the basis for one of the world’s most widely used cancer drugs, paclitaxel.
Hoodia, which originally comes from Namibia and is attracting interest from drug firms looking into developing weight loss drugs, is on the verge of extinction, the report said.
And half of the world’s species of magnolias are also under threat.
The plant contains the chemical honokiol, which has been used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat cancers and slow down the onset of heart disease.
The report also said autumn crocus, which is a natural treatment for gout and has been linked to helping fight leukaemia, is at risk of over-harvest as it is popular with the horticultural trade because of its stunning petals.
Many of the chemicals from the at-risk plants are now created in the lab.
But the report said as well as future breakthroughs being put at risk, the situation was likely to have a consequence in the developing world.
It said five billion people still rely on traditional plant-based medicine as their primary form of health care.
Report author Belinda Hawkins said, “The loss of the world’s medicinal plants may not always be at the forefront of the public consciousness.
“However, it is not an overstatement to say that if the precipitous decline of these species is not halted, it could destabilize the future of global healthcare.“

Scientists have developed a way to breed corn that can boost the vitamin A it gives people who eat it--a potentially important advance for regions of the world burdened by vitamin A deficiencies.
Vitamin A deficiency is an important cause of eye disease and other health problems in developing countries, Reuters reported.
Corn, also known as maize, is the dominant subsistence crop in much of Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, where up to 30 percent of children under age 5 are vitamin A deficient.
Scientists want to come up with ways to increase--or “bio-fortify“--levels of specific nutrients in crops like corn. Corn has precursors to vitamin A--compounds called “provitamins“ including beta-carotene--which the body uses to make vitamin A.
Writing on Thursday in the journal Science, the scientists identified a naturally mutated gene that enhances the provitamin A content of maize. Based on this, they developed an inexpensive way to select the parent stock for breeding corn with the highest provitamin A content.
Choosing varieties that have this mutated gene can provide on average three-fold higher levels of provitamin A, the researchers said.
There are thousands of different corn varieties, and they differ greatly in provitamin A levels, the scientists said. White corn does not have provitamin A, but yellow varieties have it in varying levels.
A common existing technique for assessing the provitamin A content of corn varieties can be prohibitively expensive for plant breeders, the researchers said, but the new one is vastly less expensive.
“We’ve come up with a way to detect varieties that will produce high levels of provitamin A inexpensively,“ said one of the researchers, geneticist Edward Buckler of the US Department of Agriculture and Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Buckler said the method does not involve the genetic modification of corn.
“Vitamin A deficiency is a big problem throughout the world, and it causes a lot of childhood blindness and a lot of immune deficiencies,“ Buckler said in a telephone interview.
Experts say vitamin A plays a key role in vision, bone growth, regulating the immune system and other functions.
“In parts of Africa, they eat maize three meals a day. And so if you can bio-fortify what they’re eating a lot of, even just a small amount, it adds up,“ Torbert Rocheford, a professor of plant genetics at the University of Illinois at Urbana who also worked on the study, said in a telephone interview.

No two snowflakes (as shown in this high resolution photograph) are truly alike, but they can be very similar to each other.

Three-dimensional snowflakes can now be grown in a computer using a program developed by mathematicians at University of California-Davis and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
No two snowflakes are truly alike, but they can be very similar to each other, said Janko Gravner, a mathematics professor at UC Davis. Why they are not more different from each other is a mystery, Gravner said. Being able to model the process might answer some of these questions, ScienceDaily wrote.
Intricate, incredibly variable and beautiful, snowflakes have been puzzling mathematicians since at least 1611, when Johannes Kepler predicted that the six-pointed structure would reflect an underlying crystal structure.
Snowflakes grow from water vapor around some kind of nucleus, such as a bit of dust. The surface of the growing crystal is a complex, semi-liquid layer where water molecules from the surrounding vapor can attach or detach. Water molecules are more likely to attach at concavities in the crystal shape.
The model built by Gravner and David Griffeath of the University of Wisconsin-Madison takes these factors, as well as temperature, atmospheric pressure and water vapor density, into account. By running the model under different conditions, the researchers were able to recreate a wide range of natural snowflake shapes.
Rather than trying to model every water molecule, it divides the space into three-dimensional chunks one micrometer across. The program takes about 24 hours to produce one snowfake on a modern desktop computer.
As in the real world, needles are the most common pattern of computer-generated snowflake. The classic six-pointed dendriticor feathery snowflake is relatively rare, both in the computer simulation and in nature.
Gravner and Griffeath also managed to generate some novel snowflakes, such as a ’butterflake’ that looks like three butterflies stuck together along the body. Gravner said there seemed to be no reason these shapes could not appear in nature, but they would be very fragile and unstable.
One surprise was that three-dimensional structure is often important, with complex structures often growing between two plates--a feature that is difficult to see when observing actual snowflakes, but has been observed in careful studies of real snowflakes with electron microscopes.