Can You Actually Create A Working Gun With A 3D-Printer? Why, Yes… Yes You Can (Video)

The 3D-Printed Gun Works – Big Government

Cody Wilson, a 25-year-old University of Texas law student and founder of the non-profit group Defense Distributed, invented a 3D-printed handgun made of ABS plastic whose only metal is its firing pin. The group tested the gun–and it passed.

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He named it the “Liberator,” after the single-shot pistol air-dropped in Europe during World War II, and the group made the plans available for download. Wired reported that Wilson used a single .380 caliber bullet. He does have barrels in 9mm and .22 in the works, but the design needs to be more stable. It is not perfect and Wilson thinks it is too big, but it is easy to fire. The gun was built with an $8,000 Stratasys Dimension SST 3-D Printer.

“The design is based on two to three features that worked first. We had been testing barrels for almost two months, and we used the barrels and ABS that worked,” he told Wired. “We used 60 to 70 different springs, not all separate designs, but just trial and error. We cannibalized a spring off a toy on Thingiverse, a wind-up car toy.”

Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) passed 3-D printed handguns should be banned.

“Guns are made out of plastic, so they would not be detectable by a metal detector at any airport or sporting event,” said Schumer. “Only metal part of the gun is the little firing pin and that is too small to be detected by metal detectors, for instance, when you go through an airport.”

Schumer said the Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988, which expires next year, should be updated to include printable gun magazines. Defense Distributed possesses a federal firearms manufacturers license, but only after Wilson was sought out by the ATF.

“There’s no reason for a rifle receiver or a magazine to be, quote unquote, detectable,” Wilson says. “And to make this even worse, they’ll say: we’ll it’s okay for manufacturers to make an undetectable receiver, but it’s just not okay for you to make it. It’s an attempt to regulate some gun parts under the guise of security.”

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Federal Government Spends $402,721 On Underwear That Senses Cigarette Smoke

Feds Spend $402,721 On Underwear That Senses Cigarette Smoke – CNS

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded more than $400,000 to a research project involving underwear that can detect when a person smokes cigarettes.

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The University of Alabama has received two grants totaling $402,721 for the project, which so far has produced a “very early prototype” of the monitoring system, which – in its current state – fits like a vest.

The goal of the three-year study is to “develop a wearable sensor system comprised of a breathing sensor integrated into conventional underwear.”

The Personal Automatic Cigarette Tracker (PACT for short) is intended to accurately measure when and how often people smoke as well as how deeply they inhale. The real-time information would be used to design strategies for smoking cessation.

“The modern methods of monitoring smoking, primarily you rely on self-report,” said Dr. Edward Sazonov, an associate professor at the University of Alabama who is leading the project. “There are few devices which actually allow a more computerized health report,” he told CNSNews.com.

“We are trying to eliminate the need for self-report from people about how much they smoke, when they smoke, how many puffs they take from the cigarette,” he said.

Sazonov has created two wearable sensors: a small bracelet worn on the arm that monitors a smoker’s hand-to-mouth motion; and the underwear sensor that monitors breathing.

“The combination of these two sensors, hopefully, will allow us to monitor cigarette smoking without asking people when and how much they smoke,” he said.

The PACT Sazonov created is a “very early prototype,” that fits like a vest with multiple straps and wires, far from the “non-invasive, wearable” underwear the project developers had in mind.

“It’s not very user friendly,” Sazonov said. “Right now we’re actually in the process of integrating this whole system just so it’s in an elastic band, pretty much like a heart rate monitor.”

The project began in March 2010, with the University receiving $187,368 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. That grant was followed by an additional $215,353 in 2011, though the project will not end until August of this year.

The grants have yielded two studies. In one of them, people were brought into a lab and fitted with the sensors, which tracked normal activities such as eating and physical activity. The goal was to see if the monitor would also detect cigarette smoking, differentiating it immediately from other activities. Sazonov said this study was successful.

A second study had people wearing the PACT for a full day. Those results are still being analyzed.

“The results can be used in support of cessation because potentially in the future we should be able to detect smoking in real time,” Sazonov said.

When asked if he will be applying for more grants in the future when the current funding ends this summer, Sazonov said, “We definitely want to continue with this research, yes.”

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15-Year French Study Finds That Bras Make Breasts Saggier

Bras Don’t Work, Make Breasts Saggier, French Study Finds – Global Post

According to a new French study, women have reasons to burn their bras that have nothing to do with glass ceilings or women’s liberation.

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Results from a 15-year study published Wednesday conclude that bras are a “false necessity” that provide no benefits to breasts, The Local reported.

“Medically, physiologically, anatomically – breasts gain no benefit from being denied gravity,” said the study’s author, University of Besancon Prof. Jean-Denis Rouillon. “On the contrary, they get saggier with a bra.”

That appears to be due to less muscle development in women who wear bras. The study found women it tracked who went braless had better muscle tone and higher lift than their bra-wearing counterparts.

Rouillon, a sports science expert, took measurements from 130 women during the life of the study.

One woman who participated told The Local she can “breathe more easily. I carry myself better and I have less back pain.”

The French study follows findings from British researchers that suggest bras might pose cancer risks.

Cardiff University Prof. Robert Mansel and Simon Cawthorn, from Frenchay Hospital in Bristol, asked 100 women to ban their bras for three months and then return to wearing one for another three months.

On average, the women were pain free more (about seven percent more) without a bra, the Daily Mail reported.

The doctors say there might be a correlation between breast pain and developing breast cancer, although they didn’t connect bras and cancer directly.

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Is This A Pandemic Being Born?

Is This A Pandemic Being Born? – Foreign Policy

Here’s how it would happen. Children playing along an urban river bank would spot hundreds of grotesque, bloated pig carcasses bobbing downstream. Hundreds of miles away, angry citizens would protest the rising stench from piles of dead ducks and swans, their rotting bodies collecting by the thousands along river banks. And three unrelated individuals would stagger into three different hospitals, gasping for air. Two would quickly die of severe pneumonia and the third would lay in critical condition in an intensive care unit for many days. Government officials would announce that a previously unknown virus had sickened three people, at least, and killed two of them. And while the world was left to wonder how the pigs, ducks, swans, and people might be connected, the World Health Organization would release deliberately terse statements, offering little insight.

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It reads like a movie plot – I should know, as I was a consultant for Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion. But the facts delineated are all true, and have transpired over the last six weeks in China. The events could, indeed, be unrelated, and the new virus, a form of influenza denoted as H7N9, may have already run its course, infecting just three people and killing two.

Or this could be how pandemics begin.

On March 10, residents of China’s powerhouse metropolis, Shanghai, noticed some dead pigs floating among garbage flotsam in the city’s Huangpu River. The vile carcasses appeared in Shanghai’s most important tributary of the mighty Yangtze, a 71-mile river that is edged by the Bund, the city’s main tourist area, and serves as the primary source of drinking water and ferry travel for the 23 million residents of the metropolis and its millions of visitors. The vision of a few dead pigs on the surface of the Huangpu was every bit as jarring for local Chinese as porcine carcasses would be for French strolling the Seine, Londoners along the Thames, or New Yorkers looking from the Brooklyn Bridge down on the East River.

And the nightmarish sight soon worsened, with more than 900 animal bodies found by sunset on that Sunday evening. The first few pig carcass numbers soon swelled into the thousands, turning Shanghai spring into a horror show that by March 20 would total more than 15,000 dead animals. The river zigzags its way from Zhejiang province, just to the south of Shanghai, a farming region inhabited by some 54 million people, and a major pork-raising district of China. Due to scandals over recent years in the pork industry, including substitution of rendered pig intestines for a toxic chemical, sold as heparin blood thinner that proved lethal to American cardiac patients, Chinese authorities had put identity tags on pigs’ ears. The pig carcasses were swiftly traced back to key farms in Zhejiang, and terrified farmers admitted that they had dumped the dead animals into the Huangpu.

Few Chinese asked, “What killed the pigs?,” because river pollution is so heinous across China that today people simply assume manufacturing chemicals or pesticides fill the nation’s waterways, and are responsible for all such mysterious animals demises. The Yangtze, which feeds Shanghai’s Huangpu, has copper pollution levels that are 100 times higher than U.S. safety standards, and leather tanning facilities along the river have notoriously been responsible for toxic waste, including chromium. And across China – especially in Beijing – air pollution was so bad in January and February that pollution particulate levels routinely peaked at higher than 10 times the U.S. safety standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency. When I was in Beijing in late January, the air pollution was so thick that it visually looked like fog, obscuring all sunlight and even skyscrapers located less than three city blocks away. So, hideous as the pig carcasses might be, Shanghai residents tended to shrug them off as yet another example of the trade-offs China is making, pitting prosperity against pollution.

But 12 days after the first Shanghai porcine death flow was spotted, pig carcasses washed up along the shores of Changsha’s primary river, the Xiang – also a Yangtze tributary, this one located hundreds of miles west of Shanghai. Known as “the Sky City” for its 2,749-foot-tall central tower, Changsha is home to more than 7 million people and capital of Hunan province. Along with some 50 dead pigs, authorities collected a few thousand dead ducks from the Xiang on March 22 and 23.

Two days later, another mass duck and swan die-off was spotted, this time along the Sichuan River hundreds of miles to the north, near Lake Qinghai. The lake is the most important transit and nesting site for migratory aquatic birds that travel the vast Asia flyway, stretching from central Siberia to southern Indonesia. In 2005, a mass die-off of aquatic birds in and around Lake Qinghai resulted from a mutational change in the long-circulating bird flu virus, H5N1 – a genetic shift that gave that virus a far larger species range, allowing H5N1 to spread for the first time across Russia, Ukraine and into Europe, the Middle East and North Africa – it has remained in circulation across the vast expanse of Earth for the last seven years.

On March 25, Chinese authorities seized manufactured pork buns that were found to be made from Zhejiang pigs that had died of the mysterious ailment. The possibly contaminated pork was in the Chinese food supply. By the end of March, at least 20,000 pig carcasses and tens of thousands of ducks and swans had washed upon riverbanks that stretch from the Lake Qinghai area all the way to the East China Sea – a distance roughly equivalent to the span between Miami and Boston. Nobody knows how many more thousands of birds and pigs have died, but gone uncounted as farmers buried or burned the carcasses to avoid reprimands from authorities.

While environmental clean-up and agricultural authorities scrambled to remove the unsightly corpses and provide the anxious public with less-than-believable explanations for their demise, a seemingly separate human drama was unfolding. On Feb. 19, a man identified by Xinhua, China’s state news agency, only as Li, an 87-year old retiree, was hospitalized in Shanghai with severe respiratory distress and pneumonia. On March 4, Li went into severe cardio-respiratory failure and succumbed.

On Feb. 27, a man identified only as Wu, a 27-year-old butcher or meat processor, fell ill with respiratory distress, was hospitalized, and died on March 10. The day Wu succumbed a third individual, a 35-year-old woman identified as Han, was hospitalized in the city of Nanjing, though she came from distant Chuzhou City, in Anhui province, about 300 miles northwest of Shanghai. Han is reportedly in critical condition, in intensive care. To date, no connection between the three individuals has been found.

The elderly Li may have been part of a family cluster of illness, as his 55-year old son died of pneumonia in March, and another 67-year-old son suffered respiratory distress, but has survived.

On March 31 – Easter in the United States – China’s newly created National Health and Family Planning Commission (which includes the former Ministry of Health) announced that 87-year-old Li, Wu, and Han all were infected with a form of influenza denoted as H7N9 – a type of flu never previously known to infect human beings. The commission insisted that Li’s two sons (one dead, the other a survivor) were not infected with the flu virus – their ailments were reportedly coincidental, though they occurred at the same time as the elder Li’s demise.

So much for the backstory: What is going on?

According to Chinese authorities, some of the dead pigs tested antibody-positive for circoviruses, or PCV-2, and samples of the virus were isolated from Huangpu River. The implication was that the Shanghai pigs died of PCV-2, a type of virus that is harmless to human beings, as well as birds. Photographs of the carcasses reveal that the animals were large adult hogs, but PCV-2 does not kill adult pigs – it is lethal to fetuses and newborn piglets.

The Chinese health authorities have to date offered no cause of death for the ducks and swans, failed to describe any unusual genetic features that might have turned the PCV-2 into an adult pig-killer virus, and insisted there is no connection between the pigs, people, and birds. Though the surviving woman, Han, had some contact with live chickens, according to Xinhua, neither Li nor Wu had any known contact with birds. Wu has been identified variously as a butcher, meat processor, and employee of a meat plant – all of which might imply he had contact with pigs.

Influenzas are named according to the specific nature of two proteins found on the virus — the H stands for hemaggluntinin and the N for neuraminidase. These proteins play various roles in the flu-infection process, including latching onto receptors on the outside of the cells of animals to transmit the virus into their bodies. Those receptors can vary widely from one species to another, which is why most types of influenza viruses spreading now around the world are harmless to human beings. As far as any scientists know, the H7N9 forms of flu have never previously managed to infect human beings, or any mammals — it is a class of the virus found exclusively in birds. It is therefore extremely worrying to find two people killed and one barely surviving due to H7N9 infection.

One very plausible explanation for this chain of Chinese events is that the H7N9 virus has undergone a mutation – perhaps among spring migrating birds around Lake Qinghai. The mutation rendered the virus lethal for domestic ducks and swans. Because many Chinese farmers raise both pigs and ducks, the animals can share water supplies and be in fighting proximity over food – the spread of flu from ducks to pigs, transforming avian flu into swine flu, has occurred many times. Once influenza adapts to pig cells, it is often possible for the virus to take human-transmissible form. That’s precisely what happened in 2009 with the H1N1 swine flu, which spread around the world in a massive, but thankfully not terribly virulent, pandemic.

If the pigs, people, and birds have died in China from H7N9, it is imperative and urgent that the biological connection be made, and extensive research be done to determine how widespread human infection may be. Shanghai health authorities have tested dozens of people known to have been in contact with Wu and Li, none of whom have come up positive for H7N9 infection. Assuming the tests are accurate, the mystery of Li and Wu’s infections only deepens. Moreover, if they are a “two of three,” meaning two dead, of three known cases, the H7N9 virus is very virulent.

“At this point, these three are isolated cases with no evidence of human-to-human transmission”, the WHO representative in China, Dr. Michael O’Leary, told reporters on Monday. But, O’Leary added, the possibility of a family cluster of illness could not be ruled out, and, “We don’t know yet the causes of illness in the two sons, but naturally, if three people in one family acquire severe pneumonia in a short period of time, it raises a lot of concern.”

But Hong Kong authorities, smarting from years of outbreaks spread from mainland China including H5N1 (1997) and SARS (2003), have put the territory on health alert. “We will heighten our vigilance and continue to maintain stringent port health measures in connection with this development,” the Centre for Health Protection in Hong Kong stated in a press release on Monday.

The Chinese National Influenza Center has posted the H7N9 genetic sequences of viruses from Li, Wu, and Han on the WHO flu site. A number of H7N9 sequences found in birds over the last few years are also posted: The human and bird strains do not match, though none of the birds strains were obtained from animals in 2013.

The mystery is deep, the clock is ticking, and the world wants answers.

If we were imagining how a terrible pandemic would unfold, this could certainly serve as an excellent script.

Timeline of Events

Feb. 19
First male patient, 87, became ill with H7N9 (Medical News Today).

Feb. 27
Second male patient, 27, became ill with H7N9 (Medical News Today).

March 4
First male patient dies (Medical News Today).

March 9
First female patient, 35, from Anhui province became ill with H7N9 (Telegraph).

March 10
Initial report of over 900 dead pigs in Shanghai’s Huangpu River as of Saturday, March 9 (China Daily)

Second male patient dies (Medical News Today).

March 11
Count of dead pigs in rivers near Shanghai reaches nearly 3,000 (Business Insider).

Laboratory tests find porcine circovirus (PCV) in one water sample from Huangpu River (Xinhua News)

March 13
Officials say the number of pig carcasses in Huangpu River has risen to 6,000 (BBC).

March 14
Workers continued to haul dead hogs from a river in the Shanghai suburbs Thursday, where the pig body count now exceeds 6,600, according to the municipal government (USA Today).

Farm in Zhejiang province confesses to dumping pig carcasses into river (Bloomberg)

March 20
The number of dead pigs discovered in Chinese rivers around Shanghai has risen to almost 14,000 (BBC).

March 22
50 pigs wash up onshore in Changsha, Hunan province; ~1,000 dead ducks are also discovered (NTDon China via YouTube)

Number of dead pigs found in Shanghai river rises to 16,000 (Independent)

March 25
China pulls 1,000 dead ducks from Sichuan river (BBC).

Government officials say that 1,000+ rotten duck carcasses pose no threat to human and livestock along river banks (Xinhua News).

Illegal Zhejiang pork found in food chain (South China Morning Post).

March 26
Dumping of thousands of dead pigs linked with Chinese crackdown on pork black market (Business Insider)

More than 1,000 dead ducks, in 60 woven plastic bags, are found in Sichuan province (China Daily, Time).

March 31
The government’s National Health and Family Planning Commission said over the weekend that two men, aged 87 and 27, died in Shanghai in early March after being infected with H7N9 avian influenza (AFP).

April 1
Widespread reporting about two human deaths and one severe casualty of a “lesser-known bird flu virus” (USA Today, AP).

Dr. Michael O’Leary, World Health Organization, says that there is no evidence to show that a type of bird flu which has killed two Chinese men can be transmitted between people (Reuters).

April 2
Shanghai Animal Disease Prevention and Control Center tested 34 samples of pig carcasses pulled from Huangpu River and found no flu viruses (Shanghai Daily).

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*VIDEO* ‘Terminator’ Arm Is World’s Most Advanced Prosthetic Limb

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*VIDEOS* CPAC 2013 Highlights: Day 3 – Saturday (03/16/13)

…TEA PARTY PATRIOTS CO-FOUNDER JENNY BETH MARTIN

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…CONGRESSMAN STEVE KING

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…WISCONSIN GOVERNOR SCOTT WALKER

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…FORMER HOUSE SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH

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…CONGRESSWOMAN MICHELE BACHMANN

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…AUTHOR ERIC METAXAS AND NEUROSURGEON BEN CARSON

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…FORMER CONGRESSMAN ARTUR DAVIS

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…FORMER ALASKA GOVERNOR SARAH PALIN

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…EAGLE FORUM FOUNDER PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY

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…’10 CONSERVATIVES UNDER 40′ PANEL

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…MEDIA RESEARCH CENTER PRESIDENT BRENT BOZELL

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…SARATOGA SPRINGS, UTAH MAYOR MIA LOVE

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…NRA PRESIDENT DAVID KEENE

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…AUTHOR ANN COULTER

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…SENATOR TED CRUZ

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…………Note: more videos to be posted as they become available.

…………………..Click HERE to watch highlights from Day 1.

…………………..Click HERE to watch highlights from Day 2.

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*VIDEO* Dude Launches Toy Plane Into Space Using Weather Balloon, Remotely Pilots It Back To Earth

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The EPA’s Tainted Fracking Tests

The EPA’s Tainted Fracking Tests – Wall Street Journal

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It has been four decades since Richard Nixon launched “Project Independence” with the goal of making the United States energy independent. All presidents since then have said they shared that goal, yet never has it been within reach as it is today – thanks to domestic natural gas and especially to the extraction method known as hydraulic fracturing. The International Energy Agency estimates that such technologies could allow the U.S. to supplant Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer by 2020. But, as ever, government regulation may stand in the way.

Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” uses water and trace amounts of chemicals to create tiny fissures in deep-rock formations and coax energy-laden molecules to flow toward the surface. Fracking technology is driving America’s oil and shale-gas boom, yet a White House executive order from April directs no fewer than 13 federal agencies to consider new regulations on fracking – even as it is already regulated by the states.

In recent years the federal Environmental Protection Agency has investigated fracking in three locations. In Texas and Pennsylvania, the EPA was unable to establish a link between fracking and groundwater contamination, the main ill effect that critics warn against. (Fracking contamination is the theme of “Promised Land,” a movie starring Matt Damon that opened last week.)

But the agency claims to have found a smoking gun at its third test site, in Pavillion, Wyo. There, according to draft findings, EPA investigators found “compounds likely associated with gas production practices, including hydraulic fracturing” appearing at levels “below established health and safety standards.”

The Pavillion study involves two water wells drilled by the agency in 2010 to test groundwater quality. Experts from the Wyoming Water Development Commission and elsewhere sharply criticized the EPA’s results on several grounds, including that EPA investigators didn’t follow their own guidelines on the timeliness of the testing and the purity of the water samples. The federal Bureau of Land Management said that “much more robust” testing would be needed to properly draw conclusions.

So the EPA agreed to test the wells again, in April and May of last year 2012. In October, it claimed again to have found contaminated water. But this time there was a new wrinkle: The U.S. Geological Survey had conducted tests alongside the EPA, and its investigators reported different results. Unlike the EPA, the USGS failed to find any traces of glycols or 2-butoxyethanol, fracking-related chemicals that could cause serious health issues if they entered the water supply at levels the EPA considers contamination.

Meanwhile, the USGS found significantly lower concentrations of other materials identified by the EPA—including phenol, potassium and diesel-range organics—which might not have resulted from the fracking at all. The phenols were likely introduced accidentally in the laboratory, for example, and potassium might be naturally occurring or the result of potash contained in the cement used to build the EPA wells.

The USGS also noted that in constructing the monitoring wells, the EPA used a “black painted/coated carbon steel casing,” and EPA photographs show that investigators used a painted device to catch sand from the wells. The problem is that paint can contain a variety of compounds that distort test results – so it is poor scientific practice to use painted or coated materials in well-monitoring tests.

After initially neglecting to disclose this information, the EPA eventually acknowledged it, but only while attempting to deflect criticism by releasing more test results and claiming that its data are “generally consistent” with the USGS findings. These actions only muddied the matter and postponed the peer-review process until after Jan. 15.

As the Tulsa-based energy and water-management firm ALL Consulting concluded: “Close review of the EPA draft report and associated documents reveals a number of concerns about the methodology, sampling results, and study findings and conclusions. These concerns stem from apparent errors in sampling and laboratory analysis, incomplete information that makes it difficult to assess the validity of the results, and EPA’s failure to seriously consider alternative explanations for the results of its investigation… Taken together, these concerns call into question the validity of EPA’s analytical results and their conclusions regarding the sources of the reported contamination.”

With no clear connection between fracking and groundwater contamination, it is premature and counterproductive to propose new federal regulations on the practice. Shoddy science should not form the basis of federal policy.

The fracking-facilitated development of shale gas and oil could create two million new jobs and billions in tax revenue over the next two decades, according to the research firm IHS Global Insight. Rather than look for reasons to stand in its way, the federal government should embrace hydraulic fracturing and take full advantage of its economic and security benefits.

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*VIDEOS* 10 Of The Best Speeches Of The Past 50 Years… In No Particular Order

…….Christopher Monckton

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…….Ronald Reagan

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…….A. E. Wilder-Smith

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…….Martin Luther King Jr.

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…….Charlton Heston


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…….Dinesh D’Souza

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…….Daniel Hannan

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…….Newt Gingrich

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…….Milton Friedman

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…….Mark Levin

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NASA Crashes Two Probes Into A Mountain On The Moon

NASA Crashes Two Probes Into A Mountain On The Moon – Reuters

A pair of NASA moon-mapping probes smashed themselves into a lunar mountain on Monday, ending a year-long mission that is shedding light on how the solar system formed.

The Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL, spacecraft had been flying around the moon, enabling scientists to make detailed gravity maps. The probes sped up slightly as they encountered stronger gravity from denser regions and slowed down as they flew over less-dense areas.

By precisely measuring the distance between the two probes, scientists discovered that the moon’s crust is thinner than expected and that the impacts that battered its surface did even more damage underground.

Out of fuel and edging closer to the lunar surface, the probes were commanded to smash themselves into a mountain near the moon’s north pole, avoiding a chance encounter with any Apollo or other relics left on the surface during previous expeditions.

“We do feel the angst about the end of the mission,” said Charles Elachi, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which oversaw the mission. “On the other hand, it is a celebration because this mission has accomplished tremendous science.”

The U.S. space agency lost radio communications with the first spacecraft at 5:28 p.m. EST (2228 GMT) and the second about 20 seconds later, a NASA mission commentator said.

The probes’ final resting place was named after the first U.S. woman in space, Sally Ride, who orchestrated GRAIL’s educational outreach program before her death in July. The spacecraft included cameras that were operated by students.

After completing their primary mission in May, the GRAIL twins, each about the size of a small washing machine, moved closer to the lunar surface, dropping their orbits from about 34 miles to less than half that altitude to increase their sensitivity.

On December 6, the probes, nicknamed Ebb and Flow, flew down to about 7 miles to make one last detailed map of the moon’s youngest crater.

“Ebb and Flow have removed a veil from the moon,” said lead researcher Maria Zuber, with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The discoveries not only will help scientists better understand how the moon formed and evolved, but what happened to Earth and the other inner planets which were similarly showered with comets and asteroids early in their history.

Several follow-up studies are planned, including coordinating the moon’s new gravity maps with the locations where Apollo soil and rock samples were collected, Zuber said.

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Scientists Create Brain Cells From Human Urine

Scientists Create Brain Cells From Human Urine – Yahoo News

A new scientific study claims that human urine can be converted into brain cells. And the surprising discovery may extend beyond practical applications, allowing a way to circumvent the controversial debate over stem cell research.

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The study, published online in Nature Methods and conducted by a team led by Chinese stem-cell biologist Duanqing Pei, found that cells generated from human waste might someday be used to study disease and even in therapeutic treatments for neurodegenerative diseases.

Plus, there’s a potential added bonus to the discovery: Embryonic stem cells possess a high risk of developing tumors, which reportedly would not be an issue with cells taken from the urine samples.

The process works by transforming cells present in the urine into precursors of brain cells, known as neural progenitor cells. The study says the cells found in urine are a “much more accessible source” than cells found in skin and blood samples.

“This could definitely speed things up,” James Ellis, a medical geneticist at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children in Ontario, Canada, told Nature.

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Did You Know That The State Of Maine Has Its Very Own Desert? It Does! (Pictures / Video)

The Little Desert That Grew In Maine – New York Times

Maine evokes ocean breezes, the smell of beach roses and the sight of lobster boats trawling for the evening catch. But a few miles from the coast in Freeport, there’s an anomaly that has delighted young children and intrigued curious adults for nearly 90 years. Called the Desert of Maine, it is not really a desert at all – but it sure looks like one. And although it is operated as a tourist attraction, this is no ersatz Sahara built of trucked-in sand and designer dunes. Nature laid it down, human error uncovered it, and the hucksters and gawkers arrived late in the game.

On a clear late-summer morning with temperatures in the low 70’s, the “desert,” which emerges incongruously from the surrounding green hills, shimmered at 90 degrees from the reflected heat of its shifting dunes. Walking to the middle of this silent expanse, you’ll find it difficult to believe you are anywhere in the eastern United States, let alone Maine.

Most visitors tour this otherworldly landscape – which takes up most of the Desert of Maine tourist attraction’s 47 acres – on 30-minute tram tours. But there are also easy hiking trails, and visitors can wander on their own. In places, dunes tower high above the trails, kept at bay by trees – the surrounding forest is the natural fence that keeps the sand from spreading.

My 12-year-old son and his friend, young sophisticates who had feigned lack of interest in anything in Maine unattached to a hotel pool, the ocean or a Game Boy, became so interested in their desert explorations that they didn’t want to stop to pose for pictures.

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The Desert of Maine is well known locally, according to Robert Doyle, a retired head of the Maine Geological Survey and former associate professor at the University of Maine at Augusta. “My father took me there when I was 10,” he said.

The story of this strange place began more than 10,000 years ago, Mr. Doyle explained, when the glaciers of the last Ice Age slowly scraped the soil and ground rocks into pebbles and then to a sandy substance known as glacial silt, forming a layer up to 80 feet deep in places in southern Maine. Then, over the centuries, topsoil formed a cap, concealing the “desert,” enabling forest to grow and, when settlers came to North America, supporting agriculture.

Enter William Tuttle, a farmer who bought 300 acres of prime farmland in 1797. Tuttle built a large post-and-beam barn on the site and operated a successful farm for decades, raising cattle and crops. His descendants added sheep to sell wool to textile mills. Poor crop rotation and overgrazing by sheep, which tear the plants out of the soil by the roots, resulted in soil erosion and something eerily beyond.

One day, a patch of sand the size of a dinner plate became exposed. It grew until the family became alarmed. But it was too late. The “desert” had made its entrance, and the more the soil eroded, the more the sand underneath was exposed.

The Tuttles didn’t give up right away, and tried for years to fight the inevitable. But slowly the sand claimed the farm, swallowing buildings and pasture. By the early 20th century they abandoned the place. Proving that one person’s disaster is another’s gold mine, Henry Goldrup bought the farm in 1919 for $300 and opened it as a tourist attraction in 1925. It now attracts 30,000 visitors a year, according to Mary and Bob Kaschub, who work as tour guides.

The tram tour travels through the starkest portions of the desolate landscape, like the site of a springhouse, built in 1935, that was overtaken by sand by 1962 and is now invisible under eight feet of sand. Pine trees have adapted to the sand and seem healthy, with only their tops exposed and their trunks buried as much as 50 feet deep. The contrast is vivid between the brightness of the dunes and the surrounding forest.

Mica in the silt sparkles in the Maine sun. It also reflects heat, explaining the high temperatures in the middle of the sandy expanse. Readings of more than 100 degrees are not uncommon, Ms. Kaschub said.

Over several years as a tour guide, she has learned to respect the power of the sand. On one tour, a powerful gust of wind suddenly made it impossible to see and nearly impossible to breathe, she said. Visitors and staff had to cover their eyes, noses and mouths until the swirling sandstorm subsided several minutes later. Ms. Kaschub also pointed out trees that had been stripped of much of their bark, essentially sandblasted smooth from the wind. “Every year, I wonder, will the desert win, or will the forest win?” she mused.

On the day of our visit the air was still, making it easy to admire the area’s odd beauty and to feel sorry for the hapless Tuttles. They tried to make bricks out of the sand swallowing their farm, but because of the high mica content, the bricks just crumbled and fell apart. So the sparkling quality that helped make the place a tourist attraction essentially prevented its practical use.

Once the touring and hiking are done, there are more activities for children. A staff artist gives free lessons in fashioning art from the sand, which varies in color. For the purchase of a bottle for a few dollars and a quick lesson in shaping a sand creation, visitors can spend an absorbing hour creating a piece of the “desert” to bring home.

Also on the site are a museum with agricultural implements and a play area where children can search for colored stones that the staff has scattered on the sand.

In the 1950’s, the Desert of Maine kept a camel named Sarah to add to the desert atmosphere. It developed the unfortunate habit of biting and spitting at the tourists and was eventually sent to a zoo. Taking its place now are two life-size statues of camels, one lying down and the other standing. They are not nearly as interactive as Sarah was, but at least tourists who want a souvenir picture won’t have to worry about fending off a dromedary with anger management issues.

VISITOR INFORMATION

The Desert of Maine (207-865-6962; http://www.desertofmaine.com) is at 95 Desert Road, Freeport, Me. To reach it from Interstate 295, which follows the coast, get off at Exit 20, turn west and drive for two miles. The Desert of Maine is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. between Memorial Day and Oct. 15; the last tour leaves at 4:30. Tickets are $8.75 for adults.

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Admission to the picnic area is included with the price of admission, but the Desert of Maine store sells only snack food. For more substantial picnic fare, Harraseeket Lunch and Lobster Company in South Freeport is just two miles away (36 Main Street; 207-865-3535). It’s an informal place overlooking the Harraseeket River that features fresh lobster (two one-pound lobsters for $19.95) or, for the kids, chicken fingers and $1.50 hot dogs.

A trip to Freeport would be incomplete without a stop at the mothership of shopaholics, L.L. Bean, which has had its headquarters there since 1917. Three million visitors arrive each year to visit the flagship store (800-441-5713) on Main Street in the center of the village. It is open 24 hours a day every day of the year.

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Luxury Hotel Under The Sea Features Restaurant, Gym And Even A Wedding Chapel

Luxury Hotel Under The Sea Features Restaurant, Gym And Even A Wedding Chapel… As Long As You Can Afford $15,000 For A Week’s Stay – Daily Mail

Most guests luxury hotels are not thrill-seekers – but visitors to the Poseidon Undersea Resort will have to take a serious leap of faith.

The holiday complex is set to be located 40ft under the sea in a lagoon off the shore of a private island in Fiji.

It will house 25 suites, as well as a restaurant, bar, gym, and even an underwater wedding chapel.

The innovative project is the brainchild of L. Bruce Jones, boss of U.S. Submarines, Inc.

For $15,000 per person per week, guests will enjoy access to the underwater complex, which will be accessed via an elevator from the shore of the island.

Above the water will be 51 additional hotel rooms, as well as a number of restaurants and bars plus a spa, tennis courts and a nine-hole golf course.

But most visitors will surely be attracted above all by the stunning underwater seascape, full of stunning biological phenomena such as tropical fish and coral reefs.

To explore this subaqueous world, guests will apparently have access to four personal submarines provided by the resort.

Those put off by the see-through modules will be relieved to learn that they will be able to make the plastic opaque, drawing a virtual blind over the windows.

And visitors who are concerned about the safety implications of spending hours at a time in transparent domes underwater are assured that their fears are baseless.

The resort claims on its website that its buildings are based on the design of passenger submarines, which it describes as ‘statistically the world’s safest form of transportation’.

The various modules of the complex are all structurally separate, meaning that each one can be shut off if a problem develops there.

And the plexiglass rooms can all be detached from the seabed and lifted to the surface for repairs if necessary.

The Poseidon resort has been in the making for several years as Mr Jones and his partners have sought the capital necessary to convert their comprehensive designs into reality.

They claim it will take just two years to construct the undersea complex once they have raised enough money.

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‘Today We Turned Science Fiction Into Science Fact’: Latest On The New Missile That Can Fry Electronics

‘Today We Turned Science Fiction Into Science Fact’: Latest On The New Missile That Can Fry Electronics – The Blaze

Boeing has completed another successful test for technology that fries enemy electronics with little to no collateral damage to other objects. This news comes a little more than a year after TheBlaze reported on Boeing’s previous successes with its Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP).

Boeing describes CHAMP as “a non-kinetic alternative to traditional explosive weapons that use the energy of motion to defeat a target.” In its most recent test that took place last week with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory Directed Energy Directorate, Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M., over the Utah Test and Training Range, Boeing proved CHAMP could follow a pre-programmed flight plan and wipe out enemy target data and electronic subsystems by emitting high amounts of energy.

“This technology marks a new era in modern-day warfare,” Keith Coleman, CHAMP program manager for Boeing Phantom Works, said in the company’s press release. “In the near future, this technology may be used to render an enemy’s electronic and data systems useless even before the first troops or aircraft arrive.”

Watch this Boeing report on the latest test of the first fully functional CHAMP:

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In a recent feature on CHAMP’s latest test, Boeing describes how the missile approached a two-story building, fired high-powered microwaves at it and effectively knocked out the computers and other electrical systems inside. It states that even the cameras that were inside the building to record the test were wiped out.

“Today we turned science fiction into science fact,” Coleman said in Boeing’s feature.

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Mystery Spheres On Mars Baffle Scientists

Mystery Spheres On Mars Baffle Scientists – Discovery News

A strange picture of odd, spherical rock formations on Mars from NASA’s Opportunity rover has scientists scratching their heads over what exactly they’re looking at.

The new Mars photo by Opportunity shows a close-up of a rock outcrop called Kirkwood covered in blister-like bumps that mission scientists can’t yet explain. At first blush, the formations appear similar to so-called Martian “blueberries” – iron-rich spherical formations first seen by Opportunity in 2004 – but they actually differ in several key ways, scientist said.

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“This is one of the most extraordinary pictures from the whole mission,” said rover mission principal investigator Steve Squyres of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., in a statement.

“Kirkwood is chock full of a dense accumulation of these small spherical objects. Of course, we immediately thought of the blueberries, but this is something different. We never have seen such a dense accumulation of spherules in a rock outcrop on Mars.”

The new photo by Opportunity is actually a mosaic of four images taken by a microscope-like imager on its robotic arm, and then stitched together like puzzle pieces by scientists on Earth.

Opportunity on Mars

The Mars rover Opportunity is currently exploring a location known as Cape York along the western rim of a giant Martian crater called Endeavour. Opportunity is one of two golf cart-size NASA rovers that landed on Mars in January 2004 (Spirit was the other) to explore different landing sites.

The solar-powered rovers were initially expected to last just 90 days on Mars, but each survived for years on the Red Planet. Spirit stopped communicating with Earth in 2010, but Opportunity is still operational.

Despite its advanced age, Opportunity is still pumping out new discoveries after more than eight years on Mars. The rover first spotted Martian blueberries soon after its landing in 2004. The blueberries are actually concretions created by minerals in water that settled into sedimentary rock.

Opportunity has seen Martian blueberries at many of its science sites during its Red Planet exploits, but the bumpy, spherical formations on the Kirkwood rock represent something new, researchers said. In Opportunity’s new photo, many of the strange features are broken, revealing odd concentric circles inside.

“They seem to be crunchy on the outside, and softer in the middle,” Squyres said. “They are different in concentration. They are different in structure. They are different in composition. They are different in distribution. So, we have a wonderful geological puzzle in front of us.”

Squyres said he and his science team have several theories, but none that truly stand out as the best explanation for what could have created the weird bumps on Mars.

“It’s going to take a while to work this out, so the thing to do now is keep an open mind and let the rocks do the talking,” he said.

A Martian Spring

The Kirkwood outcrop is just one science pit stop at Cape York for Opportunity. Mission scientists have already picked out another interesting rock outcrop nearby, a pale patch that may contain tantalizing clay minerals, for possibly study after Opportunity completes its current analysis.

Meanwhile, the spring equinox is approaching on Mars, ensuring increasing levels of sunshine for Opportunity’s solar arrays.

“The rover is in very good health considering its 8-1/2 years of hard work on the surface of Mars,” said rover project manager John Callas of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in a statement. “Energy production levels are comparable to what they were a full Martian year ago, and we are looking forward to productive spring and summer seasons of exploration.”

While Opportunity explores the plains of its Meridiani Planum location, NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity is poised to resume driving toward its first long-distance destination inside Gale Crater. The rover, which has completed its final health checks, is headed for a site called Glenelg near the base of the 3-mile (5-kilometer) Mount Sharp, a mountain that rises from the center of its Gale Crater landing site.

Curiosity landed on Mars on Aug. 5 and is expected to spend two years studying Gale Crater to determine if the region could have ever supported microbial life.

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Cure For Deafness A Reality As Scientists Make Animals Hear Again, Promise Humans Will Be Treated In A ‘Few Years’

Cure For Deafness A Reality As Scientists Make Animals Hear Again, Promise Humans Will Be Treated In A ‘Few Years’ – Daily Mail

Deaf animals have been made to hear again, in a breakthrough that brings hope to millions.

Sheffield University scientists used injections of millions of stem cells to successfully treat profoundly deaf gerbils.

On average, hearing was restored by almost 50 per cent within just a few weeks. But, in some cases, it returned to near perfect levels.

The work is still at an early stage but it raises the prospect of people going from being unable hear a lorry thundering past them on the street to being able take part in everyday conversations once more.

In time, up to 90 per cent of the ten million Britons who are deaf and hard of hearing could be helped, including many for whom hearing aids and other devices provide no benefit.

Dr Ralph Holme, of charity Action on Hearing Loss, formerly known as the Royal National Institute for Deaf People, said the research gives ‘real hope’ for the future.

He added: ‘For the millions of people for whom hearing loss is eroding their quality of life, this can’t come soon enough.’

One in six Britons suffers from some form of hearing loss, with 70 per cent of over 70 year-olds and 40 per cent of those 50-plus affected.

However, it is not just a problem of the old, with one in three sufferers of working age.

The research, which was part-funded by Action on Hearing Loss, involves a type of deafness called auditory neuropathy.

It accounts for up to 15 per cent of cases and it caused by age, genes, noise or illness damaging the delicate nerve cells in the inner ear that transmit electrical signals to the brain, where they are decoded as sounds.

There are no treatments in widespread use but the study, published in the journal Nature, suggests that embryonic stem cells hold the answer.

In the unborn baby, these ‘master cells’ cells are able to turn into the all the tissue types in the body and many researchers around the world see them as repair kit for dying, damaged and worn out parts of the adult body.

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The Sheffield University researchers began by creating the combination of nutrients needed to turn the stem cells into immature versions of the cells damaged in auditory neuropathy.

They then injected tens of thousands of the cells into the inner ears of gerbils left profoundly deaf by a chemical treatment.

The animals’ hearing started to return after just four weeks and many showed substantial recovery after ten weeks.

Gerbils were used in the experiments because, unlike mice, they hear the same range of sounds as people.

Lead researcher Dr Marcelo Rivolta said he hopes to test the treatment on people within ‘a few years’.

But before they do this, they have determine how long the treatment lasts – and be confident that it is safe as well as effective.

Replacing the damaged nerve cells could help up to 15 per cent of those with hearing loss.

But if doctors could also replace the delicate hairs of the inner ear that convert vibrations into the electrical signals picked up by the nerve cells, up to 90 per cent of cases could be treated.

The researchers have had some success in making the hair cells but they are more difficult to insert properly into the ear.

Professor Walter Marcotti, one of the study’s authors, said the level of recovery seen could make an enormous difference to patients.

He told a news briefing in London: ‘It would mean going from being so deaf that you wouldn’t be able to hear a lorry or truck in the street to the point where you would be able to hear a conversation in this room.’

The use of embryonic stem cells is controversial but it may eventually be possible to dispense with them an and use stem cells made from a sliver of the patient’s skin instead.

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Baldness Cure Could Be On Shelves In Two Years

Baldness Cure Could Be On Shelves In Two Years – London Telegraph

They are already talking with pharmaceutical firms about making the product, which would work by stopping the effects of a single guilty enzyme.

US-based dermatologists announced earlier this year that they had found that an enzyme, called prostaglandin D2 (PGD2), instructed follicles to stop producing hair.

They identified it by screening 250 genes implicated in hair loss.

George Cotsarelis, head of dermatology at Pennsylvania University, said the one responsible for levels of PGD2 played “the major role”.

He said he was now talking with several drugs firms about creating the anti-baldness product.

Drugs are already available that reduce PGD2 levels, as it has been implicated in asthma, holding out the hope that developing a related product for baldness could be speedy.

About four in five men will experience some degree of baldness by the age of 70. In bald patches follicles are still making hairs, but less well than before. The hairs get shorter and shorter until they are either barely visible or do not even break the skin’s surface.

Cotsarelis and colleagues found that in 17 men with hair loss, PGD2 levels were three times higher in bald spots than in hairy areas.

When the original study was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine in March, he said: “We really do think if you remove the inhibition [caused by PGD2}, you get longer hair.”

He said the finding raised the possibility of not only stopping hair loss, but of bald men also being able to regrow full heads of hair.

Des Tobin, director of the centre for skin sciences at Bradford University, described the advance as “a big step forward”.

He said: “I can’t see why we won’t soon be able to intervene to prevent hair loss.”

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Mars Rover Curiosity Makes Safe Landing On Red Planet

Mars Rover Curiosity Makes Safe Landing On Red Planet – Salt Lake Tribune

Give the landing a 10.

NASA’s Curiosity rover, the largest-ever rover launched, safely made its way to the surface of the red planet – a maneuver trickier than sticking any gymnastics landing seen in the London Olympics.

The anticipation and excitement were palpable as more than 250 people gathered at the University of Utah to watch the broadcast from inside NASA’s mission control as scientists, and the world, heard the step-by-step progress of Curiosity’s landing. The audience erupted in shouts and applause when NASA received confirmation of the 11:31 p.m. landing.

Patrick Wiggins, NASA solar system ambassador to Utah, said he was “giddy” all night.

“It just went so well, so well. We’re on Mars!” he said as tears of joy gathered in his eyes. “The insane descent module worked.”

Images nearly instantly began streaming in from the $2.5 billion machine, also called the Mars Science Laboratory. It is equipped with sensors, cameras and a robotic arm as it searches for signs of past microbial life on Mars. For the past 36 weeks, it has traveled 352 million miles, but the most difficult part of the trip was the landing.

Previous rovers have been dropped onto the planet in essentially an oversized air bag, but the Mini Cooper-sized Curiosity weighs nearly a ton – too heavy to use the method.

Instead, scientists programmed the autopilot to slow itself down from 13,000 mph to a crawl using heat shields, a massive parachute and a complicated rocket-propelled backpack, called Sky Crane, that used nylon ropes to lower the rover into a crater next to a nearly four-mile-high mountain.

Several parents brought their children to the event.

Bonnie Larson, of Sandy, casually mentioned the event to her 10-year-old son, Henry, Sunday evening, “and he was in the car before I could say ‘Whoa!’” She filled her coffee mug and drove her son, who competes to make and program robots as part of First Lego League, to the event.

“This is a good lesson because it’s just like in Lego league – this shows these kids there are going to be moments of stress and you’re not going to know if it works until it’s over,” Larson said.

David Gonzalez drove his two children, Clive, 7, and Zion, 10, from Provo to the U. to watch the event. He homeschools his children and said he has prioritized once-in-a-lifetime events such as this one.

“Kids respond really well to exploration,” he said. “This is a defining moment in their lives of the technological advances being made.”

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Two Men HIV Free After Adult Stem Cell Bone Marrow Transplants (Video)

Amazing! Two Men HIV Free After Adult Stem Cell Bone Marrow Transplants – Gateway Pundit

Two HIV-positive men were found to be free of detection following adult stem cell bone marrow transplants.

Eight months after the transplant doctors say they could not find HIV in either of the two Boston patients.

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Note: These are adult stem cells and not embryonic stem cells.

Life News reported:

Adult stem cells are responsible for another incredible scientific breakthrough.

On Thursday at the AIDS 2012 Conference in Washington, DC, researchers unveiled that two HIV-positive men have been found to be HIV-free following bone marrow transplants. Researchers believe giving bone marrow transplants, which by nature involve the use of adult stem cells, to patients undergoing anti-retroviral therapy could potentially cure the AIDS-causing virus.

“We expected HIV to vanish from the patients’ plasma, but it is surprising that we can’t find any traces of HIV in their cells,” said Dr. Timothy Henrich, one of the researchers studying the two men. “It suggests that under the cover of anti-retroviral therapy, the cells that repopulated the patient’s immune system appear to be protected from becoming re-infected with HIV.”

Only time will tell if the two men have been permanently cured of the virus. “Studies over time including biopsies of lymphatic tissue would be required,” said Dr. Michael Saag, an infectious disease expert from University of Alabama at Birmingham.

The breakthrough bears similarities to the case of Timothy Ray Brown, known as “the Berlin patient,” who says he continues to be cured of HIV after receiving a transplant of cells found to have a genetic mutations making them HIV-resistant.

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Blind Mice Can See Again With Breakthrough Injection That Could Lead To Radical Cures For Humans

Blind Mice Can See Again With Breakthrough Injection That Could Lead To Radical Cures For Humans – Daily Mail

An injection into the eye could one day restore sight to the blind, scientists say.

The jab has already been found to repair sight in blind mice, leading to hopes for new treatments for human patients.

The molecule is injected into the eyes and acts as a ‘photoswitch’ that turns on light sensitive cells.

It allowed genetically programmed sightless animals to temporarily see. The researchers are now working on a better compound that could eventually cure people with degenerative blindness.

It could help those with the genetic disease retinitis pigmentosa – the most common inherited form of blindness – as well as AMD (age-related macular degeneration) which affects 23,000 Brits a year.

In both diseases the light sensitive cells in the retina – the rods and cones – die, leaving the eye without functional photoreceptors.

Professor Richard Kramer, of California University in Berkeley, said the chemical called AAQ acts by making the remaining, normally ‘blind’ cells in the retina sensitive to light.

AAQ (acrylamide-azobenzene-quaternary ammonium) is a photoswitch that binds to proteins on the surface of retinal cells. When switched on by light AAQ activates brain cells in much the same way as rods and cones are triggered.

Prof Kramer said: ‘This is similar to the way local anaesthetics work – they embed themselves in ion channels and stick around for a long time so you stay numb for a long time.

‘Our molecule is different in that it’s light sensitive so you can turn it on and off and turn on or off neural activity.’

Because the chemical eventually wears off it may offer a safer alternative to other experimental approaches for restoring sight – such as gene or stem cell therapies – which permanently change the retina. It’s also less invasive than implanting light-sensitive chips in the eye.

Prof Kramer said: ‘The advantage of this approach is it is a simple chemical which means you can change the dosage, you can use it in combination with other therapies or you can discontinue the therapy if you don’t like the results.

‘As improved chemicals become available you could offer them to patients. You can’t do that when you surgically implant a chip or after you genetically modify somebody.’

Co-researcher Dr Russell Van Gelder, an ophthalmologist at Washington University in Seattle, said: ‘This is a major advance in the field of vision restoration.’

The blind mice in the experiment had genetic mutations making their rods and cones die within months of birth and inactivated other photopigments in the eye.

After injecting very small amounts of AAQ into their eyes light sensitivity was restored because the mice’s pupils contracted in bright light.

The mice showed light avoidance – a typical rodent behaviour impossible without the animals being able to see some light.

Prof Kramer whose study is published in Neuron is hoping to conduct more sophisticated vision tests in rodents injected with the next generation of the compound.

Dr Van gelder said: ‘The photoswitch approach offers real hope to patients with retinal degeneration.

‘We still need to show these compounds are safe and will work in people the way they work in mice but these results demonstrate this class of compound restores light sensitivity to retinas blind from genetic disease.’

The current technologies being evaluated for restoring sight include injection of stem cells, gene therapy to insert a photoreceptor into blind neurons to make them sensitive to light and installation of electronic prosthetic devices to stimulate blind neurons.

Prof Kramer said several dozen people already have retinal implants and have had rudimentary, low vision restored.

Eight years ago his researchers developed an optogenetic technique to chemically alter potassium ion channels in blind neurons so a photoswitch could latch on.

Potassium channels normally open to turn a cell off but with the attached photoswitch they were opened when hit by ultraviolet light and closed when hit by green light – activating and deactivating the neurons.

Prof Kramer said new versions of AAQ now being tested activate neurons for days rather than hours using blue-green light of moderate intensity.

These photoswitches naturally deactivate in darkness so a second colour of light is not needed to switch them off.

He said: ‘This is what we are really excited about.’

The RNIB described new research suggesting an injection into the eye could one day restore sight to the blind as ‘very interesting’.

Steve Winyard, head of policy and campaigns at the charity, said: ‘This is very interesting research as AMD is the leading cause of sight loss in the UK and retinitis pigmentosa is the most common inherited form of blindness.

‘RNIV welcomes the conituing research into treatments that could one day help to restore some people’s vision – particularly as it is predicted by 2050 the number of people with sight loss in the UK will double to nearly four million.

‘However, clearly it is still at an early stage and more extensive trials are needed to confirm the safety and effectiveness of this kind of treatment.’

The molecule called AAQ is injected into the eyes and acts as a ‘photoswitch’ that turns on light sensitive cells.

It allowed genetically programmed sightless mice to temporarily see. The researchers are now working on a better compound that could eventually cure people with degenerative blindness.

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