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Vancomycin-resistant enterococci (red) colonizing the small intestine (intestinal epithelial cells are blue and the mucus layer is green) of an antibiotic-treated mouse. (credit: Molecular Cytology Facility at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center)

When it comes to the human body’s trillions of microbial inhabitants, sorting the good from the bad is critical. Antibiotics are powerful weapons for obliterating nasty, disease-causing germs, but they can also take out microbial chums as collateral damage. The loss of those invisible allies can have long-term, cascading health effects, including opening opportunities for invasions by enemy microbes, such as Clostridium difficile and Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium (VRE).

Fixing such a culled, out-of-whack microbial community in the human body—a condition called dysbiosis—is hard. Scientists still don’t have a firm hold on the recipe for a “healthy” microbiome, let alone know how to mend one that appears imbalanced. The closest researchers have come to such a feat is with the use of fecal transplants to restore gut communities—essentially a wholesale replacement of a wrecked microbial community with a functional one.

But now researchers may be on to a way to prevent dysbiosis in the first place.

Actin fibers, labeled in green, moving across a collection of myosin. (credit: Nicolau lab, McGill University)

Quantum computers get a lot of people excited because they solve problems in a manner that's fundamentally different from existing hardware. A certain class of mathematical problems, called NP-complete, can seemingly only be solved by exploring every possible solution, which conventional computers have to do one at a time. Quantum computers, by contrast, explore all possible solutions simultaneously, and so these can provide answers relatively rapidly.

This isn't just an intellectual curiosity; encryption schemes rely on it being too computationally challenging to decrypt a message.

But as you may have noticed, we don't yet have quantum computers, and the technical hurdles between us and them remain substantial. An international team recently decided to try a different approach, using biology to explore a large solution space in parallel. While their computational machine is limited, the basic approach works, and it's 10,000 times more energy-efficient than traditional computers.

(credit: Paul)

On Thursday, Apple filed its formal legal response to the standoff between it and the Department of Justice.

Last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook again reiterated the company’s firm commitment to privacy and its resolve to fight a new court order issued earlier this month. If the order stands up to legal challenges, Apple would be forced to create a new customized iOS firmware that would remove the passcode lockout on a seized iPhone as part of the ongoing San Bernardino terrorism investigation.

In a call with reporters on Thursday, Apple executives dubbed this customized iOS firmware a "government OS" and added that it would have to make an "FBI forensics lab" at its Cupertino headquarters.

Randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials are the gold standard for determining if a drug works—or at least if it works better than other drugs that are currently out there. These are the trials in which some people get an intervention for a condition, while similar people get a placebo, and no one (neither the patients nor the doctors) knows who is getting what. The researchers then compare how everyone has fared after a certain amount of time has elapsed.

Patients enroll in these trials to advance medical knowledge and to help future patients by identifying the most effective therapies. But in order to use those therapies, doctors need to be informed of what they are—the results of clinical trials must be disseminated. That, alas, is not really happening so much.

ClinicalTrials.gov is the US government’s repository of clinical trials. It was established in 1997 and made public in 2000. As of September 2007, the FDA stipulated that all clinical trials of drugs, biologics, and devices had to be registered on the database within three weeks of enrolling their last participants. The results of the trial had to be registered within a year after the trial’s completion.

The site of the leaking well (top) relative to a nearby community. (credit: Stephen Conley)

In a paper released Thursday, a group of scientists published the results of 13 flyovers performed during the recent Aliso Canyon natural gas leak. They conclude that the well leak had effectively doubled the methane (CH₄) emission rate of the Los Angeles Basin.

The researchers, who hailed from Scientific Aviation, UC Davis, UC Irvine, CU Boulder, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, also concluded that the natural gas leak was the second-biggest failure of its kind in US history. The biggest happened in 2004 in Moss Bluff, Texas, when an underground natural gas storage facility collapsed.

Depressingly, the researchers suggested that the environmental impact from the Aliso Canyon leak would be much more damaging than the Moss Bluff collapse because "an explosion and subsequent fire during the Moss Bluff release combusted most of the leaked CH₄, immediately forming CO₂.” Carbon dioxide sticks around in the atmosphere longer than methane does, but methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas in the short-term.

Scott Kelly will be able to eat all the fresh fruit he wants next week. (credit: NASA)

Scott Kelly is less than a week from coming home. When he climbs into a Soyuz spacecraft next Tuesday night, he will have completed a 340-day mission in space, the longest ever by any NASA astronaut.

But during a space-to-ground news conference with reporters on Wednesday, Kelly said he was feeling fine and still really enjoying his time in space. "I could go another year if I had to," Kelly said. "It would just depend on what I was doing and if it made sense. Although I do look forward to getting home next week."

Kelly will land Tuesday night at 11:25pm in Kazakhstan, likely about 140 kilometers southeast of Zhezkazgan. After medical tests there, he will return to Houston on a NASA airplane and undergo subsequent tests at crew quarters at the Johnson Space Center. And what will he do when released from there early Thursday morning? He's going to go home and jump in his pool, Kelly quipped.

Oh, hey, do you work here? Mickey could use a little extra cash. (credit: Loren Javier)

The Walt Disney Company has a reputation for lobbying hard on copyright issues. The 1998 copyright extension has even been dubbed the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” by activists like Lawrence Lessig that have worked to reform copyright laws.

This year, the company is turning to its employees to fund some of that battle. Disney CEO Bob Iger has sent a letter to the company’s employees, asking for them to open their hearts—and their wallets—to the company’s political action committee, DisneyPAC.

In the letter, which was provided to Ars by a Disney employee, Iger tells workers about his company's recent intellectual property victories, including stronger IP protections in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a Supreme Court victory that destroyed Aereo, and continued vigilance about the "state of copyright law in the digital environment." It also mentions that Disney is seeking an opening to lower the corporate tax rate.