Bring in the clones

Scientists in South Korea successfully cloned 30 human embryos and extracted stem cells from them. Others have claimed to do the same before: a US company announced in 2001 that it had produced a short-lived cloned embryo, for example. But evidence for such reports has been scarce until now. It took 242 eggs from 16 women to make these few clones. If the process can be streamlined, some hope it could one day be used to provide replacement cells tailor-made for any patient.

The hobbit

The skeleton of a tiny hominid was unearthed in Indonesia, providing evidence for a previously unknown branch of human evolution that lived just 18,000 years ago — a startlingly contemporary date. The one-metre-high species, called Homo floresiensis after the island it was found on, and nicknamed ‘hobbit’ by its finders, has made researchers wonder what other creatures might be out there waiting to be found.

Tracking electrons...

A magnetic microscope was tuned to detect the tiny signal of a single electron's spin. The device — a minuscule cantilever with a magnetic tip — wobbles in the presence of the magnetic field created as a single electron spins. This wobble is in turn tracked by a laser. Although the principle is simple, it took the research team 12 years to attain the sensitivity needed to detect a single electron. The researchers say that the same technique should be able to detect an electron's spin orientation, aiding attempts to produce quantum computers.

...and taking their picture

A snapshot was taken of an electron orbital, by blasting a nitrogen molecule with laser pulses. The light emitted after these kicks from the laser reveals an image of the space where the molecule's electrons reside. The shapes and sizes of electron orbitals have been determined in the past through experiment and theoretical calculation, but this is the first time their picture has been taken. The same technique should some day let researchers watch electrons as they take part in chemical reactions.

Rat tales

The Brown Norway rat became the third mammal to have its genome sequenced, joining mice and humans. The rat is a model of choice for many studies in physiology and pharmacology, and is used to investigate everything from cardiovascular disease to space motion sickness. Researchers pored over the animal's 25,000 genes to enlighten this work. Next year should see several more mammals join the club of sequenced creatures, including the chimpanzee and the dog.

Mum's the word

Mouse eggs were persuaded to grow into apparently healthy mice without being fertilized by sperm, making for the first birth of a mammal without contribution from a father. The success doesn't make men irrelevant — the genetic manipulations used by the team are for now, at least, technically and ethically infeasible in humans: the experiments produced far more dead and defective baby mice than normal ones.

As old as ice

Results have started to pour in from a core of Antarctic ice that dates as far back as 740,000 years, giving researchers a hint of temperatures and greenhouse-gas levels during the past eight ice ages. It took eight years, two attempts, and more than a bit of luck to extract the core. Initial tests suggest that our present interglacial period, like a similar one about 400,000 years ago, might last an exceptionally long time — another 16,000 years or so, without taking account of global warming.

In the hot seat

Climate researchers estimated that anthropogenic climate change has at least doubled the chances of a heatwave like the one that hit Europe in the summer of 2003. Although scientists have long thought that a warmer world will have more extreme weather, this result provided the most solid link so far between global warming and a single weather event. Such work could open the door for groups to win lawsuits against big emitters of greenhouse gases for damages caused by bad weather.

Table-top accelerators

High-quality electron beams for use in accelerators were produced by laser focusing. This eliminates the need for the massive magnets that have traditionally been used to focus such beams, and whittles down the instrumentation needed to make a particle accelerator from the size of a football stadium to the size of a lab. The ever-shrinking size of these devices will make them increasingly accessible to universities and individual research teams.

Home-made cure

A compound was mixed in the lab that could make for cheaper antimalarial drugs. Doctors currently recommend that high doses of artemisinin-based treatments be used in countries that have problems with resistance to drugs such as chloroquine. But artemisinin, which comes from a Chinese plant, is very expensive. A public–private partnership created a cheaper synthetic version, which is now in clinical trials in Britain.