Nature Middle East | House of Wisdom

NME’s weekly science dose (March 29-April 4)

Lebanon’s diversity of religious and ethnic backgrounds has not made things too stable there for some time. But beyond the Sunni, Shia, Maronite and about half a dozen other factions along with the tensions that have accompanied them, it seems Lebanese folks are really just one big family sharing a Phoenician heritage  — or at least 30% of Lebanese men are, regardless of any current religious differences.

It’s a finding that Pierre Zalloua, an eminent geneticist from Lebanon, uncovered through his study of the Y-Chromosome to trace the historic movement of human populations. You can read more about Zalloua and his work here.

Also, here’s some tentatively good news: a research team led by the UAE’s Rabah Iratani has found that using leaf extract from a certain herb called marjoram, which is native to Cyrpus and southern Turkey, can inhibit the growth of cultured invasive breast cancer cells. Given in higher concentration, the extract was shown to stop cancer cells from forming colonies — one of the features that make them deadly and invasive. Check out this page for more details.

Finally, as we all know, electric batteries currently face a serious problem: they suck. That is, they don’t last very long between charges. They can become unsafe when they form deposits in their liquid electrolyte, which can also become hot and pressurized, potentially leading them to explode This would not make for a fun ride if this battery is running your electric vehicle.

To circumvent these two problems, Moroccan material scientist Abdelmaula Aboulaich along with other engineers have come up with a lithium battery that uses a solid electrolyte. This prototype stops deposits from forming as well as inhibits the built up of potentially explosive pressure. The battery might be running future electric vehicles.

Beyond the hood

3-D printing has been forecasted as the “next big thing” for a couple of years now, promising to potentially revolutionize how we make and fix things. Oxford University scientists are now further suggesting that it may even change how we heal ourselves.

The researchers made a custom-built 3-D printer that creates materials akin to living tissue that may one day replace damaged tissues. The material is made of thousands of connected water droplets that are encapsulated within lipid films. The fact that the material lacks a genome and does not replicate means it can bypass some of the more common problem associated with other techniques used to replace tissues and organs.

Also, you know how there’s this mysterious thing called dark matter that’s theoretically supposed to compose a quarter of the universe, except no one’s really ever detected it or knows anything about it? Well, the US$2 billion particle detector mounted onto the International Space Station might just have gotten a whiff of it. At least that’s what NASA and CERN jointly announced yesterday. Here’s a good place to get more details.

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