Little machines win chemistry Nobel prize

Artwork: The scientists are rewarded for their ability to control at the molecular level (SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY)

The 2016 Nobel Prize for Chemistry has been awarded for the advancement of the world's smallest machines. 

Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir Fraser Stoddart and Bernard Feringa will share the 8m kronor (£727,000) prize for the design and synthesis of machines on a molecular scale.

They were named at a press conference in Sweden.

The machines conceived by today's laureates are a thousand times thinner than a strand of hair.

They could slip inside the human body to deliver drugs from within - for instance, applying pharmaceuticals directly to cancer cells.

This field of nanotechnology could also yield applications in the design of smart materials.

The prize recognises their success in linking molecules together to design everything from motors to a car and muscles on a tiny scale.

"They have mastered motion control at the molecular scale," said Olof Ramström, from the Nobel Committee.

Reacting to the award, Prof Feringa said: "I don't know what to say, I'm shocked. And my second remark was: 'I'm a bit emotional about it'."

The celebrated physicist Richard Feynman is often credited with inspiring the concept of molecular machines.

In a lecture at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1959, titled "There's plenty of room at the bottom", he considered the possibility of the direct manipulation of matter at the atomic scale.

It was also in this lecture that he introduced the idea of "swallowing the surgeon".

Jean-Pierre Sauvage was born in 1944 in Paris, France. He is currently emeritus professor at the University of Strasbourg and director of research emeritus at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).

His work provided early breakthroughs in the area of molecular machines. He had been researching the use of sunlight to drive chemical reactions but this work helped him work out that he could link different molecules together in a chain.

This was the first step towards building molecular machines. In 1994, Prof Sauvage's research group succeeded in making one molecule rotate around the other in a controlled manner when energy was applied.

Sir Fraser Stoddart was born in 1942 in Edinburgh, UK. He is currently affiliated to the Northwestern University, in the US.

The Briton made a key advance by threading a molecular ring on to a rod-like structure that acted as an axle.

Sir Fraser then made use of the ring's freedom to move along the axle. When he added heat, the ring jumped forwards and backwards - like a tiny shuttle.

His group later built on this discovery to build numerous molecular machines, including a lift, a muscle and - in partnership with other researchers - a computer chip.

Bernard Feringa was born in 1951 in Barger-Compascuum, in the Netherlands. He is a professor in organic chemistry at the University of Gröningen, the Netherlands.

In 1999, Prof Feringa led the first research to produce a molecular motor that continually spins in the same direction.

In 2011, his group built a four-wheel-drive nanocar: a molecular chassis holding together four motors that functioned as wheels.

Commenting on the award, he said: "I feel a little bit like the Wright Brothers who were flying 100 years ago for the first time and people were saying why do we need a flying machine and now we have a Boeing 747 and an Airbus.

"The opportunities are great."

400-year-old Greenland shark ‘longest-living vertebrate’

Greenland sharks won't reach sexual maturity until they're 150 (Image: JULIUS NIELSEN)

Greenland sharks are now the longest-living vertebrates known on Earth, scientists say.

Researchers used radiocarbon dating to determine the ages of 28 of the animals, and estimated that one female was about 400 years old.

The team found that the sharks grow at just 1cm a year, and reach sexual maturity at about the age of 150.

The research is published in the journal Science.

Lead author Julius Nielsen, a marine biologist from the University of Copenhagen, said: "We had our expectations that we were dealing with an unusual animal, but I think everyone doing this research was very surprised to learn the sharks were as old as they were."

The former vertebrate record-holder was a bowhead whale estimated to be 211 years old.

But if invertebrates are brought into the longevity competition, a 507-year-old clam called Ming holds the title of most aged animal.

Slow swimmers

Greenland sharks are huge beasts, that can grow up to 5m in length.

They can be found, swimming slowly, throughout the cold, deep waters of the North Atlantic.

A shark seen near Disko Bay in western Greenland (Image: JULIUS NIELSEN)

With this leisurely pace of life and sluggish growth rate, the sharks were thought to live for a long time. But until now, determining any ages was difficult.

For some fish, scientists are able to examine ear bones called otoliths, which when sectioned, show a pattern of concentric rings that scientists can count as they would the rings in a tree.

Sharks are harder, but some species, such as the Great White, have calcified tissue that grows in layers on their back bones, that can also be used to age the animals.

"But the Greenland shark is a very, very soft shark - it has no hard body parts where growth layers are deposited. So it was believed that the age could not be investigated," Mr Nielsen told the BBC.

However the team found a clever way of working out the age.

A Greenland shark after its release from the research ship (Image: JULIUS NIELSEN)

"The Greenland shark's eye lens is composed of a specialised material - and it contains proteins that are metabolically inert," explained Mr Neilson.

"Which means after the proteins have been synthesised in the body, they are not renewed any more. So we can isolate the tissue that formed when the shark was a pup, and do radiocarbon dating."

The team looked at 28 sharks, most of which had died after being caught in fishing nets as by-catch.

Using this technique, they established that the largest shark - a 5m-long female - was extremely ancient.

Because radiocarbon dating does not produce exact dates, they believe that she could have been as "young" as 272 or as old as 512. But she was most likely somewhere in the middle, so about 400 years old.

It means she was born between the years of 1501 and 1744, but her most likely date of birth was in the 17th century.

"Even with the lowest part of this uncertainty, 272 years, even if that is the maximum age, it should still be considered the longest-living vertebrate," said Mr Nielsen.

Conversely, if her age is at the upper end of the scale, she will have out-lived Ming the clam - although her age has a greater probability of lying in the middle.

Conservation lessons

The team believes the animals only reach sexual maturity when they are 4m-long. And with this new, very lengthy age-range, it suggests this does not occur until the animals are about 150 years old.

The researchers say this has consequences for future conservation of the animals.

A Greenland shark caught as by-catch  (Image: JULIUS NIELSEN)

Because of their extreme longevity, Greenland sharks may still be recovering from being over-fished before WW2.

The sharks' livers were once used for machine oil, and they were killed in great numbers before a synthetic alternative was found and the demand fell.

"When you evaluate the size distribution all over the North Atlantic, it is quite rare that you see sexually mature females, and quite rare that you find newborn pups or juveniles," Mr Nielsen explained.

"It seems most are sub-adults. That makes sense: if you have had this very high fishing pressure, all the old animals - they are not there any more. And there are not that many to give birth to new ones.

"There is, though, still a very large amount of 'teenagers', but it will take another 100 years for them to become sexually active."

Another author of the study, Prof Christopher Ramsey, director of Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit at the University of Oxford, said that radiocarbon dating could be used to determine the ages of other animals, but was not likely to be chosen as the primary method.

"For many animals we have other methods to determine age," he said.

"Also, the radiocarbon method is not very precise, and so is only really relevant for very long-lived species."

He added that the statistical method used to determine the sharks' ages was Bayesian statistics.

"Bayesian statistics were first worked out by the Rev Bayes in the 18th Century. This means he will have been working on this when some of these oldest sharks were young."

Juno probe enters into orbit around Jupiter

Artist's impression: Juno will fly more than 30 times around Jupiter in the course of its mission.  (Image: NASA)

The US space agency has successfully put a new probe in orbit around Jupiter.

The Juno satellite, which left Earth five years ago, had to fire a rocket engine to slow its approach to the planet and get caught by its gravity.

A sequence of tones transmitted from the spacecraft confirmed the braking manoeuvre had gone as planned.

Receipt of the radio messages prompted wild cheering at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Celebrations at Nasa as the Juno satellite is now orbiting Jupiter.

"All stations on Juno co-ord, we have the tone for burn cut-off on Delta B," Juno Mission Control had announced. "Roger Juno, welcome to Jupiter."

Scientists plan to use the spacecraft to sense the planet's deep interior. They think the structure and the chemistry of its insides hold clues to how this giant world formed some four-and-a-half-billion years ago.

Engineers had warned in advance that the engine firing was fraught with danger.

No previous spacecraft has dared pass so close to Jupiter; its intense radiation belts can destroy unprotected electronics.

One calculation even suggested the orbit insertion would have subjected Juno to a dose equivalent to a million dental X-rays.

But the probe is built like a tank with titanium shielding, and the 35-minute rocket burn appeared to go off without a hitch.

"Nasa did it again," said an elated Scott Bolton, Juno's principal investigator. "That says it all to me. And I'm so happy to be part of the team that did that. I mean this team has worked so hard and we have such great people. And it's almost like a dream coming true right here."

'Menagerie of possibilities'

While the radiation dangers have not gone away, the probe should now be able to prepare its instruments to start sensing what lies beneath Jupiter's opaque clouds.

Tuesday's orbit insertion has put Juno in a large ellipse around the planet that takes just over 53 days to complete.

A second burn of the rocket engine in mid-October will tighten this orbit to just 14 days. It is then that the science can really start.

This will involve repeat passes just a few thousand kilometres above the cloudtops.

At each close approach, Juno will use its eight remote sensing instruments - plus its camera - to peer down through the gas planet's many layers, to measure their composition, temperature, motion and other properties.

A priority will be to determine the abundance of oxygen at Jupiter. This will be bound up in its water.

"How much water Jupiter has tells us a lot about where the planet formed early in the Solar System," explained team-member Candy Hansen.

"We think that Jupiter may not have formed where it is today, and if it formed further away or closer in - that tells us a lot about how the Solar System in general formed. Because when we look at planets around other stars we see quite a menagerie of possibilities."

• Jupiter is 11 times wider than Earth and 300 times more massive
• It takes 12 Earth years to orbit the Sun; a 'day' is 10 hours long
• In composition it resembles a star; it's mostly hydrogen and helium
• Under pressure, the hydrogen becomes an electrically conducting fluid
• This 'metallic hydrogen' is likely the source of the magnetic field
• Most of the visible cloudtops contain ammonia and hydrogen sulphide
• Jupiter's 'stripes' are created by strong east-west winds
• The Great Red Spot is a giant storm vortex twice as wide as Earth

The probe will also try to settle old arguments over whether the planet hosts a solid core or whether its gases go all the way down to the centre in an ever more compressed state.

And it will look for the deep swirling sea of liquid metallic hydrogen that theory suggests is the driver behind Jupiter's immense magnetic field and its spectacular auroras.

Scott Bolton said he wanted particularly to understand more about the Great Red Spot - a long-lived, giant storm.

"I love that Great Red Spot. We see it evolving, and it's been getting smaller ever since I first got amazed by it, which was when I was a child," he told reporters.

"The fact that it's lasted so long - there are records of it going back hundreds of years - means that it must have fairly deep roots.

"It looks a little like a hurricane on the Earth but we know it can't be working exactly like that because hurricanes on the Earth need an ocean underneath and feed off the liquid and then change when they go on land. At Jupiter, it's all gas."

Nasa plans to run Juno through to February 2018, assuming any radiation damage has not made it inoperable by then. The performance of the camera, for example, is expected to degrade rapidly within a few months.

In line with the practice on many previous planetary missions, the probe will be commanded to end its days by ditching into the atmosphere of Jupiter.

This ensures there is no possibility of Juno crashing into and contaminating the gas giant's large moons, at least one of which, Europa, is considered to have the potential to host microbial life.

SpaceX successfully landed its Falcon 9 rocket after launching it to space

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket successfully landed upright on solid ground at Cape Canaveral, Florida this evening, after traveling into space and back. It's the first time SpaceX has been able to gently touch down the Falcon 9 post-launch — something the company has been trying to do for the past year. It’s a big first step toward reusable rockets.

This launch was also the first time SpaceX has flown since June, after one of its Falcon 9 rockets exploded en route to the International Space Station. Now this return-to-flight mission has made history — no one else has ever landed a rocket that has gone as deep into space as the Falcon 9.

As big as this is for SpaceX, it's not the first time a vertical take-off rocket has landed upright after launching into space. In November, Jeff Bezos’ private spaceflight company Blue Origin announced that it had landed its rocket New Shepard post-launch. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket is more complex than New Shepard: it’s designed to go higher in space, and much faster.

Both accomplishments suggest the shape of things to come, says Charles Miller, president of NexGenSpace, a spaceflight consulting firm. "I think it’s very clear the future is reusable space, and the rest of the world is playing catch up to the innovation that’s taking place in America’s space entrepreneurs," said Miller.

Right now, all rockets that travel into orbit are either destroyed or lost after taking off. It's something that drives up the cost of spaceflight; an entirely new rocket must be built for each launch. But if SpaceX can routinely reuse its rockets, the company saves the cost of manufacturing new vehicles for follow-up missions. That could make spaceflight a lot more affordable.

SpaceX has tried this landing twice before. In January and April, the company attempted to land the first stage of the Falcon 9 — a 14-story tall portion of the rocket body — on a floating platform out at sea. The rockets fell over and exploded both times.

Since those two attempts, SpaceX has modified some things. The most obvious change is that today’s landing was on solid ground, rather than at sea — a floating ship is a smaller and more unpredictable target. That’s not all, though. SpaceX introduced an updated version of the Falcon 9, informally named the Falcon 9 v1.1 Full Thrust. This version of the rocket has a modified structure and an updated engine, that's supposed to provide more thrust.

If SpaceX can routinely reuse rockets, that may force change in the whole private space industry. SpaceX CEO Musk noted that it costs $16 million to manufacture the Falcon 9, but only $200,000 to fuel. Eliminating a $16 million expense could drastically bring down launch costs.Competing launch providers may have to explore reusable rockets as well to compete with SpaceX on future contracts.

Source: The Verge