Linketies: Science Friday

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  Medical researchers in the UK are working on a new synthetic vaccine that be made without using live virus. Such a vaccine, if proven successful, would be more stable and it could also be used more easily in developing countries that don't have refrigeration. It could potentially solve the problem of vaccines actually causing the disease they're supposed to protect against in a minority of patients. In addition, there are implications for agriculture. Present vaccine technology makes it difficult to tell the difference between infected and immunized livestock, which often prevents the export of animals. With a synthetic vaccine, exporters would be able to show an absence of infection in vaccinated animals.
  


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  Genetics continues to get weirder as researchers announce they've gotten a duck to father a chicken. No word yet on when a live Turducken will make its debut.
  


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  A miniature version of Harry Potter's invisibility cloak is real now, with one small catch: so far, it can only cloak frequencies in the microwave range and won't work with visible light. In other words, if you wear this thing you can still be seen. But sometimes it's not the end result, but what the quest teaches you that counts and research in invisibility is helping to advance scientists' understanding of optics by leaps and bounds.
  


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  The traveling salesman problem is perhaps one of the most famous conundrums in mathematics. This is the problem of finding the shortest route to a number of different points (cities) that returns the salesman to the point of origin. Currently, the only completely effective way to do this is through trial and error. However, Jeff Jones and Adam Adamatzky of the University of the West in England have developed their own method of solving the problem using a shrinking blob of "intelligent" goo.
  


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  A new report published in the open-access journal PLOS Computational Biology describes experiments that scientists are conducting on tiny robots that mimic swarm behavior, such as that found in insects. The experiments involve a large number of small robotic cubes that are programmed only to move forward toward a target and avoid obstacles in the way.
  


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  I've linked to a lot of articles in these Science Friday posts about cool new materials that are being invented. So where do scientists get the inspiration for these things? Where else? A lot of ideas can be found in the often strange biology of living organisms, everything from spider silk to the goo that a Venus fly trap uses to catch its dinner.
  


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  From monitoring highways and researching wildlife to sports coverage and journalism, Livescience.com reviewssome cool and not so creepy uses for drones.
  


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  I've long discussed how the space industry is booming in spite of NASA's apparent stagnation. Thanks to the Planck satellite launched by the European Space Agency, astronomers have created one of the most detailed maps of the universe ever created, showing the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
  


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  Many people have long assumed that intelligent life must exist elsewhere in the universe -- Fermi's Paradox notwithstanding. The discovery over the last decade of so many exoplanets has only reinforced that belief. But so far, most of the exoplanets that have been found are alien in the purest sense of the word and seem to be nothing like Earth, leading some scientists to ask the question of whether Earth-like planets may be a lot rarer than we've assumed.
  


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  Scientists have speculated that a green rock found in the sands of Morocco may have originated on Mercury. While meteorites from Mars are fairly common -- as are Earth meteorites on Mars -- this would be the first meteorite from Mercury ever found.
  


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  For over thirty years, Voyager 1 has slowly wandered through our solar system, teaching us much about our cosmic neighborhood and sending back stunning images of the outer planets. But has Voyager finally left the solar system behind? Well . . . it depends on who you ask. However, so far there's no word on whether scientists expect "V-Ger" to return in about 300 years after being modified by an alien race.