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Testing the efficacy of vaccines in clinical trials takes years, even decades. Yet challenging infections like HIV, malaria and dengue are striking today. To speed up vaccine testing, scientists at the Emory Vaccine Center have established a goal of creating a "vaccine gene chip."

This device could read the activity of all the genes in the genome in white blood cells within a few days of administration of a test vaccine. Reading such "molecular signatures" would rapidly help predict the ability of that vaccine to stimulate the immune system and protect against disease.

Pasadena, CA— Astronomers, including Carnegie's Yuri Beletsky, took precise measurements of the closest pair of failed stars to the Sun, which suggest that the system harbors a third, planetary-mass object.The research is published as a letter to the editor in Astronomy & Astrophysics available online at http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.1303.

This news release is available in Spanish.

A Cologne scientist has, together with American colleagues, discovered huge active plumes containing water vapour being released from the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. This sensational find was made using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Joachim Saur, professor at the Institute for Geophysics and Meteorology of the University of Cologne was principal investigator of the Hubble observing campaign. The discovery of the water vapour plumes was announced at a NASA press conference in San Francisco and online in the journal Science.

Bacteria can evolve rapidly to adapt to environmental change. When the "environment" is the immune response of an infected host, this evolution can turn harmless bacteria into life-threatening pathogens. A study published on December 12 in PLOS Pathogens provides insight into how this happens.

Would you believe that a broad range of human struggles can be understood by using a mathematical formula? From child-parent struggles to cyber-attacks and civil unrest, they can all be explained with a simple mathematical expression called a "power-law."

In a sort of unified theory of human conflict, scientists have found a way to mathematically describe the severity and timing of human confrontations that affect us personally and as a society.

Noble gas molecules have been detected in space for the first time in the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant, by astronomers at UCL.

Led by Professor Mike Barlow (UCL Department of Physics & Astronomy) the team used ESA's Herschel Space Observatory to observe the Crab Nebula in far infrared light.

Their measurements of regions of cold gas and dust led them to the serendipitous discovery of the chemical fingerprint of argon hydride ions, published today in the journal Science.

The findings support scientists' theories of how argon forms in nature.

A molecule containing a noble gas has been discovered in space by a team including astronomers from Cardiff University.

The find was made using a Cardiff-led instrument aboard Europe's Herschel Space Observatory. The molecule, argon hydride, was seen in the Crab Nebula, the remains of a star that exploded 1,000 years ago. Before the discovery, molecules of this kind have only been studied in laboratories on Earth.

As Tropical Cyclone Madi began its landfall in southeastern Tamil Nadu, India NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead and captured an image of the weakening storm. Several factors are responsible for Madi's quick weakening.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has discovered water vapour erupting from the frigid surface of Jupiter's moon Europa, in one or more localised plumes near its south pole.

Europa is already thought to harbour a liquid ocean beneath its icy crust, making the moon one of the main targets in the search for habitable worlds away from Earth. This new finding is the first observational evidence of water vapour being ejected off the moon's surface.

First discovered in 2007, "fast radio bursts" continue to defy explanation. These cosmic chirps last for only a thousandth of a second. The characteristics of the radio pulses suggested that they came from galaxies billions of light-years away. However, new work points to a much closer origin - flaring stars within our own galaxy.

"We propose that fast radio bursts aren't as exotic as astronomers first thought," says lead author Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

Maybe it happens tomorrow. Maybe in a billion years. Physicists have long predicted that the universe may one day collapse, and that everything in it will be compressed to a small hard ball. New calculations from physicists at the University of Southern Denmark now confirm this prediction – and they also conclude that the risk of a collapse is even greater than previously thought.

Those who travel to space are rewarded with a beautiful sight - planet Earth. But the effects of space travel on the human sense of sight aren't so beautiful. More than 30 percent of astronauts who returned from two-week space shuttle missions and 60 percent who spent six months aboard the International Space Station were diagnosed with eye problems. Two recent investigations examined mechanisms that may explain eye changes in spaceflight, help find ways to minimize this health risk to astronauts and eventually prevent and treat eye diseases on Earth.

Two detailed reports from the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) find that solar financing and other non-hardware costs — often referred to as "soft costs" — now comprise up to 64% of the total price of residential solar energy systems, reflecting how soft costs are becoming an increasingly larger fraction of the cost of installing solar.

After a year of observations, scientists waited with bated breath on Nov. 28, 2013, as Comet ISON made its closest approach to the sun, known as perihelion. Would the comet disintegrate in the fierce heat and gravity of the sun? Or survive intact to appear as a bright comet in the pre-dawn sky?