While the economy has been falling apart, it's actually been an amazing month for science. Several major breakthroughs have been announced recently, including:
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have succeeded in producing printable solar panels. Solar power is a great alternative energy source, but the reality is that it's a rather expensive alternative. It's been predicted that someday, in the future, we'd be able to simply print or paint solar cells onto roofing materials – a radically innovative and less-expensive way to make solar cells. The MIT researchers discovered the printing process works on just about any kind of paper, from regular printer paper, to tissue paper, and even to already-printed newspaper. 
However, printing the cells is not as simple. It must be done in a vacuum-tight room where the special “ink” is deposited on the paper. According to an article by MIT’s David L. Chandler, the process is almost as cheap and as easy as printing a photo on your inkjet. Professor of Electrical Engineering Vladimir Bulovic said the team has thoroughly tested the robustness of the technology. He said that the low weight of the paper substrate will let them create “scalable solar cells that can reach record-high watts-per-kilogram performance.” This could open up a number of applications. For example, they could be used in remote developing countries where weight is a large factor in how many cells can be delivered. The paper can also easily be applied to a wall or to window shades to make it super easy to install your own solar panels. It's new technology and needs to be tweaked -- for example, the paper-printed solar cells have only about 1 % efficiency. But it's pretty sure that someday, we'll be able to roll laminated paper sheets on our roofs for years of free energy!
In other news, a Dutch company PlantLab is about to revolutionize farming with a new technique that will almost everything you know about growing plants. Instead of outdoors, they want farms to be in skyscrapers, warehouses, or underground using hydroponics or other forms of controlled environments. Instead of sunlight they use red and blue LEDs. Water? They only need 10% of the traditional requirements. At every stage of their high tech process, PlantLab monitors thousands of details with advanced sensors to create the perfect environment for each individual type of crop. In short, they create a high tech ‘plant paradise’. PlantLab’s revolutionary approach to agriculture may be able to leverage math and science to create a better food 
supply for the world’s escalating population. Fresher, local, more efficient…and they supposedly taste better too! The idea is that when grown outdoors, plant photosynthesis is only about 9% efficient. With the correct balance of colored LED light, PlantLab has increased that efficiency to 12 or 15%, aiming for 18%. Doubling the efficiency means increased yields. By keeping the plants within a contained system, PlantLab can also recycle evaporated water, which helps them grow crops using just one tenth the water as with traditional greenhouses. Because PlantLab’s harvest is indoors, they don’t have pests (and could quickly isolate rooms that somehow got contaminated) and bingo... they don’t need pesticides. Finally, PlantLab’s production facilities can be built almost anywhere: from the Sahara to the Artic, it’s all going to look the same indoors. So everyone’s food can be grown as local as possible. That means fresher food with less costs of transportation. This is big.
Scientists have just designed a drug that can cure virtually any viral infection. That's right, a team of researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory has designed a drug that can identify cells that have been infected by any type of virus, then kill those cells to terminate the infection. In a paper published July 27 in the journal PLoS One, the researchers tested their drug against 15 viruses, and found it was effective against all of them — including rhinoviruses that cause the common cold, H1N1 influenza, a stomach virus, a polio virus, dengue fever and several other types of hemorrhagic fever. The drug works by targeting a type of RNA produced only in cells that have been infected by viruses. “In theory, it should work against all viruses,” says Todd Rider, a senior staff scientist in Lincoln Laboratory’s Chemical, Biological, and Nanoscale Technologies Group who invented the new technology. Because the technology is so broad-spectrum, it could potentially also be used to combat outbreaks of new viruses, such as the 2003 SARS 
(severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak, Rider says. There are very few treatments out there for viruses. Humanity has only a handful of drugs that combat specific viruses, such as the protease inhibitors used to control HIV infection, but these are relatively few in number and susceptible to viral resistance. This is quite a breakthrough and the researchers are looking forward to eventual human clinical trials.
Scientists are reporting the first clear success with a new approach for treating leukemia — turning the patients' own blood cells into assassins that hunt and destroy their cancer cells. They've only done it in three patients so far, but the results were striking: Two appear cancer-free up to a year after treatment, and the third patient is improved but still has some cancer. Scientists are already preparing to try the same gene therapy technique for other kinds of cancer. "It worked great. We were surprised it worked as well as it did," said Dr. Carl June, a gene therapy expert at the University of Pennsylvania. "We're just a year out now. We need to find out how long these remissions last." He led the study, published Wednesday by two journals, New England Journal of Medicine and Science Translational Medicine. It involved three men with very advanced cases of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or CLL. The only hope for a cure now is bone marrow or stem cell transplants, which don't always work and carry a high risk of death. Scientists have been working for years to find ways to boost the immune system's ability to fight cancer. Earlier attempts at genetically modifying bloodstream soldiers didn't reproduce well and quickly disappeared. June and his colleagues made changes to the technique, using a novel carrier to deliver the new genes into the T-cells and a signaling mechanism telling the cells to kill and multiply. That resulted in armies of "serial killer" cells that targeted cancer cells, destroyed them, and went on to kill new cancer as it emerged. It was known that T-cells attack viruses that way, but this is the first time it's been done against cancer, June said. Dr. Kanti Rai, a blood cancer expert at New York's Long Island Jewish Medical Center, could hardly contain his enthusiasm, saying he usually is more reserved in his comments on such reports. "It's an amazing, amazing kind of achievement," said Rai, who had no role in the research.
New experiments at the Niels Bohr Institute researchers have succeeded in setting new records and maintaining quantum entanglement for up to an hour. Entanglement is a curious phenomenon in quantum mechanics which Albert Einstein called "spukhafte Fernwirkung" (spooky action at a distance). Two 
separate entangled systems have a ghostlike connection even when they are placed at a large distance without being directly connected to each other. It is said that their states are correlated. This means that if you read out the one system, the other system will 'know' about it instantly... and this means communicating at a speed faster than the speed of light -- which is supposed to be impossible! Quantum entanglement will one day allow much better computer cryptography, form the backbone of quantum computing, and may allow for interstellar communication systems between spacefaring humans traveling among the stars, make it possible to store information in black holes, or even allow information to instantly pass from past to future. Usually, entangled atoms emit photons in all directions and this causes the entanglement to disappear. This usually happens in a fraction of a second. "What we have done is that we have developed a technique where we renew the entanglement as fast as it disappears. In this way we have been able to maintain the entanglement between the two atomic clouds as long as the experiment lasted, that is to say up to an hour," explains Hanna Krauter, who is a quantum physicist and researcher at the Niels Bohr Institute.
In a related breakthrough, for the first time, physicists have convincingly demonstrated that physically separated particles in solid-state devices can be quantum-mechanically entangled. The achievement is analogous to the quantum entanglement of light, except that it involves particles in circuitry instead of photons in optical systems. A team of physicists from France, Germany and Spain has now performed a solid-state entanglement experiment that uses electrons in a superconductor in place of photons in an optical system. As conventional superconducting materials are cooled, the electrons they conduct entangle to form what are known as Cooper pairs. In the new experiment, Cooper pairs flow through a superconducting bridge until they reach a carbon nanotube that acts as the electronic equivalent of a beam splitter. Occasionally, the electrons part ways and are directed to separate quantum dots -- but remain entangled. Although the quantum dots are only a micron or so apart, the distance is large enough to demonstrate entanglement comparable to that seen in optical systems. The experiment is reported in an upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters.
So take heart, things are getting better! They really are!
And if that isn't enough for you, here are eight more pieces of good news:
- The Gulf of Mexico Is almost back to its pre-spill health levels
- The global rate of new HIV infections has declined by 25 percent since 2001, and new treatment approaches have seriously improved chances for surviving the disease and reducing the chances of transmitting it at birth
- The Antarctic ozone hole is shrinking
- Traffic fatalities are actually at the lowest they've been since 1949
- Teen pregnancy is at an all time low - and nobody knows why
- People are getting happier as they age, according to a nationwide survey involving over 340,000 people between the ages of 18 and 85.
- Life expectancy is increasing as well as the quality of life overall
- Global poverty is at an all time low
You can read about these additional cheer you uppers at:
http://www.globalgoodnews.com/
http://www.cracked.com/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/
More about the scientific breakthroughs:
http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/
http://realcleverscience.tumblr.com/
http://medicalxpress.com/news/
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/
