世界大日子：World Science Day for Peace and Development
【明報專訊】In celebration of World Science Day for Peace and Development, we look at some recent scientific developments that promise to make our world even better.
Basic facts
Date: November 10
Year of designation: 2001
Designated by: the United Nations General Assembly
Aim: To renew national and international commitment to science for peace and development and to stress the responsible use of science for the benefit of society.
◆Landing on Mars
In an editorial on the CNN website, US President Obama says NASA will put humans on Mars "by the 2030s". He announced that they are working with their commercial partners to build new habitats that can sustain and transport astronauts on long-duration missions in deep space. The ultimate ambition, Obama says, is that one day humans can remain on Mars for an extended time.
◆Diving into the ocean
Up to the present, almost all of the deep ocean, which represents 95% of the living space on the planet, remains a mystery to us, although it plays a key role in supporting life on Earth. Nick Schizas, a marine biologist at the University of Puerto Rico, has recently been on a scuba diving mission going more than 150 meters deep into the ocean, trying to unlock the secrets of the sea.
◆Robot surgeons that work inside your bodies
Imagine an army of nano-scale machines 1000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, working in a human body, delivering chemotherapy (化療) drugs directly to tumours (腫瘤). Scientists working on this project hope they can finally make cancer completely curable.
◆Turning CO2 into a fuel source
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the key greenhouse gas causing man-made climate change. Adam Rondinone, a scientist from the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, worked with his colleagues and created a catalyst (催化劑) out of carbon, copper and nitrogen. Scientists added the catalyst to carbon dioxide to create ethanol. Rondinone describes the discovery as 「pushing the combustion reaction backwards."
◆Breeding baby mice from skin cells
A team of scientists at Japan's Kyushu University (九州大學) have successfully turned the skin cells of a mouse into mature egg cells that can be used to breed viable offspring. According to a new paper in the journal Nature, human reproduction one day may be achieved by this process without involving any egg cells.
Katsuhiko Hayashi and his team first reprogrammed skin cells from the tails of female mice into stem cells. The cells, which were then placed in a petri dish (有蓋培養皿) alongside cells from mouse ovaries, which essentially tricked them into growing as mature egg cells that could be fertilized to produce offspring.
