Antarctic ice wins a Nobel, and old knees may grow cartilage back

IceCube uses a cubic kilometer of the Antarctic ice cap, about a billion tons, as its detector. Most neutrinos pass through it untouched, but now and then one smashes into a proton or neutron in the ice and throws off a shower of particles that light sensors can see 141. The particle itself began as a patch on missing energy: Wolfgang Pauli proposed it in a 1930 letter to colleagues because radioactive beta decay appeared to lose energy, which he judged, correctly, to be impossible 159. Halzen was blunt about the early days: "no respectable conservative physicist would have joined me" 159.

Cartilage from patients undergoing knee replacement surgery began producing new, functional joint cartilage when exposed to the same inhibitor 4. The group calls 15-PGDH a "gerozyme," an enzyme that climbs with age and erodes tissue. Earlier work from the lab showed that blocking it with a small molecule built muscle mass and endurance in old mice, while raising it in young animals made their muscles shrink and weaken 4.

After three monthly doses, roughly 90 percent of infected mice showed no signs of the virus for at least six months after the last shot 201. A safety test in monkeys found no notable side effects, including no runaway immune response 201. The team did not call it a cure 201.

Those clocks read either DNA changes that build up over time or levels of key proteins 185. Novo's Nikolaj Roed put the overall gap at "two to three years," though it varied widely by clock and by organ, reaching as much as 4 years 185. UCLA's Steve Horvath, who is credited with inventing aging clocks, said "two years is a pretty strong effect, in my book" 185.

The plasma is the matter that filled the newborn universe, at temperatures of trillions of degrees, and it lasted only a few millionths of a second 5. At the Large Hadron Collider, heavy-ion collisions at nearly the speed of light briefly recreate small amounts of it 5. Whether the plasma should respond to a passing quark at all was a long debate in the field. "Now we see the plasma is incredibly dense, such that it is able to slow down a quark, and produces splashes and swirls like a liquid," said MIT's Yen-Jie Lee 5.

Tampa Bay sites had Mississippian-like platform mound-village complexes and iconography, but not maize agriculture or shell-tempered pottery, so the debate over how the pottery got there ran for a century 8. Researchers at the Florida Museum of Natural History tested three options: trade from the heartland, local imitation, or the vessels' makers having moved in 8. By examining production details almost invisible on the surface, they traced the decorated vessels to a small community of skilled craftspeople who likely traveled hundreds of miles and settled in Tampa Bay 8. The migrants even mixed crushed fragments of older homeland pottery into new vessels, which kept a physical link to the place they left 8.

The team worked with veterinary neurologist Stephanie McGrath and neuropathologist Caitlin Latimer, comparing brains of dogs with the syndrome to those of people with Alzheimer's, using samples donated by owners 149.