In the news this week: the next generation of batteries, the first vaccine to target an autoimmune disease and a cream that may help curb the transmission of MRSA. Plus, the advanced problem solving skills of the humble crow...

If a sheet of paper the size of a postage stamp can power a light bulb, could a broadsheet newspaper power a car? An ambitious idea but this is the eventual goal of a team from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, who have developed a novel method of electricity storage – paper batteries.

They imbedded carbon nanotubes in a material that is 90 per cent cellulose, the organic compound found in paper and cotton. Carbon nanotubes are carbon atoms rolled into tubes a billionth of a metre wide. The material was then soaked in an ionic liquid electrolyte, enabling the transfer of electrical charges. The structure can work as a conventional battery, providing electricity for prolonged periods of time, as in the light bulb, or can give intense bursts of energy, similar to a capacitor. The voltage can be increased by simply stacking more sheets of paper together or reduced by ripping them in half. Double the sheets will give double the power.

The paper battery is more efficient than a conventional device as all its components are integrated into the paper structure, eliminating power loss when the current is transferred between components. The use of an ionic liquid rather than water means that it can function over a wide temperature range but this could even be replaced by blood or sweat if the device was to be used inside the body, for example in a pacemaker. More esoteric applications include a self-propelling paper plane and a cotton shirt that could recharge a mobile phone in its pocket.
Professor Ajayan, one of the inventors, told the Daily Telegraph: ‘When we get this technology down, we'll basically have the ability to print batteries and print supercapacitors. We see this as a technology that's just right for the current energy market, as well as the electronics industry, which is always looking for smaller, lighter power sources.’

Scientists are hailing the first ever trial of a DNA based vaccine for an autoimmune disease a success. Researchers from the Montreal Neurological Institute conducted a trial to test the safety of a vaccine for multiple sclerosis. The disease is the product of an overzealous immune system that strikes the fatty sheaths, known as myelin, that coat our nerve cells, impeding the efficient transfer of signals around the central nervous system. It also causes lesions on the brain. The vaccine developed contains strands of DNA that produce myelin.

The trial was made up of 30 patients all suffering from a type known as relapse and remitting MS. They were injected with different doses of the vaccine at 1, 3, 5 and 9 week intervals. Blood tests showed that after treatment the number of attacking immune cells and associated antibodies had decreased and MRI brain scans showed that the number of lesions fell, on average, by 18 per cent and that their size reduced by 38 to 83 per cent.

Side effects were described as mild to moderate and out of the eight relapses that occurred, only one happened while the patient was taking the vaccine. The others occurred at least 5 weeks after the administration of the vaccine had finished. More extensive trials that will test 290 people over 12 months are now planned, reported the Guardian. If the results of these are also promising, the work will set a precedent for the development of vaccines to protect against other autoimmune diseases, such as type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis.

A cream, containing a cocktail of viruses, has been developed to combat MRSA by the UK biotech company Novolytics. The cream marks a new look at an old approach to tackling the drug resistant bacteria and it couldn’t have come soon enough. With fifteen new cases of the MRSA infection identified everyday in the UK, the NHS spends £1 billion every year. Resilient strains of TB and E. Coli bacteria have joined MRSA in the growing list of superbugs - so is the reign of antibiotics over? The sensible answer is ‘probably not’, but there is no denying that we cannot rely on them as we once could to tackle every bacterial infection. As a result, scientists are revisiting the idea of taking advantage of viruses that attack bacteria, known as ‘bacteriophages’, reported the Times.

Bacteriophages reproduce by infecting a bacterial cell with their own genetic material and replicating within it. The host cell soon becomes saturated with copies of the virus and bursts, releasing the virus to infect more cells. The bacterial cell is killed in the process. This concept is nothing new and has been popular in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe since the 1920s. Until recently, it had been regarded by the West as rendered obsolete by the antibiotic revolution of the 1940s.

MRSA bacteria reside in one in three of us but only become a problem when they are passed from carriers to those already sick. The bacteria tend to live inside our noses and get transferred from one person to another by sneezing or on hands. The cream would be applied to the inside of the noses of hospital staff to prevent transmission and could also be used to treat affected patients if the disease was caught within 24 hours. Lab tests have shown it kills 15 strains of MRSA and clinical trials are now planned.

A star that has been a favourite with astronomers for over four centuries had a surprise for them when they looked at images taken by Nasa’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer telescope (Galex), says a report published in Nature this week. The pictures reveal that as the star hurtles through space, it leaves an impressive 13 light year long, comet-like tail in its wake. ‘I was shocked when I first saw this completely unexpected, humongous tail trailing behind a well-known star,’ said Prof Christopher Martin of Caltech. The tail stretches over the length of our solar system thousands of times.

The star, known as Mira, is part of a binary pair found in the Cetus constellation 350 light years from Earth. It has already begun the long, drawn out death process that will render the star, that was once like our Sun, an inert blackhole. Mira is at the Red Giant stage of its evolution. This is characterized by a relatively low surface temperature which makes it glow orange-red, and a puffed up, bloated appearance as its core loses its gravitational grip on the outer layers. This, coupled with the fact that it goes through periods of variable brightness, combine to mean that it is quite easy to spot, even with the naked eye.

The tail is made up of dust and gas that the star has been shedding from its outer layers for over 30,000 years. The images have also shown a build-up of hot gases at the front of the star’s trajectory, known as a ‘bow shock’. Astronomers think that it is this area that heats up the ejected material, causing a turbulent flow behind the star that fluoresces when exposed to UV light. Astronomers hope that analysis of the tail will give them further clues about a star’s evolution. Mark Seibert, co-author of the report, told BBC News: ‘We hope to be able to read Mira's tail like a ticker tape to learn about the star's life.’

Healthy eating should start in the womb if obesity is going to be avoided in later life, concludes a report based on the dietary habits of rats and their offspring. Mothers who ‘eat for two’ or overindulge in unhealthy foods during pregnancy are more likely to give birth to children who grow up to prefer foods high in fat, sugar and salt, reported the Times.

The team from the Royal Veterinary College, fed one group of pregnant rats a diet based on doughnuts and crisps and another group, a regular diet. The first group gave birth to offspring that were initially below average weight but just ten weeks after weaning the females had a body mass 32 per cent greater than those whose mother ate a regular diet and the males, 22 per cent.

Stephanie Bayol, co-author said: ‘Our study has shown that eating large quantities of junk food when pregnant and breast-feeding could impair the normal control of appetite and promote an exacerbated taste for junk food in offspring. This could send offspring on the road to obesity and make the task of teaching healthy-eating habits in children even more challenging.

Also this week, the Institute for European Environmental Policy has recommended the introduction of car exclusion zones around schools to force families to leave the car at home. The number of parents who walk their children to school has declined in recent decades even though 38 per cent of journeys are under two miles, a distance that could be walked in half an hour at a brisk pace. Encouraging people to walk would benefit the environment and our waistlines, as walking just one extra hour a week could help keep off an extra two stones in weight for the average adult. Read more in the Independent.

Two teams from the University of St. Andrews set out this week to map the entire population of Scotland’s common seal using helicopters and thermal imaging equipment. A routine survey on the islands of Shetland and Orkney last year set alarm bells ringing when it showed that the population had decreased by 45 per cent over the last five years.

Scientists are baffled by the ‘mysterious’ decline and hope this new expedition will shed some light on it. Ailsa Hall, a team member, told the Times: ‘It’s baffling. It could be killer whales, it could be changes in the environment, it could be pollutants in the water, it could be shooting. We just don’t know.’

A-level results were announced on Thursday amid the predictable cries that ‘its all getting easier’ following the rise of the national pass rate for the 25th consecutive year. One in four of all entries were deemed worthy of an A-grade, increasing from 24.1 per cent last year to 25.3 per cent, reported the Joint Council for Qualifications. There was a slight increase in the number of students taking chemistry and physics but a small decline in the number sitting the biology exam. Read more in BBC News.

And finally…

The black crow often crops up in the gothic novel as a symbol of sinister malevolence or a harbinger of doom with its beady eyes knowing more than they let on. The sinister part may be artistic license but now scientists have shown that the birds are more intelligent than we like to think. It has been shown that they have surprisingly advanced problem solving skills to rival that of a chimpanzee, the species of great ape most adept at these kinds of tasks.

Researchers have demonstrated that the birds are capable of ‘metatool use’, the ability to use one tool to facilitate another and a key technique for the advancement of early humans. A group of New Caledonian Crows were tempted with a piece of meat placed in a box. In order to access the meat, they had to use a long stick to prise it out. However, the long stick was also just out of reach, in another box which the crows had to get out using a shorter stick.

This kind of multi-stage problem is conceptually hard. The crows had to side step the ultimate prize and concentrate on the intermediate steps, linking the non-food sticks with the attainment of the meat and then performing the sequence in the correct order. ‘It was surprising to find that these creatures performed at the same levels as the best performances by great apes on such a difficult problem,’ said Russell Gray, of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, who carried out the work. ‘Six out of seven birds tried to get the long stick with the short stick at their first attempt at solving the problem.’ Read more in the Guardian.