According to The Planetary Society, LightSail 2 has successfully raised its orbit using solar sailing, making it the first small spacecraft to demonstrate the concept. From the report: Since unfurling the spacecraft's silver solar sail last week, mission managers have been optimizing the way the spacecraft orients itself during solar sailing. After a few tweaks, LightSail 2 began raising its orbit around the Earth. In the past 4 days, the spacecraft has raised its orbital high point, or apogee, by about 2 kilometers. The perigee, or low point of its orbit, has dropped by a similar amount, which is consistent with pre-flight expectations for the effects of atmospheric drag on the spacecraft. The mission team has confirmed the apogee increase can only be attributed to solar sailing, meaning LightSail 2 has successfully completed its primary goal of demonstrating flight by light for CubeSats.

The milestone makes LightSail 2 the first spacecraft to use solar sailing for propulsion in Earth orbit, the first small spacecraft to demonstrate solar sailing, and just the second-ever solar sail spacecraft to successfully fly, following Japan's IKAROS, which launched in 2010. LightSail 2 is also the first crowdfunded spacecraft to successfully demonstrate a new form of propulsion. The mission team will continue raising LightSail 2's orbit for roughly a month, until the perigee decreases to the point where atmospheric drag overcomes the thrust from solar sailing. During the orbit-raising period, the team will continue optimizing the performance of the solar sail.

The Trump administration is outlining two possible ways certain drugs that were intended for foreign markets could be imported to the U.S. -- a move that would clear the way to import some prescription drugs from Canada. From a report: "Today's announcement outlines the pathways the Administration intends to explore to allow safe importation of certain prescription drugs to lower prices and reduce out of pocket costs for American patients," Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said in a statement about the plan. "This is the next important step in the Administration's work to end foreign freeloading and put American patients first." The Department of Health and Human Services outlined two "pathways" for importing the drugs to the U.S.

In one initiative, the Food and Drug Administration and HHS will rely on their rulemaking authority to use existing federal law to set up pilot projects from states or wholesalers "outlining how they would import certain drugs from Canada that are versions of FDA-approved drugs that are manufactured consistent with the FDA approval." Separately, the FDA will work on safety guidelines for drug manufacturers who want to import any drugs they sell in foreign countries to the U.S. market.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Researchers have demonstrated a new algorithm for detecting so-called deepfake images -- those altered imperceptibly by AI systems, potentially for nefarious purposes. Initial tests of the algorithm picked out phony from undoctored images down to the individual pixel level with between 71 and 95 percent accuracy, depending on the sample data set used. The algorithm has not yet been expanded to include the detection of deepfake videos.

One component of the algorithm is a variety of a so-called "recurrent neural network," which splits the image in question into small patches and looks at those patches pixel by pixel. The neural network has been trained by letting it examine thousands of both deepfake and genuine images, so it has learned some of the qualities that make fakes stand out at the single-pixel level. Another portion of the algorithm, on a parallel track to the part looking at single pixels, passes the whole image through a series of encoding filters -- almost as if it were performing an image compression, as when you click the "compress image" box when saving a TIFF or a JPEG. These filters, in a mathematical sense, enable the algorithm to consider the entire image at larger, more holistic levels. The algorithm then compares the output of the pixel-by-pixel and higher-level encoding filter analyses. When these parallel analyses trigger red flags over the same region of an image, it is then tagged as a possible deepfake. The deepfake-detecting algorithm has been described in a recent IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

The source of a gigantic, mysterious leak of radioactive material that swept across Europe in 2017 has been traced to a Russian nuclear facility, which appears to have been preparing materials for experiments in Italy. From a report: The leak released up to 100 times the amount of radiation into the atmosphere that the Fukushima disaster did. Italian scientists were the first to raise the alarm on 2 October, when they noticed a burst of the radioactive ruthenium-106 in the atmosphere. This was quickly corroborated by other monitoring laboratories across Europe. Georg Steinhauser at Leibniz University Hannover in Germany says he was "stunned" when he first noticed the event. Routine surveillance detects several radiation leaks each year, mostly of extremely low levels of radionuclides used in medicine. But this event was different. "The ruthenium-106 was one of a kind. We had never measured anything like this before," says Steinhauser. Even so, the radiation level wasn't high enough to impact human health in Europe, although exposure closer to the site of release would have been far greater.

An anonymous reader shares a report: More than two years ago, Facebook revealed it was working on a project for typing words onto a computer right from your brain, without requiring invasive surgery to make it work. The company has been working with several universities on the effort, including the University of California, San Francisco. Facebook helped pay for UCSF researchers to study whether electrodes placed in the brain could help us learn to "decode" speech from brainwaves in real time. As it turns out, this is possible: A study published Tuesday showed that researchers could instantly see -- as text on a computer screen -- a word or phrase that a participant was thinking from brain activity, as long as it was a response to a limited set of questions. The study includes three epilepsy patients voluntarily implanted with electrodes.

Facebook is also footing the bill for a new, year-long study that UCSF is currently conducting where it will try to use brain activity to help a person who can't speak communicate. The social network hopes the efforts could help reveal which brain signals are key for that non-invasive wearable that it's planning for in the years ahead. "We expect that to take upwards of 10 years," Mark Chevillet, a research director at Facebook Reality Labs who runs its brain-computer interface group, told CNN Business of the overall project. "This is a long-term research program."

schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: It may sound strange at first, but a team of researchers in Australia has come up with a method to predict your personality traits using just the accelerometer in your phone. Well, that and your call and messaging activity logs. Also, the system works for some traits better than others. But it's an interesting take on how we may find connections through such seemingly unrelated things. In this case, we start at the Big Five personality traits. These have been used in psychology since the 1980's to help classify five dominant parts of our personalities. These five traits are extraversion (outgoing vs reserved), openness (curious vs cautious), neuroticism (confidence vs nervous), agreeableness (compassionate vs detached) and conscientiousness (organised vs easy-going).

The researchers analysed 52 people's phone habits between March 2010 and July 2011. Each participant was given a phone with sensing and collection software on it, which gave the researchers information on when and how much the phone was moving (accelerometer data), as well as the number and time of day of all calls and messages. The participants were also asked to complete a Big Five survey to score their personalities on the five traits. Then, the team also created a list of features related to the aspects of phone use they measured, that might potentially determine personality traits; for example, physical activity on weekend nights might predict extraversion, or the number of calls one makes might predict agreeableness. After crunching the numbers, the researchers found that some of the phone features really did predict some of the personality traits for the 52 participants. The phone data best predicted neuroticism, conscientiousness, and extraversion, but had trouble predicting the other two traits, especially openness. "There's also the issue of whether the team were actually looking at personality traits, or if the personality traits could be masked by other factors," the report adds. "For instance, neuroticism may be associated with different regularity of activity intensity in the night, however we cannot rule out many other possible explanations (e.g. neurotic people are more prone to stress and therefore - if this is the case, anyone with different personality traits that are stressed will still exhibit the same results)."

The study has been published in the journal Computer.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: For the first time, doctors in the U.S. have used the powerful gene-editing technique CRISPR to try to treat a patient with a genetic disorder. "It is just amazing how far things have come," says Victoria Gray, 34, of Forest, Miss. "It is wonderful," she told NPR in an exclusive interview after undergoing the landmark treatment for sickle cell disease. Gray is the first patient ever to be publicly identified as being involved in a study testing the use of CRISPR for a genetic disease. "I always had hoped that something will come along," she says from a hospital bed at the Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Nashville, Tenn., where she received an infusion of billions of genetically modified cells. "It's a good time to get healed." But it probably will take months, if not years, of careful monitoring of Gray and other patients before doctors know whether the treatment is safe and how well it might be helping patients. "For the study, doctors are using cells taken from patients' own bone marrow that have been genetically modified with CRISPR to make them produce a protein that is usually only made by fetuses and by babies for a short time following birth," the report adds. "The hope is this protein will compensate for the defective protein that causes sickle cell disease and will enable patients to live normally for the rest of their lives."

Scientists at the University of California San Diego have created a contact lens, controlled by eye movements, that can zoom in if you blink twice. "In the simplest of terms, the scientists measured the electrooculographic signals generated when eyes make specific movements (up, down, left, right, blink, double blink) and created a soft biomimetic lens that responds directly to those electric impulses," reports CNET. "The lens created was able to change its focal length depending on the signals generated." From the report: Incredibly, the lens works regardless of whether the user can see or not. It's not about the sight, it's about the electricity produced by specific movements. The researchers believe this innovation could be used in "visual prostheses, adjustable glasses, and remotely operated robotics in the future."

A "city killer" asteroid whizzed past earth Thursday that "would have hit with over 30 times the energy of the atomic blast at Hiroshima," according to one astronomer professor.

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared a Washington Post story that begins with a reaction from Alan Duffy, lead scientist at the Royal Institution of Australia: "I was stunned," he said. "This was a true shock."

This asteroid wasn't one that scientists had been tracking, and it had seemingly appeared from "out of nowhere," Michael Brown, a Melbourne-based observational astronomer, told The Washington Post. According to data from NASA, the craggy rock was large, an estimated 57 to 130 metres wide (187 to 427 feet), and moving fast along a path that brought it within about 73,000 kilometres (45,000 miles) of Earth. That's less than one-fifth of the distance to the moon and what Duffy considers "uncomfortably close...."

The asteroid's presence was discovered only earlier this week by separate astronomy teams in Brazil and the United States. Information about its size and path was announced just hours before it shot past Earth, Brown said. "It shook me out my morning complacency," he said. "It's probably the largest asteroid to pass this close to Earth in quite a number of years."

So how did the event almost go unnoticed?
Scientists have spotted 90% of asteroids that more than half a mile wide -- but this asteroid was smaller, faster, and had an unusual orbit.

"It should worry us all, quite frankly," one scientist told the Post. "It's not a Hollywood movie. It is a clear and present danger."

CNN tells the story of a new medical breakthrough for Keven Walgamott, who 17 years ago lost one hand and part of his forearm in an electrical accident. Now, Walgamott can use his thoughts to tell the fingers of his bionic hand to pick up eggs and grapes. The prosthetic arm he tested also allowed Walgamott to feel the objects he grasped. A biomedical engineering team at the University of Utah created the "LUKE Arm," named in honor of the robotic hand Luke Skywalker obtains in "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back" after Darth Vader slices off his hand with a lightsaber.

A new study published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics explained how the arm revived the sensation of touch for Walgamott. The University of Chicago and the Cleveland Clinic were also involved in the study... The LUKE Arm sends signals to the brain in order to mimic the way a human hand can feel and sense information about an object, like whether it's soft, hard, lightweight or heavy. "We changed the way we are sending that information to the brain so that it matches the human body..." said Jacob George, study author and biomedical engineering doctoral student at the University of Utah. "We're making more biologically realistic signals..."

Utah Emeritus Distinguished Professor Richard A. Normann invented the Utah Slanted Electrode Array, a grouping of 100 microelectrodes and wires implanted in the forearm's nerves and connected to an external computer. The array was able to read signals from the nerves remaining in Walgamott's arm while the computer converted them into digital signals. The signals would act like messages for the arm to move. But in order to be successful, things would have to work the opposite way as well, meaning the LUKE Arm would need to be able to sense objects and understand the necessary pressure needed to hold them. Sensors in the hand of the LUKE Arm send signals through the Array to the existing nerves, communicating the feeling the hand should be receiving when it touches something.
Created by DEKA R&D (founded by Segway inventor Dean Kamen), the LUKE arm "was in development for 15 years and is composed of metal motors with a clear silicon overlay that mimics skin," the article points out.

While it currently draws power from an external battery (and is wired to a computer), they're working on creating a wireless version.

Long-time Slashdot reader Faizdog writes: The "sensitivity" conjecture stumped many top computer scientists, yet the new proof is so simple that one researcher summed it up in a single tweet.

"This conjecture has stood as one of the most frustrating and embarrassing open problems in all of combinatorics and theoretical computer science," wrote Scott Aaronson of the University of Texas, Austin, in a blog post. "The list of people who tried to solve it and failed is like a who's who of discrete math and theoretical computer science," he added in an email.

The conjecture concerns Boolean functions, rules for transforming a string of input bits (0s and 1s) into a single output bit. One such rule is to output a 1 provided any of the input bits is 1, and a 0 otherwise; another rule is to output a 0 if the string has an even number of 1s, and a 1 otherwise. Every computer circuit is some combination of Boolean functions, making them "the bricks and mortar of whatever you're doing in computer science," said Rocco Servedio of Columbia University.

"People wrote long, complicated papers trying to make the tiniest progress," said Ryan O'Donnell of Carnegie Mellon University.

Now Hao Huang, a mathematician at Emory University, has proved the sensitivity conjecture with an ingenious but elementary two-page argument about the combinatorics of points on cubes. "It is just beautiful, like a precious pearl," wrote Claire Mathieu, of the French National Center for Scientific Research, during a Skype interview. Aaronson and O'Donnell both called Huang's paper the "book" proof of the sensitivity conjecture, referring to Paul Erds' notion of a celestial book in which God writes the perfect proof of every theorem. "I find it hard to imagine that even God knows how to prove the Sensitivity Conjecture in any simpler way than this," Aaronson wrote.

The Grim Reefer shares a report from Live Science: Once a mighty kauri tree -- a species of conifer that can grow up to 165 feet (50 meters) tall -- the low, leafless stump looks like it should be long dead. But, as a new study published today in the journal iScience reminds us, looks are only surface-deep. Below the soil, the study authors wrote, the stump is part of a forest "superorganism" -- a network of intertwined roots sharing resources across a community that could include dozens or hundreds of trees. By grafting its roots onto its neighbors' roots, the kauri stump feeds at night on water and nutrients that other trees have collected during the day, staying alive thanks to their hard work.

Using several sensors to measure the movement of water and sap (which contains important nutrients) through the three trees, the team saw a curious pattern: the stump and its neighbors seemed to be drinking up water at exact opposite times. During the day, when the vibrant neighbor trees were busy transporting water up their roots and into their leaves, the stump sat dormant. At night, when the neighbors settled down, the stump circulated water through what was left of its body. The trees, it seemed, were taking turns -- serving as separate pumps in a single hydraulic network. So, why add a near-dead tree to your underground nutrient highway? While the stump no longer has any leaves, researchers wrote, it's possible that its roots still have value as a bridge to other vibrant, photosynthesizing trees elsewhere in the forest. It's also possible that the stump joined roots with its neighbors a long time ago, before it was, well, a stump. Since nutrients still flow through the stump's roots and into the rest of the network, the neighboring trees may never have noticed its loss of greenery.

New research from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering could be key to our understanding of how the aging process works. The findings potentially pave the way for better cancer treatments and revolutionary new drugs that could vastly improve human health in the twilight years. ScienceDaily reports: "To drink from the fountain of youth, you have to figure out where the fountain of youth is, and understand what the fountain of youth is doing," said Nick Graham, Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. "We're doing the opposite; we're trying to study the reasons cells age, so that we might be able to design treatments for better aging." To achieve this, lead author Alireza Delfarah, a graduate student in the Graham lab, focused on senescence, a natural process in which cells permanently stop creating new cells. This process is one of the key causes of age-related decline, manifesting in diseases such as arthritis, osteoporosis and heart disease.

The research team discovered that the aging, senescent cells stopped producing a class of chemicals called nucleotides, which are the building blocks of DNA. When they took young cells and forced them to stop producing nucleotides, they became senescent, or aged. "This means that the production of nucleotides is essential to keep cells young," Delfarah said. "It also means that if we could prevent cells from losing nucleotide synthesis, the cells might age more slowly." Graham said that the team's research has applications in the emerging field of senolytics, the development of drugs that may be able to eliminate aging cells. He said that human clinical trials are still in early stages, but studies with mice have shown that by eliminating senescent cells, mice age better, with a more productive life span. The study has been published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Nature: A Japanese stem-cell scientist is the first to receive government support to create animal embryos that contain human cells and transplant them into surrogate animals since a ban on the practice was overturned earlier this year. Hiromitsu Nakauchi, who leads teams at the University of Tokyo and Stanford University in California, plans to grow human cells in mouse and rat embryos and then transplant those embryos into surrogate animals. Nakauchi's ultimate goal is to produce animals with organs made of human cells that can, eventually, be transplanted into people.

Until March, Japan explicitly forbid the growth of animal embryos containing human cells beyond 14 days or the transplant of such embryos into a surrogate uterus. That month Japan's education and science ministry issued new guidelines allowing the creation of human-animal embryos that can be transplanted into surrogate animals and brought to term. Nakauchi's experiments are the first to be approved under Japan's new rules, by a committee of experts in the science ministry. Final approval from the ministry is expected next month. Nakauchi says he plans to proceed slowly, and will not attempt to bring any hybrid embryos to term for some time. Initially, he plans to grow hybrid mouse embryos until 14.5 days, when the animal's organs are mostly formed and it is almost to term. He will do the same experiments in rats, growing the hybrids to near term, about 15.5 days. Later, Nakauchi plans to apply for government approval to grow hybrid embryos in pigs for up to 70 days.

The Grim Reefer shares a report from Live Science: For the first time, scientists have created a permanently magnetic liquid. These liquid droplets can morph into various shapes and be externally manipulated to move around, according to a new study. Thomas Russell, a distinguished professor of polymer science and engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and his team created these liquid magnets by accident while experimenting with 3D printing liquids at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (where Russell is also a visiting faculty scientist). The goal was to create materials that are solid but have characteristics of liquids for various energy applications.

One day, postdoctoral student and lead author Xubo Liu noticed 3D-printed material, made from magnetized particles called iron-oxides, spinning around in unison on a magnetic stir plate. So when the team realized the entire construct, not just the particles, had become magnetic, they decided to investigate further. Using a technique to 3D-print liquids, the scientists created millimeter-size droplets from water, oil and iron-oxides. The liquid droplets keep their shape because some of the iron-oxide particles bind with surfactants -- substances that reduce the surface tension of a liquid. The surfactants create a film around the liquid water, with some iron-oxide particles creating part of the filmy barrier, and the rest of the particles enclosed inside, Russell said. The team then placed the millimeter-size droplets near a magnetic coil to magnetize them. But when they took the magnetic coil away, the droplets demonstrated an unseen behavior in liquids -- they remained magnetized. (Magnetic liquids called ferrofluids do exist, but these liquids are only magnetized when in the presence of a magnetic field.) A video of the new material has been posted to YouTube. The researchers say their findings could lead to a revolutionary class of printable liquid devices for a variety of applications from artificial cells that deliver targeted cancer therapies to flexible liquid robots that can change their shape to adapt to their surroundings.

Observations of light coming from a star zipping in orbit around the humongous black hole at the center of our galaxy have provided fresh evidence backing Albert Einstein's 1915 theory of general relativity, astronomers said on Thursday. From a report: Researchers studied a star called S0-2, boasting a mass roughly 10 times larger than the sun, as it travels in an elliptical orbit lasting 16 years around the supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* residing at the center of the Milky Way 26,000 light years from Earth. They found that the behavior of the star's light as it escaped the extreme gravitational pull exerted by the black hole, with 4 million times the sun's mass, conformed to Einstein's theory's predictions. The famed theoretical physicist proposed the theory, considered one of the pillars of science, to explain the laws of gravity and their relation to other natural forces.

While Einstein's theory held up in the observations of this star, astronomer Andrea Ghez of the University of California, Los Angeles said it may not be able to fully account for what happens in the most exotic possible gravitational environments like those of black holes. These extraordinarily dense celestial entities exert gravitational fields so strong that no matter or light can escape.

Despite a rare confluence of commercial forces and scientific interest, generating new hair remains outside the realm of the possible. This could be changing, though -- and not owing to new packaging of the same old medicines. From a report: Recently a series of scientific publications has explored advances that involve both stem-cell research and 3-D printing, with the goal of cloning a person's actual hair and then inserting it into his or her scalp -- in tremendous, unlimited quantities. "For a long time, we've been saying this is 10 years away," says Robert Bernstein, a dermatologist in Manhattan who specializes in hair transplantation. "But now it actually might be less." Of all the parts of the body to create in a lab, hair could seem like the simplest. It's a strand of protein filaments wrapped around one another. Hair doesn't have to "function" in the way of a liver or brain; it just has to sit around and grow and not fall out.

But hair is much more complex to make than many researchers initially expected. To produce a single, hardy strand, the body relies on thousands of stem cells called dermal papillae at the base of each hair follicle. Human scalps contain about 100,000 hair follicles, but their life spans are limited: As dermal papillae disappear over time, follicles "miniaturize" and become dormant. When a hair follicle goes dormant, it cannot be restored. [...] The answer, then, lies in generating new hair. This science is progressing alongside the creation of other bodily structures in what is known as cell therapy, a promising area of medicine in which therapies are derived from a person's own stem cells. Pancreatic cells could replace those that stopped producing insulin in people with type 1 diabetes. Immune cells could be used to attack tumors. Nerve cells could be used to repair spinal-cord injuries. And, of course, hair follicles could be used to cover hairless skin. Using cells from a person's own body minimizes the risk that the immune system will reject the hair transplants. The ultimate goal among scientists is to create "hair farms," as the entrepreneur Geoff Hamilton and others put it.

The majority of YouTube videos about the climate crisis oppose the scientific consensus and "hijack" technical terms to make them appear credible, a new study has found. From a report: Researchers have warned that users searching the video site to learn about climate science may be exposed to content that goes against mainstream scientific belief. Dr Joachim Allgaier of RWTH Aachen University in Germany analysed 200 YouTube videos to see if they adhered to or challenged the scientific consensus. To do so, he chose 10 search terms: Chemtrails, climate, climate change, climate engineering, climate hacking, climate manipulation, climate modification, climate science, geoengineering, and global warming.

The videos were then assessed to judge how closely they adhered to the scientific consensus, as represented by the findings of reports by UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 2013 onwards. These concluded that humans have been the "dominant cause" of global warming since the 1950s. However, Allgaier found that the message of 120 of the top 200 search results went against this view.

France announced plans on Thursday to develop satellites armed with laser weapons that will be used against enemy satellites that threaten the country's space forces. Popular Mechanics reports: In remarks earlier today, French Defense Minister Florence Parly said, "If our satellites are threatened, we intend to blind those of our adversaries. We reserve the right and the means to be able to respond: that could imply the use of powerful lasers deployed from our satellites or from patrolling nano-satellites." "We will develop power lasers, a field in which France has fallen behind," Parly added.

France also plans to develop nano-satellite patrollers -- small satellites that act as bodyguards for larger French space assets by 2023. Per Parly's remarks, nano-sats could be armed with lasers. According to DW, France is also adding cameras to new Syracuse military communications satellites. Additionally France plans to set up its own space force, the "Air and Space Army," as part of the French Air Force. The new organization will be based in Toulouse, but it's not clear if the Air and Space Army will remain part of the French Air Force or become its own service branch.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Before life began on Earth, the environment likely contained a massive number of chemicals that reacted with each other more or less randomly, and it is unclear how the complexity of cells could have emerged from such chemical chaos. Now, a team led by Tony Z. Jia at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and Kuhan Chandru of the National University of Malaysia has shown that simple a-hydroxy acids, like glycolic and lactic acid, spontaneously polymerize and self-assemble into polyester microdroplets when dried at moderate temperatures followed by rehydration. This could be what happened along primitive beaches and river banks, or in drying puddles. These form a new type of cell-like compartment that can trap and concentrate biomolecules like nucleic acids and proteins. These droplets, unlike most modern cells, are able to merge and reform easily, and thus could have hosted versatile early genetic and metabolic systems potentially critical for the origins of life.

Previous work conducted at ELSI showed that moderate temperature drying of the simple organic compounds known as alpha-hydroxy acids, which are found in meteorites and many simulations of prebiological chemistry, spontaneously polymerizes them into mixtures of long polyesters. Building on this work, Jia and colleagues took the next step and examined these reactions under the microscope, and found that these mixed polyester systems form a gel phase and spontaneously self-assemble when rewetted to form simple cell-like structures. [...] Jia and colleagues are not certain these structures are the direct ancestors of cells, but they think it is possible such droplets could have enabled the assembly of protocells on Earth. The new compartmentalization system they have found is extremely simple, they note, and could form easily in primitive environments throughout the universe. "We have this new experimental system we can now play with, so we can start to study phenomena like evolution and evolvability of these droplets. The possible combinations of structures or functions these droplets might have are almost endless. If the physical rules that govern the formation of droplets are fairly universal in nature, then we hope to study similar systems to discover whether they also can form microdroplets with novel properties," adds Jia.

The study has been published in the journal PNAS.