Scientists

One of the hot trends in cancer medicine is using tiny particles to deliver drugs directly to a tumor, rather than bombarding the whole body with chemotherapy. But the immune system treats these nanoparticles as foreign invaders, so it tries to clear them before they can do their job. The solution, says a team of University of Pennsylvania researchers, is to make the foreign particles seem like natives. The group reported Thursday it had done just that in lab mice, attaching customized protein fragments to the particles that tricked the animals' immune-system "border guards" into relaxing their vigilance.

WASHINGTON - With scant snowfall and barren ski slopes in parts of the Midwest and Northeast the last couple of years, some scientists have pointed to global warming as the culprit. Then, when a whopper of a blizzard smacked the Northeast with more than two feet of snow in some places earlier this month, some of the same people again blamed global warming. How can that be? It's been a joke among skeptics, pointing to what seems to be a brazen contradiction. But the answer lies in atmospheric physics.

NORTHAMPTON, Mass. - A chemist at a state crime lab tampered with drug evidence, authorities said Sunday in Massachusetts, where another chemist at a different lab was accused last year of faking test results in a scandal that threw thousands of criminal cases into question. Sonja Farak of Northampton, who works at a lab in Amherst in Western Massachusetts, removed a substance from a case file that tested positive for cocaine and replaced it with one that did not test positive, state Attorney General Martha Coakley said.

TOKYO - A team of Japanese scientists said Thursday that faults underneath a nuclear plant in northern Japan are most likely active, a discovery that could further delay the restart of idled reactors. The four-member panel commissioned by the Nuclear Regulation Authority said that at least two major faults underneath the Higashidori nuclear plant in Aomori prefecture are believed to be active - a contradiction of operator Tohoku Electric Power Co.'s assertion that they are inactive. The panel said the faults could cause magnitude 7-class earthquakes near the reactor, which was opened in 2005 and is among the newest of Japan's aging reactors.

VIENNA, Austria - Iranian scientists have run computer simulations for a nuclear weapon that would produce more than triple the explosive force of the World War II bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, according to a diagram obtained by the Associated Press. The diagram was leaked by officials from a country critical of Iran's atomic program to bolster their arguments that Iran's nuclear program must be halted before it produces a weapon. The officials provided the diagram only on condition that they and their country not be identified.

Bryce Bayer, 83, a retired Kodak scientist and the inventor of a widely used color filter array that bears his name, has died. Mr. Bayer, of Brunswick, Maine, died Nov. 13, a spokeswoman for Direct Cremation of Maine confirmed Friday. The cause of death wasn't released. His Bayer filter was patented in 1975 and is incorporated into nearly every digital camera and camera phone, Kodak said in a 2009 news release announcing Mr. Bayer's receipt that year of the Royal Photographic Society's Progress Award.

LIMA, PERU - Lonesome George, the late reptile prince of the Galapagos Islands, may be dead, but scientists now say that he may not be the last giant tortoise of his species after all. Researchers say they may be able to resurrect the Pinta Island subspecies by launching a cross-breeding program with 17 other tortoises found to contain genetic material similar to that of Lonesome George, who died June 24 at the Pacific Ocean archipelago off Ecuador's coast...

A high-intensity beam of violet light pierced the air in the darkened laboratory, precisely striking a whisper-thin strand of wire so that it glowed with its own, secondary light. The wire, less than a millionth of a meter wide, was the equivalent of a miniature fiber-optic cable - a potential building block for a new kind of ultrafast computer chip, according to scientists at the University of Pennsylvania. You think your sleek new laptop is fast? A slow-footed plow horse compared to what Ritesh Agarwal has in mind.

University of Pennsylvania scientists have turned a castoff drug into a novel treatment for a rare, fatal genetic disorder in which ultra-high cholesterol causes heart disease in early childhood. The journal Lancet on Friday published a small but pivotal international study of 29 adult patients who took the drug, called lomitapide. After six months, 14 patients saw their LDL "bad" cholesterol drop by at least half, and 8 reached near-optimal levels that persisted through the end of the study a year later.

Serendipity has been known to catapult science to new heights, but few lucky accidents could compete with the windfall astrophysicists picked up from the biggest, most expensive blunder in the history of spy satellites. After spending an estimated half billion dollars on two telescopes designed to spy on earthly activities, the federal government gave up and offered them for civilian use. Astronomers quickly realized that turning the scopes from spy craft into science craft could open up a new view of the universe.