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A consortium of 48 scientists from 50 institutions in the United States has called for an ambitious research effort to understand and harness microbiomes – the communities of microorganisms that inhabit ecosystems as varied as the human gut and the ocean, to improve human health, agriculture, bioenergy, and the environment.

Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) have demonstrated that RSA encryption keys, which are used by thousands of companies and organizations to protect the data and processes they entrust to cloud-based services, can be obtained using a sophisticated side-channel attack—despite recent efforts by cloud service providers and cryptography software developers to eliminate such vulnerabilities.

A chemistry PhD student from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) has found a simple way for the first time of producing two chemical compounds that were first discovered in late 19th century, entirely by accident. The discovery could have implications for fighting disease and growing crops, where the sulfur containing compounds called sultones and sultines, play a significant role.

In the future, the Pacific Ocean’s temperature cycles could disrupt more than just December fishing. A study published in Nature Communications suggests that the weather patterns known as El Nino and La Nina could lead to at least a doubling of extreme droughts and floods in California later this century.

Chinese hacking attempts on American corporate intellectual property have occurred with regularity over the past three weeks, suggesting that China almost immediately began violating its newly minted cyberagreement with the United States, according to a newly published analysis by a cybersecurity company with close ties to the U.S. government.

The company’s vision initially seems fanciful: Create applications for health care featuring animated characters that can understand language in all its complexity, from context to regional idioms, detect emotion and recognize facial expressions, perceive differences in personalities, and on top of all that, constantly learn.

Three years after a groundswell of online learning swept through higher education, Stanford researchers who were at the forefront of the movement have concluded that online learning has not been the cure-all that many educators had hoped for. Nonetheless, the techniques developed for online learning may lead to great advances in how students learn, both online and in conventional classrooms.

Organisms from bacteria to humans must defend themselves against parasitic genetic elements called transposons, and the stakes are high. These pieces of DNA, which disrupt genes by jumping around in the genome, can cause so much destruction that cells have dedicated surveillance mechanisms to keep them in check.

The MinION, a handheld DNA-sequencing device developed by Oxford Nanopore, has been tested and evaluated by an independent, international consortium coordinated by EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). The innovative device opens up new possibilities for using sequencing technology in the field, for example in tracking disease outbreaks, testing packaged food or the trafficking of protected species.

The software, developed by the EU-funded PREDICT project, has been designed to be capable of foreseeing and predicting the possible ‘cascade effects’ of a disaster. By simulating the evolution of possible impacts stemming from, say, a catastrophic flood or storm surge on industries and public services such as transport, decision makers are in a better position to take effective action quickly and to respond to prevent a domino effect.