To form all of these structures, the cell has to be internally specialized, with different regions having distinct sets of proteins and chemicals. But it's hard to study the processes that make one part of the cell different from another. Most of the tools we have are rather blunt and affect the whole cell equally. But researchers have reported a clever trick that lets them activate proteins in a specific location: stick them on a tiny magnetic bead, then move the bead around inside the cell.

"We have found that this is the oldest known star with a well-determined age," said Howard Bond of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pa., and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md.

The star could be as old as 14.5 billion years (plus or minus 0.8 billion years), which at first glance would make it older than the universe's calculated age of about 13.8 billion years, an obvious dilemma.

But earlier estimates from observations dating back to 2000 placed the star as old as 16 billion years. And this age range presented a potential dilemma for cosmologists. "Maybe the cosmology is wrong, stellar physics is wrong, or the star's distance is wrong," Bond said. "So we set out to refine the distance."

The new Hubble age estimates reduce the range of measurement uncertainty, so that the star's age overlaps with the universe's age — as independently determined by the rate of expansion of space, an analysis of the microwave background from the big bang, and measurements of radioactive decay.

This "Methuselah star," cataloged as HD 140283, has been known about for more than a century because of its fast motion across the sky. The high rate of motion is evidence that the star is simply a visitor to our stellar neighborhood. Its orbit carries it down through the plane of our galaxy from the ancient halo of stars that encircle the Milky Way, and will eventually slingshot back to the galactic halo.

At a press conference February 17 during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston, Samuel Ting, the MIT physicist who is the principal investigator for AMS, said his team was working on a paper analyzing a subset of the AMS data involving detections of high-energy electrons and positrons. “We waited for 15 years—actually, 18 years—to write this paper,” he said. “We have finished the paper and are now making the final checks.” He said he anticipated that the paper would be completed and submitted to a journal (as yet undecided, although Ting said later one possibility is Physical Review Letters) in two to three weeks.

While Ting didn’t disclose any of the results that will be in that paper, he did discuss what the paper would cover. It will examine the ratio of positrons to electrons as a function of energy from 0.5 to 350 billion electron volts. (The AMS can detect particles up to a trillion electron volts, but Ting said they didn’t yet have a statistically significant sample of data at the higher energies.) It will also measure changes in the ratio as a function of direction to see if its distribution is the same in all directions or has peaks in a particular direction, such as towards the center of the galaxy.

Changes in that positron/electron ratio as a function of energy, including increases or sharp drops, could provide evidence for one candidate of dark matter known as weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. Dark matter comprises about 23 percent of the universe, but its influence has only been detected indirectly, such as the rotation curves of galaxies. Scientists hypothesize that if dark matter is made of WIMPS—in particular, a particle known as a supersymmetric neutralino—it will produce antimatter particles like positrons when it collides with each other, creating a signature in the data detected by AMS.

"In time we hate that which we often fear." William Shakespeare

Organizations, mostly dominated by men, are telling everyone else what they can be, how they can act, what to do with decisions about their own welfare, bodies and careers.

On Friday March 8, we should make sure that the women in our institutions enjoy a coffee or a lunch. Let them talk and exchange their thoughts, and take pictures to show the world that there are women in science, and sharing their experience on Twitter and Google+ (hashtag #WomenOfScience). They are here, not a majority, but they are an important part of scientific work and discussion.

For all the "little scientists and engineers," and the pleasant world I would like them to inherit...

Official Site: International Women's Day
Office of Science and Technology Policy: Women in STEM
US Department of Commerce: Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation
NSF: Women, Minorities and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering
Cosmic Diary: Featuring the Women of Science
STEM connector: 100 Women Leaders in STEM
WAMC: Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics
STEMinist: Voices of Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

Skylar, who is also a TED2012 Senior Fellow, recently presented a new concept at TED2013: 4D printing – where materials can be reprogrammed to self-assemble into new structures. Apparently, this is just the tip of the iceberg in manufacturing with minimum energy consumption.

Living on the edge of Nairobi National Park, in Kenya, Turere first became responsible for herding and safeguarding his family's cattle when he was just nine. But often, his valuable livestock would be raided by the lions roaming the park's sweet savannah grasses, leaving him to count the losses.

So, at the age of 11, Turere decided it was time to find a way of protecting his family's cows, goats and sheep from falling prey to hungry lions.

"One day, when I was walking around," he says, "I discovered that the lions were scared of the moving light."

He fitted a series of flashing LED bulbs onto poles around the livestock enclosure, facing outward. The lights were wired to a box with switches and to an old car battery powered by a solar panel. They were designed to flicker on and off intermittently, thus tricking the lions into believing that someone was moving around carrying a flashlight.

And it worked. Since Turere rigged up his "Lion Lights," his family has not lost any livestock to the wild beasts, to the great delight of his father and astonishment of his neighbors.

What's even more impressive is that Turere devised and installed the whole system by himself, without ever receiving any training in electronics or engineering.

The 13-year-old's remarkable ingenuity has been recognized with an invitation to the TED 2013 conference, being held this week in California, where he'll share the stage with some of the world's greatest thinkers, innovators and scientists.

The following is what is now known:

National Science Foundation:
In a February 4 letter to Mikulski, NSF Director Subra Suresh wrote:

“The required levels of cuts to our programmatic investments would cause a reduction of nearly 1,000 research grants, impacting nearly 12,000 people supported by NSF, including professors, K-12 teachers, graduate students, undergraduates, K-12 students, and technicians.”

“Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction funding at $160 million or less in FY 2013 will result in the termination of approximately $35 million in contracts and agreements to industry for work in progress on major facilities for environmental and oceanographic research. This would directly lead to layoffs of dozens of direct scientific and technical staff, with larger impacts at supplier companies. In addition, out year costs of these projects would increase by tens of millions because of delays in the construction schedule.” [Note that the current and requested budget for this program is approximately $196 million.]