Thanks to materials science, the phrase "Bigger is Better" is going the way of the dodo bird. Computers that once filled entire rooms, now rest pleasantly on our laps and phones that were tethered to the wall, now live comfortably in our pockets. It's all the result of people learning to work with materials on an increasingly smaller scale.

But portability isn't the only advantage of Small. In "Making Stuff: Smaller" we're exploring what becomes possible when the barrier of "too small to work with" is broken. For example, in medicine the ability to work with materials on a small scale is providing new and less invasive solutions to various medical conditions.

In the not too distant past, if a patient was suffering from a disease of the gastrointestinal tract, the only way to take a look inside the small intestine was through invasive methods. A patient would have to be sedated and a long tube called an endoscope would be inserted into the digestive tract to look for abnormalities. Now, thanks to Given Imaging's "PillCam® video capsule" a vitamin-sized capsule containing a small camera that's ingestible, visualization of abdominal disorders is far more pleasant!
A patient simply swallows the capsule and over a period of about eight hours it passes through the entire GI tract, taking two pictures per second (more than 50,000 images per procedure!). These pictures are transmitted to a data recorder the patient wears on their waist. It's a revolutionary system giving physicians the view inside the body they need to make their diagnosis, while allowing the patient to go about their business, undisturbed.

It's hard to believe, but there are even smaller medical technologies on the horizon that will...

Why don't trees ever get sunburned? And could we harness their secret to protect our own skin? Researchers are studying how proteins called photolyases, which have been lost to humans through evolutionary time, provide most other organisms with extraordinary protection from damage caused by the sun's ultraviolet (UV) rays. The proteins do it by channeling the power of visible light.

A dimer in DNA forms in response to ultraviolet rays. Image Courtesy NASA/David Herring

Normally, the molecules that make up DNA look like a twisted ladder and form the classic double helix structure. But UV light, which has a shorter wavelength than visible light and cannot be seen, sometimes causes two of the rungs of nucleotides to fuse to each other instead of reaching across the ladder. This bulging formation, called a dimer, can be passed on when DNA is replicated and lead to mutations--some of which can turn into deadly forms of skin cancer. 

Fortunately, our cells do have repair mechanisms that find dimers, snip them out, and replace them with new DNA that fits properly into the ladder before the dimer can be replicated. But our proofreading process is not perfect, and sometimes it lets a dimer or two slip through.

Picture this: You are confined in an MRI machine. Just beyond your head is a live snake, and every time you press a button, the slithering reptile inches closer. You cannot run. You cannot move. You must be absolutely still while the MRI scans your brain to reveal the neurological intricacies of your total freak-out.

Is this a page from Stanley Milgram's to-do list? A torture scene from some straight-to-DVD Indiana Jones movie? No. It is a real experiment led by scientists at the Weizmann Institute in Israel and published last month in the journal Neuron. The goal: To pinpoint courage in the brain. That's a tall order for a lab experiment-- most true acts of courage don't happen in controlled settings--but the investigators hit on a novel solution, as they explain in this video:

My son Nick is autistic. My wife and I first began noticing something was off when Nick was 18 months old, but our pediatrician said not to worry, he's just developing slowly, let's see where he is in six months. When the pediatrician repeated that wait-and-see advice six months later, we ignored it and got Nick diagnosed at Children's Hospital Boston (and got another pediatrician).

Nick is now 13 and lives full-time in a residential facility dedicated to kids with autism -- his challenges are that severe. To this day, we wonder how much further along Nick would be today if it had been as clear to his doctor as it was to us that something was seriously wrong, and we had gotten him diagnosed at 18 months rather than at two and a half. With autism, the earlier the intervention, the greater the chances for lessening the often devastating impact of this little-understood disorder.

Now, as scientists report in a new study published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on July 19, a new technology that analyzes vocalizations in very young children offers hope of early screening of kids like Nick for autism, as well as for typical children who suffer from a language delay.

I get lost. A lot.

For this reason, I was very excited when I picked up last month's Science, in which researchers from University College London reported that sense of direction is innate in newborn rats. Their work is an important starting point in understanding how humans develop a concept of space.

This was big news for me. Maybe, I thought to myself, I was one of the unlucky few who had been cursed with bad biology. Could it be that my constant disorientation wasn't actually my fault?

If you follow soccer or marine biology, you've probably heard about Paul, the octopus who correctly predicted the winners of the 2010 World Cup games by selecting tasty mussels from boxes labeled with the flags of the victorious teams. Blame statistics, experimental biases, or simple luck of the draw; you won't find me arguing that any sea creature can see into the future. But if I had to take advice from a mollusk, an octopus would be my top choice: They are surprisingly intelligent, as the NOVA scienceNOW team found out while researching a story on these underwater eggheads for the show's upcoming season.

An octopus' brain makes up a big fraction of its total body weight--relative to its body size, the octopus has the largest brain of all invertebrates--and contains hundreds of millions of neurons. Structurally, the octopus brain looks more like that of a vertebrate than that of a clam. How did the octopus evolve so much brainpower? Without protective shells, octopuses need all the help they can get to outwit their predators. Experiments in the lab and in the field have shown that they can learn, remember, and even plan ahead. They navigate mazes and learn associations between symbols and treats. Some researchers even claim that octopuses have individual personalities, though critics disagree.

Even before Tenzing Norgay summited Mt. Everest with Edmund Hillary in 1953, it was widely known that his people, the Sherpas, had something that the rest of us did not.

On May 22 of this year, Apa Sherpa made a record 20th ascent of Mt. Everest, further driving home the obvious -- that these eastern Nepalese of Tibetan stock are superbly adapted to their lofty Himayalan home, which has about 40 percent less oxygen in its air than we lowlanders enjoy at sea level.

Sherpa climbing near Mt. Everest. Image © Bartosz Hadyniak/iStockphoto

Now scientists have found evidence that, over the thousands of years that Tibetans have lived on the Tibetan Plateau, natural selection has been working on their genes, causing evolutionary changes that enable Tibetan peoples not only to survive but to thrive at altitudes of 13,000 feet or more.

Three independent studies published in recent weeks have identified strong positive selection among Tibetans in genes that are involved in dealing with hypoxia, a deficiency of oxygen reaching the body's tissues.

One study, led by Xin Yi of the Beijing Genomics Institute in China, compared the genomes of 50 Tibetans living at 14,000 feet with those of 40 Han Chinese living in Beijing (altitude <200 feet). The team discovered about 30 genes that differ significantly between the two groups, even though the two groups split only 3,000 years ago, the team says. (As Nicholas Wade reports in a Times article, other experts dispute that figure, arguing that the split occurred thousands of years earlier.)

A new brain mapping technique uses viruses to illuminate neurons in beautiful colors, and can give us detailed visuals of how information travels through the brain.

Imagine the brain like an old house, full of complex electrical circuits and wires that branch off to every room. 

A region of the hippocampus where new memories are often formed.          Photo Courtesy T. Weissman, J. Livet, and J. W. Lichtman

Now imagine that you wanted to trace the path electricity takes from the main circuit breaker to the microwave, but you're not allowed to destroy the house in the process. Hopefully you would have a circuit map, and if you're really lucky, the circuits might even be drawn out in different colors. Now, scientists have found a way to make the same kinds of maps in the brain of a mouse by literally illuminating the pathways between neurons.

Attention astronomy enthusiasts! Remember learning about the seemingly insurmountable odds astronauts faced when upgrading the Hubble Space Telescope? (If not, check out these programs from NOVA scienceNOW and NOVA.) Thankfully, after a successful mission, the world's most powerful space telescope can now see the universe as it was a billion years after the Big Bang. But are you a little anxious (like we are) to know more about the even earlier universe?  Well, if you can wait until 2014, scientists might be able to peer into this past-- only 300 million years after the dawn of the cosmos.

Meet the James Webb Space Telescope. Engineers have started constructing this new space telescope, and astrophysicists hope that it will change the way we understand the universe. NASA showcased a full sized model of the telescope at the World Science Festival in Manhattan in June, so the team at NOVA scienceNOW went to see what it could do. Take a look.



Alex Liu, an intern at NOVA scienceNOW, is currently a master's candidate at New York University's Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program.