Researchers deduced that there had been water present during a warmer period lasting up to 5,000 years in the distant past, but this would have been too little time for life to establish itself on the surface.

The findings published in the Geophysical Research Letters journal were based on soil collected during the 2008 Nasa Phoenix mission to Mars.

Experts spent three years painstakingly scrutinising individual particles of soil to determine whether or not the planet was habitable.

The analysis, by Imperial College London researchers, showed that soil on Mars is formed under similarly arid conditions to the Moon.

The sample was taken from Mars’s icy northern arctic region, but separate studies have shown the entire planet is covered with the same type of soil.

Dr Tom Pike, who led the research, said: “We found that even though there is an abundance of ice, Mars has been experiencing a super-drought that may well have lasted hundreds of millions of years.

“We think the Mars we know today contrasts sharply with its earlier history, which had warmer and wetter periods and which may have been more suited to life.

“Future NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) missions that are planned for Mars will have to dig deeper to search for evidence of life, which may still be taking refuge underground.”

According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, adult stem cells — undifferentiated cells found in every human body that can transform into specialized cells with the medial potential to repair certain areas of the body damaged by disease or injury — fall under its jurisdiction for regulation as a drug.

The FDA states on its website:

Stem cells, like other medical products that are intended to treat, cure or prevent disease, generally require FDA approval before they can be marketed. At this time, there are no licensed stem cell treatments.

The Alliance for Natural Health states that the FDA has claimed in a legal conflict with a Colorado medical clinic, Centeno-Schultz, that a treatment it conducts using adult stem cells is under its regulatory jurisdiction. Centeno-Schultz’s Regenexx-SD is a non-surgical procedure to treat joint pain with adult stem cells by removing the stem cells from the patient’s blood and re-inserting them into the area needing treatment. No outside drugs are involved.

Since the stem cells are, as it says in FDA’s statement above, being used as a treatment, they are subject to regulation. ANH states that the FDA claims the authority to regulate because of interstate commerce:

The clinic is engaging in interstate commerce and is therefore subject to FDA regulation because any part of the machine or procedure that originates outside Colorado becomes interstate commerce once it enters the state. Moreover, interstate commerce is substantially affected because individuals traveling to Colorado to have the Regenexx procedure would “depress the market for out-of-state drugs that are approved by FDA.”

In its call for a summary judgement, the FDA expounds upon how under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) and the Commerce Clause it should be able to exert its regulatory authority over Centeno-Schultz’s procedure, which ANH reports it has been battling on this issue for several years. Here are a few snippets of the FDA’s argument from the case documents:

As we show below, the FDCA contains no “practice of medicine” exception that excuses Defendants’ conduct, and FDA’s exercise of jurisdiction over Defendants’ conduct is a permissible exercise of federal power under the Commerce Clause. Defendants’ remaining arguments are likewise without merit.

[...]

The Constitution grants Congress broad power to “regulate Commerce . . . among the several States,” U.S. Const., art. I, § 8, cl. 3. Congress may “regulate the channels of interstate commerce”; it may “regulate and protect the instrumentalities of interstate commerce, and persons or things in interstate commerce”; and it may “regulate activities that substantially affect interstate commerce.”

[...]

In Raich, the Court sustained Congress’s authority to prohibit the possession of home-grown marijuana intended solely for personal use. 545 U.S. at 32-33. It was sufficient that the Controlled Substances Act “regulates the production, distribution, and consumption of commodities for which there is an established, and lucrative, interstate market.”

[...]

United States v. 9/1 Kg. Containers, 854 F.2d 173, 176 (7th Cir. 1988) (“Congress gave the FDA comprehensive powers to license the manufacture of drugs and limit their sales. To regulate drugs is to be ‘involved’ in the ‘practice of the healing arts.’”

SlashGear states that the next step is for the court to decide “whether or not something that resides in every human being can be subject to government intervention.”

Researchers have demonstrated a striking method to reconstruct words, based on the brain waves of patients thinking of those words.

The technique reported in PLoS Biology relies on gathering electrical signals directly from patients’ brains.

Based on signals from listening patients, a computer model was used to reconstruct the sounds of words that patients were thinking of.

The method may in future help comatose and locked-in patients communicate.

Several approaches have in recent years suggested that scientists are closing in on methods to tap into our very thoughts; the current study achieved its result by implanting electrodes directly into a part of participants’ brains.

In a 2011 study, participants with electrodes in direct brain contact were able to move a cursor on a screen by simply thinking of vowel sounds.

A technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging to track blood flow in the brain has shown promise for identifying which words or ideas someone may be thinking about.

By studying patterns of blood flow related to particular images, Jack Gallant’s group at the University of California Berkeley showed in September that patterns can be used to guess images being thought of - recreating “movies in the mind”.

All in the mind

Now, Brian Pasley of the University of California, Berkeley and a team of colleagues have taken that “stimulus reconstruction” work one step further.

“This is inspired by a lot of Jack’s work,” Dr Pasley said. “One question was… how far can we get in the auditory system by taking a very similar modelling approach?”

The team focused on an area of the brain called the superior temporal gyrus, or STG.

This broad region is not just part of the hearing apparatus but one of the “higher-order” brain regions that help us make linguistic sense of the sounds we hear.

The team monitored the STG brain waves of 15 patients who were undergoing surgery for epilepsy or tumours, while playing audio of a number of different speakers reciting words and sentences.

The trick is disentangling the chaos of electrical signals that the audio brought about in the patients’ STG regions.

To do that, the team employed a computer model that helped map out which parts of the brain were firing at what rate, when different frequencies of sound were played.

With the help of that model, when patients were presented with words to think about, the team was able to guess which word the participants had chosen.

They were even able to reconstruct some of the words, turning the brain waves they saw back into sound on the basis of what the computer model suggested those waves meant.

“There’s a two-pronged nature of this work – one is the basic science of how the brain does things,” said Robert Knight of UC Berkeley, senior author of the study.

“From a prosthetic view, people who have speech disorders… could possibly have a prosthetic device when they can’t speak but they can imagine what they want to say,” Prof Knight explained.

“The patients are giving us this data, so it’d be nice if we gave something back to them eventually.”

The authors caution that the thought-translation idea is still to be vastly improved before such prosthetics become a reality.

But the benefits of such devices could be transformative, said Mindy McCumber, a speech-language pathologist at Florida Hospital in Orlando.

“As a therapist, I can see potential implications for the restoration of communication for a wide range of disorders,” she told BBC News.

“The development of direct neuro-control over virtual or physical devices would revolutionise ‘augmentative and alternative communication’, and improve quality of life immensely for those who suffer from impaired communication skills or means.”

Federal regulators Monday approved the first drug for people with advanced forms of basal cell carcinoma, the most common kind of skin cancer, as well as the most common cancer in general in the United States.

The drug, made by South San Francisco’s Genentech, a subsidiary of the Swiss drug giant Roche, is designed for patients whose basal cell cancer has spread either locally or to other parts of the body.

Basal cell carcinoma, which forms in the lower part of the outer layer of the skin or epidermis, affects some 2 million Americans each year. While basal cell carcinoma is rarely fatal and is generally considered curable, in a small percentage of patients it can spread and in some cases cannot be treated with surgery or other methods.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the drug, which is called Erivedge, after an expedited six-month review in advance of the March 8 approval deadline.

“For patients with disease that has metastasized, these patients have no other treatment option,” said Dr. Jennifer Low, global development leader for the drug. “This disease can be very devastating and in some cases life threatening.”

More than 100 patients worldwide were involved in the trial, which was conducted at about 40 centers around the world including UCSF Medical Center and Stanford University Medical Center.

Promising results

The trial found that 30 percent of patients with metastasized disease – meaning that it had spread elsewhere in the body – experienced a partial response to the drug, or shrinkage of their tumors, and 43 percent of those with locally advanced disease – meaning that it had invaded surrounding tissue – had a complete or partial response, according to the FDA.

Researchers identified a pathway that is critical for the growth of basal cell carcinoma, and the drug works to inhibit that pathway.

“This approach is becoming more common and will potentially allow cancer drugs to be developed more quickly,” said Dr. Richard Pazur, director of the office of hematology and oncology products for the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, in a statement.

Dr. Jean Tang, a Stanford dermatologist who specializes in skin cancer, said the disease can be devastating for patients who have been disfigured and are unable to participate fully in life due to multiple surgeries.

“If you’re the one person who has terrible (basal cell carcinoma) that has metastasized and is so aggressive that nobody can cut it out or you’re that patient who has 100 tumors, that’s a terrible place to be in,” Tang said. “I can say, as a physician, this drug is going to change lives for patients.”

A patient’s story

Mitch Rolin, 48, of Alameda was one of those patients. Rolin, a fair-skinned man who does not know his family history because he was adopted, has had more than 100 surgeries to remove basal cell cancers since he was diagnosed in his late teens.

He became the first patient to enroll in UCSF’s trial for the drug in June 2009 and described the results as a miracle.

“Within months, there was just dramatic change. It was just absolutely amazing,” said Rolin, who had developed lesions around his left eye that doctors were unable to remove surgically.

Rolin said he does experience some side effects with the drug, including hair loss, changes in how things taste and frequent muscle spasms that range from sharp and painful to just annoying. But he said the benefit of the drug has been worth these complications.

He said he’s looking forward to getting back involved in the things he used to enjoy. “When I realized it was going to work, it was like here was this incredible, miraculous second chance,” he said.

The drug is taken orally once a day. Erivedge will cost an estimated $7,500 a month and will be available within two weeks, according to Genentech officials.

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