11 February 2012 | NewScientist | 7

that 6372 people applied to join its astronaut corps in response to the latest call. That’s twice as many as usual and the highest number since 1978. “Being an astronaut still touches a broad chord in our society,” says Scott Pace at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute in Washington DC.

Mock astronauts are in demand too: a US research team is seeking volunteers for a four-month-long simulated Mars trip in Hawaii.

And despite some recent failures, Russia’s space agency is to ask members of the public to compete for seats on a moon mission, say some media reports.

Whale woes EVEN whales find noisy neighbours stressful – and they show it in their faeces.

The oceans have become much noisier over the last century because of shipping. We know whales can cope with the din to some extent by calling more loudly, but we have no idea if they are stressed by noise.

Rosalind Rolland of the New England Aquarium in Boston, Massachusetts, and colleagues used faeces to monitor the levels of stress hormones in endangered North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis).

For two days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, shipping traffic ground to a halt in the Bay of Fundy, Canada, and underwater noise fell by 6 decibels. During that time, stress-hormone levels in whales there were lower than in readings taken during September in the following four years (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2011.2429).

We don’t know how much stress hormone is normal for right whales, so we can’t say at what level they are genuinely stressed, cautions Patrick Miller of the University of St Andrews, UK. But if these whales are suffering chronic stress, it could explain why they struggle to breed.

Genes from a boneHOW’S this for impressive: a genome pieced together from a 30,000-year-old finger bone contains fewer errors than genomes generated using samples from living people. The genome, published online this week, is from an extinct group of hominins called the Denisovans.

Fossils of the Denisovans, close relatives of the Neanderthals, were discovered in Siberia in 2008. A draft genome was released in 2010 by Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany,

which revealed that Denisovans interbred with modern humans. However, each position in the genome was read only twice, so the fine detail was unreliable.

The new genome covers each position 30 times over. Pääbo

plans to use it to estimate how much genetic variation was present among the Denisovans, revealing whether they suffered population crashes.

“The 30,000-year-old genome has fewer errors than those sequenced from living people”

IT’S certainly something to chew on. An 83-year-old Belgian woman is now able to eat, speak and breathe normally again after a machine printed her an entirely new jawbone – a world first. Her own jaw was destroyed by an infection called osteomyelitis but the new one, made from a fine titanium powder sculpted by a precision laser, works just as well.

The team at Biomed, the biomedical research department of the University of Hasselt in Belgium, used an MRI scan of the patient’s jawbone to get the shape right. They then fed it into a laser sintering 3D printer which fused titanium particles layer by layer until the shape of her jawbone was recreated. It was then coated in a biocompatible

ceramic layer (see picture). No detail was spared: it had dimples and cavities to allow muscles to attach, and sleeves to allow nerves to pass through, plus support structures for dental implants that the woman might need in future.

The team were astonished at the success of the 4-hour implant operation, which took place in June 2011 but was only announced this week. “Shortly after waking up from the anaesthetic the patient spoke a few words, and the day after was able to speak and swallow normally,” says operation leader Jules Poukens.

Until now, probably the largest 3D-printed body part was half of a man’s upper jawbone, implanted in a 2008 operation in Finland.

Need a jawbone? Print one out

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Pearly secretsJewellery could soon be adorned with gold pearls, following publication of the Japanese pearl oyster genome. Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology say they’ve identified genes driving the process that forms pearls, information that could help produce them in novel colours (DNA Research, in press).

Malaria deaths Malaria killed 1.2 million people in 2010 – almost twice as many as the World Health Organization estimate, according to a study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, Washington. The IMHE claims the WHO massively underestimates deaths from the disease in all those over the age of 5 (The Lancet, DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(12)60034-8). The WHO disputes the IMHE result.

Alien matter tastedNASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer has captured heavy elements streaming into the solar system for the first time. The interstellar matter is truly alien: it has less oxygen relative to neon than our sun (Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, DOI: 10.1088/0067-0049/198/2/13).

Telescope quartetLight from four 8-metre telescopes at the European Southern Observatory in Chile has been combined to produce images as detailed as those from a single 130-metre telescope. The technique will be used to hunt for embryonic planets.

Dolphins in dangerSix years after the Yangtze river dolphin disappeared, its cousin is under threat. The world’s largest population of Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins lives in China’s Pearl river estuary and is declining at 2.5 per cent a year (Biological Conservation, DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2012.01.004).

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