This week in science

This week in science!

Dinosaur: http://bit.ly/XSLzRa
Artificial sweeteners: http://bit.ly/1qVE3lp
Chimps: http://bit.ly/1mnFqbc
Europeans: http://bit.ly/1uOeRgz
Mice: http://bit.ly/1mnFt6S
Black hole: http://bit.ly/1oaUEff
GMOs: http://bit.ly/1oaUB2Q
Schizophrenia: http://bit.ly/1uqd3YY

Scientists Discover Effective Strategy To Switch Off Autoimmunity

A new study has shed light on a poorly understood therapy developed to treat individuals with autoimmune diseases. The researchers not only revealed the molecular mechanisms behind the therapy, but also identified an optimal strategy that will reduce treatment-associated risks and result in long-term modulation of rogue immune system cells. The work has been published in Nature Communications.

Autoimmune diseases—such as multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis—are chronic inflammatory conditions that result from the body’s immune cells inappropriately attacking healthy tissues. This happens because the immune system is unable to distinguish between your own tissue and potentially harmful substances.

Scientists have made progress in developing treatments for these diseases in recent years, but in order to be successful the treatments need to be long-lasting and should not affect normal immune function. A specific type of therapy called antigen-specific immunotherapyaims to tick these boxes and has been shown to work in some trials.

The therapy involves administering increasing doses of the molecules that the body normally attacks, which gradually builds up a tolerance to them. However, the best dose to create safe, long-term protection was unknown. Furthermore, scientists did not understand the underlying mechanisms that led to this tolerance. Now, a new study conducted by researchers at the University of Bristol has shed light on both of these areas, which will hopefully lead to more effective treatments.

For the current study, the researchers looked at a type of white blood cell called a CD4+ T cell—one of the most important players in autoimmunity. These cells usually help fight infection, but in individuals with autoimmune diseases they drive the immune response that results in inflammation.

The researchers administered increasing amounts of protein fragments that are normally the target for attack and looked at which genes were switched on inside the CD4 cells at different stages. They found that as the dose escalated, genes that positively regulate inflammation and cell cycle pathways were switched off. This caused the cells to convert from aggressive cells into protective cells. Furthermore, they identified the genes that characterize these CD4 cells.

From this, the researchers were able to develop an optimal dose escalation strategy that efficiently reinstates self-tolerance. This means that instead of attacking self tissues, the immune system gradually begins to ignore them. Importantly, this is achieved without the need for immunosuppressive drugs that have undesirable side effects, such as leaving the individual susceptible to infections and tumors.

“Insight into the molecular basis of antigen-specific immunotherapy opens up exciting new opportunities to enhance the selectivity of the approach while providing valuable markers with which to measure effective treatment,” lead researcher David Wraith said in a news release. “These findings have important implications for the many patients suffering from autoimmune conditions that are currently difficult to treat.”

progress against HIV

In an unexpected twist, a family of proteins that have been found to promote HIV-1 entry into cells also potently block viral release. Interestingly, these proteins were also found to inhibit the release of other viruses, including Ebola virus. These intriguing new findings provide us with novel insights into both viral infection and the development of AIDS, which could ultimately lead to new antiviral strategies. The study has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Viruses are unable to replicate by themselves and thus must hijack a host cell’s machinery in order to do so. To get inside host cells, HIV, or human immunodeficiency virus, needs to bind to receptors found on target cells. This triggers a series of events that ultimately lead to viral entry; once inside, HIV converts the cell into a factory for making more viruses.

Recent studies have identified a family of proteins, called TIM proteins, which play critical roles in facilitating the entry of various viruses including Ebola, West Nile and dengue viruses. Intriguingly, University of Missouri researchers have now discovered that these proteins not only promote HIV-1 entry into host cells, but they also prevent viral release.

For the study, scientists investigated the interactions between HIV-1 and TIM proteins using various molecular, biochemical and microscopic techniques. They found that as HIV-1 begins to bud from, or escape, the host cell, TIM proteins become incorporated into the virions and tether the particles to the cellular membrane. This is mediated through interactions with a lipid called phosphatidylserine (PS) that is found both on the cell membrane and the outside of the virus particles. Usually, PS is expressed on the inside of the cell, but viral infection causes it to flip to the outside, meaning that both PS and TIM are now present on the cell and viral surface. TIM and PS then bind to one another as HIV-1 attempts to escape from the cell, causing the particles to be retained at the cell surface.

Interestingly, the team also discovered that TIM proteins inhibited the release of other viruses including a mouse virus belonging to the same family as HIV (murine leukemia virus), and also Ebola virus.

view study here:http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/08/14/1404851111.abstract

this week in science

Ebola: http://bit.ly/1sNxrU4
Rosetta: http://bit.ly/1mAyoKu
Ocean: http://bit.ly/1onL8tL
Pregnancy: http://bit.ly/1onKZq0
Dinosaur: http://bit.ly/1uDHxay
Vitamin D: http://bit.ly/1q46bNr
Chip: http://bit.ly/1r3VRLD
Zombie star: http://bit.ly/1rfo5Pb

This week in science

This week in science!

Extinction: http://bit.ly/1qGs2Rd
Genome: http://bit.ly/1tQFfVh
Beef: http://bit.ly/1nwuaYB
Crows: http://bit.ly/1o4DIFx
Virus: http://bit.ly/1tQFe3q
Dinosaurs: http://bit.ly/1oxzgnz
Insect: http://bit.ly/1lKsuGr
Tyrannosaurs: http://bit.ly/1rrS1YG

This week in science

Friends: http://bit.ly/1ruMYtP
Brains: http://bit.ly/1nXviEG
Soils: http://bit.ly/WwGluu
Higgs boson: http://bit.ly/1yN1GgA
Asteroid: http://bit.ly/1nsLnD6
Pacemaker: http://bit.ly/1n6oJ1S
Superblack material: http://bit.ly/1nsLlLJ
Diabetes: http://bit.ly/1psxuC6

higgs boson seen

First they found the Higgs boson using the world’s largest atom smasher. Now, thanks to observations of an ultra-rare particle interaction, scientists have more evidence that the Higgs does what it’s supposed to do. 

For forty years physicists have been using the standard model of particle physics to explain how forces of nature operate. And an essential feature is the Higgs boson, a particle that’s thought to provide mass to all matter. As New Scientist explains it, the particles that make us up have mass, and without the Higgs, these particles would be massless, like photons. Its discovery in 2012 might be considered the crowning achievement of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and it greatly bolstered physicists confidence in the model they'd been working with.

But finding the Higgs isn't the end of the story. For one thing, some physicists are chasing even greater levels of confidence in the standard model; for another, the standard model isn't a complete description of the way the subatomic world works. "The Standard Model has so far survived all tests, but we know that it is incomplete because there are observations of dark matter, dark energy, and the antimatter/matter asymmetry in the universe that can't be explained by the Standard Model," says Marc-André Pleier of Brookhaven National Laboratory in a news release.

It took years of collisions to confirm the Higgs discovery, and the mountain of data LHC has created hides more secrets for physicists to uncover. Take, for example, collisions of two particles called W bosons. When they collide, they scatter in a way that can tell physicists whether the Higgs does its job of imparting mass to matter in the way they expect -- and possibly eliminate some of the competing additional theories.

The problem? These interactions are harder to find than even the Higgs itself. “Only about one in 100 trillion proton-proton collisions would produce one of these events,” Pleier explains. “We looked through billions of proton-proton collisions produced at the LHC for a signature of these events -- decay products that allow us to infer like Sherlock Holmes what happened in the event.” He and the ATLAS collaboration observed 34 of these events. 

To test the Higgs mechanism, the scientists compared distributions of decay products of the W scattering process -- how often particular products are observed at a particular energy and geometrical configuration. 

“It’s like a fingerprint,” Pleier says. “We have a predicted fingerprint and we have the fingerprint we measure. If the fingerprints match, we know that the Higgs does its job of mass generation the way it should.” Sure enough, the data indicate that the Higgs is working as expected. The work will be published in Physical Review Letters.

Read more at http://www.iflscience.com/physics/higgs-boson-seen-work-first-time#rMlHMAljGDfZyFsl.99

This week in science

This week in science!

C-section: http://bit.ly/1njN04I
Autism: http://bit.ly/TO8Y44
Bird: http://bit.ly/W15dKq
Premature infants: http://bit.ly/U8CMZv
Tribe: http://bit.ly/1k0ibNX
Dwarf galaxies: http://bit.ly/1mZlN8B
Smallpox: http://bit.ly/1m7XMpN
HIV: http://bit.ly/1ydg6Xj

Anti oxidants can make certain forms of cancer worse

While many proponents of dietary antioxidants or supplements will claim they have incredible anticancer properties, amongst other things, the literature on these molecules is conflicting and animal and human studies of antioxidants as a potential cancer therapy have been largely disappointing. In fact, some trials have even found that antioxidant supplements can worsen some cancers. For example, vitamin E increases cancer burden and mortality in mouse models of lung cancer. This was particularly surprising since certain properties of cancer cells seemed to suggest that, in theory, they should be beneficial. The subject is therefore confusing and calls for much needed clarification.

In an attempt to address this issue, two researchers scoured the literature and came up with a hypothesis that may explain why these supplements are ineffective as a cancer therapy. The study has been published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Their research is centered on the systems at play within cells that maintain a balance between oxidizing and anti-oxidizing molecules. These molecules are involved in so called redox reactions that involve the transfer of electrons from one agent to another. These reactions control certain cellular processes and also generate energy.

While oxidants are critical to cellular function, if they are produced in excess they can damage the cell. Cells produce natural antioxidants to prevent this from happening, but in cancer cells the balance is disrupted and high levels of these so called reactive oxygen species (ROS) are produced, promoting cancer. This is because ROS can cause genetic mutations and activate pathways that stimulate cell growth. It therefore seemed logical to conclude that antioxidants would thwart cancer progression, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

The researchers suggest that this is because antioxidants from the diet or supplements aren’t getting to the right place in the cell, where ROS are produced and accumulate, rendering them useless.  However, they note the successes of antioxidants that have been modified in such a way that they are targeted to a specific cellular location- the sausage-shaped energy factories called mitochondria.

They also propose a mechanism for the tumor-accelerating properties of dietary antioxidants. Certain cellular proteins that have tumor suppressive properties are actually activated by ROS; therefore decreasing ROS prevents their activation and subsequent action. Furthermore, some tumor promoting proteins are attenuated by ROS.

Interestingly, the levels of natural antioxidants are also boosted in cancer cells, which seems to be a mechanism to prevent uncontrolled damage by the high levels of ROS. They therefore suggest therapies designed to boost the levels of oxidants in cells could be beneficial. Indeed, radiotherapy and certain chemotherapies depend on ROS to kill the cells.

To conclude, the researchers suggest that inhibiting antioxidant proteins may be a useful strategy to combat cancer. Studies so far in rodent models of certain cancers have shown promise. The challenge that scientists are presented with is identifying antioxidants and pathways that are used by cancer cells, not normal cells. They therefore suggest that antioxidant profiling of tumor cells and neighboring normal cells may yield useful results that could ultimately help identify potential therapeutic targets. 

[Via NEJM and CSHL]

This week in science

This week in science!

Speed of light: http://buff.ly/1x0hJXD
Exoplanet: http://buff.ly/1x0hJXG
Titan: http://buff.ly/1x0hJXJ
Diamond: http://buff.ly/1x0hMmi
Poop: http://buff.ly/1x0hJXM

Anti-vaxxers: http://buff.ly/1x0hKe1

Black holes: http://buff.ly/1x0hKe3
Signal: http://buff.ly/1x0hMmm

schrodingers algae

NOTE:this does not involve puttin algae into boxes with bombs/poisonous gas.
No algea were hurt during the making of this article.

Did you know that some species of algae use quantum mechanical behavior to maximize the light they collect? Well, a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that certain species have the ability to switch this capacity off, prompting questions of both why and how that could ultimately lead to improved energy harvesting technologies.

Quantum coherence has been defined by the great mathematician Sir Roger Penrose as, “Circumstances when large numbers of particles can collectively cooperate in a single quantum state”. Moreover, these particles can exist in multiple quantum states simultaneously, known as superposition, most famous from the thought experiment known as Schrodinger's Cat. Perhaps the most familiar coherence application is the laser, but is is also responsible for superconductivity and superfluidity.

Certain algae, and green sulfur bacteria, were found in 2010 to be able to transfer energy internally in a coherent manner. “The assumption is that this could increase the efficiency of photosynthesis, allowing the algae and bacteria to exist on almost no light,” says Professor Paul Curmi of the University of New South Wales. “Once a light-harvesting protein has captured sunlight, it needs to get that trapped energy to the reaction centre in the cell as quickly as possible, where the energy is converted into chemical energy for the organism. It was assumed the energy gets to the reaction centre in a random fashion, like a drunk staggering home. But quantum coherence would allow the energy to test every possible pathway simultaneously before travelling via the quickest route.”

The single-celled algal species found capable of this are cryptophytes, and live in places where little light penetrates, such as under ice or at the bottom of deep ponds, making every scrap of energy vital.

However, Curmi has now found two species of cryptophytes with an extra amino acid in their energy sharing proteins compared to the coherence inducing ones. X-ray crystallography of the light harvesting structure showed the alteration disrupted the coherence. “This shows cryptophytes have evolved an elegant but powerful genetic switch to control coherence and change the mechanisms used for light harvesting,” Curmi says.

It's not clear what the advantage of doing without the additional efficiency coherence supplies might be. Curmi plans to investigate differences in the habitats and ecological niches between the species with and without coherence. Coherence is much easier to achieve at lower temperatures, so it would not be surprising if species that operate in warmer conditions couldn't make it work, but that does not explain what appears to be an adaptation to disrupt it.

The discovery of biological coherence sparked interest in the possibility of incorporating the phenomenon into organic solar cells. Knowing how, and maybe even why, some species block it could help in this application.

HIV vaccine closer

Since HIV first emerged in the Congo, over 75 million people have been infected worldwide. Of those, almost 36 million have died from complications. Those who are currently infected with the virus can receive treatment and live a long, healthy life; a sharp contrast to the imminent death sentence an HIV/AIDS diagnosis was at the beginning of the epidemic. However, treatments are still incredibly expensive and must be strictly maintained over the course of a lifetime. Immunologists continue to work toward a vaccine that would prevent anyone from acquiring the virus in the first place.

Though HIV frequently mutates, the researchers found that a binding site, named V1V2, has remained fairly conserved and is susceptible to antibodies created by the immune system. Antibodies that are able to neutralize certain strains of the virus occur in about one-fifth of all HIV-infected individuals. The ability to replicate certain forms of those antibodies are believed to be the key to creating an HIV vaccine.

The team was able to identify twelve somatically-related antibodies (VRC26) that had been created by the immune system in blood samples from an HIV+ volunteer only known CAP256. The breakthrough came when they discovered that even after the virus mutated and changed a few times, the antibodies were still able to neutralize a wide range of strains. 

Studies like this have been attempted before, but scientists did not have access to the earliest forms of the virus that caused the immune system to begin antibody production. With that factor as an unknown, vaccine discovery could not occur. For patient CAP256, blood samples had been taken weekly for over 3 years, beginning just four weeks after the infection. This allowed scientists to monitor the progression of the virus and the antibodies and study their co-evolution. 

It took over two and a half years for the antibodies to mature enough to be able to neutralize isolates of the virus. The researchers believe they now have a solid timeline to work from and can begin to develop artificial copies of the antibodies from different milestones during its progression. 

Though the antibodies do not neutralize all strains of HIV, it does affect many of them. The researchers are currently trying to use those antibodies to develop a vaccine. After the vaccine has been tested for safety and efficacy with animal models, they will seek trials using uninfected humans.

This week in science

Godzilla planet: http://bit.ly/RZCW46
Autism: http://bit.ly/1oTnkOb
Cancer: http://bit.ly/1i9qaqZ
Theia: http://bit.ly/1xfn7HB
Hybrid star: http://bit.ly/SbvliX
Hubble deep field: http://bit.ly/1pRBFbi
Gamma ray burst: http://bit.ly/1kD36oV
Plastic rocks: http://bit.ly/SdukXM

This week in technology

This week in technology!

Insoles: http://bit.ly/1nU0Rkr
Shatter proof screens: http://bit.ly/1ovL5u7
Lasers: http://bit.ly/Tnyxcx
Sauron's eye: http://bit.ly/1tLbdAF
Solar plant: http://bit.ly/1jWNJTn
New material: http://bit.ly/S5U20d
Flying saucer: http://bit.ly/1h6fnCP
Solar flare: http://bit.ly/TasCrn

Though the insoles were kinda invented already

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'Quadrapeutics' works in preclinical study of hard-to-treat tumors

Two years ago, scientists at Rice University came up with the new treatment, which involves extremely small particles of gold entering cancer cells and then being heated by a laser until tiny bubbles surround them and explode, ripping apart the cancer cell.

Even better, if the bubbles don’t manage to kill the cancer cells immediately, they leave them weakened for traditional chemotherapy drugs.

Now, the results of the technique’s pre-clinical trials in mice have been reported in Nature Medicine, and they’re extremely encouraging.

The researchers tested the technique on head and neck squaomous cell carcinomas that had grown immune to chemotherapy in mice. Within one week, the cancerous tumours were destroyed, even though the scientists only used 3 percent of the typical drug dose, and 6 percent of the typical radiation.

The researchers believe the effectiveness of the treatment should not be limited to these types of cancers, and it’s likely to work on various solid tumours, especially those in the brain, lung and prostate, Dexter Johnson reports for IEEE Spectrum.

The treatment is called a quadrapeutic therapy, because the gold nanoparticles are only one part of the four-pronged attack (as shown in the illustration above).

This chemotherapy drug is the first step in the attack. Next, gold nanoparticles are introduced into the body, tagged with antibodies that target and attach to the surface of specific cancer cells. 

The cancer cells ingest these nanoparticles, where they're blasted with near-infrared laser pulses - a wavelength of light that can’t be absorbed by the gold. Instead, the light excites the free electrons on the gold nanoparticles and causes them to heat up and generate energy, eventually making the cancer cells to explode.

“What kills the most-resistant cancer cells is the intracellular synergy of these components and the events we trigger in cells,” study leader Dmitri Lapotko said in a press release. “This synergy showed a 100-fold amplification of the therapeutic strength of standard chemoradiation in experiments on cancer cell cultures.”

This Rice University video describes the technique in more detail.

einstein proved wrong!!

First off, sorry for the click bait heading.

The heading is technically correct but does not imply what you think it means.

Einsteins theory of relativity still is true, e is always equal to mc squared and nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.But his views on quantum physics are highly controversial.His most famous argument was the EPR paper.The EPR paradox says If we have 2 quantum objects that can be described by a single wave function, then we can measure the velocity of one without affecting the other, and then know both the position and velocity of the other particle which contradicts the uncertainty principle.PR paradox says If we have 2 quantum objects that can be described by a single wave function, then we can measure the velocity of one without affecting the other, and then know both the position and velocity of the other particle which contradicts the uncertainty principle. Bohr tried to explain it by using quantum entanglement.but at that time, Einstein who thought everything could be explained by classical physics without the need of probabilities was skeptical and called it "spooky action at a distance".This spooky action at a distance has been achieved by scientists.The achievement is still a very, very long way from the movements familiar from science fiction, but strengthens our confidence in the theory of quantum entanglement, one of the most controversial aspects of modern physics. It may, moreover, assist the much closer goal of quantum computing.

Certain subatomic particles always exist in paired states. For example, two electrons may have opposite spins. This is fine initially, but creates a famous paradox if one particle is interfered with in such a way that its spin is changed. According to entanglement theory the other particle will instantly respond to the changes wrought on its pair so that the two remain opposite. 

However, the distance between the two this means that the information of what has happened to the one particle must be transmitted infinitely fast – faster than the speed of light.

n 1964 physicist John Stewart Bell came up with an idea for an experiment to test whether entanglement is real. At the time the test was impractical, but with publication in Science a team from the Delft University of Technology, Netherlands have got close to conducting Bell's test.

The Delft team trapped electrons in very low temperature diamonds, which team leader Ronald Hanson describes as “miniprisons”. This allowed them to measure the spin for each electron very reliably. Alterations to this spin were reflected in the spin of an entangled electron trapped in a similar diamond prison on the next bench.

The small distance between the two diamonds makes it hard to demonstrate that the transfer of information is occurring instantly, rather than at light speed. Consequently, the next step will be to entangle caged electrons and expand their separation across town or around the world. Entanglement between islands more than 100km apart has already been demonstrated, but only statistically, rather than with 100% success. 

Besides finally settling one of 20th Century physics greatest debates, reliable quantum teleportation could make possible the ultimate in secure communication channels, which would also be infinitely fast as well. Although this is starting to sound awfully close to Ursula Le Guin's ansible, most physicists dispute the possibility of such a device.

As usual, the result does not come out of nowhere. Other teams have also been able to teleport quantum information, but only in a minority of cases. Last year Hanson's team announced they had achieved quantum teleportation using diamond entrapment, but without the 100% reliability of the most recent work.

mass extinction caused by volcanoes?

A new study, published in the journal Geology, presents evidence that suggests the first known mass extinction on Earth was triggered by dramatic volcanic eruptions in Australia. This extinction-- the Early-Middle Cambrian extinction-- occurred some 511 million years ago and caused a dramatic reduction in complex multicellular life on Earth, yet the precise reasons behind this event remained shrouded in mystery.

The investigation, which was led by Curtin University’s Fred Jourdan, involved using high precision Uranium-Lead and Argon-Argon dating to determine the age of lava flows from the eruptions of the Kalkarindji volcanic province, which smothered an area of greater than 2 million square kilometers in Northern and Western Australia. They found that the eruptions occurred at the same time as the extinction, around 511 million years ago.

According to Jourdan, this famous extinction wiped out 50% of all species on Earth and although previous studies indicated that this was due to climatic changes and depletion of oceanic oxygen, no one knew the mechanism behind these events.

“Not only were we able to demonstrate that the Kalkarindji volcanic province was emplaced at the exact same time as the Cambrian extinction, but were also able to measure a depletion of sulfur dioxide from the province’s volcanic rocks- which indicates sulfur was released into the atmosphere during the eruptions,” he added.

Jourdan detailed how a much smaller eruption in 1991 by volcano Pinatubo decreased average global temperatures by a few tenths of a degree for several years due to the sulfur dioxide released. “If relatively small eruptions like Pinatubo can affect the climate just imagine what a volcanic province with an area equivalent to the size of the state of Western Australia can do,” he added.

Read more at http://www.iflscience.com/environment/first-known-mass-extinction-may-have-been-caused-huge-volcanic-eruptions-australia#2rdtyZLCUowSgY0B.99

time travel possible for photons?

Of all the things science fiction has portrayed, time travel is by far the coolest. Sadly, reality and the laws of physics that come with it have basically eliminated all hope of a wormhole opening up and allowing us to travel through time… unless you’re a photon. Luke Butcher of the University of Cambridge has written a paper, describing a potential form of a wormhole that could be held open long enough to allow a photon to pass through. The paper has been submitted to the journal Physical Review D and has been published on arXiv.org in an open access format.

Wormholes were first suggested by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen in 1935. Essentially, it’s a hypothetical whirlpool-like passageway that would allow a traveler to escape the confines of the space-time continuum. While a wormhole could lead to a parallel Universe, it could also bend around and lead back to a different point of space and time in our current Universe. However, wormholes are regarded as remarkably unstable and would not hold open long enough to be used for travel purposes. 

Physicists then began to wonder if something could be used to strengthen the wormhole and keep it open. In 1988, a team from Caltech suggested that negative energy appeared to fit the bill. As positive energy would attract matter and pull the wormhole closed, negative energy would have the opposite effect and repel matter, holding it open.

Those researchers at the time began to explore the idea of using Casimir energy as the source of negative energy to stabilize the wormhole. In a vacuum (like space) parallel smooth plates that are near one another undergo quantum effects which trap energy (either positive or negative, depending on the circumstance) between them. If the wormhole vortex got started and negative energy was added to the center, it would brace the hole open and retard the collapse.

However, there was still one more problem: the wormhole itself would be tiny. When depicted in science fiction, wormholes are spacious openings that allow travelers in large spaceships to pass through with ease. In reality, even if a wormhole existed, humans still wouldn’t be able to get through because the passageway simply wouldn’t be wide enough. Butcher reasoned that while humans couldn’t pass through a wormhole, photons might be able to.

Butcher ran some new calculations, building off of previous research. His new design should be able to hold a wormhole open, but it would have to be very long and very narrow. There is also no good way to get the negative energy into the correct location, as the renormalized Casimir energy-density would be zero. “Nonetheless, the negative Casimir energy does allow the wormhole to collapse extremely slowly, its lifetime growing without bound as the throat-length is increased,” Butcher wrote in the paper. “We find that the throat closes slowly enough that its central region can be safely traversed by a pulse of light.”

Even if Butcher is completely correct in his calculations and he was able to hold a wormhole open long enough for a photon to pass through, that doesn't mean that your lifelong dream of going back in time and meeting Cleopatra is about to come true just yet. This paper only deals with holding the passage open, and doesn’t cover what would happen to the person—or photon—once inside. For now, you’ll have to get your time travel fix from Mr. Peabody & Sherman (let’s be honest, Ty Burrell is a treasure).