Part of the giant physics experiment was turned off for the weekend while engineers probed a magnet failure.

Cern spokesman James Gillies said on Saturday that the sector that was damaged would have to be warmed up to above its operating temperature - of near absolute zero - so that repairs could be made, and then cooled down again.

Scientists have developed a technique for retrieving fingerprints from bullet casings and bomb fragments after they have been fired or detonated.

The chemical basis of the change is not yet clear, but Bond believes it is corrosion by chloride ions from the salt in sweat. These produce lines of corrosion along the ridges of the fingerprint residue.

In his paper he demonstrates that it is possible to recover fingerprints from a bullet casing ejected when a pistol is fired. "As you are pushing the magazine in you are actually putting a thumb print on the bullet," said Bond. "That's the person you want. That's the guy who loaded the gun."

Another in a long series of claimed "powered by water" cars, this one by a Japanese company called "Genepax," which interestingly enough does not have so much as a Wikipedia entry.

"Almost sounds too good to be true" isn't the half of it; if cars could be made which would run as "long as you have a bottle of water inside" to pour into the fuel tank ("even tea," repeats this report), not only would you know about the car, but you'd notice the long lines of people buying generators, laptops, and power tools that run on the same technology.

"The car has an energy generator that extracts hydrogen from water that is poured into the car's tank. The generator then releases electrons that produce electric power to run the car."

Preventing obesity and smoking can save lives, but it doesn't save money, researchers reported Monday.

"It was a small surprise," said Pieter van Baal, an economist at the Netherlands' National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, who led the study. "But it also makes sense. If you live longer, then you cost the health system more."

The researchers found that from age 20 to 56, obese people racked up the most expensive health costs. But because both the smokers and the obese people died sooner than the healthy group, it cost less to treat them in the long run.

"Lung cancer is a cheap disease to treat because people don't survive very long," van Baal said. "But if they are old enough to get Alzheimer's one day, they may survive longer and cost more."

A US team reports in Science magazine how it built in the lab the entire set of genetic instructions needed to drive a bacterial cell.

The group hopes eventually to use engineered genomes to make organisms that can produce clean fuels and take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

Dr Craig Venter, who was involved in the race to decode the human genome, believes tailor-made micro-organisms can become efficient producers of non-polluting fuels such as hydrogen. Other synthetic bacteria could be made to take up greenhouse gases, he believes.

This is the stage which raises the most concern among critics, and where a new lifeform could be said to be truly created. How precisely will it behave? What will its impact be on other organisms and the environment? Some say it is a step too far, but others argue that the new field of synthetic biology is an important science.

Jeremy Nicholson of Imperial College London and his collegues fed strains of "probiotic" Lactobacillus to mice whose gut microbes had been replaced by those that usually live in the human gut. These mice had different bile acids from the norm - favouring enzymes that reduce the amount of fat digested. "More fat is available for the microbes, and you then 'poo' the microbes out," says Nicholson.

The changes may only reduce fat absorption by a little, but this could have an impact on obesity if sustained over several years.

University of Minnesota researchers have created a beating heart in the laboratory. By using a process called whole organ decellularization, scientists from the University of Minnesota Center for Cardiovascular Repair grew functioning heart tissue by taking dead rat and pig hearts and reseeding them with a mixture of live cells.

Decellularization is the process of removing all of the cells from an organ – in this case an animal cadaver heart – leaving only the extracellular matrix, the framework between the cells, intact.

After successfully removing all of the cells from both rat and pig hearts, researchers injected them with a mixture of progenitor cells that came from neonatal or newborn rat hearts and placed the structure in a sterile setting in the lab to grow.

Four days after seeding the decellularized heart scaffolds with the heart cells, contractions were observed. Eight days later, the hearts were pumping.

Researchers with the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine have demonstrated the process by which the cancer-causing chemical dioxin attacks the cellular machinery, disrupts normal cellular function and ultimately promotes tumor progression.

The team identified for the first time that mitochondria, the cellular sub-units that convert oxygen and nutrients into cellular fuel, are the target of tetrachlorodibenzodioxin, or TCDD. The study showed that TCDD induces mitochondria-to-nucleus stress signaling, which in turn induces the expression of cell nucleus genes associated with tumor promotion and metastasis.

TCDD is the most toxic compound in the dioxin family. Formed as a by-product during waste incineration, paper, chemical and pesticide manufacturing, it was the toxic ingredient in Agent Orange and closed the Love Canal in Niagara Falls. The public health impact of dioxin, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, compares to that of the pesticide DDT.

The idea of using nanorobots to deliver drugs and fight diseases such as cancers is not new.

Now, an international team of researchers has designed a software and hardware platform of a nanorobot to be used in medical applications. The researchers think their nanorobots could become available around 2015. 'The proposed platform should enable patient pervasive monitoring, and details are given in prognosis with nanorobots application for intracranial treatments.

Celebrity US scientist Craig Venter, seen here in June 2007, has built a synthetic chromosome using chemicals made in a laboratory, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported Saturday.

Venter told Britain's The Guardian newspaper Saturday that he has built a synthetic chromosome using chemicals made in a laboratory, and is set to announce the discovery within weeks, possibly as early as Monday.

However the prospect of engineering artificial life forms is highly controversial and likely to arouse heated debate over the ethics and potential ramifications of such an advance.

The chromosome which Venter and his team has created is known as Mycoplasma laboratorium and, in the final step of the process, will be transplanted into a living cell where it should "take control," effectively becoming a new life form.