Best of Last Week: Boosting solar desalination, DNA microscopy and anti-aging effects of pomegranate compound

It was a good week for technology, as a team of engineers at Rice University announced that they boosted the output of a solar desalination system by 50 percent using sunlight and nanoparticles.

A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, working with a group from the University of Minnesota, announced that they had built the first-ever successful mind-controlled robotic arm without brain implants. This new prosthetic is based on novel sensing and machine learning techniques.

A team from Solar-Lezama working with Josh Tenenbaum, a professor at CSAIL and MIT's Center for Brains, Minds and Machines, outlined their work toward artificial intelligence that learns to write code. The program, called SketchAdapt, was trained on thousands of program examples.

A group led by a team at Cornel University used machine learning to unlock the mysteries of quantum physics with data from an electron scanning-tunneling microscope.

In other news, a trio of researchers from Columbia University and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution mapped a huge undersea freshwater aquifer off the U.S. Northeast, stretching offshore from Massachusetts to New Jersey.

Researchers from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard described new DNA microscopy with an entirely new way to image cells—by their genome.

Researchers affiliated with several institutions across the U.S. found a shipworm in a river in the Philippines that eats rock instead of wood.

A team with members from Denmark and Canada took one step closer to chronic pain relief with a new understanding of the protein sortilin, which is expressed on the surface of nerve cells.

A team with members from the U.S. and Denmark reported the results of a study that found more long-term sea level rise from Greenland ice—leading to more sea level rise than has been predicted.

And finally, if you would like to slow your aging process, you might have help soon. A team at Amazentis, in conjunction with EPFL and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, announced that a pomegranate compound with anti-aging effects passed human trials.

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