Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares the New York Times' report on a 64-year-old man who participated in a clinical trial by Vertex Pharmaceuticals involving an infusion of insulin-producing pancreas cells grown from stem cells.

"Now his body automatically controls its insulin and blood sugar levels." Mr. Shelton, now 64, may be the first person cured of the disease with a new treatment that has experts daring to hope that help may be coming for many of the 1.5 million Americans suffering from Type 1 diabetes. "It's a whole new life," Mr. Shelton said. "It's like a miracle." Diabetes experts were astonished but urged caution.

The study is continuing and will take five years, involving 17 people with severe cases of Type 1 diabetes. It is not intended as a treatment for the more common Type 2 diabetes.

"We've been looking for something like this to happen literally for decades," said Dr. Irl Hirsch, a diabetes expert at the University of Washington who was not involved in the research. He wants to see the result, not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal, replicated in many more people. He also wants to know if there will be unanticipated adverse effects and if the cells will last for a lifetime or if the treatment would have to be repeated. But, he said, "bottom line, it is an amazing result...."

For Mr. Shelton the moment of truth came a few days after the procedure, when he left the hospital. He measured his blood sugar. It was perfect. He and Ms. Shelton had a meal. His blood sugar remained in the normal range.

Mr. Shelton wept when he saw the measurement.

"The only thing I can say is 'thank you.'"
15 people in a lab spent over 20 years working on converting the stem cells, the article reports. The total cost: about $50 million.

"It's one thing to produce nanoscale devices, but it's another to study and improve on them — they're so small they can't reflect enough light to get a good look," reports Engadget. "A breakthrough might make that possible, however." Univeristy of California Riverside researchers have built technology that squeezes tungsten lamp light into a 6-nanometer spot at the end of a silver nanowire. That lets scientists produce color imaging at an "unprecedented" level, rather than having to settle for molecular vibrations. The developers modified an existing "superfocusing" tool (already used to measure vibrations) to detect signals across the entire visible spectrum. Light travels in a flashlight-like conical path. When the nanowire's tip passes over an object, the system records that item's influence on the beam shape and color (including through a spectrometer). With two pieces of specrtra for every 6nm pixel, the team can create color photos of carbon nanotubes that would otherwise appear gray.
"The researchers expect that the new technology can be an important tool to help the semiconductor industry make uniform nanomaterials with consistent properties for use in electronic devices," according to an announcement from University of California Riverside, adding that the new full-color nano-imaging technique "could also be used to improve understanding of catalysis, quantum optics, and nanoelectronics."

Long-time Slashdot reader thisisnotreal writes: Long sought-after, and previously thought impossible — a McMaster University PhD student in Hamilton Canada demonstrates a cost-effective and simple laser in silicon.

This could have dramatic consequences for the SiP (Silicon Photonics) — a hot topic for those working in the field of integrated optics. Integrated optics is a critical technology involved in advanced telecommunications networks, and showing increasing importance in quantum research and devices, such as QKD (Quantum Key Distribution) and in various entanglement type experiments (involved in Quantum Compute).
"This is the holy grail of photonics," says Jonathan Bradley, an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering Physics (and the student's co-supervisor) in an announcement from McMaster University. "Fabricating a laser on silicon has been a longstanding challenge." Bradley notes that Miarabbas Kiani's achievement is remarkable not only for demonstrating a working laser on a silicon chip, but also for doing so in a simple, cost-effective way that's compatible with existing global manufacturing facilities. This compatibility is essential, as it allows for volume manufacturing at low cost. "If it costs too much, you can't mass produce it," says Bradley.

The Los Angeles Times summarizes the results of a new medical study conducted by Northwestern University researchers on antibody levels protecting against Covid-19 in 974 people. "Those who were immunized against COVID-19 with two doses of an mRNA vaccine and received a booster shot about eight months later saw their levels of neutralizing antibodies skyrocket.

"Among this group of 33 fully vaccinated and boosted people, the median level of these antibodies was 23 times higher one week after the booster shot than it had been just before the tune-up dose." What's more, their median post-booster antibody level was three times higher than was typical for another group of people whose antibodies were measured a few weeks after getting their second dose of vaccine, when they're close to their peak.

And it was 53 times higher than that of a group of 76 unvaccinated people who had recovered from COVID-19 just two to six weeks earlier. Even compared to a group of 73 people who had weathered a bout with COVID-19 and went on to get two doses of an mRNA vaccine, the boosted group's median antibody level was 68% higher.

Study leader Alexis Demonbreun, a cell biologist at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, said the data demonstrate that no matter how well protected a vaccinated person may think she is, getting a booster shot is likely to increase her neutralizing antibodies — and with it, her immunity — considerably. And because scientists expect large antibody responses to create more durable immunity, the protection afforded by the booster should last longer than the initial two-shot regimen did...

Among their other findings: After receiving two doses of vaccine, people who'd already had an asymptomatic infection were typically no better protected than vaccinated people who had never been infected.

"The international Forward Search Experiment team, led by physicists at the University of California, Irvine, has achieved the first-ever detection of neutrino candidates produced by the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN facility near Geneva, Switzerland," reports Phys.org.

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shared their report: In a paper published Friday in the journal Physical Review D, the researchers describe how they observed six neutrino interactions during a pilot run of a compact emulsion detector installed at the LHC in 2018. "Prior to this project, no sign of neutrinos has ever been seen at a particle collider," said co-author Jonathan Feng, UCI Distinguished Professor of physics & astronomy and co-leader of the FASER Collaboration. "This significant breakthrough is a step toward developing a deeper understanding of these elusive particles and the role they play in the universe."

He said the discovery made during the pilot gave his team two crucial pieces of information. "First, it verified that the position [480 meters] forward of the ATLAS interaction point at the LHC is the right location for detecting collider neutrinos," Feng said. "Second, our efforts demonstrated the effectiveness of using an emulsion detector to observe these kinds of neutrino interactions...."

"Given the power of our new detector and its prime location at CERN, we expect to be able to record more than 10,000 neutrino interactions in the next run of the LHC, beginning in 2022," said co-author David Casper, FASER project co-leader and associate professor of physics & astronomy at UCI. "We will detect the highest-energy neutrinos that have ever been produced from a human-made source."
The article also points out that in future experiments the researchers hope to explore dark matter — and how it interacts with normal atoms.

While the Omicron mutation might "impact" the effectiveness of our current vaccines, they're "super unlikely" to render them useless, according to Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University's School of Public Health.

And USA Today reports that vaccine makers are already getting ready to fight the variant: Health experts have said it will likely be weeks before the world has good data about how omicron may reduce the effectiveness of current vaccines, but Moderna has already announced a three-point strategy to combat the new variant...

Moderna's strategy involves three options for boosting COVID-19 vaccination, should omicron prove problematic for current vaccines. The three options, according to a Friday release from the company: A higher dose booster, shots currently being studied that are designed to "anticipate mutations such as those that have emerged in the Omicron variant" and an omicron-specific booster — which is already in the works.

Andy Slavitt, who previously served as President Joe Biden's White House senior adviser for COVID response, said in a tweet that both Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech have estimated a vaccine to combat a new variant could be developed in about 3 months, with some regulatory and logistical hurtles to follow. "If we start in early December, new vaccines could be available by summer in much of the world," Slavitt tweeted.

Multiple media organizations on Friday reported Pfizer-BioNTech is studying the new variant and expects data within weeks. If warranted, a targeted vaccine could be developed within 6 weeks and ship within 100 days, the reports say.

Johnson & Johnson is also testing its current vaccine against omicron, according to CNBC.

"The thought of combining a printer (the bane of office workers) with the bacterium E. coli (the scourge of romaine lettuce) may seem an odd, if not unpleasant, collaboration," writes the New York Times.

"But scientists have recently melded the virtues of the infuriating tool and of the toxic microbe to produce an ink that is alive, made entirely from microbes." The microbial ink flows like toothpaste under pressure and can be 3D-printed into various tiny shapes — a circle, a square and a cone — all of which hold their form and glisten like Jell-O. The researchers describe their recipe for their programmable, microbial ink in a study published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

The material is still being developed, but the authors suggest that the ink could be a crucial renewable building material, able to grow and heal itself and ideal for constructing sustainable homes on Earth and in space... [T]he new substance contains no additional polymers; it is produced entirely from genetically engineered E. coli bacteria. The researchers induce bacterial cultures to grow the ink, which is also made of living bacteria cells. When the ink is harvested from the liquid culture, it becomes firm like gelatin and can be plugged into 3D-printers and printed into living structures, which do not grow further and remain in their printed forms...

Bacteria may seem an unconventional building block. But microbes are a crucial component of products such as perfumes and vitamins, and scientists have already engineered microbes to produce biodegradable plastics. A material like a microbial ink has more grandiose ambitions, according to Neel Joshi, a synthetic biologist at Northeastern University and an author on the new paper. Such inks are an expanding focus of the field of engineered living materials. Unlike structures cast from concrete or plastic, living systems would be autonomous, adaptive to environmental cues and able to regenerate — at least, that is the aspirational goal, Dr. Joshi said. "Imagine creating buildings that heal themselves," said Sujit Datta, a chemical and biological engineer at Princeton University who was not involved with the research....

Dr. Manjula-Basavanna is shooting for the moon, Earth's satellite, where there are no forests to harvest for wood and no easy way to send bulk building materials. There, he said, the ink might be used as a self-regenerating substance to help build habitats on other planets, as well as places on Earth. "There is a lot of work to be done to make it scalable and economic," Dr. Datta conceded. But, he noted, just five years ago creating robust structures out of microbes was unimaginable; conceivably, self-healing buildings could be a reality in our lifetime.

The Biden administration announced plans on Friday to ban travel to the United States from South Africa and seven other countries, just hours after a new coronavirus variant was deemed a highly transmissible virus of concern. From a report: The travel restrictions will begin Monday, affecting South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Lesotho, Eswatini, Mozambique and Malawi, according to a senior administration official. The administration's decision was in response to advice from Anthony Fauci, the president's chief medical adviser, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the official said. Roughly a dozen countries took similar action on Friday.

President Joe Biden, who is in Nantucket for the holiday, was briefed on the new variant Friday. He urged fully vaccinated Americans to get booster shots and the unvaccinated to get the "life-saving protection." Biden also addressed the global community in his statement, saying the new variant shows the pandemic won't end until vaccines are readily available around the world. He said the U.S. has donated more vaccines than every country combined, calling on others to match "America's speed and generosity."

The Einstein Foundation Berlin is honoring the American physicist Paul Ginsparg and the Center for Open Science with the inaugural Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research. Paul Ginsparg is the founder of the preprint server arXiv.org, the first platform to exchange scientific discoveries among scientists immediately, openly and globally without review- and paywall restrictions.

South Africa's government is considering new public-health restrictions to contain a fast-spreading new variant of the coronavirus that scientists say has a high number of mutations that may make it more transmissible and allow it to evade some of the immune responses triggered by previous infection or vaccination. From a report: The warning from the South African scientists and the Health Ministry, issued in a hastily called news briefing Thursday, prompted the World Health Organization to call a meeting of experts for Friday to discuss whether to declare the new strain a "variant of concern." The WHO uses this label for virus strains that have been proven to be more contagious, lead to more serious illness or decrease the effectiveness of public-health measures, tests, treatments or vaccines. Other variants of concern include the Delta variant that is now dominant world-wide and the Alpha variant that drove a deadly wave of infections across Europe and the U.S. last winter and spring. While the scientists said they were still studying the exact combination of mutations of the new variant -- currently dubbed B.1.1.529 -- and how they affect the virus, its discovery underlines how changes to the virus's genome continue to pose a risk to the world's emergence from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Hmmmmmm writes: China is developing a powerful nuclear reactor for its moon and Mars missions, according to researchers involved in the project. The reactor can generate one megawatt of electric power, 100 times more powerful than a similar device Nasa plans to put on the surface of the moon by 2030. The project was launched with funding from the central government in 2019. Although technical details and the launch date were not revealed, the engineering design of a prototype machine was completed recently and some critical components have been built, two scientists who took part in the project confirmed to the South China Morning Post this week.

To China, this is an ambitious project with unprecedented challenges. The only publicly known nuclear device it has sent into space is a tiny radioactive battery on Yutu 2, the first rover to land on the far side of the moon in 2019. That device could only generate a few watts of heat to help the rover during long lunar nights. Chemical fuel and solar panels will no longer be enough to meet the demands of human space exploration, which is expected to expand significantly with human settlements on the moon or Mars on the agenda, according to the Chinese researchers. "Nuclear power is the most hopeful solution. Other nations have launched some ambitious plans. China cannot afford the cost of losing this race," said one researcher with the Chinese Academy of Sciences who asked not to be named as they were not authorised to speak to the media.

Germany is set to decide on tougher Covid-19 restrictions and could even opt for a full lockdown amid record daily infections and mounting pressure on hospitals. From a report: Olaf Scholz, Germany's chancellor-designate, said Wednesday that the Covid situation was serious and that the country would massively push its vaccination campaign, noting that "vaccination is the way out of this pandemic." Scholz said Germany "should make vaccination compulsory for certain groups," without stating which groups, while new Finance Minister Christian Lindner stated that Germans should avoid all unnecessary contact this winter "to preserve all of our health in this pandemic."

That Scholz chose to address the Covid crisis as he and his new government colleagues announced a draft coalition deal on Wednesday shows where the officials' immediate priorities lie. The country's outgoing health minister, Jens Spahn, issued a dire warning to Germans this week, saying that by the end of winter "pretty much everyone in Germany will be vaccinated, recovered or dead." Outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel has called on the heads of Germany's 16 federal states (which have largely been free to determine their own Covid measures) to decide upon stricter rules by Wednesday. On Tuesday, Spahn reiterated that request, adding that more public spaces should be restricted to the vaccinated, the recently recovered, or those that have had a negative test -- otherwise known as the "3G rule." From Wednesday, 3G rules apply to any Germans going into the workplace or accessing public transport.

President Joe Biden will require essential, nonresident travelers crossing U.S. land borders, such as truck drivers, government and emergency response officials, to be fully vaccinated beginning on Jan. 22, the administration planned to announce Tuesday. The Associated Press reports: A senior administration official said the requirement, which the White House previewed in October, brings the rules for essential travelers in line with those that took effect earlier this month for leisure travelers, when the U.S. reopened its borders to fully vaccinated individuals. Essential travelers entering by ferry will also be required to be fully vaccinated by the same date, the official said. The rules pertain to non-U.S. nationals. American citizens and permanent residents may still enter the U.S. regardless of their vaccination status, but face additional testing hurdles because officials believe they more easily contract and spread COVID-19 and in order to encourage them to get a shot. [...] About 47 million adults in the U.S. remain unvaccinated, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

If all goes as planned, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will launch early Wednesday morning "to test whether slamming a spacecraft into an asteroid can nudge it into a different trajectory," reports The New York Times. "Results from the test, if successful, will come in handy if NASA and other space agencies ever need to deflect an asteroid to save Earth and avert a catastrophic impact." From the report: The DART spacecraft is scheduled to lift off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Wednesday at 1:20 a.m. Eastern time (or 10:20 p.m. local time) from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. NASA plans to host a livestream of the launch on its YouTube channel starting at 12:30 a.m. on Wednesday. If bad weather around the Vandenberg launch site prompts a delay, the next opportunity for liftoff would be about 24 hours later.

After launching to space, the spacecraft will make nearly one full orbit around the sun before it crosses paths with Dimorphos, a football-field-size asteroid that closely orbits a bigger asteroid, called Didymos, every 11 hours and 55 minutes. Astronomers call those two asteroids a binary system, where one is a mini-moon to the other. Together, the two asteroids make one full orbit around the sun every two years. Dimorphos poses no threat to Earth, and the mission is essentially target practice. DART's impact will happen in late September or early October next year, when the binary asteroids are at their closest point to Earth, roughly 6.8 million miles away.

Four hours before impact, the DART spacecraft, formally called a kinetic impactor, will autonomously steer itself straight toward Dimorphos for a head-on collision at 15,000 miles per hour. An onboard camera will capture and send back photos to Earth in real time until 20 seconds before impact. A tiny satellite from the Italian Space Agency, deployed 10 days before the impact, will come as close as 34 miles from the asteroid to snap images every six seconds in the moments before and after DART's impact.

California is in the process of approving new guidelines for math education in public schools that "pushes Algebra 1 back to 9th grade, de-emphasizes calculus, and applies social justice principles to math lessons," writes Joe Hong via the San Francisco Standard. The new approach would have been approved earlier this month but has been delayed due to the attention and controversy it has received. Here's an excerpt from the report: When Rebecca Pariso agreed to join a team of educators tasked in late 2019 with California's new mathematics framework, she said she expected some controversy. But she didn't expect her work would be in the national spotlight. [...] Every eight years (PDF), a group of educators comes together to update the state's math curriculum framework. This particular update has attracted extra attention, and controversy, because of perceived changes it makes to how "gifted" students progress -- and because it pushes Algebra 1 back to 9th grade, de-emphasizes calculus, and applies social justice principles to math lessons. San Francisco pioneered key aspects of the new approach, opting in 2014 to delay algebra instruction until 9th grade and to push advanced mathematics courses until at least after 10th grade as a means of promoting equity.

San Francisco Unified School District touted the effort as a success, asserting that algebra failure rates fell and the number of students taking advanced math rose as a result of the change. The California Department of Education cited those results in drafting the statewide framework. But critics have accused the district of using cherry-picked and misleading assertions to bolster the case for the changes. The intent of the state mathematics framework, its designers say, is to maintain rigor while also helping remedy California's achievement gaps for Black, Latino and low-income students, which remain some of the largest in the nation. At the heart of the wrangling lies a broad agreement about at least one thing: The way California public schools teach math isn't working. On national standardized tests, California ranks in the bottom quartile among all states and U.S. territories for 8th grade math scores.

Yet for all the sound and fury, the proposed framework, about 800-pages long, is little more than a set of suggestions. Its designers are revising it now and will subject it to 60 more days of public review. Once it's approved in July, districts may adopt as much or as little of the framework as they choose -- and can disregard it completely without any penalty. "It's not mandated that you use the framework," said framework team member Dianne Wilson, a program specialist at Elk Grove Unified. "There's a concern that it will be implemented unequally."

Not a single scientist has applied to a UK government visa scheme for Nobel prize laureates and other award winners since its launch six months ago, New Scientist reported Tuesday. From a report: The scheme has come under criticism from scientists and has been described as "a joke." In May, the government launched a fast-track visa route for award-winners in the fields of science, engineering, the humanities and medicine who want to work in the UK. This prestigious prize route makes it easier for some academics to apply for a Global Talent visa -- it requires only one application, with no need to meet conditions such as a grant from the UK Research and Innovation funding body or a job offer at a UK organisation.

The number of prizes that qualify academics for this route currently stands at over 70, and includes the Turing Award, the L'Oreal-UNESCO for Women in Science International Awards, and various gongs awarded by professional or membership bodies both in the UK and elsewhere. "Winners of these awards have reached the pinnacle of their career and they have so much to offer the UK," said home secretary Priti Patel when the prestigious prize scheme launched in May. "This is exactly what our new point-based immigration system was designed for -- attracting the best and brightest based on the skills and talent they have, not where they've come from." But a freedom of information request by New Scientist has revealed that in the six months since the scheme was launched, no one working in science, engineering, the humanities or medicine has actually applied for a visa through this route.

A short update on the projected launch date of the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope came out of NASA on Monday, and it wasn't exactly a heart-warming missive. From a report: The large, space-based telescope's "no earlier than" launch date will slip from December 18 to at least December 22 after an "incident" occurred during processing operations at the launch site in Kourou, French Guiana. That is where the telescope will launch on an Ariane 5 rocket provided by the European Space Agency. "Technicians were preparing to attach Webb to the launch vehicle adapter, which is used to integrate the observatory with the upper stage of the Ariane 5 rocket," NASA said in a blog post. "A sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band -- which secures Webb to the launch vehicle adapter -- caused a vibration throughout the observatory."

Hmmmmmm shares a report from SciTechDaily: Investigators from Brigham and Women's Hospital and MIT used the power of nanotechnology to discover a new way that cancer can disarm its would-be cellular attackers by extending out nanoscale tentacles that can reach into an immune cell and pull out its powerpack. Slurping out the immune cell's mitochondria powers up the cancer cell and depletes the immune cell. The new findings, published in Nature Nanotechnology, could lead to new targets for developing the next generation of immunotherapy against cancer.

To investigate how cancer cells and immune cells interact at the nanoscale level, [corresponding author Shiladitya Sengupta, PhD, and co-director of the Brigham's Center for Engineered Therapeutics] and colleagues set up experiments in which they co-cultured breast cancer cells and immune cells, such as T cells. Using field-emission scanning electron microscopy, they caught a glimpse of something unusual: Cancer cells and immune cells appeared to be physically connected by tiny tendrils, with widths mostly in the 100-1000 nanometer range. (For comparison, a human hair is approximately 80,000 to 100,000 nanometers). In some cases, the nanotubes came together to form thicker tubes. The team then stained mitochondria -- which provide energy for cells -- from the T cells with a fluorescent dye and watched as bright green mitochondria were pulled out of the immune cells, through the nanotubes, and into the cancer cells.

"By carefully preserving the cell culture condition and observing intracellular structures, we saw these delicate nanotubes and they were stealing the immune cells' energy source," said co-corresponding author Hae Lin Jang, PhD, a principal investigator in the Center for Engineered Therapeutics. "It was very exciting because this kind of behavior had never been observed before in cancer cells. This was a tough project as the nanotubes are fragile and we had to handle the cells very gently to not break them." The researchers then looked to see what would happen if they prevented the cancer cells from hijacking mitochondria. When they injected an inhibitor of nanotube formation into mouse models used for studying lung cancer and breast cancer, they saw a significant reduction in tumor growth.

IEEE Spectrum reports on the progress being made to develop a "smart artificial pancreas" that senses blood glucose and administers insulin accordingly. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: The artificial pancreas is finally at hand. This is a machine that senses any change in blood glucose and directs a pump to administer either more or less insulin, a task that may be compared to the way a thermostat coupled to an HVAC system controls the temperature of a house. All commercial artificial pancreas systems are still "hybrid," meaning that users are required to estimate the carbohydrates in a meal they're about to consume and thus assist the system with glucose control. Nevertheless, the artificial pancreas is a triumph of biotechnology.

It is a triumph of hope, as well. We well remember a morning in late December of 2005, when experts in diabetes technology and bioengineering gathered in the Lister Hill Auditorium at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. By that point, existing technology enabled people with diabetes to track their blood glucose levels and use those readings to estimate the amount of insulin they needed. The problem was how to remove human intervention from the equation. A distinguished scientist took the podium and explained that biology's glucose-regulation mechanism was far too complex to be artificially replicated. [Boris Kovatchev, a scientist at the University of Virginia, director of the UVA Center for Diabetes Technology, and a principal investigator of the JDRF Artificial Pancreas Project] and his colleagues disagreed, and after 14 years of work they were able to prove the scientist wrong.

It was yet another confirmation of Arthur Clarke's First Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." [...] Progress toward better automatic control will be gradual; we anticipate a smooth transition from hybrid to full autonomy, when the patient never intervenes. Work is underway on using faster-acting insulins that are now in clinical trials. Perhaps one day it will make sense to implant the artificial pancreas within the abdominal cavity, where the insulin can be fed directly into the bloodstream, for still faster action. What comes next? Well, what else seems impossible today?

A rare manuscript by theoretical physicist Albert Einstein goes under the hammer in Paris on Tuesday, with auctioneers aiming for a stratospheric price tag. Phys.Org reports: The manuscript, containing preparatory work for Einstein's key achievement the theory of relativity, is estimated at between two and three million euros (2.3-3.4 million), according to Christie's which is hosting the sale on behalf of the Aguttes auction house. "This is without a doubt the most valuable Einstein manuscript ever to come to auction," Christie's said in a statement.

The 54-page document was handwritten in 1913 and 1914 in Zurich, Switzerland, by Einstein and his colleague and confidant, Swiss engineer Michele Besso. Christie's said it was thanks to Besso that the manuscript was preserved for posterity. This was "almost like a miracle" since the German-born genius himself would have been unlikely to hold on to what he considered to be a simple working document, Christie's said. Today, the paper offers "a fascinating plunge into the the mind of the 20th century's greatest scientist," it said.