What: A spacecraft that travels at faster-than-light speeds by distorting, or "warping," the fabric of spacetime. Instead of trying to move through space, the warp drive moves space itself. The ship sits inside a bubble of spacetime bound by a negative energy field that races across the cosmos.

On this glorious spring day in Cambridge, England, the heraldic flags are flying from the stone towers, and I feel like I could be in the 17th century—or, as I pop into the Eagle Pub to meet University of Cambridge longevity theorist Aubrey de Grey, the 1950s. It was in this pub, after all, that James Watson and Francis Crick met regularly for lunch while they were divining the structure of DNA and where, in February 1953, Crick made his breathless announcement that they had succeeded.

Reasons: They’re small and easily bred, and 99 percent of mouse genes (and likely rat genes too) correspond to human ones. Here, recent rodent-based research.

†Fighting AIDS and breast cancerInvestigators at UCSF made a mouse version of HIV, and a U. Wisconsin team created the first “knockout” rat; it was stripped of a gene that curbs human breast cancer.
†Extending the human life spanThe Methuselah Mouse Prize promises $10 million for rejuvenating an old mouse so that it lives five years instead of three.

No creatures make more sacrifices for science -- albeit involuntarily -- than the mice and rats of lab research. Some 30 million are used each year in the U.S. alone. Reasons: They're small and easily bred, and 99 percent of mouse genes (and likely rat genes too) correspond to human ones. Here, recent rodent-based research.



Fighting AIDS and breast cancer
Investigators at UCSF made a mouse version of HIV, and a U. Wisconsin team created the
first "knockout" rat; it was stripped of a gene that curbs human breast cancer.



Extending the human life span