In science news around the world, the first case of Middle East respiratory syndrome in the United States is confirmed, the World Health Organization declares the spread of wild poliovirus an international emergency, the United Kingdom proposes lifting its confidentiality rules for animal research, and more.

To speed up the production of a new malaria vaccine grown in mosquito saliva, scientists have designed a robot, dubbed SporoBot, that can rapidly dissect a mosquito's salivary glands—and they're asking for crowd funding via Indiegogo.com to help pay to build it.

Science chats with David Saltzberg, the one and only science consultant for the immensely popular CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory. And former biotech CEO Randy Mills is tapped to head the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

Based on a statistical analysis of a published paper, a national research integrity panel in the Netherlands has found evidence of data manipulation in the work of Jens Förster, a social psychologist at the University of Amsterdam. It is the third affair in Dutch social psychology since 2011. Förster, who enjoys an excellent reputation in the field, denies the charges and says he feels "like the victim of an incredible witch hunt."

A new generation of archaeologists is searching for new evidence of the earliest humans in America, and finding it. At the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, young researchers reported the discovery and analyses of a number of new sites, especially in South America, where they discovered the bones, stone tools, and hearths of Paleoindians. New dates on those sites show that Paleoindians had spread throughout the Americas by 12,000 to almost 15,000 years ago and even inhabited extreme environments, such as mountaintops or deserts.

Researchers aboard a 2011 cruise found severe damage to shells of Limacina helicina, a sea snail that plays an important role in the ecosystem of the California Current off the Pacific coast. Scientists estimate that one-fifth of the pteropods had damaged shells in preindustrial times, owing to the natural acidity of the water, and anthropogenic emissions of CO₂ made the water more acidic, more than doubling the number of individuals with damaged shells.

Researchers may have found a protein that acts as an elixir of youth, at least in mice. In recent years, researchers studying mice found that giving old animals blood from young ones can reverse some signs of aging, and last year one team identified a growth factor in the blood that they think is partly responsible for the antiaging effect on a specific tissue—the heart. Now that group has shown this same factor can also rejuvenate muscles and the brain. Independently, another team has found that simply injecting plasma from young mice into old mice can boost learning.

All living things use two pairs of DNA nucleotides, or bases, to write their DNA. Now, researchers have created a microbe capable of adding a third pair. So in addition to the usual A-T and C-G base pairs, there is now X and Y. Not only do the designer microbes take up presynthesized X and Y nucleotides introduced into the surrounding culture medium, but they also use them to copy genes containing X-Y pairs. The advance opens the way for creating a wide variety of proteins with amino acids other than the standard 20 used in biology, which could lead to new protein-based materials and pharmaceuticals.

Thirty years ago, China didn't have a single underwater archaeologist. Today the country is spearheading exploratory missions in its waters and beyond, with an estimated hundreds of wrecks awaiting excavation. As it makes a soft power push into Asia and Africa, China is also resuscitating the memory of the 15th century seafarer Zheng He, claiming that his voyages were peaceful, and funding projects in countries with submerged riches. But foreign archaeologists note that the outlay comes as China is pressing territorial claims in the South China Sea—and worry that Zheng He's history is being rewritten.