It’s difficult for people to change their identities or careers, but it can be done. We don’t have to be stuck with one particular fate; with a bit of effort, we can become different people. The same is true for the cells that we’re made of. They come in different types, from brain cells to skin cells to muscle cells. Stem cells can produce all of these types, but once a cell commit to a particular role, it’s largely stuck there.

But not always. Scientists can convert one type of cell into another with the right cocktail of molecules – a process known as transdifferentiation. It’s a cellular makeover. The hope is that this technique will allow doctors to grow bespoke tissues and organs. If someone suffers from a disease that destroys their nervous system, like Alzheimer’s, you could theoretically take their skin cells, and transform them into a fresh supply of genetically identical neurons.

To do this, you need to work out the right recipe. Many groups are working on this. They’ve managed to change pancreatic cells into liver cells, skin cells into heart cells, and more. But no one ...

[Note: I expect to hear some disagreement over my statements in this post. If you are going to comment, PLEASE read the whole post first, and then read my post "When belief kills" before leaving your comment. That should minimize misunderstanding about where I stand on this. Thank you.]

In February, I wrote that in Oregon a bill was being proposed to the state legislature that would remove the defense of religious belief in the case of homicide. Specifically, if the bill passes, parents who use faith healing instead of real medicine for their children can face murder or manslaughter charges if the child dies due to lack of medical care.

In March, the Oregon State House unanimously approved the bill. On Monday, the Senate approved it 25 – 5. It will now go back to the House for any changes to reconcile the versions. After that, it will be sent to the governor where he will sign it, and it will become state law.

This law would apply to anyone who does not seek medical care for their child, but the situation has become urgent of late because a fringe group called Followers of Christ ...

What’s the News: A modified antibody can make its way into the brain and target the development of Alzheimer’s-inducing plaques, researchers reported today in two animal studies in Science Translational Medicine. The blood-brain barrier usually keeps drugs and other compounds from entering the brain in large enough quantities to be effective, but these studies show a way to trick the body’s own defenses into letting the drug in, demonstrating that this obstacle to treating Alzheimer’s could potentially be overcome.

How the Heck:

Antibodies—immune proteins that attack disease-causers like viruses and bacteria—are far too big to fit through the blood-brain barrier under normal circumstances. But because of the brain’s need for iron, one protein is routinely ferried across the barrier: transferrin, which binds to iron in the blood.
So, the researchers added a molecular structure to the antibody that essentially fooled receptors in the blood-brain barrier into treating the antibody as though it were transferrin, picking it up from the bloodstream and releasing it on the other side, into the brain. Ten times as much of the modified antibody made it past the barrier, compared to a version of ...

What’s the News: Bacteria are everywhere—in us, on us, around us. But they’re also floating around in the atmosphere, and researchers cracking open hailstones have now discovered them at the core, lending credence to the theory that bacteria jump-start the atmospheric process of forming snow, hail, and rain as a way to hitch a ride down to Earth.

What’s the Context:

We’ve long known that bacteria are involved in precipitation—scientists have been studying the idea since the 60s. But only in recent years have we begun to piece the relationship together.
In 2008, a landmark study analyzed the bacterial populations of 19 snowfalls, running tests to see how the microbes affected the freezing of water. They found that some bacteria dramatically increased the temperature at which ice crystals form; for instance, in the presence of Pseudomonas syringae, ice crystals, which normal require a frigid –40 C, can grow at a balmy –2 C. Bacteria could be catalyzing the formation of ice in the atmosphere, helping cause precipitation. And such organisms are pervasive: the team found bacteria in snow from all over the world. The lead researcher of that study, Brent Christner of Louisiana State University, told ...

My latest DeSmogBlog post is based on some reporting–and some storm-watching–that I got to do while here in Norman, Oklahoma. It starts like this:

Recently, I witnessed the destructive power of a tornado nearly firsthand. In Norman, Oklahoma on the evening of May 24, I watched the sky darken and unleash a battery of nickel sized hail. Then a funnel cloud twisted down from the clouds, even as the cloud line itself touched earth in the distance, where a tornado had landed. Later, grass and leaves came flying through the air and stuck to our window, debris propelled from miles away.

It was terrifying—and more than that, awe inspiring. But what happened in Oklahoma that day, while very destructive and deadly, was nothing near the death toll in Joplin, Missouri two days earlier, or in Alabama in April, a month that set a new record for tornado outbreaks. So much tornado destruction this year, and so many deaths, has inevitably led some to ask the question—could global warming be implicated here?

Fortunately, being in Norman, I was also in the place to ask one of our country’s top experts this question—Harold Brooks, a tornado specialist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory. Along with other mainstream scientists, Brooks agrees that “it’s abundantly clear that the surface temperature has increased, and will continue to increase, and the overwhelming evidence is that it’s due to human activities.” Brooks also thinks global warming is likely to impact many weather phenomena–increasing the risk of heat waves, for instance, and stronger precipitation events.

“But it doesn’t necessarily mean that every bad weather event is going to get worse,” Brooks continues, and when it comes to tornadoes, “I get really worried when people oversell the case.” After all, if we’re wrong and we go through a series of quiet tornado years in the coming years, it will be just another weapon with which to attack those who want climate action.

You can read the rest of the piece–where Brooks elaborates on why he doubts tornadoes are increasing in number–here.

In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the titular heroine quaffs a potion that shrinks her down to the size of a doll, and eats a cake that makes her grow to gigantic proportions. Such magic doesn’t exist outside of Lewis Carroll’s imagination, but there are certainly ways of making people think that they have changed in size.

There’s nowhere in the world that’s better at creating such illusions than the lab of Henrik Ehrsson in Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. In a typical experiment, a volunteer is being stroked while wearing a virtual reality headset. She’s lyng down and looking at her feet, but she doesn’t see them. Instead, the headset shows her the legs of a mannequin lying next to her.

As she watches, Bjorn van der Hoort, one of Ehrsson’s former interns, uses two rods to stroke her leg, and the leg of the mannequin, at the same time. This simple trick creates an overwhelming feeling that the mannequin’s legs are her own. If the legs belong to a Barbie, she feels like she’s the ...

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer was turned off a few months ago, but the science it did lives on. NASA just released a gallery of nine spiral galaxy images taken by WISE, and they’re lovely:

[Click to galactinate.]

Several of my favorite big, grand design spirals are there, like M51, M81, and M83. Note that since WISE only sees infrared light, these are false color images; the colors used are blue for 3.4 micron IR light, cyan for 4.6 microns, green for 12 microns, and red for 22 microns. The reddest light a human eye can see is very roughly 0.75 microns, to give you a comparison. In the images, star-forming regions are yellowish and/or pink, dust (in the form of long-chain organic molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) is green, and old stars are blue.

While looking over the images, I actually recognized the name of the one in the lower right: IC 342 (here’s a full-res WISE shot of it). This is part of a small group of galaxies near our Milky Way that is heavily obscured by dust in our galaxy. I wrote about it a little while ...

Now that the Thiel Fellows have been announced the media has been pouncing. If you don’t know, Peter Thiel is giving a bunch of bright-young-things some money to drop out of college (or not go to college). Here are the details:

As the first members of the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship, the Fellows will pursue innovative scientific and technical projects, learn entrepreneurship, and begin to build the technology companies of tomorrow. During their two-year tenure, each Fellow will receive $100,000 from the Thiel Foundation as well as mentorship from the Foundation’s network of tech entrepreneurs and innovators. The project areas for this class of fellows include biotech, career development, economics and finance, education, energy, information technology, mobility, robotics, and space.

The media has expressed polite and impolite skepticism of the idea of not going the college route. They point out, correctly, that those who are college graduates have much higher earning power. If you think college is a waste of time, try getting a high paying job outside of manufacturing or high-risk labor. Since this is a site where I can express my own personal perspective, let me drop the mask of objective reportage and shift toward ...

Last week I posted Don’t buy AIBioTech Sports X Factor kit! I laid out my rationale explicitly:

I’ve been pretty vocal about the impending specter of genetic paternalism in relation to personal genomics, which I believe to be futile in the long term, and likely to squelch innovation in the United States in the short term. Like any new product category there’s a lot of hype and confusion in the area of personal genomics, but I think it’s important that we allow some mistakes and misfires to occur. Innovation and creativity isn’t failure-free.

With that said, I also think it is incumbent upon the personal genomics community, if there is such a thing, to “police” the flow of information. I have seen references in the media to a new personal genomics kit, Sports X Factor, selling for $180, from AIBioTech. My initial intent was to ignore this, as there is real science and tech to be covered. This is just another case of a biotech firm trying to leverage public confusion and gullibility into revenue. But if I think such a thing, I should make my opinion known, shouldn’t I?….

My intent was to come up high on Google searches for the ...