Gene that allows growing a new head identified

British boffins say they have identified the key "smed-prop" gene which allows Planarian flatworms to regenerate any part of their body following an injury - even their brains. The discovery is seen as a step towards regeneration therapy for humans in future.

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The doc suggests that it may be possible in future to simply grow new organs and limbs for injuried or sick humans - even, perhaps, to repair their damaged brain in situ. This would be preferable to removing a duff brain and growing a new one, as happens when a planarian worm's head is cut off.

Eh?

The guy from Burn Notice -- he eats a lot of yogurt.

JUST TURNED 9! all I'm sayin.

halfway kidding. He doesn't do the hungry or thirsty thing at bedtime, but wanting one thing over and over for meals? yep. refusing to eat unless he gets it? yep. throwing fits unless he gets what he demands? yep. He actually seems to have turned a bit of a corner with all this toddler-like behavior and has calmed a bit. It is quite lovely and I have told him so. I think it is finally starting to click with him and he wants approval enough to curb behavior.

Mars Rovers Set to Break Red Planet Record

On Thursday, NASA's beleaguered Spirit rover could become the longest-running mission on the surface of Mars, surpassing the Viking 1 lander's record of six years and 116 days of operation on the Martian surface — if it's still alive, that is.

Spirit fell silent on Mars on March 31, when it skipped a planned communications session with Earth. It may be hibernating through the harsh Martian winter. But even if Spirit doesn't survive, its robotic twin Opportunity is poised to break the Mars mission record in early May.

Beating Viking's record, which NASA set in the 1980s, would be a major feat for a rover the size of a golf cart that was only supposed to last for three months and spent the past year stuck in Martian sand. The milestone would also be a welcome surprise to the team of scientists and engineers that have been commanding Spirit for these past six years.

Harriet M. Welsch was 11, and she had a tomato sandwich every single day for lunch, don't forget.

t makes out with Scrappy for being so ... Scrappy

We rearranged our desks this morning in my office and I'm now facing my co-worker head-on with only our laptops in-between us. Fortunately this is a co-worker I'm friends with, but it's still a little unnerving to be sitting face-to-face this close.

Signed, Give me back my cube, damnit. This open-plan thing blows.

(And no, there's not a good way to arrange the desks so we don't face each other. I stared at our space for a long time trying to figure one out.)

Dillo is usually too rambunctious to eat enough dinner at dinnertime, so sometimes he really is hungry. Also, he plays his daddy by asking for snacks at bedtime and dilly-dallying. This game does not work with mommy.

Huh. Here's an advantage to being a four-dimensional being that never occurred to me:

SF writers make up monsters for a kids' writing program

The Hyperman exists in four spatial dimensions. When it protrudes into ours, you see it as a series of slices (imagine that you are sticking your face through a sheet of paper, being observed by a two-dimensional flat person drawn on the page) -- the tip of the nose, the bridge, the face, the head, the back of the head.

The Hyperman can go from anywhere to anywhere by taking strides through four-space. If it brings a three-dimensional object, say, a book, into the fourth dimension and rotates it on the 4D axis, it comes back into three-space with all the type backwards. If it does this with a piece of cake, it comes back with all its sugars reversed, so that you can eat it without gaining weight (but you might get explosive diarrhea).

I'm going to quote Sullivan ranting about Palin because I love the phrase "media-ideological-industrial complex"...

Look: what we have seen this past year is the collapse of the RNC as it once was and the emergence of a highly lucrative media-ideological-industrial complex. This complex has no interest in traditional journalistic vetting, skepticism, scrutiny of those in power, or asking the tough questions. It has no interest in governing a country. It has an interest in promoting personalities and ideologies and false images of a past America that both flatter and engage its audience. For most in this business, this is about money. Roger Ailes, who runs a news business, has been frank about what his fundamental criterion is for broadcasting: ratings not truth. Obviously all media has an eye on the bottom line - but in most news organizations, there is also an ethical editorial concern to get things right. I see no such inclination in Fox News or the hugely popular talkshow demagogues (Limbaugh, Levin, Beck et al.), which now effectively control the GOP. And when huge media organizations have no interest in any facts that cannot be deployed for a specific message, they are a political party in themselves.

"In Palinworld, Palin, By Definition, Speaks The Truth."