Art, science and love.

I worry about the state of science in our society. (well, “our” = America… mostly.) So it’s nice to see headlines informing me that people aren’t total dolts and that science is getting the proper funding.

– A study of how chemical modification of DNA in hESCs impacts nerve formation and the ability of stem cells to repair brain damage caused by stroke (UCLA)

– Development of new ways of deriving hESCs and investigating the special capabilities of newly-derived human cell lines. (UCSF)

– A proposal to develop neural cellular models of Parkinson’s disease and Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS) that could be used to screen chemical libraries for novel drugs and to develop preclinical models of human disease (Salk Institute)

– Building tools to better isolate heart and blood cells from differentiated populations of hESCs (Stanford)

– A proposal to optimize the creation of liver cells for transplantation, and be able to monitor their in-vivo fate non-invasively (UC Davis)

– A study of molecular mechanisms regulating hESC survival, focused on a very specific and promising class of growth factors (UC Irvine)

Now all we need to do is devote double that to sustainable energy resource research and I’ll be happy. Almost as happy as I was to find out that the Smashing Pumpkins are getting back together. (Homer Simpson, smiling politely.) There had been rumors of it for a while, but now it’s actually happening. Too bad the festival that they’re doing it for is all the way out on Toronto Island. Wrong Island fellas. Oh well - maybe I can convince Samis to go and she can just record the whole thing for me because it is most definitely going to be epic.

In other news - did you hear that Sinbad died of a heart attack? I have such a love-hate relationship with Wikipedia.