Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells

Do you remember some years back,:when the Bush Administration (?) prohibited the use of fetal stem cells for research?  This was of course because abortions were the source of fetal stem cells.  

The usual suspects insisted that all sorts of really important medical research would leave the U.S. without access to fetal stem cells.  

Then, amazingly enough, fetal stem cells failed repeatedly to do the claimed miracles.   Adult stem cells turned out to be effective for treatment.   

Why?  I suspect that the scientists doing the screeching were really more concerned that women considering an abortion might be more willing to do so if they could imagine that removing this inconvenience would advance medical science.

I am reading Mary Roach's Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy at the moment.  Like all Roach books, it is fascinating popular science and written with a frightening level of wit.  On p. 215 she describes how a Kyoto University scientist figured out how to "regress adult cells to their undifferentiated state.  That is, he induced pluripotency..."

Part of why I tend to be skeptical when someone makes the accusation that someone is anti-science is stunts like the fetal stem cells tempest in a teapot.   (Yes, this is guaranteed to be the first time that metaphor has appeared in a sentence with the phrase "fetal stem cell.")

Will Avi Loeb's Reputation Ever Survive 3I/ATLAS?

When Professor Loeb started talking about 3I/ATLAS as an interstellar spacecraft, it was an interesting, but implausible idea. But he is sticking with this idea in absurd ways.  11/21/25 Medium:

Today a new image of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS was taken by M. Jäger, G. Rhemann, and E. Prosperi and reported here. The image stacks 20 exposures of 100 seconds each, observed at 4:15 UTC on November 20, 2025. The displayed field has dimensions of 16.7 arcminutes on a side, equivalent to 1.6 million kilometers at the 3I/ATLAS distance of 326 million kilometers from Earth. The image shows two narrow jets directed opposite to each other and oriented vertically from the 3I/ATLAS-Sun axis. Together with the tail and anti-tail along this axis, the sideways lines constitute an X-shaped pattern. They extend out to a distance of about a million kilometers from 3I/ATLAS.

The simplest interpretation is that these lines are the streak of an Earth-based communication satellite which coincidentally intersected 3I/ATLAS in projection in the sky for a few seconds. There is another line near the bottom of the image, also likely to be a satellite streak....

If not a satellite streak, these straight and narrow sideways-jets is that they are lines highlighting the trail of gas or dust associated with the linear path of small mini-objects that departed from 3I/ATLAS. If the mini-objects started their journey near perihelion — at closest approach of 3I/ATLAS to the Sun on October 29, 2025, they traversed a distance of a million kilometers in 22 days. This corresponds to a speed of 500 meters per second relative to 3I/ATLAS.

The mini-objects could either be pieces of ice that broke apart from the surface of a natural comet nucleus or small probes that were released from a technological mothership. By monitoring these components in the coming weeks, we should be able to distinguish the two interpretations.

Occam's Razor.  Of course, if we see this:

 

All my snarky criticisms go away.

 

 

Having Fun With a Serious Scientific Subject

11/20/25 Scientific American:

Roughly four and a half billion years ago the planet Theia slammed into Earth, destroying Theia, melting large fractions of Earth’s mantle and ejecting a huge debris disk that later formed the moon. Scientists have long wondered what Theia was made of and where it came from. Now they have evidence that it formed very close to home.

The original giant impact model of the moon’s creation, proposed in the 1970s, predicted the moon was made mostly of Theia’s material. This scenario implied there should be differences in the chemical composition of the moon and Earth, but research has found that the two are nearly identical—far more similar than two independent planetary bodies should be. A new study, published today in Science, took a close look at other things Theia gave us beside the moon: additional molybdenum and iron left behind in the collision.

Ancient Earth would have had these heavy elements accumulate in its core but not in the rocky mantle closer to the surface, so any iron present now in Earth’s mantle likely came from Theia and can tell us about that planet’s composition, says study co-author Thorsten Kleine, director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany.

That is the teaser for a serious article from a publication largely taken over by the left since I stopped subscribing about 1981.  The fun aspect is how the 11/20/25 New York Times covered this with a title that mocks the "9/11 Was An Inside Job" bumper stickers popular with the Alex Jones fans:

The Moon Was an Inside Job

New research suggests that Theia, the object whose collision with Earth is theorized to have caused the formation of the moon, came from closer to the sun.

 

Why Does Andromeda Strain Come to Mind?

11/20/25 NBC News:

For nine months in 2022, moss lived in space.

It wasn’t in a lab aboard the International Space Station, like other gardening experiments conducted in orbit — rather, the moss was attached to the station’s exterior, fully exposed to the harsh environment of the cosmos.

The purpose of the space moss test, reported in a study published Thursday in the journal iScience, was to see if moss — an early land plant capable of thriving in some of the most extreme environments on Earth — could survive long-term exposure to the vacuum of space.

Surprisingly, the researchers found that the moss spores not only endured, they “retained their vitality” and were still capable of reproducing when they eventually returned to Earth.

“Most living organisms, including humans, cannot survive even briefly in the vacuum of space,” Tomomichi Fujita, the study’s lead author and a professor in the department of biological sciences at Hokkaido University in Japan, said in a statement.

If you read Crichton's phenomenal novel (in my case, at one sitting; was I wreck for high school the next morning) you will recall that Project Scoop, which brought the nasty organism to Earth was a space survivor of early Earth organisms.  The idea of anything surviving the extraordinary conditions of space (vacuum, no water, radiation, heat, and cold, is like implausible science fiction.

 

Reversing Alzheimer's

10/28/25 SciTechDaily:

"Scientists Reverse Alzheimer’s Disease in Mice With Impressive New Treatment...

"The new treatment approach targets restoring normal blood vessel function instead of focusing on neurons or other brain cells, which has been the common strategy until now.

"A team of scientists co-led by the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) and West China Hospital Sichuan University (WCHSU), in collaboration with UK researchers, has developed a nanotechnology-based treatment that successfully reverses Alzheimer’s disease in mice. Unlike conventional nanomedicine, which typically uses nanoparticles to deliver drugs, this new strategy relies on nanoparticles that are therapeutic themselves, described as “supramolecular drugs.”"

Apparently, permeability of the blood-brain barrier is a factor in removal of amyloid-β which is part of Alzheimer’s.  They saw dramatic improvements in mice one hour after injection.

This is the sort of research that is worth every penny spent unlike research that tries to catrgorize math as systemic racism.

Instapundit Refers to It As Witchdoctoring

From Instapundit: 2/13/24 Free Beacon reports on how Health and Human Services is expecting scientists to explore Indigenous Knowledge in their pursuit of truth.

Let me be clear: there are scattered bits of knowledge in folk medicine that can lead to useful medical science: willow bark tea to alleviate pain gave us aspirin; foxglove contains digitalis which was a folk remedy for congestive heart failure; Guatemalan Indians made use of an estrogen containing plant to control fertility of livestock, leading to birth control pills.  But capitalizing Indigenous Knowledge (which the linked report does) suggests a primacy or at least importance in scientific research that risks leading us down a path that if we called it Biblical Knowledge would produce a firestorm of outrage.