Good summary with great accompanying animation of stuff most of us have heard before:

The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

There's a new power source being developed. Certain types of plastics ("ionic polymers") generate small amounts of electricity when they bend. The city of Vandergrift, Pennsylvania is looking into putting arrays of them into a nearby river. They're even plant and fish friendly - they just look like some small-tendril plants sitting on the bottom ( Read more... )

Here's an interesting article about the first paper-based transistor.

( Umerikan Tranzlayqun )

• A possible way to cure herpes, once and for all (including cold sores and things like chicken pox and shingles) by preventing their ability to hide during treatment.
• Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) may be linked to serotonin levels in the brain, opening a means of possible testing for babies at risk.
• The first malaria vaccine goes into its first ( Read more... )

DARPA is now funding research into plasma disruption through EM fields and acoustics, or more simply put, containing and suppressing fire (which is just a cold form of plasma) with electric fields and sound.

( Umerikan Tranzlayqun )

The DoD has announced that they are budgeting $250M (at $50M/year) toward regenerative medical research; specifically, regrowing skin, muscles, tendons, noses, fingers, and eventually other organs and whole limbs. They've already successfully regrown blood vessels, livers, bladders, muscle tissue, and an ear.

Links: "Rearming America" [slate.com ( Read more... )

Researchers have defined the conditions under which normal adult cells can be reverted to an embryonic stem cell state.

What this means for non-geeks:   In the near future, using this process, doctors will be able to take healthy cells from your body, convert them to embryonic stem cells, grow them, and then change their environment to trigger ( Read more... )

Forbes has an article that describes a new, alternate approach to fighting anti-bacterial-resistant bacteria that's having some success.

Summary:

• Many bacteria appear to issue chemical signals for others to gather, and then wait to reach a critical level before attacking in overwhelming force. Breaking up that signal, with chemical counters that ( Read more... )

For those of you who haven't been paying attention, two teams have independently figured out how to convert normal human skin cells into stem cells.

( Umerikan Tranzlayqun )

Here's an interesting paper (PDF) describing a possible E8 ToE (Theory of Everything)
(Here's the abstract.)

Lead-up:

1. Group Theory
2. Symmetry Group
3. Differentiable Manifold
4. Lie Group (pronounced "Lee")
5. E8