Some news worth knowing:

First, and potentially one of the most important news stories you’ll read in a while:

Scientists make ‘laboratory-grown’ kidney

In short: a rat kidney was extracted, then soaked in a  detergent. This washed out everything in the kidney except the “glue” that holds the cells to each other, leaving a ghostly “scaffold” in the detailed shape of a kidney. Cells from the “recipient” rat were then spread throughout the scaffold; 12 days of artificial incubator growth later, the cells had repopulated and rebuilt the kidney. Effectiveness compared to a natural kidney was 23%; the kidney was transplanted into a rat, where effectiveness dropped further to 5%. But the researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital point out that only 10% kidney function is enough to get someone off dialysis. And of course, this is early days with this technology.

The ability to essentially clone kidneys would vastly improve the lives of millions of people. The technology as described would still require donor kidneys… but since the cellular material is washed out and replaced with the recipients own adult stem cells, the complex nightmare of finding just the right donor would disappear. Now, all that would be needed are kidneys of about the right *size,* and maybe even that might not be so important. Kidneys could be collected from donors (who could potentially even have diseases that would otherwise bar them from being donors, diseases that would be washed away with the detergent), the kidneys quickly processed into the empty scaffolds, then carefully stored for perhaps extended periods. If this technology comes to fruition, if you find you need a new kidney, a proper scaffold could be pulled off the shelf, your own cells would be harvested (perhaps from your existing kidneys, perhaps processed stem cells), and the new kidney grown. The whole process from diagnosis to transplant might only take a matter of weeks.

So… yay, science!

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Aww, booo:

Awesome Mars-Comet Impact Less Likely

The odds of comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring)  whacking Mars in October 2014 have dropped from1-in-8,000 to 1-in-120,000. It will likely pass within 68,000 miles of Mars.

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Mysteriously Shrinking Proton Continues to Puzzle Physicists

Accepted radius of a proton is 0.8768 femtometers, based on measurements using electron orbitals. Measurements using muon orbitals gives a proton radius of 0.84087 femtometers.