Cassini gives a look at Saturn. Click for larger. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Cassini took this great picture of Saturn in late June.  The shadows of the rings on the planet are getting wider since it has been almost a year since the equinox when they appeared to be pretty much a thin line.

There is a moon in the image.  Pandora is just below the rings on the left side, you might have to click the image for the larger version to make it out even though it was brightened by a factor of 1.3 relative to the planet.

Cassini was 1.3 million miles (2.1 million km) from Saturn when it took the image.

If you want to see the original release click here.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Pubic Hair Removal among Women in the United States: Prevalence, Methods, and Characteristics

“Introduction. Although women’s total removal of their pubic hair has been described as a “new norm,” little is known about the pubic hair removal patterns of sexually active women in the United States. Aims. The purpose of this study was to assess pubic hair removal behavior among women in the United States and to examine the extent to which pubic hair removal methods are related to demographic, relational, and sexual characteristics, including female sexual function. Methods. A total of 2,451 women ages 18 to 68 years completed a cross-sectional Internet-based survey. Main Outcome Measures. Demographic items (e.g., age, education, sexual relationship status, sexual orientation), cunnilingus in the past 4 weeks, having looked closely at or examined their genitals in the past 4 weeks, extent and method of pubic hair removal over the past 4 weeks, the Female Genital Self-Image Scale (FGSIS) and the Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI). Results. Women reported a diverse range of pubic hair-grooming practices. Women’s total removal of their pubic hair was associated with younger age, sexual orientation, sexual relationship status, having received cunnilingus in the past 4 weeks, and higher scores on the FGSIS and FSFI (with the exception of the orgasm subscale). Conclusion. Findings suggest that pubic hair styles are diverse and that it is more common than not for women to have at least some pubic hair on their genitals. In addition, total pubic hair removal was associated with younger age, being partnered (rather than single or married), having looked closely at one’s own genitals in the previous month, cunnilingus in the past month, and more positive genital self-image and sexual function.”

Thanks to Barking up the wrong tree for today’s ROFL!

Photo: flickr/littlepomegranate

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Scientific analysis of Playboy centerfolds reveals Barbie-like vulvas.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: The G-Spot: nature vs. nurture
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: A woman’s history of vaginal orgasm is discernible from her walk.

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

• Coyotes are what they eat: Feeding pups soft food changes their bones and muscle structures, making it more difficult for them to chomp on harder stuff later in life. That bites.

• About one-quarter of the food in the U.S. is wasted each year–and 16 percent of our energy goes toward food production. The result? We waste more energy in the food we throw out than is available via offshore drilling.

• If you get bored this weekend (and have $8,000 to spare), fret not. You can always build and launch your very own satellite.

• Run DMC: Listening to music in which the tempo matches a runner’s stride increases athletes’ endurance by about 15 percent.

• Cow-dung toothpaste, a deer penis, and guinea pigs: just a few of the bizarre items travelers have been caught attempting to smuggle through JFK International Airport. No wonder it takes so long to go through customs.

Although money may not grow on trees, it can spew from an ATM–at least if you’re computer security expert Barnaby Jack. He demonstrated recently at a security conference in Las Vegas how to get an ATM to spit money for minutes on end. Jack purchased the ATMs online, and says the tools required to hack them cost less than $100, according to Technology Review:

“After studying four different companies’ models, he said, “every ATM I’ve looked at, I’ve found a ‘game over’ vulnerability that allowed me to get cash from the machine.” He’s even identified an Internet-based attack that requires no physical access.”

Of course, Jack didn’t reveal how exactly he hacked the machines… but he came pretty close. In one demonstration Black explained:

“The device’s main circuit, or motherboard, is protected only by a door with a lock that is relatively easy to open (Jack was able to buy a key online). He then used a USB port on the motherboard to upload his own software, which changed the device’s display, played a tune, and made the machine spit out money [for several minutes].”

Some ATMs remain very vulnerable to remote attacks as well, Jack explained, such as those designed to accept software upgrades over the Internet. For example, a hacker can circumvent an ATM authentication system by installing his or her own software, which the hacker could then exploit using someone else’s information or a fake card.

Jack said he hoped the demonstration would spur manufacturers to make ATMs more secure. Maybe we’re just cynical, but with every new lock or security measure, won’t new hackers arise to bypass them?

Check out Tech Review’s video about Jack’s demonstration. The best bit—hacked ATM plays silly music and spits out money—starts at 1:15:

Related content:
Discoblog: iCop: Police to Use Facial Recognition App to Nab Criminals
Discoblog: Crime-Fighting Kitties: Cat Hair Could Be the Next Forensic Tool
Discoblog: True Crime, Real-Time: Live Streaming Mugshots to Your iPhone

Image: flickr / thinkpanama

PLoS One has a paper out on Korean (South) population genetics and phylogeography, Gene Flow between the Korean Peninsula and Its Neighboring Countries:

SNP markers provide the primary data for population structure analysis. In this study, we employed whole-genome autosomal SNPs as a marker set (54,836 SNP markers) and tested their possible effects on genetic ancestry using 320 subjects covering 24 regional groups including Northern ( = 16) and Southern ( = 3) Asians, Amerindians ( = 1), and four HapMap populations (YRI, CEU, JPT, and CHB). Additionally, we evaluated the effectiveness and robustness of 50K autosomal SNPs with various clustering methods, along with their dependencies on recombination hotspots (RH), linkage disequilibrium (LD), missing calls and regional specific markers. The RH- and LD-free multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) method showed a broad picture of human migration from Africa to North-East Asia on our genome map, supporting results from previous haploid DNA studies. Of the Asian groups, the East Asian group showed greater differentiation than the Northern and Southern Asian groups with respect to Fst statistics. By extension, the analysis of monomorphic markers implied that nine out of ten historical regions in South Korea, and Tokyo in Japan, showed signs of genetic drift caused by the later settlement of East Asia (South Korea, Japan and China), while Gyeongju in South East Korea showed signs of the earliest settlement in East Asia. In the genome map, the gene flow to the Korean Peninsula from its neighboring countries indicated that some genetic signals from Northern populations such as the Siberians and Mongolians still remain in the South East and West regions, while few signals remain from the early Southern lineages.

I can’t comment too much on the inferences they make from the results because I’m not familiar with the geography of South Korea, or particular historical details. But more generally the genetics of Korea are of particular interest for social reasons:

South Korea is one of the most ethnically homogeneous societies in the world with more than 99 per cent of inhabitants having Korean ethnicity…The Koreans call their ethnic homogeneousity of their society using the word, ?????? (Dan-il minjok gook ga, literally means the single race society.)

Korean racialism has recently gotten the spotlight in works such as The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters, articles in The New York Times about South Korean prejudice against dark-skinned people, and the rise of mixed-origin Koreans nationals due to the large number of Vietnamese brides in rural areas. Here’s an interesting comment on South Korean race consciousness, Western Mixed-Race Men Can Join Military:

Western mixed-race men can join the military beginning next year.

Currently, Asian mixed-race men, dubbed “Kosians,” are subject to the country’s conscription system, but “Amerasians” or “Eurasians” are exempted from the mandatory service.

The parliamentary approval of a bill proposed by Rep. Yoo Seung-min of the governing Grand National Party has paved the way for them to join the military.

Western mixed-race men, who have distinctive skin colors, had been exempted because they could have experienced difficulty mixing with Korean colleagues in barracks, the defense ministry had said previously.

The article was published in January of 2010. And that’s not the weirdest idea to come out of the Korean peninsula. With all that in mind, the distinctiveness, or lack thereof, of the Korean nation as adduced from scientific genetics is of particular curiosity, as it is a clear example of the intersection of science and culture. First, here’s the figure which shows where in Asia & South Korea they got their samples from:

And here’s a detailed breakdown of samples:

One point to note is that there seem to be some mixed-nationality individuals in the sample; Korean-Japanese, and Korean-Vietnamese. Here’s a MDS plot showing the relationship between the various East Asian groups:

And Structure (remember K = putative ancestral populations which contribute quanta to the genome of individuals):

I think it is important to note that their Chinese samples were all north Chinese; Beijing and Manchurian. Fujianese and Cantonese would span the Vietnamese and Chinese cluster. The outliers are probably due to the moderately cosmopolitan nature of the Beijing HapMap sample. The Han Chinese are less diverse than Europeans as a whole, but not inordinately so (using pairwise Fst’s a measure). There is an asymmetry when talking about China and any other East Asian nation because it is feasible that Han groups from various regions of China are more genetically similar to non-Han groups which are geographical neighbors. This is what L. L. Cavalli-Sforza found in History and Geography of Human Genes. The northern Chinese clustered with northern Asians, while the southern Chinese clustered with Southeast Asian groups. There have been conflicting results since that initial finding, but I think that points to the sensitivity of some of the inferences to the geographical and linguistic biases of sampling (different dialect groups in Guangdong may be very genetically distinct).

With all that said it’s pretty clear from the above figure that the Japanese and Korean samples are close enough that you need to zoom in on them specifically. So here you go:

KB_Japanese = Kobe Japanese. In the paper itself they’re testing a few historical hypotheses. So I’ll leave it to them for the interpretation:

The gene flow events of the three selected models for SW, MW and SE Korea can be assessed using the genome map. The populations in Model I (SW Korea) are closer to Mongolians than are the other two regions in the genome map (Fig. 2B). Historically, some of the loyal families and their subjects in the Goguryeo Empire moved to this region and formed the BaekJae Empire in BC18-22. This region also showed connections with populations in Tokyo (JPT), as illustrated in Fig. 4. Certain outliers in Model II (SE Korea) display some similarity to the people of Kobe, a port city near Osaka, indicating that there may have been links between the two regions. In addition, considering that the SE Korea region has some connections with Siberian lineages, with respect to grave patterns and culture, it is possible that the outliers in the GU and Kobe (KB) populations could be of Siberian lineage. On the other hand, the GR and US populations showed average signals in the Korean Peninsula. Historically, the Kaya Empire, with its southern lineages, was formed in the GR region and then the Shilla and Kaya Empires became united around AD532. Very recently, the US region became one of the rapidly developing regions, and people from other provinces moved to this region. This might explain why it shows an average signal in South Korea. Model III (MW Korea): the Middle West area formed a melting pot in the Korean Peninsula because populations moving from South to North, North to South, and from Eastern China, including the SanDung peninsula, to the Middle West in Korea all came together in this region. In the genome map, the signals for MW Korea are also close to those for Peking (CHB) in China. The overall result for the Korea-Japan-China genome map indicates that some signals for Mongolia and Siberia remain in SW Korea and SE Korea, respectively, while MW Korea displays an average signal for South Korea.

The connections between coastal southern Korea and the western islands of Japan are well known. It seems like that the Yayoi people, who probably contributed the preponderance of the ancestry of modern Japanese, arrived in Kyushu approximate ~2,500 years ago. And were originally a group within the Korean peninsula. Over the past 2,000 years Korea has gone through a process of ethnic-linguistic homogenization during the ethnogenesis of the modern Korean nation, but it seems possible that the original group(s) which gave rise to the Yayoi existed in southern Korea to facilitate contact between the islands and the peninsula into the historical era.

Citation: Jung J0, Kang H, Cho YS, Oh JH, & Ryu MH (2010). Gene Flow between the Korean Peninsula and Its Neighboring Countries PLoS ONE : 10.1371/journal.pone.0011855

I hope you enjoyed Sex Week (in a purely intellectual way, of course). I’m now off to a confab called SciFoo, which I’ve heard a lot about over the years and am now finally able to attend. Each year, Google and O’Reilly Media bring together a motley crew of scientists, writers, and others, and basically tell them to make up a conference on the spot. There are a whole bunch of people on the attendee list that I’ve waited years to meet in person, so it will definitely be worth the trip to California. But if there are any SciFoo vets out there with advice for making the most of the experience, I’d love to hear it.

I will try to report on my experience, either in a measured reflection next week, or in a torrent of half-baked tweets.

One might think that identical-twin bacteria—clones of each other—would grow up and live very similarly. But a study published today in Science that examined individual bacterial cells in detail found that genetically identical E. Coli cells actually seem to express their genes quite differently, simply because of the random accidents of how their molecular machinery happens to operate.

“The paper is quite rich,” said Sanjay Tyagi, a molecular biologist at New Jersey Medical School who was not involved in the research [but published a perspectives piece on it]. “People think that if an organism has a particular genotype, it determines its phenotype [observable characteristics]–that there’s a one-to-one relationship,” said Tyagi. “But as it turns out, [differences in gene expression] can arise just from chance.” [The Scientist]

Specifically, a team at Harvard University sorted through E. Coli bacteria, analyzing them one at a time. They looked at the amount of mRNA (messenger molecules that carry protein blueprints) and the amount of protein built from those blueprints. They noticed a lot of variation–or “noise”–from one cell to the next.

At any given moment, a fraction of cells didn’t have a single molecule of mRNA or protein from a given gene, and a surprising subset of genes–more than 20 percent of those analyzed–expressed one or fewer copies of protein per cell. The ability to measure with this kind of single-molecule sensitivity is valuable for single-cell studies, said [senior researcher on the study, Sunney] Xie. [The Scientist]

Besides each genome varying in how it expressed itself, the researchers also found a discrepancy with, what Science News reports as a “central dogma” of molecular biology: the amount of mRNA for a specific protein and the amount of that protein should correspond. The researchers counted mRNA molecules and proteins associated with 1,018 genes in each microbe. More mRNA did not necessarily mean more of the associated protein: Instead, they discovered that each cell varied in the exact number of proteins present and the amount of mRNA it employed. As The Scientist reports, Tyagi suspects that short life of mRNA (only minutes) and of E. Coli (which divides about every 30 minutes) could, in part, cause these random variations. The mRNA might disappear during counting while the longer-lived protein made from it remains, and that dividing E. Coli might throw off the count by passing proteins from parent to offspring.

The researchers think the study may help research practice and perhaps to understand one cause of antibiotic resistance.

The results provide a “cautionary note” to researchers when they measure mRNA levels in single cells, Xie says: They need to take into account that the mRNA level in a cell does not reflect the level of its associated protein. Xie and his team next will study how this “noise” might contribute to antibiotic resistance in bacteria. [Science News]

Related content:
80beats: Engineered E. Coli Bacteria Produces Road-Ready Diesel
80beats: GM Corn Leads to Organ Failure!? Not So Fast
80beats: Red Meat Acts as Trojan Horse for Toxic Attack by E. Coli
DISCOVER: Reviews: The Wonderful World of E. Coli
DISCOVER: E. Coli Collision

Image: E. Coli / NIH

I love geeks. I love clever people. I love sciencey stuff.

So this fills my heart with squishiness: a skirt with rows of lights that illuminate when facing north:

Make those LEDs red and every astronomer could use it. Not to mention campers, hikers, and let’s face it, nerds like all of us. I would dance all night with someone wearing this.

Want one? She’s selling kits so you can make one yourself!

Of course, in 2012^* when the poles flip the skirt will light up when facing south. Oh! I know! You could wear it backwards. Problem solved.

Tip o’ the compass needle to that bon vivant, Josh A. Cagan.

My latest hosted installment of Point of Inquiry just went up. The show is with Francesca Grifo of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Here’s the description:

When President Obama was inaugurated in January of 2009, he pledged to “restore science to its rightful place” in the U.S. government. And true to his word, the president promptly staffed his cabinet with distinguished scientific leaders, liberated embryonic stem cell research from the Bush era restrictions, and released a memorandum on “scientific integrity” intended to reverse the kinds of problems seen in the Bush years.

Since those days, however, the “scientific integrity” agenda does not seem to have filtered through the federal government as hoped. And according to a recent report in the Los Angeles Times, some scientists are having problems in this administration when it comes to speaking with the media, or having their research results properly handled by their superiors.

To put these developments in context, Point of Inquiry called upon Francesca Grifo, director of the Scientific Integrity Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists. As Grifo explains, claims that the Obama administration is behaving like the Bush administration did on science are absurd. However, the administration must do more to deliver on President Obama’s pledge to restore science to its “rightful place”—and move swiftly to address reports of scientific discontentment.

Francesca Grifo is a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists and an expert in biodiversity conservation, and heads up UCS’s Scientific Integrity Project. She has testified before Congress about scientific integrity and is widely quoted in the press on the topic. Prior to joining UCS, she was at Columbia University where she ran the Science Teachers Environmental Education Program.

Once again, you can find the show here, and you can stream it here.

Imagine an infantile version of our 4.6 billion-year-old sun. Now picture a “failed star,” a brown dwarf, about the size of Jupiter, tightly orbiting that 12 million year old stellar baby–at the distance Uranus orbits our sun. Astronomers have just found such a duo: a star about the mass of our sun with an unusually close brown dwarf companion.

Of the similarly situated brown dwarfs that astronomers have imaged, most keep their distance, orbiting at about 50 AU (or 50 times the average distance from the Earth to the sun). A team of astronomers believe the distance between this young sun, called PZ Tel A, and its dwarf companion, PZ Tel B, is less than half that, a mere 18 AU.

A paper to appear in Astrophysical Journal Letters details the find, which was made using images from the Near-Infrared Coronagraphic Imager, on the Gemini-South telescope in Chile. The researchers predicted the orbit by using two observations, one in April of 2009 and another in May of 2010 and then calculated the brown dwarf’s motion using a computer model.

Because PZ Tel A is young and sun-like, researchers say, that it might present a good history lesson on our own solar system.

In fact, PZ Tel is young enough to still possess significant amounts of cold circumstellar dust, which may have been sculpted by the gravitational interaction with the young brown dwarf companion. This is the material that can form planets so the PZ Tel system is an important laboratory for studying the early stages of planetary system formation. [Gemini Observatory]

Astronomers say that the brown dwarf is about Jupiter’s size, but is around 36 times its mass. Though they have imaged PZ Tel A before, they couldn’t pick out its dim companion because of its proximity.

An older image, taken seven years ago and reanalyzed by Laird Close, a professor at UA’s Steward Observatory and the department of astronomy, showed PZ Tel B was obscured by the glare from its parent star as recently as 2003, indicating its orbit is more elliptical than circular.”Because PZ Tel A is a rare star being both close and very young, it had been imaged several times in the past,” said Close. “So we were quite surprised to see a new companion around what was thought to be a single star.” [University of Arizona]

The Near-Infrared Coronagraphic Imager gave them more power than previously possible, as its a high-contrast instrument designed for finding dim bodies circling bring stars, like exoplanets or brown dwarfs, and can pick out a companion up to one million times fainter than the host star.

The research team was able to take pictures so close to the star by using an adaptive optics system and coronagraph [a device to block out light from the brighter star] to block our excess starlight. They then applied specialized analysis techniques to the images to detect PZ Tel B and measure its orbital motion. . . “We are just beginning to glean the many configurations of solar systems around stars like the sun,” said Michael Liu, NICI campaign leader. “The unique capabilities of NICI provide us with a powerful tool for studying their constituents using direct imaging.” [Space.com]

An international team is now using the telescope to complete a 300-star survey, the largest such survey to date, so hopefully more brown dwarfs will come out of hiding soon.

Related content:
80beats: A Hidden Cosmic Neighbor: Cool Brown Dwarf Found Lurking Near Our Solar System
DISCOVER: Hi Ho, Hi Ho—Brown dwarfs are the missing links between stars and planets
DISCOVER: Works in Progress—When it’s a planet that’s not a planet
Bad Astronomy: Brown Dwarf T Party
Bad Astronomy: The Upper Limit to a Planet

Images: Jon Lomberg, provided by Gemini Observatory, and Beth Biller and the Gemini NICI Planet-Finding Campaign

In a medical sense, you’d be wise to steer clear of filoviruses, a group that includes the deadly Ebola, and bornaviruses, which cause neurological diseases. But in a genetic sense, it may not be possible to avoid them. A new study in PLoS pathogens shows that bits and pieces of these viruses have been floating around in the human genome, as well as those of other mammals and vertebrates, for millions of years.

It’s not that having genetic material left behind by viruses is odd—previous research had shown that viruses account for 8 percent of the human genome. But scientists thought most of that material came from retroviruses, which use their host’s DNA to replicate and leave some of their genetic material behind. What’s weird about this is that filoviruses and bornaviruses are not retroviruses—they’re RNA viruses, which don’t use the host to reproduce in the same way.

When researcher Anna Skalka heard the peculiar news of RNA viruses leaving material in plant genomes, she and her colleagues rushed to see if the same thing is true for vertebrates.

Unlike the previous studies that focused on certain species or a particular RNA virus, Skalka went broad: She and her colleagues surveyed every vertebrate genome available, 48 in all, and looked for hints of 5666 RNA viral sequences from 38 known families and nine genera that were unclassified. It was “everything available that could be looked at,” Skalka says [ScienceNOW].

While previous research had spotted bornaviruses genes in the human genome, Skalka’s study found that squirrels, guinea pigs, zebrafish, and many other species besides us showed remnants of RNA viruses in their genomes. And Skalka’s team found that just those two groups—Ebola’s filoviruses group and the bornaviruses—dominated. So how did those RNA viruses get their material into our genomes, why has it lasted for so long, and why do we only see these two groups?

First, the how:

How these gene fragments jumped from viruses to vertebrates is a matter of speculation. Skalka suspects that malfunctioning machinery in sperm or egg cells could have copied RNA virus genes, then slipped them into chromosomes later duplicated during reproduction. Also speculative is what these viral fragments did — or still do, given their conspicuous lack of random mutations that gather in unused genes — for their unwitting recipients [Wired.com].

As for the why:

Because these pieces have been present in vertebrate genomes for some 40 million years, “there might be some selective advantage to having them,” Skalka says. For bornaviruses and filoviruses in particular, she notes, “there must be something special about these viruses,” to have kept them around for so long [Scientific American].

It’ll take a lot more research to figure out what that “something special” might be. But there’s perhaps another reason why Skalka’s team saw so much material from these two viruses groups and so little from all the others. While most viruses seem to evolve quite rapidly, perhaps some—like these two groups and others like hemorrhagic fever viruses—haven’t changed too much over millions of years, which would explain their over-representation in this study.

Studies like this can’t help but miss genetic sequences from viruses that have changed significantly over time, and the viruses may now look very different from how they did when they inserted themselves into a genome. “There may be some ancient ghosts in there,” Skalka agrees, “but the surviving viruses have evolved so far that we can’t recognize them anymore” [ScienceNOW].

Check out DISCOVER on Facebook.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Too Close to Ebola, an American doctor’s tale from Uganda
80beats: My Excrement, Myself: The Unique Genetics of a Person’s Gut Viruses
80beats: The Swine Flu Virus Is Evolving. Are We Paying Enough Attention?
80beats: Number of Humans with Pig Ebola in the Philippines Rises to Five

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Star Wars, A.I., The Six Million Dollar Man, Star Trek and a host of other science-fiction films all share a particular futurist’s dream: a broken body is repaired with an artificial replacements. Reality is finally catching up with our imaginations. Stem cells, mind-controlled arms, osso-integrated prostheses, exoskeletons, and xenotransplants are here. It’s important to note that most of these innovations are right on the cutting edge, either experimental, prohibitively expensive, or both. Individually they each may seem like small or too esoteric to matter, but as a whole, it looks like we’re on our way to a very cyborg future.

1) Rex

Rex Bionics has created what will be a commercially available set of robotic exoskeleton legs. The only currently existing set, custom built for Hayden Allen, allow him to walk up and down stairs and take awesome, super-mecha pictures like the one above. In an interview, he talks about basic quality of life issues (blood circulation, knowing when you have to go to the bathroom) that come from being ambulatory. Take that, paralysis!

2) Tooth Regeneration

Have you ever had a cavity? How would you like it if you could just undo the cavity instead of getting a filling? Instead of drilling and filling, a gel containing the peptide melanocyte-stimulating hormone (MSH) could let teeth grow back from within! According to Discovery News “Previous experiments, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that MSH encourages bone regeneration.” What good news! Now where is my barrel of Mountain Dew?

3) Organs to Order

Right now two major universities, Wake Forest and Yale, are trying to grow organs in a lab to put in you. At Yale, Thomas Peterson’s team is trying to master regrowing rat lungs. At Wake Forest, Dr. Anthony Atala’s team is attempting to master growing, um, everything else. Peterson, and Atala, who has spoken at TED, are rightfully skeptical of speed but hopeful for the eventual success of their experiments. Before you take up smoking, Laura Niklason, the member of Peterson’s team who lead the rat lung study, has a sobering statistic:

“I think that 20 to 25 years is not a bad time frame,” says Niklason. “I previously developed an engineered artery that will be ready for patients next year. It was first published in 1999. If an artery takes 12 years from first report to patients, then a lung will take 20-25.”

4) Mind-Controlled Prostheses:

Dean Kamen isn’t the only fella trying to replicate Luke Skywalker’s amazing prosthetic arm. The good folks at Johns Hopkins University, working with DARPA–military funder of all things futuristic–have just received over 30 million bucks to continue developing and testing their own robot arm. The creatively named Modular Prosthetic Limb has 22 points of actuation, weighs as much as a human arm, and is uses mind control.

For an idea of how mind-controlled prostheses work, check out the Dean Kamen DEKA “Luke” arm video and this surreal monkey robot-arm clip from the New York Times.

5) Osso/dermal Integrated Prostheses:

Oscar the cat had a run in with a combine harvester that lopped off his back two feet. A British veterinary surgeon, Noel Fitzpatrick, decided to get the little black cat back to being a quadruped, and, in doing so, revolutionized prosthetics. One of the holy grails of artificial limbs is osso and dermal integration: that is, fuzing metal and plastic to the bone and having the skin grow naturally over it. Just look at the joy on Fitzpatrick’s face when the bandages are removed from Oscar’s stumps and, then again, when the cat has to be reined in because he’s exploring a bit too heartily with his new kicks.

6) Replace Your Face:

Another unlucky Oscar, in this case a frightful shooting victim, has had the first full-face transplant. Muscle, bone, nerves, blood vessels–the whole kit-and-kaboodle–has been replaced. The overwhelming complexity of the operation is a testament to the progress medicine has made. Oscar, as it would happen, lives in the organ donation capital of the world: Spain. ¡Olé!

7) HULC and SARCOS

Lockheed Martin and Raytheon are racing to complete the first untethered, full-body exoskeleton. Both are working on military applications, as well as competing to see who can have the goofiest nu-metal music accompanying their dry, engineer-narrated videos of their exoskeletons (Lockheed’s HULC and Raytheon’s SARCOS) doing things like helping a soldier carry a bomb and shadow box. While still very, very early in the development phases, it’s not hard to see where exoskeletons have a real potential to change the modern battlefield.

8.) All Together Now:

Every one of these innovations is worthy of our awe independently, but considered together we have a rough picture of where medical, biological, and robotic science are flowing together. Even non-human breakthroughs, like Oscar the cat, herald great things: Noel Fitzpatrick, Oscar’s surgeon, has a facility dedicated to animal prosthetics that is serving not only to help amputated animals but as a test bed for techniques which might one day be used to help people. Robotic exoskeletons like the REX, HULC, and XOS, combined with mind-synched technology, complex articulation, and osso-dermal integration pave the way for complete rehabilitation and mobility of those with traumatic amputating and paralyzing injuries and diseases. Coupled with lab-grown, transplantable organs and the necessary techniques to successfully complete even the most complex transplants, not to mention the ability to coax certain parts to heal themselves, and we have one amazing looking future.

No one technology or breakthrough is going to change how we heal ourselves, but every year cyborg science-fiction gets a bit closer to cyborg science fact.