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The Australian government plans to phase out conventional incandescent light globes by 2010 - a bold maneauveur from a government that has previously been skeptical of climate change. It is perhaps the simplest and most effective single step one could take in reducing household carbon emissions - 12% of which are due to lighting.

It is disappointing, however, that low-voltage halogen downlights won’t be affected. These wretched devices are highly inefficient on account of heat and transformer losses, and yet they seem to have become standard fixtures in modern homes. I’ve seen small rooms with 300 watts worth of these lights, where ample illuminiation could have be generated for perhaps a quarter of this by utilising compact fluorescents.

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Shelley describes how an unfortunate chop stick through the eye facillitated the collection and subsequent culture of neural stem cells from the prefrontal subcortex.

A Chinese woman was admitted to Huashan Hospital in Shanghai, with a chopstick in her brain (!)—specifically the inferior prefrontal subcortex. The chopstick was removed by a Dr. Zu, who took the opportunity to culture the brain tissue that came out with the chopstick. [...]

The cultured tissue thrived, and many of the resultant cells contained proteins that were characteristic of neural stem cells. In order to make sure they were really stem cells, Dr. Zu cultured cells in isolation and watch and see if it divides into daughter cells. He found that about 4% of the ‘chopstick cells’ went on to form neurospheres (a ball of daughter cells), indicating that they were stem cells.

Jumping ahead…

They transplanted cultured neural stem cells derived from 8 patients with brain injuries back into those same patients’ brains. They then asked a separate group of neurologists to blindly examine these experimental patients and compare them with un-treated control patients who also had similar injuries. The treated patients had lower disability scores (a good thing), possibly paving the way for this therapy to be used clinically. And all because of one mis-aimed chopstick!

I haven’t been able to find any peer reviewed references on this latter paragraph, and would appreciate if anyone could point me in the right direction. There’s a review by Zhu and colleagues here (PDF), and a mention by Seed magazine. China’s seemingly prodigous status in stem cell research is interesting in itself.

(Pretty confocal photomicrograph from here.)

The study, conducted by Dr Matthew Symonds from the Department of Zoology at the University of Melbourne with colleagues from Australia and New Zealand followed 168 biologists from British and Australian universities, all of whose careers began in the early 1990s.

Results showed that the men in the study published 40 percent more papers than women, but that women’s work is cited relatively more often by other scientists, a key indicator of quality.
[...]

Dr Symonds said that women are discriminated against by current systems for measuring research performance, which are heavily based on quantity of output.

“Even though women have their work cited relatively more frequently, their lower overall productivity means that this difference in quality of research is often overlooked.”

Press Release, Full Article (PLos ONE)

Aside: How awesome is it to be able to include a link to the full text of the journal article! Up yours, Eric Dezenhall!