Shannon Herod

Researchers have now shown how to repair a key component of that connection — the auditory nerve — by using human embryonic stem cells to restore hearing in gerbils. "We have the proof of concept that we can use human embryonic stem cells to repair the damaged ear," says lead author Marcelo Rivolta, a stem-cell biologist at the University of Sheffield, UK, whose research appears in Nature today. "More work needs to be done, but now we know it's possible." - Shannon Herod

[Brussels are obviously superior] A few months ago, a friend said to me, with disconcerting severity, “There’s something perverse about enjoying such a boring cookie.” I was moved to wonder: Is there something perverse about me? What kind of person am I, and how am I different from people who prefer, say, Veronas or Genevas? It was then that I decided to sample every cookie in the Pepperidge Farm family and figure out what was what. I would try to understand what made each cookie special and seductive—and what it might mean to be drawn to one of them more than another. - Shannon Herod

The human genome is packed with at least four million gene switches that reside in bits of DNA that once were dismissed as “junk” but that turn out to play critical roles in controlling how cells, organs and other tissues behave. The discovery, considered a major medical and scientific breakthrough, has enormous implications for human health because many complex diseases appear to be caused by tiny changes in hundreds of gene switches. The findings are the fruit of an immense federal project, involving 440 scientists from 32 labs around the world. As they delved into the “junk” — parts of the DNA that are not actual genes containing instructions for proteins — they discovered it is not junk at all. At least 80 percent of it is active and needed. The result is an annotated road map of much of this DNA, noting what it is doing and how. - Shannon Herod