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A single protein can help a bald mouse sprout a coat of fur, a new study suggests. Researchers working with genetically hairless mice have successfully coaxed hair growth, results that provide a better understanding of the mammalian hair cycle. Hair is normally maintained through a process that depends on the regeneration of tiny hair follicles. For humans and mice that have mutations in the Hairless gene, hair growth starts out normally, but once a strand is shed it cannot grow back....

Five years ago Denise Faustman stunned the biomedical world–and not in a good way, it seemed. She declared that she had cured diabetic mice by getting them to regrow their insulin-producing beta cells, a finding that, if it could be translated to humans, would spare the million-odd Americans with type 1 diabetes their daily needle pricking and insulin dosing. Since her announcement, the academic establishment has given Faustman little money and a lot of flak....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. I was fortunate enough to catch a preview screening of Ready Player One, Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Ernest Cline’s futuristic novel. It blew me away. What really caught my attention wasn’t just the awesome references to 1980s pop culture, or the mind-blowing set pieces. It was also the sub-text of the philosophical and cultural impact of gaming and related technologies....

Ever since NASA’s Dawn spacecraft arrived at the dwarf planet Ceres in March 2015, scientists have been arguing over more than 130 curiously bright spots Dawn spied on the surface of the coal-dark world. Most are found in craters—including the biggest and brightest spots, which lie within Occator, a 90-kilometer-wide crater estimated to be relatively youthful at less than 80 million years old. Are these spots the uncovered surface of a buried layer of ice or perhaps erupting geysers or cryovolcanoes or the shattered remains of space rocks striking Ceres—or something else entirely?...

If there were no Higgs mechanism, what a different world it would be! Elementary particles of matter such as quarks and electrons would have no mass. Yet that does not mean the universe would contain no mass. An underappreciated insight from the Standard Model is that particles such as the proton and neutron represent matter of a novel kind. The mass of a proton, in contrast to macroscopic matter, is only a few percent of its constituent masses....

Space shuttle Atlantis has left the building — NASA’s voluminous Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida — for the final time. The last of the space agency’s retired space shuttles to be museum-bound, Atlantis was rolled out of the 52-story VAB early Friday morning (Nov. 2) to leave on a day-long move to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, 9.8 miles (15.8 kilometers) away. There, the orbiter will enter a new $100 million display facility, still under construction, which is set to open to the public in July 2013....

Over-the-counter packages of Nexium, Prevacid and Prilosec tell you to take the pills—known to doctors as proton-pump inhibitors, or PPIs—for just two weeks at a time unless otherwise directed by a physician. Yet drugs of this best-selling class prevent heartburn and ease related ailments so well that patients—particularly those who suffer from a condition called GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease)—are often advised to take the medications for years. By decreasing acid production in the stomach, the agents prevent the caustic liquid from backing up—or refluxing—into the esophagus, where it can cause pain and can damage the food tube’s delicate lining....

A few years ago, while doing research for a virtual reality (VR) program at MIT that I would be running, I donned a VR headset and played a ping-pong game. The game was so realistic that it momentarily fooled my brain. When it ended, I instinctively tried to put the paddle down on the “table” and lean against it. Of course, the table didn’t exist, and I almost fell over. It was so easy to trick my senses into thinking that virtual world was real that I began to think about what would happen to humanity if we kept developing this technology....

I was preparing dinner, portioning a piece of cod, when a small, pink blemish appeared in the pristine white muscle of fish. Removing the splotch with a knife tip, I realized something was very wrong. What had looked like a bulbous vein began unfurling into a thin squiggle the length of my pinky finger—and it was moving. Like a scene from a horror movie, I watched, entranced, as the serpentine creature swayed its body, dismayed, it seemed, at finding itself ripped from the embrace of fish flesh....

WASHINGTON—President-elect Donald Trump is weighing naming as Food and Drug Administration commissioner a staunch libertarian who has called for eliminating the agency’s mandate to determine whether new medicines are effective before approving them for sale. “Let people start using them, at their own risk,” the candidate, Jim O’Neill, said in a 2014 speech to a biotech group. O’Neill, has also called for paying organ donors and setting up libertarian societies at sea—and has said he was surprised to discover that FDA regulators actually enjoy science and like working to fight disease....

A recent outbreak of deadly lung illnesses linked to vaping has put the practice in health professionals’ and regulators’ crosshairs. Now the first longitudinal population-based study of e-cigarette use in a representative sample of U.S. adults suggests it increases the risk of many chronic lung illnesses, too—especially when combined with smoking combustible tobacco. Most of the media coverage of vaping has focused on the short-term, or acute, health impacts. More than 2,500 cases of e-cigarette, or vaping, product use–associated lung injury (EVALI) have been reported across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, as well as in Puerto Rico and the U....

Kids form cultural impressions early, deciding where and how they’ll fit into the world. Unfortunately, they don’t see science in their future often enough. Children as young as kindergarteners, when asked to draw a scientist, are likely to make a picture of a white man in a white lab coat (See Start Science Sooner—and they don’t see themselves that way. But what if they saw that scientists come in all shapes and colors?...

What are the structural differences in the brain between animals that are self-aware (humans, apes) and other vertebrates? —Emma Schachner, Salt Lake City Robert O. Duncan, a behavioral scientist at York College, the City University of New York, responds: Self-awareness distinguishes humans from most other species. In psychology, self-awareness is defined as metacognition, awareness of one’s own ability to think. In humans, metacognition and other advanced cognitive skills, such as social intelligence, planning and reasoning, are all thought to depend on a region of the brain called the prefrontal cortex....

I pity Astronomers. They can see the objects of their affection—stars, galaxies, quasars—only remotely: as images on computer screens or as light waves projected from unsympathetic spectrographs. Yet many of us who study planets and asteroids can caress pieces of our beloved celestial bodies and induce them to reveal their innermost secrets. When I was an undergraduate astronomy major, I spent many a cold night looking through telescopes at star clusters and nebulae, and I can testify that holding a fragment of an asteroid is more emotionally rewarding; it offers a tangible connection with what might otherwise seem distant and abstract....

Our fate is tied to a frozen desert at the bottom of the world. Should Antarctica’s ice sheets dissolve, sea levels would rise dramatically—enough to flood the world’s great coastal megalopolises from New York to Shanghai and push millions of people inland. But determining just how the vast and frigid continent is currently responding to a warming world has been a challenge. In West Antarctica the story is relatively clear. The floating platforms of ice that ring the coast are thinning, glaciers are surging toward the sea, meltwater is flowing across the surface, fast-growing moss is turning the once shimmering landscape green and a massive iceberg the size of Delaware broke off into the ocean in July of 2017....

Ever since he can remember, even as a boy growing up on a small farm in Michigan, Ken Martin has battled betrayal by his own body. Now 50 years old, Martin was born with hemophilia, and he bleeds almost uncontrollably from a cut. If an internal vein or artery is injured, the blood it carries pools in an intensely painful balloon under Martin’s skin. When that happens in his knees, as it frequently does, he must hobble on crutches or stay in a wheelchair until the bleeding slowly stops....

Five years ago this month a devastating tsunami engulfed Japan’s northeastern coast, triggering the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Washing over a 10-meter-high seawall, the waves knocked out electricity at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, causing cooling systems to fail and half of the facility’s uranium cores to overheat and melt through their steel containers. Hydrogen explosions in the next few days damaged three of the reactor buildings, venting radioactive materials into the air....

We may be witnessing a historic change in our driving habits. Americans love their cars and love to drive their cars. With each American traveling on average less than 10,000 miles a yearand the country as a whole nearlythree trillion total vehicle miles traveled per year(VMT), we are hands down the champs at racking up the miles.But of late, something remarkable and, for many, unexpected has been happening. It’s not so much that our automobile love affair has ended, rather that maybe, just maybe, it’s not quite as hot and heavy as it has been....

Dear EarthTalk: How are the world’s reptile species faring in terms of population numbers and endangered status? What’s being done, if anything, to help them?— Vicky Desmond, Troy, N.Y. The world’s reptiles—turtles, snakes, lizards, alligators and crocodiles—are indeed in trouble. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, which publishes an annual global roster of threatened and endangered species called the Red List, considers some 664 species of reptiles—representing more than 20 percent of known reptile species worldwide—as endangered or facing extinction....

Every two hours, Craig Stevens gets a text message from Antarctica. The messages come from a narrow, hugely expensive metal tube suspended in the Southern Ocean beneath the Ross Ice Shelf. The tube contains sensors that periodically record the temperature, salinity and currents at various depths of the surrounding water. The instrument then relays the measurements by satellite phone to Stevens, an oceanographer at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in Wellington, New Zealand....