A lighter load of articles this month and just as well as I am very busy! Almost all of this is medical related as well especially as I have started paying more attention to potential health issues.

• We may as well start with the news that everyone most likely has heard already, about a man in US being the first recipient of a heart transplant from a genetically-modified pig. The genes needed to be modified to reduce the risk of organ rejection due to the presence of foreign proteins and even after all that work this is understandably still a huge gamble. It is an incredible milestone to reach of course and even if the transplant fails in this particular instance, there will most certainly be many more attempts.
• A very common ailment as one ages is arthritis caused by wear and tear of the cartilage protecting our joints. The only treatment possible right now are artificial implants or transplants of healthy cartilage from elsewhere which makes for a very scary surgery as someone I know had to go through this recently. So this announcement about success in inducing cartilage to regrow is promising. This experiment was performed on a rabbit and they stimulated the cartilage to regrow by constructing a tissue scaffold that generates a weak electrical field. This induces cells to colonize the scaffold and grow into cartilage and the scaffold itself is made of a biodegradable polymer that doesn’t have to be removed afterwards.
• Next up is the discovery of a possible explanation for what actually causes multiple sclerosis. To the uninitiated, this is a horrifying condition in which your own immune system attacks your neurons but why this happens has always been unclear. By searching through extensive blood samples drawn from every serving member of the US armed forces, researchers showed that diagnosis of multiple sclerosis is preceded by infection by the Epstein-Barr virus, one of the most common viruses in humans. We still don’t know why only a small subset of those infected by this virus goes on to develop the condition but this finding may be enough to prompt more effort to develop a vaccine against the virus, which currently does not exist.
• Finally here is a cool article about how astronomers watched a red supergiant star go supernova for the first time. Of course the star in question is located in the NGC 5731 galaxy about 120 million years away so this happened a long time ago and this still marks the first time that astronomers were able to observe the day before it went supernova and kept observing it when they detected unusual activity 130 days before the violent event.