Not much in the way of science news. I suppose the Nobel Prize announcements have a way of overshadowing things.

• Easily the most headline grabbing news this month is the announcement by a team in China that they have successfully cured a patient’s type 1 diabetes with stem-cell therapy. They took fat cells from the woman, induced them to behave as pluripotent stem cells and used these to create islet cells, the type of cells that create insulin in the pancreas. These were then injected back into the woman’s body between the skin and the abdominal muscles where they successfully engrafted. They claim that the woman no longer needed insulin injections around two and a half months after the procedure and remained so for a year afterwards. They’ve since tested this on two other patients and results are still pending. It’s an exciting result but it is still just one person for now and I found it weird that this woman is now apparently producing insulin from a part of her body that is not her pancreas?
• The next article is tough to understand, especially when it keeps using the term phonon laser and you don’t know what that means. This video from the always excellent Sabine Hossenfelder uses an easier to understand term for what they are: sound lasers. It’s not a new idea but it’s been difficult to get a sound source to achieve the required amplitude increases that remain coherent for long enough. This team uses the familiar approach of trapping a metallic ball with lasers but they also use an alternating electric field to amplify the sound vibrations inside the ball. The results are apparently impressive even though the experimental setup currently exists only in a vacuum and doesn’t actually create a beam as it opens a brand new field of possibilities.
• Finally, here’s one that I debated over including as it seems a little petty but it’s sound science and publishing it called for some courage. It examines the habit of gossiping among women and how it is used as part of intrasexual competition. In particular, it finds that although most people dislike malicious female gossipers, it is possible to frame the gossip as an expression of concern for the person being talked about. This reduced the negative social effects on the gossiper while being just as effective in harming the social reputation of the person being talked about.