A mixed bag of articles for this month, ranging from the funny to the weird. Let’s get to it.

•  Regenerative medicine, or growing replacement body parts from one’s own cells, will be the next frontier of medicine. This article from the admittedly skanky Global Post site demonstrates that it has the potential to covers external organs as well as the more commonly considered example of internal organs. In this instance, a woman had a replacement ear grown on her arm as a substitute for the original one which was removed due to cancer. The new ear was fashioned using cartilage from her rib.
• The next article from the Wall Street Journal covers a paper that is cleverly titled “The Power of Kawaii”. The claim is that human test subjects perform assigned with greater care and precision after being exposed to pictures of cute things, such as puppies and kittens. The tasks ranged from the delicate, such as picking up small objects from a hole without brushing the sides, to the purely logical, such as finding a target from a sequence of random numbers. As a control, participants were also exposed to pictures of adult dogs and cats and food items, which did not result in the same improved performance.
• As this next article from The Economist states, we’ve found so many extrasolar planets now that they’re no longer exciting. The difference with this one is that it’s orbiting Alpha Centauri B, one of the three gravitationally bound stars that form the trinary Alpha Centauri system. This is the nearest system from our own Sol system at a mere four light-years, close enough that we could conceivably launch an expeditionary probe to it. The bad news is that it is located far too close to its parent star to have any chance of harboring life with one of its “years” lasting 3.2 Earth days. But where we’ve found one planet, we’re more likely to find more. You can bet that astronomers all around the world are feverishly working on it.
• Ever wonder if animals are capable of recognizing their own dead and responding to it? This post at the The Scorpion and the Frog blog talks about a research paper on just this topic. The animals in question are western scrub-jays and the researchers tested their responses towards both an actual scrub-jay carcass, complete with feathers, and a collection of painted wood pieces arranged vaguely to look like a dead scrub-jay. The live birds reacted furiously to the real carcass, hopping about and calling loudly, while taking far fewer peanuts strewn on the ground as usual. Testing further with a realistic mounted great horned owl, a predator of scrub-jays, led to similar reactions, leading the scientists to conclude that the reaction wasn’t about grief but about alarm and physical danger.
• Finally, here’s a longer article about the evolution of lactose intolerance in humans from Slate. It’s not about a specific new discovery, more of an overview of the subject. Apparently the ability to digest lactose in adult humans spread very quickly once the mutation occurred, unreasonably quickly according to most scientists, and the reason why is still something of a mystery.

A little bit of everything this month and no less than five articles, so let’s get to it.

•  You’ve probably heard about scientists making robots based on insects and small animals as models. This article with links and accompanying video is all about skipping the robot part and taking direct control of a live cockroach to perform tasks. It’s wireless too. I guess cockroaches are okay for this but I predict serious ethical concerns if they scale it up to larger animals.
• The next article comes with the predictable still image from Planet of the Apes. It’s about scientists who trained a bunch of monkeys in a simple pattern matching exercise. They then selectively impaired the monkeys’ performance with cocaine and used a brain implant to restore their original performance. When this worked, they also tested the implant without the influence of cocaine and found improved performance beyond the original baseline. They’re lauding it as a primitive sort of implant to boost cognition, but I’m skeptical. The implant seems tailor designed just to stimulate the right parts of the brain needed for that specific part. It’s hard to see it as an device that can be generalized.
• This one is even more deserving of skepticism, being firmly in the realm of pure theory, but it is all about a plausible way to create faster than light warp drives, so that’s enough to get it featured here. In principle, one way to cheat around the light speed limit would be not to move objects faster than light through spacetime, but to alter the geometry of spacetime itself around the objects we want to move. This is the famous warp bubble that we know of all the way back from Star Trek. But even apart from not knowing how to generate them, scientists have long calculated that the energy costs involved would be impossibly high. This latest finding claims that altering the shape of the ring around the spacecraft that generates the bubble would bring the energy costs down to a manageable level and allowing the intensity of the warping effect to oscillate would make it cheaper still.
• So surgeons can transplant just about anything these days. The latest record broken is the transplant of the uterus from a mother to her daughter by a team of Swedish doctors to allow the recipient to become pregnant.
• Finally a link to a research paper whose results any male could confirm for you for free. The Dutch team found that not only is the cognitive performance of heterosexual men impaired after an interaction with someone of the opposite sex, but mere anticipation of such interaction is sufficient to make males dumber. Furthermore these effects occur even when the males have no idea whether or not the women they believe they will be interacting with are physically attractive.