SCItations

If you’re near a window take a quick look out of it. If you’re in your bedroom, glance at your closet. If you’re in the kitchen, open up the fridge. Just take a minute to appreciate the life and vibrancy that color adds to our world. Now imagine that you can’t see any of it; an orange is just slightly darker grey than a banana and the leaves of a tree are the same dusty grey as the flowers that bloom on its branches. This is how Neil Harbisson experiences our brilliant world of color – in grayscale. Neil has complete achromatopsia, or total color blindness. Although this is tragic news, it is not the end of the story.  When he was 21 Neil became a part of a project along with Adam Montandon (an expert in Digital Futures according to his website) that would allow Neil to experience color for the first time. You might think the solution would involve some sort of operation or eye transplant, but their idea was much more innovative. They developed the Eyeborg—a sort of third ...

We have all witnessed first-hand the magical power of healing that our skin possesses. Even a deep cut can fix itself up with almost no help from special medical procedures. My favorite personal example involves my fourth toe being half torn from my foot after a freak accident at a friend’s sleepover. Cringe-worthy stories aside, I learned a lot more about the mysterious workings of our largest organ at a talk by Elaine Fuchs during UCLA’s Mautner Lecture Series earlier this year. Part of what makes skin special is the pool of stem cells that hang out down inside our hair follicles. “Ooooh, stem cells!” you say. I couldn’t agree more! And for good reason: stem cells are powerful. They are different from the other cells in your body in a couple of ways. Most tissues in your body are made up of cells that can essentially clone themselves. These cells undergo mitosis – an exact copy of the genetic material of the cell is made, then it splits itself in half, forming two completel...