Does anyone else feel a trifle deceived, or a bit manipulated? The enthusiasm over last week’s announcement that two groups of scientists had coaxed plain old adult skin cells into embryonic-like stem cells—no embryo required—was tempered by one little fact: among the four genes the team from Kyoto University used to reprogram adult cells back to embryonic status was one that causes cancer.

That suggests that using the reprogrammed or “induced” stem cells, or their descendants, to treat diseases might cure Parkinson’s, for instance, but at the cost of giving patients cancer. That led me and many others to raise concerns about the real potential of the new kind of stem cell.

Turns out we needn’t have worried so much, and the Kyoto researchers knew it all along.

So there you are, celebrating the holidays, and this year one of the guests is an infant. As everyone is chatting and passing the olives before dinner, you notice that the baby stretches out his little arms toward some people but not others. Pay attention. The kid is very likely a good judge of character.

In a study published recently in the journal Nature, scientists tested 6- and 10-month-old babies to see how smart they are about judging people by how they act toward others. The babies, it turns out, prefer those who are helpful rather than unhelpful toward a third party (that is, not the baby himself). The findings suggest that children evaluate those around them far earlier than previously thought, deciding “who is friend and who is foe, who is an appropriate social partner and who is not,” write graduate students Kiley Hamlin, Karen Wynn and psychology professor Paul Bloom of Yale University.

That might give babies the biological tools that serve as the basis for moral reasoning later in life. “6- and 10-month-old infants," conclude the scientists, "prefer an individual who helps another to one who hinders another, prefer a helping individual to a neutral individual, and prefer a neutral individual to a hindering individual.”

In their experiment, the scientists opened a curtain to reveal a stage where a green wooden slope was front and center. As the babies sat on their mother's lap, a wooden block with big, googly eyes tried to climb a hill. It was either aided by another wood block, the “helper,” who pushed it from behind, or pushed down by a third block, the “hinderer.” Then the babies were given a choice about whom—helper or hinderer—to reach for. “Infants robustly chose the helper,” even though it was just a geometric shape, found the scientists, “indicating that they held distinct impressions of the two characters on the basis of their actions towards the climber.”

Then the scientists tested whether the babies had really understood what they had witnessed. They set up the scene so that the climber first approached the helper and then the hinderer. The 10-month-olds looked longer at the latter; since infants generally gaze longer at the unexpected or surprising, that indicated that they couldn’t get their little brains around the fact that the climber was approaching someone who had blocked him from reaching his goal. Six-month-olds didn’t get it, though, showing no surprise that the climber approached the hinderer. That suggests that they were too young to attribute a preference to the climber.

The findings are the first evidence that babies’ social preferences “are influenced by others’ behavior toward unrelated third parties,” conclude the scientists. Lesson: if you want kids to like you, don’t do anything mean to someone else while they’re watching. Even 10-month-olds will hold it against you.

What's so striking in this morning's story on declining bird species in the U.S.--of 683 species that regularly breed in this country, 178, or 26 percent, are in trouble--is the new culprit on the scene: global warming.

That should have been obvious. If you're a murrelet that breeds and feeds around Alaskan glaciers, as those ice mountains melt of course you're in trouble. And if you're a shorebird like the sharp-tailed sparrow, which lives only in a saltmarshes along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, of course as seas rise your home shrinks.

Can four little genes (or maybe six) really make the whole bitter debate about human embryonic stem cells go away?

Two separate tems of scientists are announcing this morning that they can create the precious cells, which have the potential to turn into any of the 200-plus kinds of cells in the human body, without producing, let alone destroying, human embryos, which until now have been the only source of embryonic stem cells. If they're right, and if the recipe works reliably, then stem cells could be created from cells no more ethically problematic than human skin.

Every cell of the human body contains the exact same DNA (sperm, eggs and red blood cells being the only exceptions)—that is, the complete human genome. But neither skin cells nor muscle cells nor liver cells nor any other specialized cell follows the whole program. Only fertilized eggs—the union of egg and sperm—do that, using all the genes to produce a complete individual. Because the vast majority of genes in adult cells are silent, no one has been able to take, say, skin cells and make them turn into any chosen kind of cell, such as neurons to treat patients with Parkinson’s disease. Only the cells in very early embryos—stem cells—can transform into whatever cell you want, and you all know the ethical problems that research on stem cells raises in some quarters.

If only it were possible to take one of those specialized, or differentiated, cells and roll back the clock, back to when that skin or kidney or liver or other cell was a stem cell and had that unlimited potential. According to this morning announcement, it is possible, and scientists in the U.S. and Japan have done it.

With the nation’s 78 million baby boomers approaching the age of those dreaded “where did I leave my keys?” moments, it’s no wonder the market for computer-based brain training has shot up from essentially zero in 2005 to $80 million this year, according to the consulting firm SharpBrains.

But while the puzzles, math questions, reading exercises and other challenges in, say, Nintendo’s Brain Age are billed as just entertainment, other brain software claims to do more. And it does: if you practice eye-hand coordination, do memory exercises and sharpen your problem-solving acumen, you get better at them (at least in the immediate aftermath of training), as the MindFit brain-exercise software from Israel’s CogniFit Ltd. has been found to do after people used it for three months.

Now comes the largest and most rigorous study of a commercially-available training program, and it shows that there is hope for aging brains. This morning, at the meeting of the Gerontological Society of America, scientists are presenting data showing that after eight weeks of daily one-hour sessions with Brain Fitness 2.0 from Posit Science, elderly volunteers got measurably better in their brain’s speed and accuracy of processing. And unlike every other training program tested before, the improvements "generalize to broad measures of cognition and are noticeable in everyday life," Elizabeth Zelinski of the University of Southern California, who led the IMPACT (Improvement in Memory with Plasticity-based Adaptive Cognitive Training) Study, reports.

Nigersaurus: 500 teeth and a vegetarian diet. Photo by Mike Hettwer, courtesy of Project Exploration. ©2007 National Geographic.

Discovered in 1999 in the Sahara desert by National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Paul Sereno of  the University of Chicago, Nigersaurus taqueti was a vegetarian originally known only by a few distinctive hand bones. But further excavation has fleshed (boned?) him out.

Not that Congress, let alone the global community, shows real signs that it is going to get serious about addressing climate change, but if they ever did they now have a clear idea of where a big part of the problem is coming from. An online database going live this afternoon lists the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of 50,000 power plants worldwide. Power plants are responsible for one-quarter of the world’s CO2 emissions, and the trend line is ever upward.

Produced by the Center for Global Development, a policy and research group in Washington that examines how the actions of wealthy nations affect the poor in developing countries, it is a treasure-trove of data that shows just what the world is up against when it comes to controlling CO2 emissions. The data reflect information that is publicly available from agencies such as Environment Canada and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, as well as calculations of CO2 emissions based on the kind of generators, fuel, efficiency and other specs at power plants.

Some findings:

This morning the journal Nature, citing widespread speculation, confirmed that it will soon publish the first report that scientists have used cloning technology with a primate, producing custom-made stem cells. Scientists at Oregon Health & Science University describe injecting the nucleus, which contains a cell’s DNA, of an adult rhesus monkey’s fibroblast into an egg whose own nucleus was removed. They then manipulated the egg so that it developed into an early-stage embryo called a blastocyst, from which they teased out and grew, in lab dishes, embryonic stem cells.

Their success rate was less than stellar, but that’s not unusual in cloning: the Oregon team generated two embryonic stem cell lines from 304 eggs, a 0.7% efficiency. Still, even this level of success suggests the approach might work in humans, allowing scientists to finally generate stem cells that have the DNA of an individual patient. Those cells would develop into neurons and other cells that would be perfect genetic matches for that patient, eliminating the possibility that transplanting these cells—neurons to treat Parkinson’s disease, for instance—would trigger the immune system to reject them.

In a highly unusual step, and in reaction to the South Korean fraud, an independent team of scientists in Australia verified that the Oregon team had indeed produced stem cells through cloning. Their report is being published by Nature simultaneously with the Oregon paper.

Nature asked the scientist who cloned Dolly, Ian Wilmut, to discuss the potential of such cells. He and a colleague inject a much-needed dose of realism into the stem cell debate, which has led the public to expect these almost magical cells—able to develop into any kind of cell, from pancreatic to muscle to neuronal—to be primarily used for therapy, via transplants. But as Wilmut says, “In our haste to use patient-specific cells in therapy, however, we tend to overlook that they have great value for basic research and drug discovery. . . . Realistically, a careful examination of resources and the time required to produce differentiated cells for treatment purposes suggests that large-scale use of stem cells would be impractical.” It will be interesting to see whether a public torn by the ethics of stem-cell production will support research that is at least one step removed from directly yielding cures for terrible diseases.

You know the old children’s game (excellent for long car trips) where you think of a name, place, and item for sale beginning with the same letter: “P my name is Paul, and I come from Poughkeepsie and I sell potatoes.” Turns out there may be more to it than we thought: People like their names so much that they unconsciously opt for things that begin with their initials. Tom is more likely to buy a Toyota, move to Totowa and marry Tessa than is Joe, who is more likely to buy a Jeep, move to Jonestown and marry Jill—and Susie sells seashells by the seashore. Even weirder, they gravitate toward things that begin with their initials even when those things are undesirable, like bad grades or a baseball strikeout.

In what they call “moniker maladies,” a pair of researchers find that although no baseball player wants to strike out, players whose names begin with K (scorecard shorthand for a strikeout) fan more often than other players. Most students want As, but those whose names begin C or D have lower grade point averages than students whose names begin with A and B—with an even greater effect if they say they like their initials. That has real-world consequences: students whose names begin with C or D and go to law school attend lower-ranked ones than students whose names begin with A or B.

Before we get to whether this is real, a little more detail on what Leif Nelson of the University of California, San Diego, and Joseph Simmons of Yale University found in a study to be published next month in the journal Psychological Science. It’s possible, they figured, that Joe is consciously so enamored of his name that, faced with the choice of living in Jonestown or Akron, he deliberately chooses Jonestown (ditto when he has to choose between Jill and Amy). Or, maybe people are driven by unconscious self-liking.

If the preference for people, places and things that share one of your initials is conscious, then it shouldn’t work if the thing you’re choosing is basically undesirable. Strikeouts are undesirable. Yet based on data from 1913 through 2006, for the 6,397 players with at least 100 plate appearances, “batters whose names began with K struck out at a higher rate (in 18.8% of their plate appearances) than the remaining batters (17.2%),” the researchers find. The reason, they suggest, is that players whose first or last name starts with K like their initial so much that “even Karl ‘Koley’ Kolseth would find a strikeout aversive, but he might find it a little less aversive than players who do not share his initials, and therefore he might avoid striking out less enthusiastically.” Granted, 18.8% vs. 17.2% is not a huge difference, but it was statistically significant—that is, not likely to be due to chance.

The pattern held for grades, too. Using 15 years (1990–2004) of grade point averages for business school grads, they found that students whose names began with C or D earned lower GPAs than those whose names began with A or B. The Carters and Dorns performed worse than average (based on students with grade-neutral initials such as M and N); the Ashes and Bakers didn't do significantly better than the norm. The former had such “an unconscious fondness for these letters, [they] were slightly less successful at achieving their conscious academic goals than were students with other initials,” write the researchers.

The eerie coincidences also held for law schools. Scrutinizing data on 170 law schools and 392,458 lawyers, the researchers found that the higher the school’s ranking (by U.S. News & World Report), the higher the proportion of lawyers with the initials A or B. Adlai and Bill are more likely to go to Stanford than Chester and Dwight. (In the study, people with conflicting initials--Douglas Avery--were eliminated from the analysis.) Liking your own name “sabotages success for people whose initials match” the names of negative things such as low grades and strikeouts.

Clearly, the effect is not all-powerful. This SB married an EG, lives in P and named her children D and S (oops). The effect was small, just a fraction of a point in GPA, for instance, but the fact that it exists at all "took us aback," Nelson told me. He's pretty sure they eliminated all other explanations for the weird link between initials and performance. While it’s also true that, as statisticians know, if you search for a correlation between some outcome (strikeouts) and enough possible explanations, you’ll find one by chance alone. But again, the scientists say this is not the case here. Other explanations, anyone?

You can bet that the increase in the percent of newborns who are breastfed, from 68 percent in 1999 to 74 percent in 2004, didn’t happen because more mothers cared about strengthening their child’s immune system (one of many reported benefits of breast over bottle, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics). Instead, this period coincides with more reports that breastfeeding spurs a baby’s brain development, conferring an extra half-dozen or so IQ points by the time he or she enters school. Talk about feeding into the neuroses of middle-class parents.

But not all breastfed babies are little Einsteins, and some parents may well wonder why all the months of milk-stained blouses and balky breast pumps didn’t seem to boost Junior's cognitive development. A remarkable study unveiled Monday evening offers a clue. Researchers are reporting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that only babies who carry a particular form of a gene derive an IQ benefit from being breastfed. Without this form of the gene, breastfeeding has no effect on later IQ.

The study, of more than 3,000 children in Britain and New Zealand, cuts through the stultifying debate about whether intelligence reflects nature or nurture. Of course it reflects both, which is not exactly a stop-the-presses statement. More interesting is the finding that intelligence reflects a specific interaction of genes and environment: in children with a particular version of a gene called FADS2, breastfeeding raises intelligence an average of nearly 7 IQ points, find scientists led by Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi of King's College London and Duke University.

If you envy the lab rats with paralyzing spinal-cord injuries that have walked again, the legions of lab mice whose tumors have melted away thanks to experimental drugs, and the mice whose rodent version of Alzheimer’s has been cured—while human Alzheimer’s, paralysis and many cancers remain incurable and sometimes untreatable—join the club. For at least four years even biomedical scientists have been saying what many used to dismiss as the whining of no-nothing laymen who failed to grasp the value of basic biomedical research. Namely, “patients have been too patient with basic research,” as immunologist Ralph Steinman of Rockefeller University put it in 2003.

He meant that the basic discoveries that fill medical journals, reflecting research that has been generously supported by U.S. taxpayers (the National Institutes of Health received just over $28 billion in each of the last three years), do not result in enough new treatments soon enough. After all, there is no cure for Parkinson’s disease, for many cancers, for multiple sclerosis, for cystic fibrosis—or even for baldness, for pete’s sake. That failure threatens to shred the implicit understanding that taxpayers spend billions of dollars on cellular and molecular biology—from the genetics of slime molds to the neurology of the giant squid—for one reason and one reason only: because some of the resulting basic knowledge will lead to medical treatments for human diseases.

Now some big guns are taking aim at what more and more critics see as a broken system. This afternoon Andy Grove, co-founder of computer-chip giant Intel and its former CEO and chairman, is unleashing a no-holds-barred critique of the nation’s biomedical establishment for falling woefully short in its search for disease treatments. Speaking at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, he issues a wake-up call that should be heeded by every congressman who votes for multi-billion-dollar NIH budgets, by every CEO of a big pharma company who hasn’t had an important new compound approved in ages, by every dean of a biomedical center who bases tenure and promotion and hiring decisions on a scientist’s number of published papers with no regard to whether the research is leading to something that can alleviate the suffering of humankind.

Just to elaborate on that last point. The culture of academic biology is part of the problem. There is little prestige in “translational research,” in which basic discoveries are turned into medical treatments. Look at the very name: who gets more prestige, the author writing a great novel in her native tongue or the translator who produced a version for other audiences? So it is in biology. The basic discoveries bring the glory. Translating them is—and I exaggerate only slightly—considered the work of drones. Also, it’s easier to get an NIH grant for a simple animal experiment that is likely to yield clean results, rather than a human one that’s probably going to be ambiguous because humans—who are genetically diverse—are more complicated than fruit flies.

As Rockefeller’s Steinman told me when I first asked him about his “patients have been too patient” declaration, “Most of our best people work in lab animals, not people. But this has not resulted in cures, or even significantly helped most patients.”

Drug companies are also in Andy Grove’s crosshairs. Drawing a comparison to the semiconductor industry he knows so well, and to high-tech in general, he argues that pharma could learn something from how tech industries learn from their successes and failures. As an example of the latter, Grove notes that when Intel started new production lines, invariably a large fraction of the chips it made were faulty. Rather than throwing them out, he said, engineers scrutinized the manufacturing process to determine the cause of the failure.

Drug companies, in contrast, tend to abandon compounds that fail in clinical trials. As a result, they lose potentially valuable information on, say, whether the drug works in certain patients (those with particular genetic variations, for instance). Those rare successes, which Grove calls "golden nuggets," are washed out by the averaging of results across the whole patient population.

To take just one sorry example of the slow pace of drug discovery, in the 1960s the mainstay of treatment for Parkinson’s disease, from which Grove suffers, was L-dopa. In the 2000s the mainstay of treatment for Parkinson’s disease is . . . L-dopa. Need we contrast to the gains that the computer industry has made in 45 years?

It will be interesting to see whether a shot across biomedicine’s bow by someone of Andy Grove’s stature will give the system the shaking up it needs.