Sunspots 649

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Christianity: Christianity Today says that a Chinese pastor, of an unregistered church, has been arrested, with some of her family, for publicly proclaiming the gospel.

A Relevant writer has some good advice for those attracted, or hooked on, pornography, and other sexual sins.

Relevant discusses martyrdom, which is all too real for hundreds of Christians (almost all in other countries than the US) every year.

A Relevant writer explains the benefits of not agreeing with everything your pastor believes.

And another Relevant writer says that US Christians are NOT under attack.

(And Politics) Michael Gerson, himself a political conservative and a Christian, blasts those who sympathize with the Family Research Council's Values Voter Summit, for straying from Christian values. Writes Gerson: "Now, according to [Steve] Bannon, 'economic nationalism' is the 'centerpiece of value voters.' I had thought the centerpiece was a vision of human dignity rooted in faith." Bannon spoke at the Summit, and was apparently acclaimed.


Computing: Gizmo's Freeware mentions a program that converts Office files to .PDF. It apparently also converts Word files to epub files, too.
 
Health: National Public Radio reports that medical eye drops are bigger than they need to be, or than you actually absorb, and users are paying more because of their size.

History: (or something) Sojourners reports on the Samaritans of today. A tiny group, less than 1,000.

Politics: Scientific American documents how several appointees in the Trump administration are working to set aside scientific findings which show how industries of various kinds are hurting the public.

(and gender) A Pew Research poll finds that Democrats and Republicans have different views of how hard men have it.

Science: According to Scientific American, dodder, a parasitic plant -- you may have seen it, it looks like skinny spaghetti -- passes warning signals between plant hosts, allowing plants that may soon be attacked by insect pests to be better prepared.

Listverse shows us, and describes, 10 newly discovered species of animals.

Image source (public domain) 

Reprogramming heart scar tissue, and cell signalling

I recently read an article on some of the biggest scientific breakthroughs of 2012.

One of these was that experimenters have been able to reprogram heart scar tissue -- tissue that results from a heart attack -- to perform ordinary heart functions. See reports here and here. The work was done in mice, but most likely there will be ways to do this in humans, too.

Another breakthrough was the emerging importance of proteins called G protein-coupled receptors, which proteins receive signals outside a cell membrane, and cause some sort of action inside that membrane. These receptor proteins are involved in the senses of vision and smell, in regulating heart rate and digestion, and in regulating the immune system, as well as having other functions. The DNA which codes for these proteins makes up about 4% of the human genome.

See the previous Sunspots column for links to another list of the most important scientific discoveries of 2012, and to the most interesting microscopic views of living things published in 2012.

Thanks for reading!