BBC News: “Skin transformed into stem cells”

After 12 days in the laboratory clumps of cells grown to mimic heart muscle tissue started beating.

This indirectly means significant progress in learning how to build a pancreas from scratch, thus being able to heal diabetes type 1 patients, not just treat them.

Exciting.

At the same time, it does raise plenty of moral issues. I disagree about the extent of the government’s involvement in deciding on those (especially the great lengths the US has gone through), but I strongly feel people should pause and think about just how far we can go with medicine before we seriously start altering evolutionary processes.

Clearly, we are capable of enormous, amazing research. But are we capable of it so we can use its results, no matter what they are? Or, rather, do we also have the ability to analyze their merits for good reason?

Vodafone is – surprise! – not too happy about the exclusive deals Apple has been making with cellphone carriers. In Germany’s case, that would be T-Mobile, the cellular subsidiary of ex-monopoly and -state-owned enterprise Deutsche Telekom. They now claim to have achieved an injunction at the Landgericht Hamburg. Good for them.

Good for me?

If I were a potential customer, yes. Vodafone argues that the device should be available in an unlocked fashion, thus making it work with any carrier. (Yes, you can achieve this with hacks, but that’s not the same.) This has previously been achieved in France, albeit for legal reasons, and at a premium price. It goes without saying that more carrier choice would benefit a customer, even if it does come at a premium price.

That said, I’m not a potential customer (at this point). So, is it good for me as a shareholder? Probably not. I’m convinced that Apple hates to partner up with other companies just as much as Microsoft does, so the fact that they do in the iPhone’s case means that they found overwhelmingly good reasons to do so. Whether it’s about the ability to implement features exactly the way they wanted to (particularly Visual Voicemail, which requires some technical changes on the carrier’s end), the added revenue through sharing deals, or something else entirely: Apple must have thought this through thoroughly, and must have found that going this quirky, unusually and potentially damaging (particularly PR-wise) path has benefits that outweigh the downsides. Thus, being a business, their choice was likely the economically smarter one, which means that shareholders indirectly benefit from it, even if only in theory.

Let us also not ignore the hypocrisy of Vodafone. You think for one second that, if they had scored the deal (it’s not as if they hadn’t been in the race), they would have still advocated “customer choice”? Or that, had T-Mobile not revealed a moderately successful first day of sales, Vodafone would have still cared? Vodafone has found that it’s worth having a slice of the cake that is German iPhone sales and that they can disingenuously wrap this into “customer-friendly” PR. Good for them. Good for customers, even, if they win.

Though, with the abysmal state of Vodafone’s EDGE network in Germany, you’d find yourself roaming T-Mobile regardless.

Take Notorious B.I.G.’s “One more chance (remix)”, then “translate” it to “standard English”.

Via reddit.

Via Fraser: “I lost my wife cause of Flckr”

If it wasn’t for the 437 photos on that account, one might almost think it’s a troll.

FreeRice helps you practice some more obscure English words while simultaneously donating grains of rice to third-world countries. It’s also a fun (and somewhat educational) way of killing time. I assume the trick here is in the displayed (but fortunately not ridiculously distracting) ads: regardless of whether someone gets a word right, the pay-per-view ad revenue does come in, yet the rice is only donated when words are correct. (Via AppleNova)

On that note, Mike Lee’s “The Power of Charity” (a bit of a follow-up to “Dinosaur Ranch”) goes into insane, smart, creative and perhaps even feasible ideas of how a software business can be profitable and charitable at the same time.