The Wall Street Journal (no link available) reports that scientists are treating wounded Iraqi War veterans with a substance from pigs that seems to resurrect the ability to regenerate organs and other body parts–an ability possessed by fetuses but lost after birth. In this case, the scientists hope to regenerate parts of fingers the soldiers lost. From the story: “Doctors plan to treat them with a fine powder called extracellular matrix, harvested from pig bladders. The material, found in all animals, is the scaffolding that cells latch onto as they divide and grow into tissue and body parts. In the human body, it was long thought to be inert. But scientists have discovered that it appears to activate latent biological processes that spur healing and regenerate tissue.”^[1]

Wow.

This^[1] article has some more details of the reaction to my my previous post by the scientific community, or rather, their reaction to the article I posted about. It also differs on when the research was published, claiming last week instead of late last year. Still, it appears that the research is being received relatively favorably. Hopefully the particle accelerator experiment will bear out the results Dr. Svensmark found.

[D]id anyone tell you that in east Antarctica the Adélie penguins and Cape petrels are turning up at their spring nesting sites around nine days later than they did 50 years ago? While sea-ice has diminished in the Arctic since 1978, it has grown by 8% in the Southern Ocean.^[1]

Why is Antarctica’s ice mass growing, why is it colder there? Because the ice is brighter and more reflective than cloud cover. Cloud cover is, according to Dr. Henrik Svensmark, linked to cosmic radiation.^[2] Dr. Svensmark had trouble publishing his research, as do many scientists who doubt global warming is a product of man’s destruction of the environment. Still, it did eventually make it into a peer-reviewed journal, the Proceedings of the Royal Society, in late 2006 (the article does not say exactly when unfortunately).^[3]

This is yet more confirmation of the sun’s influence on our climate, as the change in solar activity is directly responsible for a change in the amount of cosmic radiation hitting the Earth. With more solar activity, less radiation is reaching us, therefore less clouds. And so Antarctica is cooling even while the Arctic is melting.