Shawna Williams in The Scientist:
Treating infants with X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency with low-dose chemotherapy followed by gene therapy gave the children the ability to make the cells needed to mount a normal immune response, researchers report today (April 17) in the New England Journal of Medicine. The finding marks a milestone in the long effort to use gene therapy for the devastating condition, also known as bubble boy disease, which requires untreated patients to be isolated in order to protect them from life-threatening infections. Experts caution that longer follow-up is needed to determine whether the gene therapy–treated patients are truly cured.
“We were able to remove the protective isolation within three to four months post gene therapy and send the babies home to their families,” said Ewelina Mamcarz, a pediatric hematologist-oncologist at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Tennessee, in a telephone press conference about the study. “They are all toddlers now, exploring life, attending daycares, and this part has been extremely rewarding.”
People with severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) have mutations in genes needed for immune cell function, leaving them vulnerable to infection. In the most common form of the disease, X-linked SCID (SCID-X1), the gene at fault is IL2RG, which codes for a piece of the cytokine receptors needed for the normal development of several different kinds of immune cells, including T cells, B cells, and natural killer cells.
More here.
The portrait of university life offered by the online journal Quillette is not a flattering one. Free speech stifled at every turn. Scholars with divergent views relentlessly mobbed. Entire disciplines ruined by left-wing activism. A leafy dystopia populated by irrationally furious undergraduates, pathetically craven administrators, and professors who peddle mindless ideology at the expense of scientific inquiry. It’s enough to make anyone question the mental health of the academy, if not run screaming through the quad.
As the prospects for a nuclear renaissance in the U.S. based on conventional nuclear technology have dimmed, many nuclear advocates have pinned their hopes on advanced reactors that are smaller and utilize different technologies.
Right-wing populists have won an unprecedented 57 seats in elections to the European Union’s Parliament, up from 30 in 2014. In Hungary, Viktor Orban’s Fidesz won a majority of 52 percent. In Italy, Matteo Salvini’s Lega topped the poll at 30 percent, in Britain, Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party won, while in France, Marine Le Pen pipped Emmanuel Macron 23 percent to 22 percent. While not quite the populist surge some feared, right-populist momentum continues. Meanwhile, the mainstream Social Democrats and Christian Democrats saw their combined total drop below a majority for the first time, from 56 percent in 2014 to 44 percent as Green and Liberal alternatives gained.
HeadOn was the Max Headroom Incident of the millennial generation. Every time I bring it up, people tell me that they were equally stunned the first time they saw it, and that they remember being so relieved when other people said that they had seen it, too. Companies from Geico to Old Spice to Skittles have all tried their hand at absurdist advertisements, but nothing they’ve produced even remotely achieves the eldritch creepiness of catching the Head On commercial while watching the Weather Channel at 2 a.m. in 2006.
In big cities particularly, I notice that every new person I meet is manically interested in what I do, and how much of it. I used to be embarrassed by my lack of drive and murmur vaguely about projects and deadlines, but I’m quite happy now to admit the truth, which is that I have very little ambition and no desire to work any harder than I do now, which is honestly not very much. I’ve calculated fairly minutely how much work I need to do to in order to pay my bills and that’s the amount of work I do. No more. Sometimes I get it wrong and need to work much more than usual for a month or two, sometimes I have blissful unexpected mostly vacant weeks. I work about half as much as I did in Ireland, and earn about half as much money – which is fine with me because I’ve started seeing money not as a mark of achievement but as a cumulative display of all the days you’ve spent not doing what you’d like to be doing. I want freedom, not houses. I’d like more money, certainly, but not enough to give up all my time.
When it comes to intelligence, we all have bad days. Heck, we even have many bad moments, such as when we forget our car keys, forget a friend’s name, or bomb an important test that we’ve taken a day after staying up all night worrying about it. Truth is, none of us– including the world’s smartest human– is perfectly consistent in our cognitive functioning. Sometimes we are at our very best and feel like our brain is on fire, and at other times, we don’t even recognize ourselves. All of this sounds so obvious, but surprisingly the field of human intelligence has not had much to say on the topic. For over the past 120 years, the field has shed far more light on how we differ from each other in our patterns of cognitive functioning than how we each differ within ourselves over time.
If we’re the kind of people who care both about not being racist, and also about basing our beliefs on the evidence that we have, then the world presents us with a challenge. The world is pretty racist. It shouldn’t be surprising then that sometimes it seems as if the evidence is stacked in favour of some racist belief. For example, it’s racist to assume that someone’s a staff member on the basis of his skin colour. But what if it’s the case that, because of historical patterns of discrimination, the members of staff with whom you interact are predominantly of one race? When the late John Hope Franklin, professor of history at Duke University in North Carolina, hosted a dinner party at his private club in Washington, DC in 1995, he was mistaken as a member of staff. Did the woman who did so do something wrong? 
If you’re bad, we are taught, you go to Hell. Who in the world came up with that idea? Some will answer God, but for the purpose of today’s podcast discussion we’ll put that possibility aside and look into the human origins and history of the idea of the Bad Place. Marq de Villiers is a writer and journalist who has authored a series of non-fiction books, many on science and the environment. In 
In Varanasi recently, I took an auto-rickshaw from Godowlia to Assi Ghat. Like everyone else in town, the driver and I began talking politics. The 2019 general election was a week away and Prime Minister Narendra Modi was seeking reelection from Varanasi. The driver was an ardent Modi fan and would hear no criticism of him. He even claimed that demonetisation had punished the corrupt rich. One topic led to another and soon he was loudly praising Nathuram Godse as a patriot – Gandhi deserved no less than a bullet for being a Muslim lover. “You don’t know these people,” he thundered. “Read our history! Only Muslims have killed their own fathers to become kings. Has any Hindu ever done so? Inki jaat hi aisi hai. You too should open your mobile and read on WhatsApp. Kamina Rahul is born of a Muslim and a Christian; Nehru’s grandfather, also Muslim, Mughal. Outsiders all. Modi will teach them!” Fortunately, my destination came before his passion for the topic could escalate further.
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The first words to pass between Europeans and Americans (one-sided and confusing as they must have been) were in the sacred language of Islam. Christopher Columbus had hoped to sail to Asia and had prepared to communicate at its great courts in one of the major languages of Eurasian commerce. So when Columbus’s interpreter, a Spanish Jew, spoke to the Taíno of Hispaniola, he did so in Arabic. Not just the language of Islam, but the religion itself likely arrived in America in 1492, more than 20 years before Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door, igniting the Protestant reformation. Moors – African and Arab Muslims – had conquered much of the Iberian peninsula in 711, establishing a Muslim culture that lasted nearly eight centuries. By early 1492, the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella completed the Reconquista, defeating the last of the Muslim kingdoms, Granada. By the end of the century, the Inquisition, which had begun a century earlier, had coerced between 300,000 and 800,000 Muslims (and probably at least 70,000 Jews) to convert to Christianity. Spanish Catholics often suspected these Moriscos or conversos of practising Islam (or Judaism) in secret, and the Inquisition pursued and persecuted them. Some, almost certainly, sailed in Columbus’s crew, carrying Islam in their hearts and minds.
In 1986, at the age of twelve, I joined Tim Rollins and Kids of Survival. I first met Tim as a seventh grader at the Intermediate School 52 where he was teaching at the time. Tim had only intended to stay at the school for a few weeks. The students had made charcoal drawings on the ceiling of the classroom, and the walls were covered in graffiti. Tim often described the art room as the “Hip-Hop Sistine Chapel.” He was convinced that there was a profound reason he was there.
“Technology will surely drown us. The individual is disappearing rapidly. We’ll eventually be nothing but numbered ants. The group thing grows.” So said 
Dr. Arnold won fame and the Nobel Prize for developing a technique called directed evolution, a way of generating a host of novel enzymes and other biomolecules that can be put to any number of uses — detoxifying a chemical spill, or example, or disrupting the mating dance of an agricultural pest. Or removing laundry stains in eco-friendly cold water, or making drugs without relying on eco-hostile metal catalysts. Rather than seeking to design new proteins rationally, piece by carefully calculated piece — as many protein chemists have tried and mostly failed to do — the Arnold approach lets basic evolutionary algorithms do the work of protein composition and protein upgrades. The recipe is indeed an engineer’s dream: simple. You start with a protein that already has some features you’re interested in, such as stability in high heat or a knack for clipping apart fats. Using a standard lab trick such as polymerase chain reaction, you randomly mutate the gene that encodes the protein. Then you look for slight improvements in the resulting protein — a quickened pace of activity, say, or a vague inclination to carry out a task it wasn’t performing before, or a willingness to operate under conditions it deplored in the past.
Consider a hypothetical society that severely marginalizes individuals with red hair and considers red hair to be a genetic disorder with a recessive pattern of inheritance. The “pathology” is determined to be an imbalance between the levels of the red pigment pheomelanin and dark pigment eumelanin in the hair filaments. Red-haired individuals—and parents of red-haired children—in this society go to extreme lengths to dye their hair black. In fact, this society has spent extensive resources to develop complex dyeing procedures, performed only by specially trained medical professionals, that work best for red hair and last longer than regular dyes.