In December’s GQ, the magazine introduces this year’s “Rock Stars Of Science”, a campaign funded by the Geoffrey Beene Foundation in order to bring scientists to the public’s attention.

The theory is that kids are losing interest in science, and their parents aren’t encouraging them much any more. So, because we all know that scientists are boring and ugly and smell of poo, the GQ campaign pairs them with people who are cool and attractive and smell of money and bling: rock stars, in other words.

We’re really into this campaign: science is cool. It’s just scientists that are a bit of a mess. So perhaps these photos of rock stars posing with scientists will encourage a few more of the cool kids to keep on studying their biology instead of…whatever it is that cool kids do. We’ve no idea, quite frankly.

Then again: maybe not. After all, one of the stars shown posing is Sebastian Bach, and we’re pretty sure that the last time he was anything approaching cool was 1987.

Other featured rock stars include Timbaland, Jay Sean and…Heart. Hang on, that Heart? The two mannish-looking ladies Heart?

We retract our stated interest in this campaign: it’s quite obviously being run on the cheap. The website for those interested is: www.rockstarsofscience.org. But who cares, because rock stars posing with scientists is nothing new, as our exclusive pictures below show:

In news which will delight all those teenagers who walk around in white facepaint and black cloaks, like they’re some kind of a frickin’ vampire and not just a deluded adolescent, scientists claim to have made blood from skin cells.

Of secondary importance, patients suffering from cancer, anemia and a host of other diseases gain the hope of an improved future.

Whatever: emo kids get endless supplies of blood! To pose with, while looking all emotional and sad like!

Okay, serious time. This is a huge breakthrough in many ways. Generating whole, fully-functional blood from a person’s own skin not only gives a way of providing blood to cancer patients undergoing chemo, it is a huge leap forward in scientists’ ability to reprogram adult cells in previously unknown ways.

The work was done at McMaster University in Canada, under the lead of Mickie Bhatia, and is published in the journal Nature. As the journal says, similar work has recently transformed mouse skin cells into nerve and muscle cells, but this is the first example of using similar techniques to produce human progenitor (essentially, “stem”) cells.

What the guys did is this: they collected small patches of skin from several volunteers. Cells within these samples known as “fibroblasts” were made to express a protein called OCT4.

OCT4 has previously been shown to turn fibroblasts into “induced pluripotent stem cells“, or iPS cells. That means cells which have been forced into becoming stem cells by treating normal, adult cells with various inductive chemicals.

Importantly, previous attempts to make blood iPS cells have only been able to do so by routing the cells through an embryonic state. Embryonic blood cells are not the same as an adult’s. They produce, for example, a different form of the oxygen-carrying protein hemoglobin. In this latest work, the scientists were able to route the skin cells directly into adult blood cell lineages. This bypassing of the embryonic state, the scientists say, means that the end result is blood cells which are not going to be inherently tumorigenic. And that, of course, means they are theoretically safe enough to inject back into a human.

Some cautions at this stage: the cells are not produced in great quantities, so that until further work is done you may need to sacrifice a buttock of skin to produce a pint of blood. Also, the scientists involved cannot yet confidently say that the blood cells produced are exactly the same as regular blood cells. Proteins within cells can be turned on and off by many mechanisms, so the fact that this fake blood contains cells which look like every normal kind of cell doesn’t mean they will behave like them.

But still, a wonderful advance. Ian Wilmut, a scientists not associated with the research, sums up the importance of this work thusly:

It takes us a step along the line to believing that you can produce anything from almost anything.

It’s said that upon hearing this, Simon Cowell immediately ordered one hundred copies of himself, aged twenty-five. He’s currently waiting to hear back from the scientists.

Great news for skinny guys! Scientists have used gene therapy to successfully increase the size and strength of lab monkeys’ muscles.

But calm down, stickboys: the intended use of this research is in treating degenerative muscular diseases. Better keep paying that gym subscription for a while longer yet.

This work was carried out at various research facilities in Columbus Ohio, under the leadership of Brian Kaspar. It is published in Science Translational Medicine.

The background to the boffins’ work is this: it was known that myostatin – a protein which is produced by the body and circulates in the bloodstream – inhibits muscle growth. This is the protein made famous when it was knocked out in mice, resulting in the super-muscled variety seen below, on the right:

So, these guys wondered if it would be possible to reduce the levels of myostatin in specific muscles by increasing the levels of an inhibitor.

That inhibitor’s name is follistatin, and the scientists used a viral delivery system to place its gene into the cells of their lab monkeys’ quadriceps muscles (that’s those big guys on the front of your thighs). The gene transfer was successful, the cells began producing follistatin protein and…

[it] induced pronounced and durable increases in muscle size and strength.

Quoted from the paper. The authors made sure that other organs in these monkeys remained normal.

And their conclusion? Let’s see what they have to say:

Our results, together with the findings in mice, suggest that therapy with [follistatin gene therapy] may improve muscle mass and function in patients with certain degenerative muscle disorders.

Here’s hoping.

Don’t Hold Your Breath, But This May Lead To: well, hopefully to a safe and effective treatment for some muscle-wasting diseases. Sadly, we predict that its use in sports will not lag too far behind any legitimate medical use.

We have a list of all the people we would go to for medical advice if we were struck down by some catastrophic illness.

Anybody at Johns Hopkins – right down to the janitorial staff – is at the top.

Our list then moves onto the Cleveland Clinic, the Mayo Clinic, and continues all the way down to the West Mississippi Regional Center For Acupuncture And Mystical Healing (great place, lovely people).

After that, the list gets a little more personal : next up is Dr Phil, then Dr Oz, then Dr Dre.

Thousands of entries later, after Charles Manson, after the guy who plays a one-stringed guitar at 3 in the morning in our neighborhood park, and after a bag of roasted peanuts, comes our very last resort for medical advice: Mr Ozzy Osbourne.

Well, it seems that we may need to rethink this list: a British newspaper has just hired the rock legend as its new health columnist.

What a shame. We had $5 on them hiring the guy who cleans tables at our local Olive Garden.

On the face of it, this story couldn’t look any crazier if you wrapped it up in corn husks, stuck a clown’s hat on top and had it dance the Macarena while counting backwards from 100 in Flemish.

But think about it a bit more, and you come to realize that this could actually be a move of genius.

Ozzy Osbourne has decades of personal experience with every drug known to medical science, and quite a few known only to some crazed Chemistry majors working late nights in the lab.

But there’s more: thanks to his marriage to Sharon Osbourne, he has intimate knowledge of the entire sub-specialty of plastic surgery. Thanks to his son Jack Osbourne‘s wild physical exploits, he has become immersed in the fields of trauma and orthopedics. And thanks to his daughter Kelly Osbourne, he has gained experience of…oh, crap, we have no idea. What the hell does she do? Weight loss: let’s go with that.

Yeah, we’re really coming round to this whole idea of Ozzy Osbourne as a national newspaper’s health adviser. Over to the big guy himself for his take on things, from the Times of London:

By all accounts I’m a medical miracle. When I die, I should donate my body to the Natural History Museum.

At one point I was knocking back four bottles of cognac a day, blacking out, coming to again, and carrying on.

While filming The Osbournes I was also shoving 42 types of prescription medication down my neck, morning, noon and night — and that was before all the dope I was smoking in my “safe” room, away from the cameras.

Ozzy Osbourne is an actual, no-shit hero! And while his liver may have the exact dimensions and consistency of an avocado seed, his heart apparently has no bounds: he’s promised to donate his wizened, ravaged, tattooed-to-hell-and-back body to a museum

Well, to be fair, that does solve one of the problems we’ve been wondering about for a while now: how the hell would you cremate Ozzy Osbourne’s body without getting everyone within four hundred miles as high as the sky?

Before you leave, go up and look at the picture above this article, and see what you think Ozzy is doing to his wife there…

…You back? Okay.

If you answered “Squeezing her titties in a wild-eyed, possibly drug-induced state of madness“, then you’re wrong.

The correct answer, of course is “Administering a mammogram“.

See? That’s why Ozzy Osbourne is becoming a medical columnist, and you ain’t.

Before we go, here’s one last thing for you from your friends at SlantedScience. Below is a little something which you need to print off and keep in your pockets at all times in case you require urgent medical aid. This way, when the paramedics go looking for valuables to steal, they will also discover your wishes for medical treatment.

You’re welcome.

Dear Paramedics: you may as well stop looking now, because I have absolutely nothing valuable on my person.
But more importantly, could you please contact Professor Ozzy Osbourne immediately, as his insightful medical opinion is the only one I trust.
You’ll find him in LA, biting heads off of bats or some shit like that. Thanks.

Apologies to all, but we are having a bit of a cleanup. We will be back with you soon.

In the meantime, why not check out our sister site:

www.GoodNewsForBadPeople.com

See you soon!