Geron, a California company developing therapies derived from embryonic stem cells, announced on Monday that the first patient has been treated in its landmark trial for spinal cord injury. The therapy, which involves injecting differentiated neural cells into the injury site, is the first such treatment to be tested in humans.

Other experimental stem cell therapies involve adult stem cells or cells derived from fetuses.Geron first garnered approval for the tests from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in January of 2009. But that approval was put on hold several months later due to new safety concerns from animal tests. Because cells can behave unpredictably, regulators want to make sure the transplanted cells don't develop into teratomas, a type of tumor associated with the injection of embryonic stem cells.The FDA gave permission to resume testing in July, after another round of animal safety tests. [Read the full article]

The Physics arXiv Blog produces daily coverage of the best new ideas from an online forum called the Physics arXiv on which scientists post early versions of their latest ideas. Contact me atKentuckyFC @ arxivblog.comTurn on your kitchen tap and the steady stream of water will spread out into a thin circular disc when it hits the sink. This disc has an unusual property: it is surrounded by a circular "lip", where the height of the water changes suddenly.This so-called hydraulic jump has puzzled physicists for at least a hundred years (John Strutt, otherwise known as Lord Rayleigh, published the first mathematical description of the phenomenon in 1914). These kinds of hydrodynamic problems are notoriously difficult to tackle.In recent years, the study of hydraulic jumps has intensified. That's because various physicists have pointed out that hydraulic jumps are examples of much more exotic objects: white holes, the time-reversed equivalent of black holes. [Read the full article]

The Central Processing Unit (CPU)--the component that has defined the performance of your computer for many years--has hit a wall.In fact, the next-generation of CPUs, including Intel's forthcoming Sandy Bridge processor, have to contend with multiple walls--a memory bottleneck (the bandwidth of the channel between the CPU and a computer's memory); the instruction level parallelism (ILP) wall (the availability of enough discrete parallel instructions for a multi-core chip) and the power wall (the chip's overall temperature and power consumption).Of the three, the power wall is now arguably the defining limit of the power of the modern CPU. As CPUs have become more capable, their energy consumption and heat production has grown rapidly. It's a problem so tenacious that chip manufacturers have been forced to create "systems on a chip"--conurbations of smaller, specialized processors. [Read the full article]

Animism is a component of the Shinto faith, the religion that preceded the introduction of Buddhism to Japan and remains an influential part of the country's culture. Animism is the notion that all objects have a spirit - even man-made objects. Here's social scientist Naho Kitano in Animism, Rinri, Modernizationp; the Base of Japanese Robotics (pdf)The sun, the moon, mountains and trees each have their own spirits, or gods. Each god is given a name, has characteristics, and is believed to have control over natural and human phenomena. This thought has continued to be believed and influences the Japanese relationship with nature and spiritual existence. This belief later expanded to include artificial objects, so that spirits are thought to exist in all the articles and utensils of daily use, and it is believed that these sprits of daily-use tools are in harmony with human beings. [Read the full article]