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While there is no getting around the creep factor when it comes to topics like artificial limbs and regenerative medicine, advancement in these spheres holds out enormous potential for improving human welfare. With the stakes so high, it’s hardly surprising that research dollars have been pouring into these areas in the last few years. The fruits of such investment are just now coming into focus, and for those with a weak stomach, that focus maybe a little too sharp. A medical experiment taking place at Massachusetts General Hospital whose findings were released this week certainly falls into this category.

The MGH team announced this week that they had made the first steps towards the development of bioartificial replacement limbs suitable for transplantation. The limb in question, a strange looking rat appendage replete with muscle, bone, and ligaments is pictured below.
If you haven’t been following the field of regenerative medicine, it’s been experiencing something of a boom since the 2006 discovery by a Japanese researcher that normal somatic cells in humans could be induced to become pluripotent cells. From this state, the cells can go onto to become tissues of almost any organ in the body. The Japanese discovery circumvented the difficulty regarding limb or organ rejection by the host, since the regenerated tissues would belong to the patient themselves and therefore not set off any alarm bells in the immune system. It also sidestepped the political football concerning harvesting stem cells from unborn fetuses.
But there is another hurdle holding regenerative medicine back, and this one relates to the advances made by the MGH team. It turns out that cultivating the right tissue isn’t enough for limb or organ regeneration, that tissue needs a biological matrix to form and grow around. Even organs lacking bone support, like the liver, contain a matrix of cells that forms the scaffolding over which the liver grows. In the case of an entire limb, the complications get even thicker, with numerous types of tissues involved as well as bone and scaffolding.
To circumvent the scaffolding issue, the scientists at MGH used a process called decellularization. Decellularization works by flushing a detergent solution through the vasculature of a limb or organ, in this case, the amputated arm of a deceased rate (at least we hope it was deceased). This solution strips away all the cells belonging to the dead rat and leaves only the matrix behind. The matrix of the rat arm is then bathed in a nutrient solution where the progenerator cells of another rat (the client/recipient) were injected into the scaffolding.
In a moment straight out of Frankenstein, the bioreactor containing the rat arm was stimulated with electrical charges and low and behold, new muscles, nerves, and sinews commenced to grow. After two weeks, the arm was deemed complete and removed for examination. Much to the researchers’ glee, the new rat arm appeared to have developed nerves and tissue in all the correct places, and when stimulated with electricity, contracted to 80 percent of what would be expected in a newborn.
While there are still some issues to tweak with the process, the MGH team sees no reason why the same technique cannot be applied to growing human limbs. Creepy or not, we can fully expect such experiments to be taking place in the near future. With the prospect of growing human arms in a bioreactor, it seems the 21^st century is going to be every bit as weird as some of us hoped it would be.

This time, however, Windows 10 is looking better than any OS I've ever reviewed, and it is largely because Microsoft did two things I've been requesting since Windows 95.
I'll share my thoughts on these "features" and Windows 10 in general this week, since we now know it is showing up two days after my birthday on July 29 (I think I'll still call it my "birthday present"). I'll close with my product of the week, an offering that reminds me of Bill Gates' house.

Microsoft's 1st Strategic Mistake

The Apple fans, even inside my own company, as well as the Unix and OS/2 fans, wanted me killed, and I became really famous (and surprisingly wasn't killed).
However, the first time and most every time I sat down with the Windows folks, I pointed out that they had a critical strategic weakness they had to correct. I'd been a competitive analyst for years, and one of the things that job entails is looking for things that either could enhance our firm's success or cause the firm to fail.
The thing I pointed out was that the PC industry, including Microsoft, lived on churn. In other words, it wasn't new sales but hardware replacements that increasingly drove the market. Windows was painful to upgrade, but it was excessively painful when you bought a new PC.

It could take up to a day to get anyplace close to where you were on the old hardware, and people started locking down their PCs. I can recall talking to an IT manager at Intel who said employees were refusing new PCs, because they didn't have the time to get them running. When that happens at a tech company, you have a problem.
The other issue is that if it is really hard to move to a new Windows PC, then moving to an Apple PC isn't that scary, because you have to pretty much go through the same mess. However, if you spoke to an Apple user, Apple migrations were drop-dead easy by comparison. Apple understood that churn was important, and it didn't have that problem.

Microsoft's 2nd Strategic Mistake

A related issue was the fact that if you were part of the beta program for Windows, you could install the beta product over your existing version pretty easily -- but when the beta was over, you had to do a clean installation.
Often, that meant you had to run down the earlier copy of Windows to validate you qualified for the upgrade price, and then, as with every new machine, run down every disk related to a program you used.
As a result, even at Microsoft, testers had two machines -- one running the beta, which they rarely if ever touched, and one they actually did work on. So, while Microsoft thought it had a legion of folks, both internal and external, testing the product, there were only a few of us -- I was typically one -- running the product in actual production. When we few complained about a problem, our voice was lost among the masses of folks who seemed to be testing the product but rarely touched it.

Windows 10 Fixed Both

Migrations started to get a lot better with Windows 7, but they are brilliant with Windows 10. You basically log in with your Microsoft -- or if you're on a work PC, your work ID -- and all of your settings, apps and personalities transfer down from the server (be aware that this doesn't apply to legacy apps or if you are coming from Windows XP).
Once on Windows 10, getting one, two or six PCs is login-easy, and as you move to the newer apps, the experience is similar to what you currently get with iOS or Android. You buy a new PC, log in, and after a short wait, your new PC looks like your old one.
The even bigger move, at least when it comes to creating a reliable product, is that those of us testing Windows 10 automatically will get upgraded to the final version with Windows Update. Since we started with a valid version of Windows 7 or 8, we still get a free upgrade to Windows 10 without having to figure out what happened to our old Windows disks.
This means more of us actually are using Windows 10 in production, and that the number of testers Microsoft thinks it has internally and externally is one hell of a lot closer to the number it actually does have. I do think it is likely going to take a while for some people to break a decades-old habit of using two machines, but it is still a huge step in the right direction.

Wrapping Up

Just like the testers, I too am going to now have to break a decades-old habit of whining about the upgrade and new hardware process for Windows. There are a lot of new features in the offering that fix issues with Windows 8 -- like Continuum, which morphs the product between tablet and PC mode.
However, the one that I think is the most powerful, because it fixes a problem that is decades old, is the feature that lets you almost painlessly migrate from an old to a new PC. That's something that should have been fixed in the first version of the product but actually did get fixed in this one.

We all have a lot of regrets. I have two with regard to Microsoft: One is not going on an interview there in the late 70s; the other is turning down a tour of Bill Gates' house. He'd offered to take me, but I'd thrown out my back and was in massive pain and felt I needed to address that first.
In hindsight, I should have sucked it up. Even though I was given a rain check, I was never able to call it in. The part of the house I really wanted to see was the home automation component, particularly with regard to entertainment.
Gates had a unique system. The pictures on the walls were flat-panel displays, and music changed automatically with the pictures, according to the tastes of the person viewing them. You wore a badge that told the system who you were, and it knew your preferences. I always thought it would be really cool to have something like that.
Well, a startup called "Artkick" has launched a crowdfunding project on Kickstarter for Look-- a next-generation large form digital picture frame (up to 40 inches) that can bring you art personalized to taste, and take feeds from your -- or anyone else's -- social network account.
It doesn't yet change based on who is viewing it, and there is no music aspect, but those could be future features -- and given the cost is in the display, likely not very expensive ones to add.
I'm thinking that if you had a lot of kids who were away, rather than mounting a large picture of each child on the wall, you might enjoy a dynamic digital picture frame showing what they're posting on their social network. That would let you feel like you were in touch with them -- or perhaps occasionally have the crap scared out of you (kids can do some crazy things).

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iPhone 5 Variants

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Battery Life

As per usual, the phone's Lithium Ion battery is sealed inside. You can charge the phone over USB or the included 5 volt, 1 amp charger (the same charger bundled with prior iPhone models). Apple claims up to 8 hours of talk time on 3G (currently no US LTE network supports voice over 4G LTE). They claim 10 hours of video playback, 8 hours of web browsing on LTE or 3G and 40 hours of music playback. Apple's battery life estimates for their products tend to be fairly accurate, and in our tests, the iPhone 5 is no exception. Our AT&T unit on LTE had no trouble making it through the day with both push data for iCloud and every 15 minute fetch settings for Gmail and Google calendar.