Hey there science fans! We are back with yet another Friday column jam packed with all (well, OK, most) if the hottest, coolest, awesome-est science stories from the past week!

Owing to a new high tech and brilliant (OK, low tech and obvious) new scheme for preserving science stories until they are ripe for the plucking, we have six, count them, SIX, science stories to cover this week, and let me tell you, it was hard enough just whittling it down to six!

Never let it be said that I don’t work hard (OK, moderately firm) for you nice people!

First up, we have some paranoia busting news from the field of microbiology. Turns out, there is a protein in human breast milk that help antibodies fight antibody-resistant diseases.

This protein, rather adorably named HAMLET (for Human Alpha-lactalbumin Made Lethal to Tumor cells.. a little sloppy, I know… hey, I didn’t coin it!), acts as a kind of biological crowbar that pries open resistant strains of diseases like Staphylococcus aureus and makes them vulnerable to antibodies and antibiotics once more.

For those of us who have been getting rather anxious about the current rise of resistant strains of nasty diseases due to our unintentionally applying positive evolutionary pressure on existing strains via vaccines and antibiotics, this is very good news.

The war between humans and germs has been going very well for the last 100 years or so, at least in the developed world, and we have, anti-vax nuts aside, destroyed many terrible scourges that killed millions of people over the centuries.

But the rise of diseases that resist our best efforts to destroy them has put us, to a minor but potentially lethal degree, back where we were in the days of Pasteur.

Anything that can keep that from happening is good news to me.

Also on the front of fighting disease, we have news of a new molecule that kills the bacteria that causes tooth decay.

The molecule is called Keep 32, and it could be showing up in toothpaste and even in sugary foods themselves some time in the near future.

As we all learned in health class, sugar doesn’t cause tooth decay. It just feeds the bacteria, Streptococcus Mutans, that causes tooth decay. It does this by excreting acid all over your teeth which eats through the enamel.

So in theory, if you could kill all the Streptococcus Mutans in your mouth and keep them dead, you could eat whatever you like without fear of cavities.

Makes me wonder how the big gets on your teeth in the first place. Is it floating around in the air we breathe, or the water we drink? Are we born with it there? If you went three weeks without eating anything with any sugar in it, could you starve the little fuckers to death?

Heck, if this stuff is safe enough (big if), we could just add it to the water supply, just like we did with flouride in years gone past, and for pretty much the same reason.

Imagine, a future without tooth decay! (Sorry, dentists!)

Keeping with the Cool Molecule theme, how about a molecule that if injected into your bloodstream allows you to live without breathing?

Is that straight from science fiction, or what? The “martians” in Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan survive on Mars by taking oxygen pills and learning to breathe in a special way. This is not far from that!

The idea is that these microparticles are made of oxygen molecules separated by micro-thin layers of lipids, essentially creating time-release oxygen.

The most immediate use for this would, of course, be medical. There are all kinds of catastrophic medical situations where the patient simply cannot get oxygen from the air, and with these particles in the doctor’s arsenal, they could simply inject them into the patient’s bloodstream and give them a nearly normal blood oxygen level for up to 30 minutes.

That is more than enough time to deal with the issue, or at least get the heart-lung machine hooked up and working, although honestly, with this particle, maybe you wouldn’t even need those any more.

Of course, the fun uses would be things like scuba diving without oxygen tanks, or just really convincingly faking your death to mess with your friends.

Speaking of stuff straight out of science fiction, how about a bionic ear? How about, in face, a 3D printed bionic ear made of your own cells and with the electronics built right in?

Eat your six million dollar heart out, Linday Wagner aka The Bionic Woman! All you had was a souped up hearing aid.

As you all know, the exciting new world of tissue engineering is a fave here at the Friday Science Whatever, so I just had to cover this. And while an ear is not technically all that complicated a thing to reproduce, this is definitely an encouraging first step towards a future where custom printed 3D organs are widely available and any part of our body can simply be replaced if it breaks.

And as someone who will be turning 40 in 9 days, I find that highly reassuring.

Speaking of that rat bastard aging, a highly unusual theory of aging has emerged recently : it turns out that aging might actually be all in your head.

Your hypothalamus, to be exact. An over-activation of a particular protein causes inflammation of the hypothalamus, and that leads to various aging-type symptoms, including inhibiting a protein used to repair nerves.

At least, it does so in rats. This theory seems fairly left-field, but it is actually in line with a lot of the current research about the surprisingly deep and profound role that inflammatory responses in our body in all kinds of disorders, including ones that don’t seem related at all.

To me, blaming all of aging on this one factor seems a tad extreme. Modern medicine knows that aging is not a single process but a number of concurrent but not necessarily related processes.

But this hypothalmic route might provide important clues as to how the whole thing gets started.

Finally, we will talk about something that might help us all live better in this glorious organ-replacement aging-free future : aquaponics.

As the name implies, it is a brilliant synthesis of aquaculture and hydroponics where the ammonia rich waste from the fish becomes nitrogen rich food for the plants, which take the nitrogen out of the water and returns nothing but pure, clean water.

This replaces aquaculture’s constant need for waste disposal and hydroponics’ heavy need for constant nutrient injection. One problem solves the other in a beautiful display of harmonic efficiency.

If we are to feed the world in the future, we will need to go way out of the box in order to create ways to grow food in cities, and a system like this one could very well be the backbone of skyscraper farms of the future. Fresh fish and produce from the same place!

Of course, the biggest threat to a closed recirculating system like this is disease, so it will take very strict monitoring and near quarantine levels of cleanliness to make it work.

Besides that, I wonder how well the system would scale upward. A lot of promising systems produce very high efficiency rates under highly controlled conditions but can’t make the transition to the less tightly controlled world of industrial production.

Still, I am absolutely in love with the efficiency of the whole thing, and I have no problem with the idea of a future in which all our food is produced this way.

As long as it still tastes good and is nutritious, I don’t care how you make it.

That’s all for this week. Ain’t science grand?