Hidey ho, neighbors! We here at the Scienceville Welcome Wagon are pleased as particularly pleased punch to welcome you to out picturesque little town and I will be glad to give you the grand tour of the neighborhood and introduce you to your new neighbors!

First off, over there in that charming little neodymium Quonset hut, is our youngest resident, a 19 year old boy who recently designed a ocean array that could clean up millions of tons of plastic waste.

The existence of vast patches of conglomerated plastic waste just floating in the oceans of the world like vast drift of immortal yet toxic seaweed is an international disgrace and a stinging rebuke to humanity in general. It reminds us of just how often we human beings shit where we sleep.

So it would be a great service to both the ecology of the world and that of our ethical beings if we could clean that stuff the heck up. But the problem is so massive that attempts to come up with a solution have foundered in the early planning stages.

Enter Boyan Slat, who has designed a vast ocean-going array of booms and nets that would encircle the garbage patch and funnel the plastic waste towards a series of processing platforms, where workers would then sort and process it for recycling.

Obviously, this would not be cheap. And the money earned by selling the plastic to recyclers would probably not even come close to paying for such a massive operation.

But young Boyan Slat’s idea at least makes it seem possible.

Next door to Slat, in that gorgeous magnetically levitated Buckyball, lives Dean Burnett, whose main claim to fame is a recent article he did for The Guardian summarizing the criticisms of the widely used Mybers Briggs Personality Index, or MBTI.

Full disclosure : I like the MBTI. I like it for fairly personal and anecdotal reasons, granted, but I still like it. See, it worked great for me.

Before I took the MBTI in college, I had little faith in personality tests. All the ones I had taken up to that point (I had to take quite a few when I was a child for reasons I will not go into here) gave results which were either blindingly obvious, or wildly inaccurate, or some combination of the two.

Then I took the MBTI, found out I was an INTJ, and read the official description… and was powerfully illuminated. It not only described me extremely well, it described in detail aspects of my personality and thinking that I thought, up until that point, were unique to me and me alone.

So it was quite the extraordinary experience to find out that there were other people out there with the kind of independent and relentlessly pragmatic minds as me, and made me an instant convert.

Ergo, I am biased towards it. And nothing in the article seems like a legitimate and cogent criticism of the test itself. In fact, they strike me as criticisms cooked up by someone who did not like their result.

Instead, the main criticism is of how the test is overused in situations where it is not even applicable in corporate environments, and honestly, there is no tool which is safe to use by those who use it blindly and by rote, without knowledge or understanding of the nature of the tool and how it works.

Across the street from Dean Burnett, in that adorable little neolithic igloo in between the Laser Testing Range and our award-winning Holographic Community Center, lives the team of scientists who recently found a surprising link between intestinal bacteria and obesity.

When someone gets a gastric bypass surgery (ugh), the bacteria in their intestines changes. This discovery began when someone had the bright (and gross) idea to take some of those changed bacteria and put them into the intestines of some mice that had not had the bypass, and see what happened.

And lo and behold, the mice lost weight!

This means that it is possible that the weight loss associated with gastric bypass (meaning, taking a big chunk of your gut and just throwing it away) was caused merely by the gut bacteria change it spurred.

Roll THAT one around your brain for a bit.

It also means that the futuristic high tech treatment for obesity might simply be one of those yogurt drinks with the helpful biota in it.

According to those wacky scientists, that would cause the right kind of microbes to multiply, increasing our basal metabolism rates and improving insulin response and blood glucose levels.

The rats lost 30 percent of their body weight. For me, that would be like 110 pounds. Boffo.,

My theory for why this works : these helpful microbes pre-digest the food for us (ick), making the nutrition more available, and our body perks up and says “Time to party!”.

But possibly our most promising residents live over there, in that enormous replica of the human genome with every human base-pair sequence carved into it.

There lives the scientists who recently managed to convince patients’ immune systems to attack and eliminate their cancer, and that has truly breathtaking implications for the future of oncology.

It is, of course, a small study, with only five patients. Obviously, you start small when testing a new therapy on very sick people. But the results are so strong that it is worth noting anyhow.

Three of the five patients have been cancer free for at least five months and up to two years.

How sick were these people?

The patients all had B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia and had relapsed following chemotherapy. The outlook for patients in this category is typically bleak.

Amazing. They took people with very bleak prospects and made them cancer free.

Who knows? This might be the first solid blow of our eventual victory over cancer!

Well, neighbor, that concludes our tour of your new home. Feel free to pick a drawer in the hyperspatial portmanteau we use as guest housing, and settle in. Don’t worry, they are quite spacious and well-appointed on the inside!

See you at the next Vat Gown Barbecue!