First blood cells, now heart tissue?

Scientists have turned skin tissue from heart attack patients into fresh, beating heart cells in a first step towards a new therapy for the condition. The procedure may eventually help scores of people who survive heart attacks but are severely debilitated by damage to the organ. By creating new heart cells from a patient's own tissues, doctors avoid the risk of the cells being rejected by the immune system once they are transplanted. Though the cells were not considered safe enough to put back into patients, they appeared healthy in the laboratory and beat in time with other cells when implanted into rats. This has shown that it's possible to take skin cells from, for example, an elderly patient with advanced heart failure and end up with his own beating cells in a laboratory dish that are healthy and young - the equivalent to the stage his heart cells were in when he was born. This is an amazing medical advancement indeed, and could make stem cells obsolete because you're using the patient's skin cells instead of cells from aborted foetuses. But stem cell research should still be pursued because the resultant treatments could also have significant medical potential. And speaking of potential, the potential for 4G revenue in India appears to be limited. Mobile companies gearing up to launch lucrative 4G data services are likely to be disappointed as research shows that India may not see a sufficient increase in data use to justify the high entry prices. Telecom regulator Trai, while figuring out per unit 4G spectrum rates, has assumed that data services will contribute more than half of an operators’ revenues by 2020. Analysts and industry operators are now arguing that this basis of pricing spectrum is wrong. At present, non-voice revenues as a percentage of total revenues stand at 14 per cent, out of which pure data services contribute only 5 per cent and the rest comes from message-based services. Data services (such as Internet use, live streaming of TV, and online gaming) usually give an operator more profits than voice services, where profits have been squeezed by intense competition. Hence, the degree to which customers would use data services in the future is linked to revenue and profitability forecasts, and also to the pricing of spectrum.