Coaxing a stem cell to differentiate is similar to telling a college freshman to pick a major—and about as difficult. With a plethora of options to choose from, how does one decide on a pathway to follow, and what’s the most efficient route?

For the stem cell at least, researchers at the University of Wisconsin have found a controlled method to signal cell decision-making, or differentiation. Their discovery opens new doorways in tissue engineering, a field that may one day create lab-grown replacements for failing organs and tissue.

• NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Among the many fun diversions downtown this weekend (including the Luz de Vida benefit concert at the Rialto Theatre and the opening of Who Shot Rock & Roll at the Tucson Museum of Art): The UA College of Science is opening Mars and Beyond, featuring a whole bunch of artifacts and exhibits from the UA Lunar and Planetary Lab's adventures in outer space, including shots from the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Details here.

Apparently, it's first come, first served for the riches of the moon, so former-Microsoft and currently very rich dude Naveen Jain is going to figure out to get up there and start digging:

NASA, which ended America's space shuttle program in June, says it wants to privatize spaceflight. Naveen Jain, co-founder and chairman of Moon Express, Inc., wants to go a step further: He wants to privatize the moon itself.

Jain's company plans to piggyback on private shuttle flights, using them to carry his lunar landers and mining platforms to the moon.

"People ask, why do we want to go back to the moon? Isn't it just barren soil?" Jain told FoxNews.com. "But the moon has never been explored from an entrepreneurial perspective."

Our nearest neighbor in the sky holds a ransom in precious minerals, Jain explained: Twenty times more titanium and platinum than anywhere on earth, not to mention helium 3, a rare isotope of helium that many feel could be the future of energy on Earth and in space.

When the word "ransom" comes up, that doesn't exactly give me a good feeling about this project.

Men lie about themselves, women lie to protect their friends. Married people lie to their spouses moreless than non-married people lie to who they're dating. When gorillas learn to communicate, they start to lie. College kids lie to their parents in one out of every five interactions. We're all screwed, I guess, but expert Pamela Meyer talked about what can be done to navigate the world of falsehood.

Don't worry about using these techniques on me. I tell the truth all the time. You look great, by the way.

[The Hairpin]

So yeah, dinosaurs are super cool and how awesome would it be if they had 'em running around this place?

• JOHN DE DIOS
• Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Ariz., sits on a 40-acre campus owned by the University of Arizona.

• JOHN DE DIOS

Averaging 100,000 visitors per year, the University of Arizona’s Biosphere 2 provides an opportunity for science and the public to have a better dialogue.

The sprawling 40-acre campus in Oracle, Ariz., first came into the UA’s management four and a half years ago after Columbia University abandoned the project after more than a decade of running scientific research. A major part of the UA taking over, said Dr. Travis Huxman, director of Biosphere 2 and B2 Earthscience, was a major push to improve the public’s science literacy.

Feel guilty whenever you leave a bad tip?

You should.

According to University of Arizona researchers, guilt plays a major role in our decisions to do what we think is right. By combining the math in economics and psychology, the researchers devised a new technique to measure the influence of guilt in decision-making and cooperation.

• UA Lunar and Planetary Lab

From University Communications:

Michael J. Drake, Regents' Professor, director of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and head of the department of planetary sciences, died Wednesday at The University of Arizona Medical Center-University Campus in Tucson, Ariz. He was 65.

Drake, who joined the UA planetary sciences faculty in 1973 and headed LPL and the planetary sciences department since 1994, was the principal investigator of the most ambitious UA project to date, OSIRIS-REx, an $800 million mission designed to retrieve a sample of an asteroid and return it to Earth. OSIRIS-REx is due to launch in 2016. It is the largest grant or contract the UA has ever received.

Drake played a key role in a succession of ever more high-profile space projects that garnered international attention for LPL and the University.

Those include the Cassini mission to explore Saturn, the Gamma-Ray Spectrometer onboard NASA's Mars Odyssey Orbiter, the HiRISE camera onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Phoenix Mars Lander.

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I have come to believe that the Tooth Fairy has been stealing our children's teeth to power some sort of underground evil stem-cell fueled society. These teeth could be curing Parkinson's apparently, so the dollar that parents are getting in exchange is a total ripoff. Someone should really look into this black market for teeth. We've been getting ripped off for far too long.

[The Awl]

[Skip ahead to 2:10 to see Bachmann link the HPV vaccination and "mental retardation"]

Penn Professor and bioethicist Arthur Caplan is challenging Michele Bachmann's anti-HPV vaccination scare tactics:

If she can produce a case in one week starting today verified by three medical experts that she and i pick of a woman who became 'retarded' (her words) due to HPV vaccine i will donate that to a charity of her choice. She must donate 10k to a charity I pick if she fails to do so.

My guess is Bachmann just ignores this challenge, but it gets out in the media enough, maybe she'll have to address it, no?