Israeli scientists transform skin cells into heart cells for the first time ever

There may come a time when doctors can patch up your damaged heart not with fancy futuristic materials, but with your own skin. A paper recently published in the European Heart Journal details the work of a team of Israeli scientists who took sample skin cells from two patients — aged 51 and 61 — with heart problems. For the first time ever, they were able to transform the skin cells into healthy, beating heart cells.

According to team leader, Lior Gepstein, the resulting cells were "equivalent to the stage of [the patient's] heart cells when he was just born." After forming heart tissue out of the erstwhile skin cells, the scientists cultivated it in a petri dish with real heart tissue.

The researchers found that after 24 to 48 hours, the man-made heart tissue merged with the real sample — the whole thing was even beating. They then implanted the hybrid tissue into healthy rats whose little rodent hearts accepted and formed connections with it.

While the results sound extremely

Films and TV shows from several studios are being manufactured to order, never go out of stock

You've heard of video on demand, now Amazon is offering DVD on demand. Through a new shop called Never Before on DVD, the online retailer is making more than 2,000 films and TV series from the likes of 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures, Disney, and Warner Bros. available on DVD for the first time ever. Here's the twist: The DVDs aren't actually made until you order them.

Using a service called CreateSpace, Amazon manufactures the discs and packaging once an order is placed. No extra inventory of the films or shows is kept, so studios don't have to be concerned with unsold copies. This benefits customers as well, since studios don't have to base their decision to make certain titles available on actual demand. Most of the discs being offered through the service — like the Vanilla Ice masterwork Cool as Ice — are actually in too little demand to make manufacturing them en masse commercially unviable.

In addition to offering them on disc, Amazon is going to be adding many of the titles for

By replacing existing barcodes with his own, one SAP exec made off with $30,000 in goods

Was it compulsion, a desire to beat the system, or just pure greed? Authorities — and indeed, the public at large — are struggling to understand the "why" behind a complicated theft scheme where wealthy Silicon Valley executive Thomas Langenbach stands accused of stealing Lego sets from Target locations in Northern California.

Langenbach, a top executive with global software company SAP, is facing four felony counts of burglary after replacing the existing barcodes on Lego sets with new ones that would allow him to purchase the building blocks at a huge discount. According to Liz Wylie, a spokesperson for the Mountain View Police, Langenbach "sold 2,100 items in just over a year on eBay, and made $30,000. The motive was clearly money. Why does he want the money? I don't know. I can think of a million different scenarios." Langenbach clearly was not hurting for money — he lives in a $2 million San Carlos home.

According to authorities, Langenbach was printing his own barcodes — he was