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Today, Robert G. Edwards, a British physiologist who spent much of his career at Cambridge University, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for developing in vitro fertilization (IVF), a technique used to help people conceive children. The procedure involves mixing eggs and sperm in a laboratory dish, and then returning the embryo to the womb to resume development.

The ӳý's creative director Bang Wong writes about visual salience -- that quality that makes objects "pop" off the page -- in his column for this month's issue of . Salience allows viewers to spot trends and patterns in data faster and process multiple features of the data. Understanding how salience works could help scientists communicate information in figures as well as in presentations.

Fat cells may be one of the most maligned cell types in the human body. For centuries, people have thought that adipose tissue – fat – was just an inert storage unit for energy. But in the last two decades, scientists have discovered that fat cells release dozens of hormones that can regulate clotting, blood pressure, appetite, insulin sensitivity, and much more. Researchers now hope to manipulate fat cells to control diseases like type 2 diabetes and obesity. But first, they need to find the pathways that govern how fat cells develop, and for that, they need a map.

Height was one of the first traits recognized to be heritable — stature seemed to “run in the family,” with tall parents mostly having tall children and short parents mostly having short children. Scientists realized over a century ago that human stature, which can fall anywhere along a continuum, is not influenced by 1 or 2 genes, but many. Researchers today perform genome-scanning studies to hunt for the genes that determine height, but until recently those studies had only turned up a few dozen genetic links, accounting for less than 5% of height’s heritability.