Home Away from Home

A Home Away from Home

Someday, many people hope, humans will travel to Mars. The U.S. National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) has plans for a mission to the planet in the 2030s, and entrepreneur Elon Musk says his SpaceX company can do it by 2024. If people succeed in setting up an outpost on Mars, they’ll need to build someplace for astronauts to live, sleep, and work. But hauling building materials acro...

A home away from home: the patient-centered health home.

Living With “Man’s Fate” Away From Home

Edward Nilges is a former software consultant who came from Chicago to Hong Kong in 2005, and has since worked as a teacher. Having been residing in Hong Kong for all these years, Edward fell ill with cancer and its complications. He choose to receive medical treatment in Hong Kong, where both the dominant culture and medical system were foreign to him. Here, he gives an account of his physical...

Import of proteins into peroxisomes: piggybacking to a new home away from home

Peroxisomes are capable of importing folded and oligomeric proteins. However, it is a matter of dispute whether oligomer import by peroxisomes is the exception or the rule. Here, I argue for a clear distinction between homo-oligomeric proteins that are essentially peroxisomal, and dually localized hetero-oligomers that access the peroxisome by piggyback import, localizing there in limited numbe...

A home away from home: challenges and opportunities in engineering in vitro muscle satellite cell niches.

Satellite cells are skeletal muscle stem cells with a principal role in postnatal skeletal muscle regeneration. Satellite cells, like many tissue-specific adult stem cells, reside in a quiescent state in an instructive, anatomically defined niche. The satellite cell niche constitutes a distinct membrane-enclosed compartment within the muscle fiber, containing a diversity of biochemical and biop...