The Repugnant Conclusion is an implication of some approaches to population ethics. It states, in Derek Parfit's original formulation,

Blindness represents an increasing global problem with significant social and economic impact upon affected patients and society as a whole. In Europe, approximately one in 30 individuals experience sight loss and 75% of those are unemployed, a social burden which is very likely to increase as the population of Europe ages. Diseases affecting the retina account for approximately 26% of blindness globally and 70% of blindness in the United Kingdom. To date, there are no treatments to restore lost retinal cells and improve visual function, highlighting an urgent need for new therapeutic approaches. A pioneering breakthrough has demonstrated the ability to generate synthetic retina from pluripotent stem cells under laboratory conditions, a finding with immense relevance for basic research, in vitro disease modeling, drug discovery, and cell replacement therapies. This review summarizes the current achievements in pluripotent stem cell differentiation toward retinal cells and highlights the steps that need to be completed in order to generate human synthetic retinae with high efficiency and reproducibly from patient-specific pluripotent stem cells.

The excavations at Kilise Tepe in the 1990s inevitably left a range of research questions unanswered, and our second spell of work at the site from 2007 to 2011 sought to address some of these, relating to the later second and early first millennia. This article gathers the architectural and stratigraphie results of the renewed excavations, presenting the fresh information about the layout and character of the Late Bronze Age North-West Building and the initial phases of the Stele Building which succeeded it, including probable symbolic practices, and describing the complex stratigraphic sequence in the Central Strip sounding which covers the lapse of time from the 12th down to the seventh century. There follow short reports on the analyses of the botanical and faunal materials recovered, a summary of the results from the relevant radiocarbon dating samples and separate studies addressing issues resulting from the continuing study of the ceramics from the different contexts. Taken together, a complex picture emerges of changes in settlement layout, archi¬tectural traditions, use of external space, artefact production and subsistence strategies during the centuries which separate the Level III Late Bronze Age settlement from the latest Iron Age occupation around 700 BC.

Gravitational microlensing observations will lead to a census of planets that orbit stars of different populations. From 2008, ARTEMiS will provide an expert system that allows to adopt a three-step strategy of survey, follow-up and anomaly monitoring of gravitational microlensing events that is capable of detecting planets of Earth mass and below. The SIGNALMEN anomaly detector, an integral part, has already demonstrated its performance during a pilot season. Embedded into eSTAR, ARTEMiS serves as an open platform that links with existing microlensing campaigns. Real-time visualization of ongoing events along with an interpretation moreover allows to communicate “Science live to your home” to the general public.