Who Knew Herpes Could Be Good for Something?

Scientists have discovered a way to kill brain tumors in mice using the herpes virus; Israel’s future, as John Kerry predicted, may not be far from apartheid; meanwhile, the National Institutes of Health is mandating gender balance in animal studies. These discoveries and more below.

On a regular basis, Truthdig brings you the news items and odds and ends that have found their way to Larry Gross, director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. A specialist in media and culture, art and communication, visual communication and media portrayals of minorities, Gross helped found the field of gay and lesbian studies.

Herpes-loaded Stem Cells Help Kill Brain Tumor in Mice Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital have found a potential solution for how to more effectively kill tumor cells using cancer-killing viruses.

Mapping Our Interiors Two trends, location technology and crowdsourcing, may soon converge.

Why Are American Health Care Costs So High? In which John Michael Green discusses the complicated reasons why the United States spends so much more on health care than any other country in the world, and along the way reveals some surprising information, including that Americans spend more of their tax dollars on public health care than people in Canada, the UK, or Australia.

Kerry Wasn’t Wrong: Israel’s Future Is Beginning to Look A Lot Like Apartheid The howls of outrage from the pro-Israel lobby are probably the best indicator that John Kerry and his chief Middle East mediator, Martin Indyk, had it right.

More than 2.7 Billion People Live In Countries Where Being Gay Is a Crime New research lays bare discrimination faced by gay people – in not a single country do they enjoy equal rights as heterosexuals

Google Has Most of My Email Because It Has All of Yours For almost 15 years, Benjamin Mako Hill has run his own email server which he uses for all of his non-work correspondence.

Elizabeth Warren Reveals Inside Details of Trade Talks One of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s top priorities since coming to Washington has been opening up ongoing international trade talks to public scrutiny—she has, on several occasions, criticized the secret nature of the negotiations, and has pressed the administration’s trade representative directly about transparency.

I Sort of Hope We Find Out That Jill Abramson Was Robbing the Cash Register So far, accounts of why Jill Abramson, the first woman executive editor of The New York Times, was abruptly fired last Wednesday, don’t leave us with a firm sense of what happened.

Coursera Co-Founder Takes a Job at ‘China’s Google’ Coursera, the online-education company, announced on Friday that one of its founders, Andrew Ng, was taking a third job, as chief scientist at Baidu, an Internet giant often called “China’s Google.”

Data Mining Your Children The NSA has nothing on the ed tech startup known as Knewton.

NIH to Require Gender Balance in Subjects of Animal Studies The National Institutes of Health announced a new policy requiring that both sexes be represented among the subjects of preclinical biomedical research it finances involving animal and cell models.

Unionization for Everyone? Why has the right to workplace representation been historically denied to millions of employees in the United States?