Houston, we've got a thrumming sound
In a photo op plucked straight from nerd heaven, a phalanx of stormtroopers converged this week on Houston's William P. Hobby Airport to escort a NASA official carrying the lightsaber prop wielded by actor Mark Hamill in the 1983 movie Star Wars. The event was hatched to drum up press for the geek icon's scheduled flight to and from the International Space Station on board the shuttle Discovery in October, in celebration of the movie's 30th anniversary, according to news reports. Chewbacca the Wookie jumped through hyperspace to California, where he handed the Jedi weapon to Roger Bornstein, director of marketing for the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, who then rendezvoused with representatives of the dark side in Texas. No word on whether space traitor Lando Calrissian was involved in the transaction. (NASA shuttle to launch Luke's lightsaber | collectSPACE.com)

A fix for broken rat hearts
Scientists this week successfully implanted human embryonic stem cells into rats that suffered heart attacks, coming a heartbeat closer to realizing the full potential of such therapy. Such cells usually die when injected into damaged hearts, but researchers from Geron Corp. were able to make the rat hearts survive and pump away, getting the blood flowing again. The secret? A "survival cocktail" of proteins injected along with the cells, researchers report in Nature Biotechnology. (Cardiomyocytes derived from human embryonic stem cells in pro-survival factors enhance function of infarcted rat hearts | Nature Biotechnology)

A new dolphin tale
Good news for Winter, a Florida dolphin who lost her tail flipper after getting tangled in a crab trap line but lived to tell the tale. Hobbled in the accident, the tenacious two-year-old mammal is now being trained to use a prosthetic tail, reports the Associated Press. The latex flipper is designed as an aid that trainers hope will help Winter grow strong in the right places and adapt to life without a back rudder. An elderly dolphin named Fuji gets an assist from a similar but smaller prosthetic she wears for a few minutes at a time. (New prosthetic may help dolphin, troops | AP)

Mightier mouse—and maybe muscle boosters
Want to build a brawnier mouse? Researchers already knew that shutting off the gene for the muscle-limiting protein myostatin doubles the muscle mass of rodents, cows and humans. Now a scientist reports that mice engineered to make extra follistatin, which deactivates myostatin, have four times the muscle of regular mice, suggesting a new target for drugs to fight muscle-wasting diseases such as muscular dystrophy. (Quadrupling Muscle Mass in Mice by Targeting TGF-ß Signaling Pathways | PLoS One)

Why flies like beer
Flies prefer the taste of CO2 in their water, according to a report in Nature. Flies were drawn to fizzing beer or dry ice dissolved in water, which excite a special class of taste receptors in the fly proboscis, but had no desire for flat soda and avoided gaseous CO2. Researchers propose that the taste draws flies to half-spoiled food, full of CO2-belching bacteria that pump out nutrients they feed on. (The detection of carbonation by the Drosophila gustatory system | Nature)

Stressed moms cradle to right
Stress may somehow be influencing mothers to cradle their babies in the arm opposite the one they would normally use. A new study of 79 new moms found that 32 percent of those showing signs of stress cradled to the right, compared with 14 percent of stress-free mothers, although depressed moms preferred cradling to the left. (Maternal stress and depression and the lateralisation of infant cradling | The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry)

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