Woke up to a 65 degree house, which is the temp I normally keep it at. No frozen pipes or other problems.

I did keep a space heater in the basement, set at 65 (so not constantly on), so I can't say how it would have gone with heat pumps alone. In general, I'm pretty happy with how they performed yesterday. Still waiting on energy usage data.

Yes, I would like to have had the power consumption data for this post, but the BED consumption tracker does not always update in real time. I may have to wait until tomorrow for the data.

According to the usage tracker, last year on a similar day (Jan 21, High of 6, low of -14), I used about 90 kwh, but I charged my car and used a space heater. Assuming $0.16 per kwh that works out to about $15 for that day.

I was going to make a separate post about this later (still gathering data), but currently it is -9f outside my house, and the house is right at 70 degrees with heat pumps only. No supplemental heat aside from baking some cookies a few hours ago. The real test will be tonight when we get to -13, but so far so good.

The process that resulted in Dolly was somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). The process was a big deal because it demonstrated that there was a way to reprogram a cell from a "somatic" state to an earlier developmental state.

This method was developed roughly at the same time that scientists first isolated and grew human embyonic stem cells, which were isolated from pre-implantation embryos. (as an aside, mouse ES cells have been around for much longer, but hESCs proved tougher to keep going in culture).

Human ES cells are super useful in research because they can be used to generate many different cell types, which we can use to model disease and generally understand tissues that might be otherwise hard to get from humans (think neurons or heart cells).

The limitation of human ES cells is that they're hard to make with the exact genetic makeup that you might want to study. For example, let's pretend that I care about a genetic disease like Huntington's disease, which affects specific regions of the brain. If I want to study human cells in a dish, my options are limited, since getting a biopsy of the brain and growing neurons isn't going to be easy.

If you could make ES cells with a Huntington mutation, you would have a basically endless supply of human neurons, but to do that you'd need an embryo with the Huntington disease genotype.

This is where the insight from Dolly comes in: because of Dolly, scientists knew that reprogramming was possible, and a few labs set out to figure out how to do it without physically transplanting a nucleus into an egg cell. The result was the induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC), which was a big deal and won a nobel prize. Basically, the recipe to reprogram cells using just 4 proteins was identified, and has led to a tool that is widely used around the world. Any patient's somatic cells can now be reprogrammed into iPSCs, which can in turn be used to generate all sorts of cell types to help explain the underlying biology associated with many conditions.

Air source heat pumps in Burlington, 1,400 square foot house at 65.

Total electric bill for December was $205, but that includes heat pump hot water, electric dryer, an EV and electric (induction) stove.

It's really hard to assess the heating only costs, but I'd estimate them at ~$100 for the month. It'll be more in January and Feb as it gets colder and the heat pumps lose some efficiency.

There is an FDA-approved GHR inhibitor called pegvisomant approved for acromagaly.