Cellular agriculture, whose products are known as cultured or lab-grown meat, builds up muscle tissue from a handful of cells taken from an animal. A little over five years later, startups around the world are racing to produce lab-grown meat that tastes as good as the traditional kind and costs about as much. The Good Food Institute, which campaigns for regulations that favor plant-based and lab-grown meats, has joined forces with Tofurky (the makers of a tofu-based meat replacement since the 1980s), the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Animal Legal Defense Fund to get the law overturned.

The woman, who had been attacked from behind, could not offer a description. A man serving time for another sexual offense submitted a DNA sample with his parole application. The sample matched DNA from the rape scene.

His unusual hobby started couple of years ago, when Oswalt came across a story about Taylor Wilson, a 14-year-old who built his own nuclear fusion reactor in his garage in Reno, Nevada, in 2008, making him the youngest person to ever achieve nuclear fusion. Oswalt’s results were verified by members of a forum called Fusor.net that included physicists and hobbyists alike, making him the youngest person to ever build a working nuclear fusion reactor. Image: Jackson Oswalt

Oswalt decided to take on the challenge anyway, starting with research on what it takes to build a nuclear fusion reactor—the parts, what tools he would need, and how long it would take.

The battle, pitting drug companies against doctors and patient advocates, is being fought over the unlikeliest of substances: human excrement. The therapy transfers fecal matter from healthy donors into the bowels of ailing patients, restoring the beneficial works of the community of gut microbes that have been decimated by antibiotics. At the heart of the controversy is a question of classification: Are the fecal microbiota that cure C. diff a drug, or are they more akin to organs, tissues and blood products that are transferred from the healthy to treat the sick?