SUDDENLY, THEY’RE NOTICING THAT OBAMACARE ISN’T LIVING UP TO THE HYPE: WaPo: Left behind: Stories from Obamacare’s 31 million uninsured.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN FOR TOMORROW: Obama Diplomacy Is Making Him A Laughingstock.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The New Test for Grads That Could Get Them a Job.

More than 200 schools, including some in the Texas and California state systems, have signed on to offer students the new voluntary Collegiate Learning Assessment Plus (CLA+) test, designed to give employers an objective way to measure entry-level candidates.

Proponents of the CLA+ say the test scores are a better way of measuring student performance and career readiness than Grade Point Averages (GPAs), which have become so inflated they’re no longer as useful to employers as they once were. The average college GPA has risen over the past few decades from 2.3 to 3.2, according to Gallup.

The compromised value of a high GPA has little impact on students from highly selective, well known colleges who are likely to land a job regardless of their GPA. But it has hurt hard-working students at schools without a marquis name, says Robert Benjamin, executive director of the nonprofit Council for Aid to Education, which administers the CLA+.

“This gives able students at those schools an opportunity to show that their skills are the same or better than [those of] their counterparts,” Benjamin says. “It also allows those schools to objectively demonstrate they have quality students.”

This is a good idea, though a truly independent test would be better still.

LEGAL ANALYSIS: Iraq Vet vs. Would-Be Robber.

CONTINGENCY PLANNING: “The Texas Railroad Commission Chairman loves the Lone Star State so much that he says he has devoted much of his public sector career to preparing the state to secede from the union if necessary.” The way things are going, the nutty-vs.-prudent evaluation on that is growing more favorable . . . .

HOW TO MAKE A SAILBOAT FLY.

I DON’T KNOW IF THE DEEP SEVENS WILL LIKE THIS: Long term effort to develop capability to drill to the Earth’s Mantle.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Little Rock school district will now make teachers wear underwear. “T-shirts, patches and other clothing containing slogans for beer, alcohol, drugs, gangs or sex will also be prohibited.”

Plus: “Organized labor vocally opposes the new universal underwear requirement and the rest of the non-draconian dress code.”

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THIS IS COOL: World’s Largest Cave, Son Doong, Prepping For First Public Tours. Video at the link.

MAX BOOT: OBAMA’S SYRIA BLUNDER.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: RFK Jr’s secret sex diary: Serial philanderer’s journal discovered with a scorecard of conquests and noted on his Catholic guilt over cheating on wife Mary who later committed suicide. Okay, for the Kennedy clan, it’s pretty much any century.

Of course, worse than his adultery is is anti-vaccine scaremongering.

Related: Profiles In Psychobabble.

MEAN GIRLS: Queen Bees and Wannabes Rule In Gill Hornby’s ‘The Hive.’ “The awesome power of the Queen Bee is over other females, rather than males. Yes, males fall for her, too, but the really interesting thing about her is the way she controls her sisters. That’s what makes her the Queen. . . . Here’s one startling takeaway from The Hive: If a middle class housewife feels second-class in 2013, her oppressor is more likely to be another woman—quite possibly the local queen bee or the queen’s ambitious minions. Men are excluded for different reasons now. A queen bee’s power is exaggerated when her subjects are cut off from men and from the larger world. She might be the bossy friend who pressures you to forgo vaccinating your kids. Or the hostess who gets her kicks excluding you from her spa party.”

FASTER, PLEASE: Synthetic mRNA can induce self-repair, regeneration of the infarcted heart.

A team of scientists at Karolinska Institutet and Harvard University has taken a major step towards treatment for heart attack, by instructing the injured heart in mice to heal by expressing a factor that triggers cardiovascular regeneration driven by native heart stem cells. The study, published in Nature Biotechnology, also shows that there was an effect on driving the formation of a small number of new cardiac muscle cells.

“This is the beginning of using the heart as a factory to produce growth factors for specific families of cardiovascular stem cells, and suggests that it may be possible to generate new heart parts without delivering any new cells to the heart itself “, says Kenneth Chien, a Professor at the medical university Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and Harvard University, US, who led the research team behind the new findings. . . .

The study, performed in mice, shows that only a single administration of a short pulse of expression of VEGFA is required, if it can be delivered to the exact region where the heart progenitors reside. The therapeutic effect is long term, as shown by markedly improved survival following myocardial infarction with a single administration of the synthetic mRNA when given within 48 hours after the heart attack. The long-term effect appears to be based on changing the fate of the native heart stem cells from contributing to cardiac fibrotic scar tissue and towards cardiovascular tissue.

“This moves us very close to clinical studies to regenerate cardiovascular tissue with a single chemical agent without the need for injecting any additional cells into the heart.” says Professor Chien.

Like I said, faster, please.

PIONEERING THE INTERNAL FRONTIER: Understanding Our Gut Microbes Could Lead to New Medicines. “The diversity of the human collection of microbial residents—known as the microbiome—became more clear last year when the Human Microbiome Project described the diversity and abundance of microbes living in and on the human body (see “Researchers Catalog Your Microbial Zoo”). For every one human cell in the body, there are an estimated 10 microbial cells. Changes in this microbial zoo have been correlated with many health problems: from gastrointestinal disease to diabetes, obesity, and inflammation. . . . One reason it has been difficult to profile an individual’s microbiome is that most of these organisms can’t grow in pure cultures of a single species. So Second Genome uses DNA sequencing along with another DNA analysis technology developed by Andersen to identify community members and to look at gene activity in both the bugs and the human body.”

WALLOPS ISLAND: The Little Spaceport That Could.

ANGELO CODEVILLA: Parting Ways. “Some three fourths of Americans oppose making war on Syria. Hence the Republican leadership class’ reflexive advocacy of entry into Syria’s civil war is cutting one of the few remaining ties that bind it to ordinary Americans.”

My advice to the GOP: Listen to what John McCain is saying and do the opposite.

MORE ON THE CONNECTION BETWEEN GUT BACTERIA AND WEIGHT: “Researchers found pairs of human twins in which one was obese and the other lean. They transferred gut bacteria from these twins into mice and watched what happened. The mice with bacteria from fat twins grew fat; those that got bacteria from lean twins stayed lean.”

TRANSPARENCY: Lengthy Senate Report Reveals EPA FOIA Abuses.

RUSH LIMBAUGH’S CHILDREN’S BOOK is still #1 on Amazon, and it doesn’t come out for almost two months.

MICHAEL GRAHAM: Obama, If You’ve Lost Massachusetts…

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 123.

HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL CREATES A BUBBLE, CALLS IT PREPARATION:

As faculty members pointed out, the more exquisitely gender-sensitive the school environment became, the less resemblance it bore to the real business world. “Are we trying to change the world 900 students at a time, or are we preparing students for the world in which they are about to go?” a female professor asked.

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