The Nobel Prize committee decided on Monday to posthumously award Dr. Ralph Steinman a prize in medicine and physiology. Steinman's ground-breaking winning research into dendritic cells helped treat his own pancreatic cancer, but he died just three days before the committee awarded him with the prize. Nobel rules say the award can only go to living scientists, but the foundation did not know Steinman had died on Friday and thus did not reverse their decision. Steinman shares this year's award with two other researchers, Bruce Beutler and Jules Hoffmann.

For Dr. Anthony Ritaccio, the idea of being a human-cyborg isn't just something of science fiction books, but a real world possibility. Ritaccio was born without his right hand, and through his work, as the director of the Epilepsy and Human Brain Mapping Program at the Albany Medical Center and J. Spencer Standish Professor of Neurology at the Albany Medical College, he has learned to map intentions of the human brain. In his lab, Ritaccio is mapping out the electrical layout of the brain, in hopes of building interactions that will one day change the lives of millions of Americans with physical and mental disabilities.

Thousands of babies are conceived through in-vitro fertilization (IVF) each year, but 29 years ago, when Elizabeth Comeau was born, the in vitro method was considered strange and miraculous. Comeau was America's first "test-tube baby." Now, at 29 years old, she's just given birth to her own baby boy.

(Correction: an earlier version of this story referred to Comeau as the "world's first test-tube baby" - she was actually the first in the United States. Louise Brown, born in the UK in 1978, was the world's first baby conceived via IVF.)

Scientists in the U.K. claim that for the first time they've created human sperm from embryonic stem cells. While the advance is a huge scientific leap that could allow infertile men to have children, it also raises ethical concerns. For more on this new step in reproductive biology, The Takeaway turns to Clive Cookson, Science Editor for the Financial Times.

Summer brings warm evenings dotted by the light of fireflies. The apparently serene scene is full of murder, deception, and secret trysts as the fireflies communicate with each other and try to mate. Joining The Takeaway with more on the passionate life of the firefly is science writer Carl Zimmer. You can read Zimmer's New York Times article on fireflies in today's Science Times, "Blink Twice if You Like Me".

Ever since this whole "swine flu" thing erupted it's been nothing but talk about humans, humans, humans. But what's it been like to be a virus these last few weeks? Today, we shrink down to take a look at life from the point of view of one of the world's smallest biological toxins. How, really, do viruses get out of one organism and travel to another? (Warning: It's pretty gross.) What perils face a virus that ventures outside the human body? Our microscopic tour guide is The Takeaway's favorite virus hunter, Dr. Susan P. Fisher-Hoch, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas School of Public Health and co-author of Level 4: Virus Hunters of the CDC.

If you want to see the view of the body a virus sees, all you have to do is watch Fantastic Voyage, a 1966 classic in which "four men and a beautiful lady" were shrunk down and sent into the bloodstream on a submarine (it was not yellow):

When we drag our nails across a chalkboard, it's not pleasant. But dragging our nails across our skin often provides us nothing but relief from a prickly, tickly sensation know as The Itch. Just what is it about scratching an itch that causes the itchy sensation to go away? New research out this week in the journal Nature Neuroscience provides an answer. And we're itchin' to tell you about it: Glenn Geisler, one of the scientists involved with the work, joins The Takeaway with more.

Read Geisler's Nature Neuroscience paper here .

And have you ever wondered how deep into the skin a person can scratch? Read Atul Gawande's New Yorker article The Itch to find out. We won't spoil the ending for you, but it's pretty darn deep.