Well, let's just say that if you were carefully regulated to recieve just enough food to not have any strong malnourishment symptoms but still be pretty damn hungry - unless you help with the move and get a pizza on top, then consent is maybe not the right word. You are by no means forced but you'll still be pretty motivated to help - much less than if you could just eat as much as you liked. Which can be seen by the fact that the mice were participating less on mondays - after they had free access to water on the weekend.
I'm not saying it's particularly cruel, especially since the tests appeared to be harmless, but still, it's a crude but effective way to ensure the mice don't just sit in the corner bored but actually do a high test repeat...

Not strictly true. See, the trick is to just not put a water bottle into the cage and make water the reward.

Disclaimer: I work in bioscience, so I actually know a thing or two about the process.
If there is a comparatively trivial way to produce stem cells THAT ACTUALLY WORKS, people will go heads over tail to do it themselves. I'd assume every lab that is even remotely connected to the stem cell field would set people on replicating this since the method is basically the equivalent of turning lead into gold. It is the holy grail. No matter how much money you have, no matter how much influence you have, you can't contain such a breakthrough, especially not after it's published. That is, if it actually is what it is claimed to be.
On the other hand, if you claim to have made such a breakthrough, everyone tries it out and no one can replicate it, weeeellll, you'll piss a few people off. Considerably more people than when you just say you found that protein X interacts in subcascade Y under conditions Z and it turns out it doesn't after all.
And if serious intentional misconduct is found, the result is burning at stake. I suggest having a look at http://retractionwatch.com/
And finally, Sasai wasn't the main author behind the whole thing but rather the seniour guy who slapped his seal of approval on it. So even IF the conspiracy nutjobs were true, it's the wrong man that's dead.

Clicked the wrong entry while moderating, so posting this to undo it - please ignore.

Imagine something like that with the Occulus Rift... You could basically look around in the virtual space as if you were sitting there!

whooooosh

They are actually going to produce and sell a small number of them (250 I believe), though I fear the price might be a bit prohibitive for the mass market...

Nope, that's no longer possible on such a brain. What you do is you inject special tracer substances (while the mouse is still alive). These substances will stain neurons at the site of injection and then cross the synapse to connected cells, either in the direction of the information flow or opposed to it, depending on the system used. These tracers are then imaged using the method that this article is about. To further aid you, you can do different stainings to see what type/subtype of neurons you are looking at. By combining this information with known functional properties of the found neuronal types, you can try to infer what is actually happening in the area you examine.

True, but the level of transparency wasn't that impressive with that method, it only worked up to 1-3mm of depth. BABB based protocols were a lot better in that regards.

Hell yes, that's the big one here. Plus, expressed fluorescent proteins in the tissue don't get degraded as much as with BABB et al. Definitely give it a shot, you probably have all the ingredients around the lab anyway. The clearing is done with PFA, acrylamide, bis-acrylamide, VA044 and PBS. The slices should then be immersed in glycerol, so nothing special there as far as I can see it. You only need to build a custom electrophoresis chamber to stain the brain, but even that shouldn't be too hard.

No, I was thinking of something still lethal but less freaky: cancer. Plus, even if one of the patients goes insane for whatever strange one-in-a-billion chance, it's not really infectious unless he's still capable of drilling a hole into your skull and injecting a tiny amount of purified virus into precisely the correct area of the brain (think micrometer precision). So no zombie apocalypse there, sorry.

True, but I would say that a few lost muscle cells are less problematic than a few neurons lost in the wrong part of the brain. AFAIK there is no reliable way to control the site of lentiviral integration. Plus, purifying lenti properly is nasty, the stuff can be either quite neurotoxic or not infectious at all if something goes wrong during that step.
Recombinant Adeno Associated Virus is much less problematic, it's dead simple to manufacture and only the potential protein overload problem remains (and in mice we're using them a lot without any apparent problems). However, in an adult brain, the effect of rAAV is only temporary since it doesn't integrate and gets degraded over time.