My mom always taught me that I need to speak up more, because my voice is too soft and girlish to be taken seriously. But despite training, my voice still doesn’t command attention. Then I heard about a pioneering surgery recently performed in Russia, in which two patients successfully received laryngotracheal implants. The implants were created from synthetic scaffolding seeded with the patients’ own stem cells, effectively giving them a new voicebox. Obviously, that’s a long way from my getting a voice as powerful as Adele’s, but the singer in me can dream, right?