The Scientific Discovery Thread: Blow Our Minds World! - Part 1

[Thread Manager]

This is a continuation thread, the old thread is [split]473639[/split]

 

[NickNitro]

I want this thread to celebrate all of the wonderful Scientific Advancements the world gives us. I'll start with a few from one of my favorite sites, Gizmodo.

Nuclear Fusion Just Got More Energy Out of Its Fuel Than It Put Into It

It's one of science's ultimate goals, and perhaps the only thing that could prevent humanity's ultimate depletion of the Earth's resources — the ability to create more energy than is used to make it. Now, a new nuclear breakthrough has brought that feat even closer to becoming a reality.

Continuing on from an earlier breakthrough last year, US researchers at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have managed to generate more energy from a string of fusion reactions than was put into the nuclear fuel used within them. While it still hasn't reached a stage where scientists have been able to create more energy than the entire experiment consumes, it's a significant step forward.

http://gizmodo.com/nuclear-fusion-just-got-more-energy-out-of-its-fuel-tha-1522006589

 

[DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs]

Pioneering Gene-Editing Therapy Reverses Cancer in Baby Girl

A one-year-old girl diagnosed with incurable aggressive leukemia is now in remission after receiving “designer cells” from a donor. The therapy made use of a powerful new gene-editing technique that could eventually be used to treat an array of hereditary diseases.

Layla Richards from London, England, is the first patient in the world to receive the pioneering therapy, which was performed by Great Ormond Street hospital doctors. They’re not calling it a cure, but her condition has improved vastly from just a few months ago, when her prognosis looked grim. The therapy appears to be holding the leukemia at bay.

Her situation had been dire, prompting the medical staff, along with biotech firm Cellectis, to seek permission to use the untested technology. The only prior application of the technique, known as site-specific genome editing, was performed on mice. Layla, who was diagnosed with leukemia when she was three months old, started to take a turn for the worse, compelling her doctors—and her parents—to take the desperate measure, one that now appears to be paying off.

“I didn’t want to go down that road [and admit her to palliative care], I’d rather that she tried something new and I took the gamble,” noted Layla’s father, Ashleigh, in a BBC article. “And this is her today standing laughing and giggling, she was so weak before this treatment, it was horrible and I’m just thankful for this opportunity.”

For the therapy, the doctors made use of a biotechnology known as transcription activator-like effector nuclease, or TALENs for short. It’s an enzyme that allows scientists to cut DNA strands at specific sequences, which is why it’s often referred to as a molecular scissor. In this case, immunologist Wasseem Qasim and his team at GOSH used the TALENS scissor to deactivate the genes in healthy, donated immune T-cells that would normally cause the foreign cells to be rejected when transplanted into a leukemia patient. The cells were also modified to protect them from anti-cancer drugs.

The details of the procedure, which will be presented at the 54th American Society of Hematology, now appear at the science journal, Blood.

To make room for the new “designer cells,” Layla’s existing immune system had to be destroyed. After the procedure, Layla’s health improved almost instantly. Team member Paul Veys was quoted in the BBC as saying the transformation was one of the most remarkable things he’d seen in 20 years, describing the turn of events as “almost like a miracle.”

However, while Layla’s leukemia is currently in remission, it’s still early, and it represents a single case. The technique has not yet been tested in formal, long-term clinical trials. What’s more, the therapy is not meant to be permanent; as noted by Qasim in Nature News, it’s meant to serve as a “bridge” to keep Layla and future patients alive until a matched T-cell donor can be found.

Looking to the future, and assuming this technique can work in the ways intended, it could be used to treat an assortment of ailments, including hemophilia, beta thalassemia, and hemoglobinopathy (a hereditary condition involving an abnormality in the structure of hemoglobin).

http://gizmodo.com/pioneering-gene-editing-therapy-reverses-cancer-in-baby-1740983135?trending_test_d&utm_expid=66866090-62.H_y_0o51QhmMY_tue7bevQ.4&utm_referrer=http%3A%2F%2Fio9.com%2F

Awesome way to kick off the next part of this thread!

 

[Teelie]

Scientists may have found formula for a painless existence

This is a good way to continue and bump the thread. No more pain.

That is if the science works out and they don't find any adverse side-effects. The other more immense benefit is you can have surgery done while conscious and alert or people with chronic pain issues can be given a remedy. Plus it grreatly reduces the risk of drug addiction.

All in theory of course.

Physical pain is a near universal problem, whether its sudden pangs or chronic aches. Yet, researchers’ efforts to quash it completely have fallen short—possibly due to a moonlighting channel in nerve cells. But that may be about to change.

The sodium ion channel, called Nav1.7, helps generate the electrical signals that surge through pain-related nerve cells. It’s known to play a key role in pain, but researchers’ past attempts to power-down its charged activities did little to soothe suffering. In a bit of a shocking twist, researchers figured out why; the channel has a second, un-channel-like function—regulating painkilling molecules called opioid peptides. That revelation, published in Nature Communications, provided researchers with the know-how to reverse painlessness in a woman with a rare condition, plus make mice completely pain free.

The link between Nav1.7 and opioid painkillers is “fascinating,” Claire Gaveriaux-Ruff, a pain researcher and professor at the University of Strasbourg, told Ars. And, she added, “this discovery brings hope to the many patients suffering from pain that are not yet adequately treated with the available pain medications.”

That source of hope has been a long time coming, John N. Wood, lead author of the study and a neuroscientist at University College London, told Ars. Researchers have been interested in Nav1.7 for years, he said. Excitement peaked in 2006 when scientists reported finding a family who lacked the channel and could feel no pain at all. After that, researchers excitedly scrambled to relieve pain with Nav1.7-blocking drugs. But the drugs inexplicably failed, Wood said. “So we thought, well maybe this channel isn’t just a channel, maybe it’s got some other activities as well.”

Using genetically engineered mice, Wood and colleagues found that completely shutting off Nav1.7 not only made mice pain-free, it cranked up their amount of opioid peptides in nerve cells. These molecules are natural painkillers that help the body moderate pain responses. In these Nav1.7-lacking mice, opioid levels were extremely high, blunting all twinges and throbs. When the researchers gave the mice a drug that blocks those opioids, the animals could feel pain normally. (The opioid-blocking drug, naloxone, treats overdoses of opioid drugs, such as morphine and codeine.)

Even more promising, Wood and colleagues saw the same result in a person. The test subject, a 39-year-old woman with a rare mutation that shuts off Nav1.7, had been pain-free all her life. But, when the researchers gave her a dose of the opioid-blocking naloxone, she felt pain for the first time—the sting of a tiny laser. She was happy to go back to her normal, painless state after the drug wore off, Wood reported. But, she hopes that the drug treatment can be used in children with the pain-free condition to keep them from unknowingly injuring themselves.

Now that Wood and his team could conjure pain in the painless, they aimed to do the reverse. They gave normal mice a combination of a Nav1.7-blocker and a very low dose of an opioid drug. Individually, the drugs did little to nothing to eliminate pain. But, together, they seemed to mimic what was going on in Nav1.7-lacking mice and people, producing a blocked ion channel and boosted levels of opioid molecules. With the drug combo, the mice felt no pain.

Wood thinks that the Nav1.7-blocking drugs can’t eliminate pain alone because they may not block the channel’s opioid-regulating role completely—thus the level of opioid peptides might not get high enough to block pain. But, it’s still unclear how the channel regulates the opioid peptides in the first place. Preliminary data suggest that the amount of sodium the channel lets into the cell may play a role, Wood said.

Still, the one-two-punch of the drug duo may do the trick for making people pain-free. Wood has filed a patent on the therapy in hopes that a pharmaceutical company will be interested in developing a treatment. He is also pleased that only a very low dose of opioid drugs seems necessary, thus lowering the dangers of addiction. It could still all fall apart, Wood cautioned, because the combination therapy has only been tested in animals. But, he said, “at the moment, it looks very, very encouraging.”

Ars Technica

 

[DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs]

Holy S***! Scientists Have Confirmed the Existence of Gravitational Waves

Since Albert Einstein first predicted their existence a century ago, physicists have been on the hunt for gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime. That hunt is now over. Gravitational waves exist, and we’ve found them.

That’s according to researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), who have been holed up for weeks, working round-the-clock to confirm that the very first direct detection of gravitational waves is the real deal. False signals have been detected before, and even though the rumors first reported by Gizmodo have been flying for a month, the LIGO team wanted to be absolutely certain before making an official announcement.

That announcement has just come. Gravitational waves were observed on September 14th, 2015, at 5:51 am ET by both of the LIGO detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington. The source? A supermassive black hole collision that took place 1.3 billion years ago. When it occurred, about three times the mass of the sun was converted to energy in a fraction of a second.

The discovery has been accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters.

Gravitational waves are ripples in the universe caused by some of the most energetic cosmic events, from exploding stars to supermassive black hole mergers. As they propagate through space and time, gravitational waves cause tiny tremors in atoms that make up matter. While Einstein predicted them in his general theory of relativity in 1916, and their existence was indirectly demonstrated in the 1980s, it wasn’t until the LIGO detector came online in 2002 that the hunt for elusive spacetime ripples started to get serious.

But the first generation LIGO experiment, which ran for eight years, wasn’t sensitive enough. Which is understandable. Gravitational waves are minuscule— the atomic jitters that pass through our world when two black holes bash together in a distant galaxy are on the order of a billionth of a billionth the diameter of an atom. LIGO detects them by proxy, using high powered lasers to measure tiny changes in the distance between two objects positioned thousands of miles apart. A million things can screw this up, including a rumbling freight train, a tremor in the Earth, and the inconvenient reality that all objects with a temperature above absolute zero are vibrating all the time.

After a series of upgrades that lasted from 2010 to 2015, LIGO was back online this past fall. With more powerful lasers and improved system for isolating the experiment from vibrations in the ground, the prospects of detecting the first gravitational waves have never looked better. Some scientists even predicted that we’d have our first positive detection in 2016—but few could have known how quickly it would come.

In fact, LIGO saw gravitational waves almost immediately. The team then spent the entire fall exhaustively investigating potential instrumental and environmental disturbances to confirm that the signal was real.

According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, when a pair of black holes orbit on another, they lose energy slowly, causing them to creep gradually closer. In the final minutes of their merger, they speed up considerably, until finally, moving at about half the speed of light, they bash together, forming a larger black hole. A tremendous burst of energy is released, propagating through space as gravitational waves.

The two black holes behind the all the hubbub are 29 and 36 times the mass of the Sun, respectively. During the peak of their cosmic collision, LIGO researchers estimate that their power output was 50 times that of the entire visible universe.

“The description of this observation is beautifully described in the Einstein theory of general relativity formulated 100 years ago and comprises the first test of the theory in strong gravitation,” said Rainer Weiss, who first proposed LIGO as a means of detecting gravitational waves in the 1980s. “It would have been wonderful to watch Einstein’s face had we been able to tell him.”

The discovery of gravitational waves has been an open secret for weeks now. The scientists’ own excitement got the better of them on several occasions, including last week, when theoretical physicist Clifford Burgess at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, sent an email to his entire department, telling them that LIGO had found a real, and “spectacular,” signal of two large black holes merging.

Now, the muzzle has been lifted and the physicists can geek out at the top of their lungs. Keep an eye on social media today, it should be a ruckus.

The discovery of gravitational waves confirms an important aspect of the theory of relativity, but it does much more than that. Quite literally, it opens up a new chapter in our exploration of the cosmos, one where electromagnetic radiation is no longer our only tool for “seeing” the universe. As MIT astrophysicist Scott Hughes told Gizmodo in a phone interview, we can use gravitational waves to probe mysterious celestial objects like black holes and neutron stars, which typically no light.

“There’s a lot of rich information encoded in gravitational waves,” he said, noting that the shape of a spacetime ripple can tell us about the size and motion of the object that produced it. “As an astronomer, I try to think about how to go from the ‘sound’ of the waveform that LIGO measures, to the parameters that produce that waveform.”

Hughes also notes that once our detectors are sensitive enough to catch gravitational waves regularly, we can start to build a census of the universe’s most energetic events. “Actually getting some demographic data is one of the key things we hope to do in an era of detection,” he said.

“Whenever first detection happens, there’s gonna be a party, no question,” he continued. “But after that, when detection becomes routine, is when things start getting really interesting.”

A century-long hunt is over. But a new cosmic exploration is just beginning.

http://gizmodo.com/holy-****-scientists-have-confirmed-the-existence-of-g-1755465297

Cool video explainer at the link above. This is freaking huge news!!!!

 

[Teelie]

Report of lab-made sperm spawns fertility treatment hopes, skepticism
Chinese scientists say they coaxed mouse stem cells into sperm used to produce pups.

Men are now obsolete? Hmm, maybe not so fast.

What happens in the testes, stays in the testes. At least, that’s according to frustrated researchers who have spent years trying to understand and recreate the process that generates sperm. But now, in a satisfying data release, a group of Chinese researchers reports that they’ve finally cracked that nut.

In the study, published Thursday in Cell Stem Cell, the researchers describe using mouse stem cells to generate rudimentary sperm that was used to fertilize eggs and produce healthy mouse pups. If true, the study could pave the way for the development of human sperm in lab dishes for fertility treatments.

“The results are super-exciting and important,” Jacob Hanna, a stem cell scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, told Nature. However, several other researchers said they were skeptical of the data and anxious to see the results repeated in other researchers’ hands. “You have to be very cautious about the implications of this paper,” Mitinori Saitou of Kyoto University said.

In the past, researchers were able to coax mouse stem cells to produce primordial germ cells (PGC), a precursor to sperm and eggs. But, to get full-blown sperm, researchers had to transplant the cells into the testes where—hidden from scientists' prying eyes—the cells completed the somewhat mysterious, multi-step process of meiosis.

In the new study, researchers say that they again made PGCs in lab but then sprinkled in testicular tissue from newborn mice and other molecules. After 14 days, the PGCs turned into spermatids—immature sperm that can’t swim but have sailed through the critical stages of meiosis. When the researchers fertilized eggs with the spermatids, they produced seemingly health pups.

“It is, I think, truly the first time any lab has been able to go all the way up to a live pup in vitro,” Niels Geijsen, a stem cell biologist at the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht, told Science, “which is quite amazing, if this is indeed what happened.”

Other scientists questioned the protocol and timing of the spermatid creation. In testes, for instance, going from PGC to spermatid takes four weeks, while the study says it took two weeks in lab. Takashi Shinohara, a reproductive biologist at Kyoto University in Japan, called the scenario “practically impossible.” Takehiko Ogawa, a reproductive biologist at Yokohama City University in Japan, said he planned to try to reproduce the result and that he “cannot yet believe it.”

Ars Technica

 

[Teelie]

New plastic-eating bacteria could help save planet

To slightly adjust Jurassic Park's intent: Life always finds a way. In this case to eat something previously considered unbiodegradable.

Scientists in Japan have discovered a strain of bacteria that can eat plastic, a finding that might help solve the world's fast-growing plastic pollution problem.

The species fully breaks down one of the most common kinds of plastic called Polyethylene terephthalate (PET). It's the type often used to package bottled drinks, cosmetics and household cleaners.

The findings, published in the academic journal 'Science' on Friday, say that "Ideonella sakaiensis breaks down the plastic by using two enzymes to hydrolyze PET and a primary reaction intermediate, eventually yielding basic building blocks for growth."

This could be really good news for the environment. Almost a third of all plastic packaging escapes collection systems and ends up in nature or clogging up infrastructure, the World Economic Forum (WEF) warned.

The WEF report, based on analysis of 20 studies and interviews with 180 experts, also said only 14% of plastic packaging is collected for recycling and that there will be more plastic than fish calculated by weight in the world's oceans by 2050.

Back in September, researchers also found that mealworms can live on a diet of styrofoam and other types of plastic.

CNN

 

[Teelie]

Standing can also be bad for you, says scientist studying desk set-up

Sit, stand, somewhere inbetween. Doesn't seem to make much difference. This is why I dislike fads, especially scientific ones that aren't proven. A lot of people bought into "standing desks" only to now learn they aren't healthy for you either.

If there’s anything scientists know about the best type of desk for an office worker’s long-term health, it’s that they don’t really know anything, according to a new analysis of the scientific literature on the matter.

After closely examining 20 of the highest quality studies about workplace interventions to reduce sitting time, which include standing, pedaling, and treadmill desks, researchers concluded that there simply isn’t enough data to say whether any of the alternatives are better that just plopping in front of a standard desk.

A number of studies in the past had found that planting your bum in an office chair for hours at a time can up your chances of heart failure, disabilities, and even shorten your life. Collectively, the data spurred a trend for alternative workstations that are aimed at reversing those negative effects, boosting calorie burning, and improving overall health.

But the reviewers say it’s unclear if such solutions make the mark. To-date, the studies on the alternatives did show that they can cut down on 30 minutes-to-two hours’ worth of sitting time. But all of the studies have been too small and/or poorly designed to definitely give an answer on whether that has an impact on health, the researchers report in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. The studies included a total of only 2174 participants, rarely had randomized controls, and only followed health outcomes for up to six months.

"What we actually found is that most of it is, very much, just fashionable and not proven good for your health," Jos Verbeek, a review coauthor and health researcher at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, told NPR.

"The idea you should be standing four hours a day? There's no real evidence for that," he added. "I would say that there's evidence that standing can be bad for your health." For instance, an earlier study found that standing for long periods may increase the risk for needing medical attention for enlarged veins.

While the authors urge that more, high-quality studies are needed to evaluate the health impacts of different workstations, they concluded so far:

Sit-stand desks did not have a considerable effect on work performance, musculoskeletal symptoms, or sick leave. It remains unclear if standing can repair the harms of sitting because there is hardly any extra energy expenditure.

Ars Technica

 

[Teelie]

A common drug for ulcers could prevent alcohol abuse
A substance derived from licorice root could stop cravings for alcohol.

They are very, very clear this is not a cure. It is a treatment and one that is still in the process of being tested.

There are almost no medicines available to treat alcoholism, but that might be about to change. A new study shows that a substance commonly used to treat stomach ailments may also hold the key to reducing the craving for alcohol.

Many of the scientists involved in the study, published recently in Translational Psychiatry, have been studying the molecular mechanisms of alcoholism in the body for years. One focus of their work is the way our bodies produce glucocorticoids, which are steroid hormones that help our immune systems function smoothly and reduce inflammation. People who drink compulsively often suffer from disruptions in the regulation of glucocorticoids in their bodies.

Previous studies have shown that tinkering with these steroid hormones can dramatically alter how much alcohol rodents and humans want to drink, reducing their urge to drink more after they've already imbibed. (Rodents are often used as human proxies in studies of addiction because they can become addicted to alcohol—and they have hormones in their bodies that are close analogies to the ones in humans.)

In their new study, the researchers looked for drugs that might regulate glucocorticoids, and they discovered something intriguing. Carbenoxolone, or CBX, is a substance derived from licorice root that has long been used to treat ulcers and gastritis. Among other things it can do, CBX dampens activity of an enzyme that enhances the effectiveness of glucocorticoids. Essentially, by taking CBX, you can indirectly affect the glucocorticoid system by dialing back one of the ingredients that makes these steroid hormones so powerful.

The researchers speculated that CBX might therefore work to dial back our urges to binge drink, too. They tested the drug on rodents that were addicted to alcohol and rodents that weren't—and discovered that in both cases, taking CBX "[reduced] alcohol drinking in rodents in both baseline and excessive drinking models," making them "promising new targets for the treatment of alcohol use disorder."

One of the researchers, Scripps Institute neuroscientist Pietro Sanna, told Ars that his group is looking to test the drug in humans because rodents don't always respond the same way that humans do. The good news is that CBX drugs are already approved for use in humans, albeit for different conditions. So we know the drugs are safe; we just don't know whether they'll be effective at preventing alcohol abuse.

But assuming that CBX does affect humans the same way it did the mice and rats in this study, it could prove invaluable for people trying to cut back on drinking. People trying to stay on the wagon often fall off when they come across a "cue" that reminds them of their addiction, like the smell of beer or the sight of a familiar pub. Sanna told Ars that people who took a CBX drug might not feel the urge to drink when faced with a cue. Or if they did have a drink, they might feel satisfied after just one pint and not want to have another.

Once the group tests CBX on humans, they'll have more information. Sanna and his team have already tested a similar drug on humans, and their subjects reported fewer cravings overall. This could be the beginning of a new era in treatments for alcoholism.

Ars Technica

 

[Reek]

https://www.facebook.com/IFeakingLoveScience/videos/1345769228777418/

didn't know where else to post it... but thats cool as ****

 

[Teelie]

This looks too fake to be real but it is. Even the scientists think it looks like a toy. Video below.

[YT]lEhYJEQmExE[/YT]

 

[childeroland]

Physicists Maybe, Just Maybe, Confirm the Possible Discovery of 5th Force of Nature

Excerpt:

For some time, physicists have understood that all known phenomena in the Universe are governed by four fundamental forces. These include weak nuclear force, strong nuclear force, electromagnetism and gravity. Whereas the first three forces of are all part of the Standard Model of particle physics, and can be explained through quantum mechanics, our understanding of gravity is dependent upon Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

Understanding how these four forces fit together has been the aim of theoretical physics for decades, which in turn has led to the development of multiple theories that attempt to reconcile them (i.e. Super String Theory, Quantum Gravity, Grand Unified Theory, etc). However, their efforts may be complicated (or helped) thanks to new research that suggests there might just be a fifth force at work.

In a paper that was recently published in the journal Physical Review Letters, a research team from the University of California, Irvine explain how recent particle physics experiments may have yielded evidence of a new type of boson. This boson apparently does not behave as other bosons do, and may be an indication that there is yet another force of nature out there governing fundamental interactions.

As Jonathan Feng, a professor of physics & astronomy at UCI and one of the lead authors on the paper, said:

“If true, it’s revolutionary. For decades, we’ve known of four fundamental forces: gravitation, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. If confirmed by further experiments, this discovery of a possible fifth force would completely change our understanding of the universe, with consequences for the unification of forces and dark matter.”

The efforts that led to this potential discovery began back in 2015, when the UCI team came across a study from a group of experimental nuclear physicists from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Institute for Nuclear Research. At the time, these physicists were looking into a radioactive decay anomaly that hinted at the existence of a light particle that was 30 times heavier than an electron.

In a paper describing their research, lead researcher Attila Krasznahorka and his colleagues claimed that what they were observing might be the creation of “dark photons”. In short, they believed that they might have at last found evidence of Dark Matter, the mysterious, invisible mass that makes up about 85% of the Universe’s mass.

This report was largely overlooked at the time, but gained widespread attention earlier this year when Prof. Feng and his research team found it and began assessing its conclusions. But after studying the Hungarian teams results and comparing them to previous experiments, they concluded that the experimental evidence did not support the existence of dark photons.

 

[Alex Murphy]

Irish scientists have devised a revolutionary new scanning technique that produces extremely high-res 3D images of bones, sparing patients exposure to X-ray radiation.

The chemists in Trinity College and the Royal College of Surgeons (RCSI) said the technique could have major benefits for healthcare, allowing a patient's bone strength to be assessed in detail. The elderly and athletes will be among those to benefit.

It works by forming agents that are attracted to calcium-rich surfaces, which appear when bones crack, even at a micro level.

3D bone-scanning technique devised by Irish scientists

 

[DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs]

Using a simple membrane extract from spinach leaves, researchers from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have developed a bio-photo-electro-chemical (BPEC) cell that produces electricity and hydrogen from water using sunlight. The raw material of the device is water, and its products are electric current, hydrogen and oxygen.

 

[DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs]

“Reversing” Combustion: We Can Now Convert Carbon Dioxide Back Into Ethanol

 

[DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs]

DARPA’s Brain Chip Implants Could Be the Next Big Mental Health Breakthrough—Or a Total Disaster

Long read but crazy good article and bleeding edge tech.

 

[DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs]

Scientists Finally Observed Time Crystals—But What the Hell Are They?

Motherf***ing time crystals yo! Science B****!

 

[Teelie]

Spinach leaf transforms into sheet of beating human heart cells

Now vegetables are really good for your health.

To create artificial tissue with functioning vasculature, tissue engineers looked no further than their salad bowls.

By peeling away the cells from a spinach leaf and seeding the cellulose matrix left behind with heart cells, researchers were able to create a beating sheet of human heart tissue—complete with a functional vascular system. The proof-of-concept experiment, appearing in the May issue of Biomaterials, provides an intriguing plant-based approach to generating realistic tissues for grafts and transplants.

Vasculature has been a sticking point for bioengineers. Modern methods for creating artificial tissues and organs, such as 3D printing, haven’t included a good way to recreate the vital conduits. Yet the success (and survival) of any bioengineered tissue or organ hinges on whether it’s equipped with an extensive network of blood-carrying vessels, which drop off oxygen and critical nutrients to cells while flushing away molecular garbage.

Though the vasculature of plants is fundamentally different from that of animals, the structures and cell access are similar. Plus, cellulose—the main organic polysaccharide left standing in de-celled leaves—is known to be biocompatible, that is, it’s safe in humans and already used in other tissue-engineering applications, such as wound healing. This sparked ideas in the study's authors, led by bioengineers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts.

“When I looked at the spinach leaf, its stem reminded me of an aorta,” Joshua Gershlak, first author on the study and a researcher at WPI, said in a press release. “So I thought, let’s perfuse right through the stem. We weren’t sure it would work, but it turned out to be pretty easy and replicable. It’s working in many other plants."

Basically, the researchers first pumped a detergent solution through the leaves’ veins, which stripped away the plant cells over several days. Then, the researchers pumped in cells that blanket human blood vessels so they could re-line the leaves' pipes. Lastly, the researchers seeded the outside of the leaves with human heart cells, which took to their plant-based skeleton.

Over the course of a 21-day experiment, the heart cells started spontaneously beating, like normal heart tissue. The researchers also found that mock-blood could flow through the system. The researchers did similar experiments with parts of parsley and peanut plants.

This study is simply a first step. The whole process needs optimization and further development to create viable, resilient tissue for transplants. And it’s currently unclear how leaf-shaped tissue sheets could work as graft tissue or combine to create an artificial organ. Still, the researchers are optimistic and are forging ahead with the idea.

“Although further investigation is needed to understand future applications of this new technology, we believe it has the potential to develop into a “green” solution pertinent to a myriad of regenerative medicine applications,” they conclude.

Ars Technica

 

[:eek:]

Meet the zeptosecond, the shortest unit of time ever measured | Live Science

 

[Dr.]

Declassified footage of Tsar Bomba — “the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created and tested”, and “the most powerful human-made explosive ever detonated” = 50 megatons.

 

[Dr.]

 

[Marvolo]

 

[Dr.]

And amazingly, Wisdom continues to breed!!! Her last chick hatched in February 2021.