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'3D printing' used to test a 'cure' for type-1 diabetes
Researchers are one step closer to reducing the effects of type-1 diabetes after developing a way to implant insulin-generating cells into the pancreas. According to publisher IOP, this method was previously unsuccessful, but has begun to work now that scientists can "3D-print" a structure to protect the cells. Previous attempts to implant these cells, called islets of Langerhans, have been unsuccessful because the body's immune system would attack them as soon as they were injected.
L'Oreal is 3D printing its own human skin to test cosmetics
The L'Oreal Group hasn't tested its products on animals worldwide since 2013, instead relying on a predictive model that utilizes a "Reconstructed Human Epidermis" -- basically bits of skin grown in a lab -- to ensure that its products are safe. Now the French cosmetics giant is teaming up with 3D bioprinting company Organovo to create the real thing...or at least as real as human skin that comes out of an ink jet nozzle can be.
Annoying song stuck in your head? Chew gum
Catchy songs are infectious, so you shouldn't feel bad if you've spent the last six months muttering about being all about that bass. Treatments for this persistent condition normally include either playing the track on a loop until you're bored of it, listening to anything else or forcing yourself to put it out of your mind. They all work to some degree, but it looks as if researchers at the University of Reading have found a far more successful solution: to chew gum. According to the findings, the best and easiest way to eliminate an earworm is to crack open a pack of Wrigley's.
Scientists look at flower cells in 3D without wrecking them
Plants are delicate things, which makes them a pain to study under an electron microscope -- you'll probably damage the very cells you're trying to look at. You'll get a much better look if the University of Florida's new imaging technique catches on, though. Their approach leans on both a compound fluorescence light microscope and a camera to capture several layers of cells, creating a detailed 3D snapshot of the cellular structure of something as fragile as a flower petal. The resulting pictures may not be shocking (surprise: there are lots of globs), but they should be a big deal for biologists. Researchers would have a better sense of how animal and plant tissues work when they're untouched by humans, which could go a long way toward fighting diseases and learning about new species. [Image credit: Jacob B. Landis]
Artificial blood vessels can cause your body to regrow the real thing
A blocked blood vessel can be pretty nasty, and the two most common treatments involve wedging it open or transplanting another vessel from elsewhere in your body. Scientists in Vienna think they may have a slightly more elegant solution to the latter, having developed a method of replacing blocked vessels with artificial ones. The clever part here is that the synthetic polymer that the prostheses are made of encourages the body to grow a real vessel in its place. In one trial on a rat, it took less than six months before the artificial material had broken down and been replaced with a brand new blood vessel.
NASA forms a coalition to look for life on other planets
NASA knows that it can't rely solely on astronomers and robotic rovers to find life on other worlds, so it's recruiting some help. The space agency has formed the Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS), a coalition of scientists who study astrophysics, Earth, other planets and the Sun. The group will use its collective knowledge to search for alien lifeforms using perspectives that NASA wouldn't always have -- how does the loss of atmospheric chemicals affect the chances for life, for example? NASA hopes that the group will not only determine the habitability of planets, but develop technology to study those planets in greater detail. There's no guarantee that NExSS will discover organisms, let alone organisms that you might see within your lifetime, but the odds of success are now a bit higher. [Image credit: NASA]
Lasers quickly load thousands of cells with nano-sized cargo
Doctors dream of injecting cells with large nanoscopic cargo to treat or study illnesses. The existing approach to this is extremely slow, however. At one cell per minute, it would take ages to get a meaningful payload. That won't be a problem if UCLA scientists have their way, though -- they've developed a technique that uses lasers to inject legions of cells at a time. The concentrated light heats up the titanium coating on a chip until it boils water surrounding the target cells, creating fissures that let the cargo inside. It only takes 10 seconds for the laser to process an entire chip's worth of cells, and researchers estimate that they could fill a whopping 100,000 cells per minute.
Here are the most beautiful medical images you'll see in 2015
This isn't some long lost Jackson Pollock, it's what's going on inside the mind of a fruitfly. Life really does imitate art, as this incredible collection of medical images from Wellcome Images illustrates. These spectacular shots leverage modern medicine's most advanced imaging techniques while providing us with an unprecedented look at biology's most fundamental functions.
Scientists take detailed pictures of the smallest known life forms
Just how small can life get? Almost unbelievably small, if you ask a team of Berkeley Lab researchers. They've taken the first detailed electron microscope pictures of the tiniest bacteria known to date -- at a typical 0.009 cubic microns in volume, you could fit 150 of them in an already miniscule e. coli cell. Scientists had to catch the hard-to-spot microbes by using a new portable cryo plunger, which flash-froze groundwater to near absolute zero (about -458F) to keep the cells intact while they were in transit.
Microscopic gold tubes can both detect and destroy cancer cells
There's no doubt that doctors would prefer to treat cancer as soon as they spot it, and it looks like nanotechnology might give them that chance. Researchers at the University of Leeds have successfully tested gold nanotubes that are useful for both imaging and destroying cancer cells. Since the tubes absorb near-infrared light frequencies, which both generate heat and render human skin transparent, you only need to zap them with lasers of varying brightness to achieve multiple ends. You can use a relatively low brightness to reveal tumors, while high brightness will heat the tubes enough to kill nearby tumorous cells. The shape also has room for drugs, so you can deliver medicine at the same time.
Transparent eggs let scientists see how bird embryos grow
If you want to see how animal embryos grow in eggs, you typically have to poke a hole in the egg and patch it up later. That's not always safe, and it may give you an incomplete picture of what's going on. Scientists at Beijing's Tsinghua University think they have a better solution, though. They've developed transparent artificial bird eggs that mimic the real deal while showing every single nuance of the embryo's development. The key is a special process that gives an organic polymer the same shape as an egg, offering the avian a relatively natural environment that's easier to work with in a lab.
The FDA will regulate wearables making health claims
Everyone loves the idea of strapping a smartwatch to their wrist and using it to get a bit healthier, but there's a fine line between casual wearables and serious medical devices. It's an important distinction, since while the former can be sold without any sort of oversight, the latter is rightly covered by the FDA's regulations. Since the most recent batch of fitness wearables could be blurring the borders somewhat, the agency has decided to make its thinking on the subject a little clearer.
Russia wants to collect the DNA of every creature
Institutions have already been amassing huge DNA collections to catalog the world's creatures, but Moscow State University might just top them all. It's planning to build "Noah's Ark," a repository for the genes of every creature, living or extinct -- as long as the genes are readable, they'll either be cryogenically frozen or stored as pure data. Not surprisingly, it's going to be a massive undertaking in more ways than one. The Russian government is spending the equivalent of $194 million on the facility, which should occupy an enormous 166 square miles when it's finished in 2018.
These videos prove that music and science can (usually) mix
Wondering how NASA could make a clever yet groan-inducing music video like "All About That Space?" Really, it's just carrying on a tradition of producing science-themed tunes. A lot of them are cheesy covers -- we've seen scientific riffs on Adele and Psy, among others -- while others remind you why biology, chemistry and physics are such wonderful things. We've rounded up ten noteworthy science music videos to show you how good (or at least, dorky) they can get. And if you've discovered any other cool or kitschy clips, be sure to share them in the comments.
Artificial evolution is now possible in chemicals, but life remains elusive
We're still a very long way from creating an evolving lifeform from scratch in a lab. However, the University of Glasgow has managed to foster artificial evolution in chemicals. Their technique uses a 3D printing robot to both create oil droplets and choose the next generation based on desirable properties, like stability. No, the chemicals aren't evolving on their own, but the process works much like natural selection -- after 20 generations, the droplets were noticeably more stable. In the long run, the scientists hope to use this discovery both to study the beginnings of life and maybe, just maybe, create it.
BioDigital Human - 3D anatomy views on iOS
BioDigital Human (free with in-app purchases) is an astounding 3D map of the human body, all rendered in real time so you can explore, zoom and rotate anatomically correct illustrations. The body can be dissected virtually, and layers can be added or removed. Illustrations can be annotated and shared. The free version has access to more than 1,000 anatomy and health condition models, along with editing tools. You can have any 5 models resident on your iOS device at any one time, and you can manage them by deleting some and replacing them with other models. A premium option is US$4.00 a month, billed annually, which gives you the ability to browse more than 5,000 models, along with tools for authoring and embedding. I can see a great benefit for medical or biology students, and even medical professionals can use this to create impressive displays to share with patients or students. There are other plans that let you explore these models in a web browser on a laptop or desktop computer. The quality of the graphics is very high quality, and on my iPhone 6, rotation is done in real-time and is very smooth. When you step back and think that this is running on an iPhone or iPad and not a high-end workstation, you will be impressed. This app is better experienced than described, so if you are interested download the free version and explore. The iOS app is universal and requires iOS 7 or greater. If you are interested in how the human body works this is the app for you. It is both impressive and educational.
3D-printed livers go on sale to impatient scientists
So far, the biggest benefit of 3D-printing organs is that you don't need someone to donate their body to medical science before you can do an experiment. That's why Organovo's big news is so exciting for scientists, since the company has let it be known that its 3D-printed livers are now on sale. The bio-printed tissues can be used for drug testing programs, since causing unexpected liver damage is one of the biggest causes for pharmaceutical recalls. Unfortunately, with a rated lifespan of around 42 days, we won't be able to use these stamp-sized organs in transplants just yet, but who knows? Maybe in a few years time, the idea of asking a relative or close friend for a slice of their liver will be as outdated as sending them a fax.
The food industry's next big hope is to sell you exercise in a can
In every business, from the Amalgamated Rubber Sole Company through to the halls of Nabisco, someone, somewhere, is dreaming of a pill that instantly makes you thin. Several already exist, but if you don't want to sit through that one worrying side-affect of Xenical or find a way to get a large quantity of Speed delivered to your garage, then a double-hander of diet and exercise is the only way to go. That's not something that will deter Nestlé, however, since the company is working on a foodstuff that, it's hoped, will help you to "exercise" without having to leave the couch.
Your own cells could one day 'spy' on you to track disease
Scientists from MIT have figured out how to hack living cells to store biological events around them. They modified E. Coli cells to generate so-called retrons -- a type of mutated single-strand DNA -- in response to stimuli like light or chemicals. Those lo-fi "memories" can then be read back to glean useful information using high-throughput DNA sequencing and other techniques. However, it works even better by scaling it up to billions of copies. Once the hacked cells reproduce, new ones start recording the events too, meaning scientists can track changes in an environment over time. The mutations can even be written and erased, meaning they could one day track the progress of a disease from directly inside your body, like a personal, benevolent NSA. [Image credit: Shutterstock/vitstudio]
Genome testing is now easy, fast and pretty
Genome testing gear doesn't get a lot of love. Like a lot of lab equipment, it tends to be ugly and unwieldy -- it's not designed with the same elegance as the smartphone in your pocket. Mercifully, the crew at Fluidigm appears to have solved those problems in one shot with its Juno genotyping machine. The Yves Behar-designed device is (dare we say it) pretty, and wouldn't look out of place sitting on a desk. It's also more intuitive, relying on a large, simple touchscreen interface instead of keyboards and tiny displays.
