Look at a heart. Look at a jellyfish. Go Hmmmmm....

[kayshapero]

Veeeerrry interesting.....

Artificial jellyfish 'Medusoid' swims in a heartbeat: Creation is an amalgam of silicone polymer and heart muscle cells
July 22, 2012


This is a still of the artificial jellyfish. Credit: Harvard University and Caltech



Using recent advances in marine biomechanics, materials science, and tissue engineering, a team of researchers at Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have turned inanimate silicone and living cardiac muscle cells into a freely swimming "jellyfish."


The finding serves as a proof of concept for reverse engineering a variety of muscular organs and simple life forms. It also suggests a broader definition of what counts as synthetic life in an emerging field that has primarily focused on replicating life's building blocks. The researchers' method for building the tissue-engineered jellyfish, dubbed "Medusoid," was published in a Nature Biotechnology paper on July 22.

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