Making a durable, natural-looking skin substitute that could cover burn injuries or other wounds has been a decades-long dream of bioengineers. Now we may be much closer to that dream, thanks to a new method for printing 3-D skin complete with working blood vessels.
The research, done at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and Yale University, uses living human skin cells turned into a liquid “bio ink.” The bio ink is used to print artificial skin, which then grows its own blood vessel system.
“The vasculature is very important because that’s how the host and the graft talk to each other,” says Pankaj Karande, a professor of chemical and biological engineering at RPI, who led the research. "Communication between host and graft is critical if the skin substitute is not to be rejected by the body."
Head over at Smithsonian for more details about this.
Being an aerial lookout is one of the most dangerous positions in the crew of First World War German Zeppelin. As an aerial lookout, one’s job will be to observe the ground for enemy positions and bombing targets while hanging at the end of a long tether which was suspended from the belly of the aircraft.
The lookout sat in an observation car called the spy gondola or spy basket that was lowered from the zeppelin through the cloud, while the zeppelin itself stayed shrouded within the cloud layer and out of enemy view. The aerial lookout then became the eyes for the zeppelin’s pilot instructing the pilot on an appropriate course via a telephone. Although the job was alarming, it was said that many crew members enjoyed lookout duty because it was the only place where they were allowed to smoke.
The spy gondola was later adapted by the US Navy, but they decided that it was too dangerous to use.
I wonder, how did it feel being an aerial lookout?
Built by Tesla and managed by renewable energy company Neoen, is the Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia. It is the biggest battery in the world, and it is set to grow even bigger next year. It will be expanded by an extra 50 percent early next year.
The Hornsdale facility was built in 2017 to help alleviate the energy woes of the state of South Australia, which had seen rolling blackouts the previous summer. Tesla was awarded the contract, and Elon Musk vowed to build it within 100 days or it was free. True to his word, it was completed in November that year.
With a capacity of 129 MWh and an output of up to 100 MW, Hornsdale became the world’s largest lithium-ion storage battery, a title that it still holds two years later. And now, it looks set to strengthen its lead with a new expansion.
For hundreds of years, the claim of the 2nd century Greek doctor Galen, remained unchallenged. Galen believed that the blood is produced in the liver. The produced blood then would be filtered through tiny pores in the heart. But was it the right one? No, it wasn’t. We know better.
But who really discovered how the heart actually works? The discovery of the heart’s true anatomy is commonly credited to the English physician William Harvey, but before him was someone who correctly explained how the heart pumps blood and did so way before the arrival of modern medicine.
Sprawled on her back in the dirt, with her head resting on one side, and her elbows bent as if she was about to prop up, is an elderly woman. She was already dead for three months, and her face was no longer recognizable.
She was among more than 150 corpses scattered beneath the trees, rotting in the open air or covered in plastic, on roughly three wooded acres.
This might look like a serial killer’s dumping ground for an outsider, but this was just another ordinary day at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Anthropology Research Facility. This facility, known as the “body farm”, is one of the first of only a handful of such facilities in the world where researchers study human decay and law enforcement officers train to retrieve human remains at crime scenes.
The dead woman was there to play her part in a developing frontier in forensic crime solving: analyzing and interrogating the suite of trillions of microorganisms and other creatures that are witness to our deaths.
“It’s an exciting time,” said Dawnie Steadman, director of the school’s Forensic Anthropology Center — through which the body farm operates — standing in the shade to escape the nearly 95-degree heat one morning in late May. “We’re in an age of technology where the microbes can help provide new answers about time of death, but also whether a body was moved, and medical conditions inside the body that can help identify a person.”
Post-mortem interval, which is the calculation of time since death, is an important aspect of forensic investigation. It is one of the focuses of body farm research.
When an individual is unidentified, the post-mortem interval can help investigators narrow down who they might be based on missing persons records. “If we say, well, this individual passed away at least a year ago,” Steadman said, “then we know not to look at recent cases.”
Most of us don’t read license agreements of the apps that we use. I myself am guilty of this. I just scroll down and click or tap “I agree” and I go on my merry way after. Since most of the time we do this, we have no idea what the consequences will be unless we encounter an issue within the app. Thankfully, we have a “robot lawyer” in our midst that could help us take the mystery out of license agreements.
DoNotPay, the “robot lawyer” service that helps you contest parking tickets and even sue people, is launching a new tool to help customers understand license agreements. Called “Do Not Sign,” the service is included with DoNotPay’s monthly $3 subscription fee, and it lets users upload, scan, or copy and paste the URLs of any license agreements they’d like to check. The service uses machine learning to highlight clauses it thinks users need to know about, including options to opt out from data collection. It’s available starting today, November 20th, on the web and via DoNotPay’s app on iOS.
This is Narwhal (short for “Narwhal the Little Magical Furry Unicorn”). He was born with an extra tail on his head. Unicorns might not be real, but I think we can compensate with a furry unicorn. I’ve got no problem with that.
Rochelle Steffen, founder of the Jackson, Missouri, animal rescue Mac's Mission, noticed the one-of-a-kind dog in a Facebook post. The puppy had been abandoned and was in need of a new home. Mac's Mission takes in a lot of animals with histories of abuse, injuries, or physical abnormalities that make them harder to adopt. When Steffen saw the unicorn dog, she knew that he was a perfect candidate for her rescue.
Narhwal's [sic] "tusk" is about a third of the size of his regular tail, and according to his veterinarian, it causes him no pain or medical issues. He can't wag the bonus tail, but it does wave back and forth when he plays.
The extra tail indeed adds cuteness to Narwhal. What do you think?
Disaster strikes in an upcoming episode of Sesame Street. In the episode Abby Cadabby’s brother, Rudy, messes up a drawing he’s been working on, and he gets very frustrated with himself.
But since this is a kid’s show, we know (or rather, we expect) this to have a happy ending.
Alan, the current owner of the show’s gathering place Hooper’s Store, encourages Rudy not to give up. Eventually, Rudy gets inspired by his mistake and creates a new picture.
The episode—designed to teach that messing up is okay, but giving up is not—is in keeping with the curriculum focus of the show’s 50th season, which begins airing on November 16: “Oops and Aha!: Embracing the Power of Possibilities.”
“Today’s preschool kids are under an unprecedented amount of stress and pressure,” Rosemarie Truglio, Sesame Workshop’s senior vice president of curriculum and content, said in a statement. “That result-oriented mindset can make kids afraid to take even the safest risks — never trying to pour their own milk for fear of spilling it.”
The episode is a timely one as perfectionism has become increasingly common in young people over the past decades. Perfectionism has been linked to a number of psychological issues, such as depression and social anxiety.
Tired of just staying in an Earthly hotel? You might consider going to a space hotel within the next few years. Numerous plans that detail the construction of the Von Braun Space Station were revealed by its designer.
Built by the Gateway Foundation, the world's first space hotel will have gravity, bars, inviting interiors and full-fledged kitchens. They plan to have the station visited by about a 100 tourists per week by 2025.
More details about the space hotel over at Big Think.
You’ve been invited to a friend of a friend’s party. You’ve never been to this house before, and you’ve also never been to this street. As you track the street numbers, you notice you’re getting close, and you (automatically) turn the radio down in order to look for the house better. The question is, why?
One response might be: “When we need to concentrate a little more, like when we’re looking for a house in the dark, we often try to get rid of distractions so we can focus.”
This answer is intuitively appealing. It’s also exactly the kind of answer cognitive psychologists try to avoid.
The words concentrate, distractions, and focus all point towards something (attention) that is left undefined. Rather than detailing its properties and how it works, we just assume people intuitively know what it means.
Recently, Chinese company Big Pixel posted a panorama photo of Shanghai. And when I say “panorama”, it is not just your ordinary panorama photo that your phone can replicate. It is a panorama photo of the whole city, and you can zoom in and see everything in detail.
With this kind of scale, it wouldn’t be a surprise if you find funny or weird details in the photo. Check out some of them over at Bored Panda.
Cell phones have become an essential need for most of us. It might be next to food, if I dare say so. After all, it’s what keeps us updated to the latest news, and what keeps us connected to our friends whenever and wherever we go.
When it comes to traveling, battery power is usually one of those things that we worry about. When I myself do travel and arrive at a place, the first thing that I always look for is a charging station. But in doing so, I am risking myself to juice-jacking.
This week, the LA County District Attorney’s office put out a warning to remind everyone of one way you shouldn’t keep that device charged: a public USB port.
The issue is that public USB ports can potentially be hacked so that they install data-stealing malware onto your phone while you charge up. Called “juice-jacking,” the hack could result in scammers getting access to your passwords, personal information and more.
Yikes!
Thankfully, there are better options than just looking for public USB ports. Check out the alternatives over at LifeHacker.
Brooklyn — During New York’s harshest weather, Shayla would open her kitchen window, as well as the screen. This means that bugs, dirt, ice, or humidity, depending on the season, can come in unhindered to her house. But why does Shayla expose herself to these elements? The answer is, so that a stray cat can go through the window and seek shelter, that is, if he wants to.
I moved into my apartment in the fall of 2014. It’s a first-floor railroad in a brick rowhouse overlooking a garden that none of the tenants have access to. As a result, the yard is a wild place. Its only human trespassers are the occasional handyman or gardener.
The cat appeared shortly after I moved in. He was a small grey and white tabby, with a fuzzy nub on his behind where a tail should be. I named him Nubbin. After seeing him dart through the yard a few times, I bought a can of Friskies, put it on a plate on the windowsill, and was happily surprised when he came and ate it all up. Now, I feed Nubbin two or three times a day.
Nubbin, like Shayla, is an anxious and neurotic creature. But how did Nubbin teach Shayla a lesson about anxiety? Know more about this story over at Vice.
Vaccines are safe and effective in preventing the spread of disease. Failing to vaccinate your children not only puts them in danger from diseases when outbreaks occur, it also puts vulnerable people around them at risk.
Now it seems that Germany, Australia, and a number of other countries are fed up enough with vaccine-refusing parents that they’re experimenting with punitive measures...
This marks a pretty aggressive shift in how we manage vaccine refusers and the costly, deadly outbreaks of diseases like measles and whooping cough they help spark.
Germany and Australia are not the only countries who implemented severe measures against vaccine-refusing parents. Check out the global crackdown on parents who refuse to vaccinate their children over at Vox.
It might look like your conventional plastic, but it really isn’t. It’s made up of fish waste and algae. In other words, if in an unfortunate moment it goes to the ocean, the plastic could be eaten safely by a fish. Called MarinaTex, this plastic won this year’s James Dyson Award.
“It began with my desire to work with waste,” says Lucy Hughes, a recent graduate from the U.K.’s University of Sussex, who began developing the material as a student. Through a contact at the university, Hughes visited a fish processing plant to see the massive quantity of waste generated by the industry and find new ways to use it. She focused on fish skins and scales. “When I had it in my hands, I realized this has got potential,” she says. “It’s super strong and flexible and pliable.”
Hughes spent months experimenting with fish waste in her kitchen, running more than 100 experiments to find a binder and a process that could hold together the proteins in the fish skins and scales. “I had a lot of failed attempts—a lot of things either went too brittle or too gooey or somewhat moldy,” she says. She finally landed on a type of algae that can be locally sourced.
More details about this wonderful invention over at Fast Company.
