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If an overhyped vegetable existed before marketers coined the term superfood — and long before Oprah Winfrey chatted up acai berries with Dr. Oz — look no further than spinach. (Here’s to Popeye, eating the stuff by the can to inflate his biceps.) Spinach alone, of course, won’t pump anyone up. But it does have a few physical properties of the type that excite biomedical engineers. Spinach grows a network of veins, for instance, that thread through its leaves in a way similar to blood vessels through a human heart.

These leafy veins allowed researchers at Massachusetts’s Worcester Polytechnic Institute to give a new meaning to heart-healthy spinach. The tissue engineers, as they reported recently in the journal Biomaterials, stripped green spinach leaves of their cells. The spinach turned translucent. The scientists seeded the gaps that the plant cells left behind with human heart tissue. Heart cells, in clusters, beat for up to three weeks in this unusual environment.

The inspiration for the human-plant fusion came over lunch — and, yes, the leafy greens were involved — when WPI bioengineers Glenn Gaudette and Joshua Gershlak began to brainstorm new ways to tackle a deadly medical problem: the lack of donor organs. Of the more than 100,000 people on the donor list, nearly two dozen people die each day while waiting for an organ transplant.

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Researchers have developed a line immortal stem cells that allow them to generate an unlimited supply of artificial red blood cells on demand.

If these artificial blood cells pass clinical trials, they’ll be far more efficient for medical use than current red blood cell products, which have to be generated from donor blood — and would be a huge deal for patients with rare blood types, who often struggle to find matching blood donors.

The idea isn’t for these immortal stem cells to replace blood donation altogether — when it comes to regular blood transfusions, donated blood still does the trick.

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This is big: Is the Singularity a step closer?

Tesla Inc founder and Chief Executive Elon Musk has launched a company called Neuralink Corp through which computers could merge with human brains, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Neuralink is pursuing what Musk calls the “neural lace” technology, implanting tiny brain electrodes that may one day upload and download thoughts, the Journal reported. (on.wsj.com/2naUATf)

Musk has not made an official announcement, but Neuralink was registered in California as a “medical research” company last July, and he plans on funding the company mostly by himself, a person briefed on the plans told the Journal.

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An exclusive interview with Ichor, the biotech company pioneering a SENS based repair therapy that could help cure age related blindness.


Check out our exclusive interview with Ichor the company taking the first SENS based therapy to the clinic. Should clinical trials be a success this will mark the arrival of a technology that addresses one of the aging processes.

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Are 3D printed pills the future? We visited a London laboratory to find out.

Established by academics from University College London (UCL) in 2014, FabRx is a company seeking commercialize 3D printed medicines and devices. On the principle that everyone is different, the vision of 3D printed pills it to be able to provide more personal and specific care to patients in need.

Dr. Alvaro Goyanes is one of the four founding partners of FabRx and the company’s director of development. Dr. Goyanes invited 3D Printing Industry into the lab at UCL’s School of Pharmacy to find out more about the ongoing FabRx research.

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Amazing Genes are HIDDEN inside of us; Science has found it. In 2014 one of the craziest science experiments by some incredible scientists at Oxford University found that less than 10% of human DNA is active, meaning that the majority of your genetic code is just sitting around doing nothing.

Narration provided by JaM Advertising New Mexico www.tasteofjam.com

If you’ve ever been in a fight with a child, and I know I have, you’ll soon realise that their bodies have an uncanny ability to heal faster than an adult’s. Every human on Earth possesses a gene called ACTN3, but for some people this gene possesses a very special ability — the ability to be totally badass at sports. When my head is in a bouquet of flowers or I’m hovering over a batch of freshly baked cookies, I wonder how great this must smell to a dog. Remember that movie where Bruce Willis had unbreakable bones and Samuel L Jackson played a weird guy who said he was unbreakable and he proved it when he was in a car crash and his bones were unbreakable?The ability to hibernate for months at a time is a trait man has envied ever since the invention of the Lay-Z-Boy. Instead of sleeping for months, how awesome would it be to need no more than four hours sleep and still feel as refreshed as you would after sleeping in till noon? Remember the mice from the regeneration gene entry? Ever wanted to swim underwater without having to worry about that pesky little thing called drowning? On the surface this ability may sound pretty neat, because imagine how good chocolate or steak would be if your sense of taste was ramped up a few notches? The ability to become infected by an ancient virus may not seem like the best dormant trait to wake up, but they can’t all be winners now can they?

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Tech to aid video search, detection of disease and of fraud.

Artificial intelligence has been the secret sauce for some of the biggest technology companies. But technology giant Alphabet Inc.’s Google is betting big on ‘democratising’ artificial intelligence and machine learning and making them available to everyone — users, developers and enterprises.

From detecting and managing deadly diseases, reducing accident risks to discovering financial fraud, Google said that it aimed to improve the quality of life by lowering entry barriers to using these technologies. These technologies would also add a lot of value to self-driving cars, Google Photos’ search capabilities and even Snapchat filters that convert the images of users into animated pictures.

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Researchers have successfully used spinach leaves to build functioning human heart tissue, complete with veins that can transport blood.

To tackle a chronic shortage of donor organs, scientists have been working on growing various tissues and even whole organs in the lab. But culturing a bunch of cells is only part of the solution — they simply won’t thrive without a constant blood supply.

It’s notoriously difficult to build a working network of fine blood vessels (also called vasculature), especially when you get down to capillaries, which are only 5 to 10 micrometres wide. Blood vessels transport the oxygen and nutrients that a lab-grown tissue sample needs to grow and function.

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