In a leap toward making stem cell therapy widely available, researchers at the Ansary Stem Cell Institute at Weill Cornell Medical College have discovered that endothelial cells, the most basic building blocks of the vascular system, produce growth factors that can grow copious amounts of adult stem cells and their progeny over the course of weeks. Until now, adult stem cell cultures would die within four or five days despite best efforts to grow them.
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A new phenomenon found. Everyone keep looking there’s more out there!
A team of scientists at MIT have discovered a previously unknown phenomenon that can cause powerful waves of energy to shoot through minuscule wires known as carbon nanotubes. The discovery could lead to a new way of producing electricity, the researchers say.
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Small can be more.
As far as mobile, ad-hoc medical labs for developing countries go, you can’t get any more mobile or ad-hoc than something the size of a postage stamp. One Harvard University chemist has developed an ultraportable “paper†chip that can diagnose killer diseases like malaria, HIV, hepatitis, and tuberculosis for just a penny at a time. A finger prick’s worth of blood on one side of the paper, according to inventor George Whitesides, produces a colorful, tree-like pattern on the other that indicates what ails you. The surprisingly low-tech secret? Water-repellant comic-book ink.
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Slick invention inspired by hairy spiders.
Engineering researchers have crafted a flat surface that refuses to get wet. Water droplets skitter across it like ball bearings tossed on ice.
The inspiration? Not wax. Not glass. Not even Teflon.
Instead, University of Florida engineers have achieved what they label in a new paper a “nearly perfect hydrophobic interface” by reproducing, on small bits of flat plastic, the shape and patterns of the minute hairs that grow on the bodies of spiders.
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Just when you think we know it all a wasp shows us the way. Imagine what else the natural world has to show us if we only took the time to look.
Wasps learned how to use sophisticated antibiotics millions of years before the invention of penicillin, research has shown.
Digger wasps of the family Philanthus, also known as ”beewolves”, harness beneficial bacteria to manufacture a cocktail of drugs that protect its larvae from infection.