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Scientists print self-assembling 'living tissue'
Researchers have created networks of water droplets that mimic some properties of cells in biological tissues. Using a three-dimensional printer, a team at the University of Oxford, UK, assembled tiny water droplets into a jelly-like material that can flex like a muscle and transmit electric signals like chains of neurons. The work is published today inScience1.
These networks, which can contain up to 35,000 droplets, could one day become a scaffold for making synthetic tissues or provide a model for organ functions, says co-author Gabriel Villar of Cambridge Consultants, a technology-transfer company in Cambridge, UK. “We want to see just how far we can push the mimicry of living tissue,” he says.
The network relies on each water droplet having a lipid coating, which forms when the droplets are in a finely-tuned mix of oil and a pure lipid (see video, top).
Velcro action
The lipid molecules have a water-loving head, which sticks to the droplet's surface, and a water-fearing tail, which pokes out into the oily solution. When two lipid-coated droplets come together, each with its carpet of water-fearing tails, they stick to each other like Velcro, forming a lipid bilayer, similar to those in cell membranes. The bilayer creates a structural and functional connection between droplets.
Although previous studies 2, 3 have shown that lipid-coated droplets can form such connections, their watery composition and spherical shape made them tricky to assemble. “I already made a raft of droplets that stuck together,” says biomedical engineer David Needham of the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, who was not involved in the study. “But to print them is really an achievement.”
To pull off the tricky feat, Villar, who at the time was a graduate student in Hagan Bayley's lab at the University of Oxford, created a printer that squirts water droplets from a glass nozzle into a 5 millimetre-deep container full of an oil–lipid mixture. As the droplets sank to the bottom, they gathered their lipid coating (see video, below).
A motorized platform then moved the container ever so slightly so that the next droplet fell either beside or on top of the previous one, eventually creating droplet networks shaped as spheres, cubes and even castles and flowers.
Villar then added a second nozzle so that two kinds of droplets could be squirted at once. To make the networks flex, he printed layers of salty droplets next to low-salt droplets. Because water can permeate the bilayer, the salty droplets swelled with water from their neighbours, causing the whole structure to curve. To create a pathway for electrical current, Villar printed droplets containing a toxin that bores holes in lipid bilayers, through which a current can pass.
Bioengineer Karen Burg of Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina, says that the technology is still too rudimentary to work in clinical settings or to be used for modelling actual organs. “You can argue long and hard about how complex something has to be to give you good information.”
“If their vision really is to make tissues, then I think they’ve still got a long way to go,” says Needham. “But I think they’ve gone about it in the right way.”
Source: http://www.nature.com/news/scientists-print-self-assembling-living-tissue-1.12743
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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