Translate

Monday, September 17, 2012

Life: Almost doesn't count... or does it?

Have you seen this yet!? Artificial Jellyfish? No way... yes way!

Okay, if that isn't enough to raise on eyebrow then chew on this for a moment. Dr. Kevin Kit Parker of Harvard University with the help of John Dabiri and Jana Nowroth of the California Institute of Technology, built an artificial jellyfish from RAT heart cells. Oddly enough, this experiment has little to do with jellyfish or rats. Instead the key word here is HEART. In fact, Dr. Parker insists that in maybe a decade at least that the medical community might be using clinical therapies designed from his initial approach. For example, as stated in the article hyperlink on ABC and Nature that this medical technology could be used to replace parts of a human beating heart like heart valves.

Nature.com - Artificial Jellyfish

ABCnews.com - Artificial Jellyfish

Although the pumping Jellfyfish is electrically stimulated and not a "living" organism it's still important to realize that each individual cell on the engineered "MEDUSOID" are living. So bizarre and cool.


2 comments:

  1. That is really cool! Hope this gets science one step closer to jellyfish sting relief.
    -Joe McDonough

    ReplyDelete
  2. you have really cool info to share but this is super interesting!

    ReplyDelete