“In what might be the first documented case of technologically-assisted interspecies telepathy, an international team of researchers has successfully created a non-invasive brain-to-brain interface that allows humans to make a rat move involuntarily. The breakthrough could lead to more advanced techniques in which a person can control the parts of another person’s body with their thoughts.”

The same printer technology that sits on your desk could soon be a common fixture in rebuilding human tissue, treating burns by laying down layers of a patients’ own skin or even rebuilding whole organs.

A team at Wake Forest University has built a “bioprinter” that uses cells instead of ink. It even uses an ordinary, off-the-shelf printhead, connected to test tubes full of different cell types instead of wells full of colored inks.

Led by Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston–Salem, N.C., the team is working on treating burns. Such wounds can be hard to treat, because in severe cases there might not be enough healthy skin on the patient to harvest or culture for a graft. Grafting skin to cover burn wounds is also important for preventing infections, which can be a source of complications. Printing out cells grown in culture would eliminate these problems. Another application is repairing scar tissue.

Currently, grafts are either sheets of skin taken from a donor site on the body, or layers of cells cultured in vitro from the patient. But the latter technique is not always successful as the skin cells grown in vitro must be handled carefully and the skin can break down or contract.

To treat burns, a laser would scan the wounded area and create a three-dimensional map that would be transmitted to the printer. The print head would lay down the cells layer by layer, directly on the burn. […]

The breakthrough in using bioprinting for tissue regeneration is the gel used to contain the cells: The mixture must hold the cells in place when they are laid down as well as provide a viable medium where they can be kept alive while they are held in the reservoirs. “It took us seven years,” he says. “There’s lots of trial and error; this isn’t trivial chemistry,” he adds. […]

For building tissue, several printing methods were tried, including three-dimensional CAD and laser printing. But once the group hit on the inkjet method, it turned out to work so well that some of the early work on building tissue was done on modified inkjet printers from a local office supply store. […]

So far, the system has been tested on mice*, which are given wounds similar to burns. Those that were treated with printer-generated cells healed in three weeks, whereas those that were allowed to recover naturally required five weeks. The researchers plan to test the system on bigger animals in the future*. […]

The Wake Forest group is not just working on skin. Bone tissue and a two-chambered mouse heart have both been successfully printed. The heart was stimulated to beat when the cells were shocked with electricity, and the printed bones have been implanted in mice. […]

* I do wish they wouldn’t experiment on animals and do not personally ‘condone’ it (if you will) but I am still able to recognize that this is outstanding.

“After experiencing drastic changes in my environment, I looked for other experiences that might profoundly affect my perception of the self. So I devised another experiment where everyday I took a different drug and drew myself under the influence. Within weeks I became lethargic and suffered mild brain damage. I am still conducting this experiment but over greater lapses of time. I only take drugs that are given to me.”

I believe I’ve shared this before but I must share it again. It may take a couple of minutes to load for you, but I promise it’s worth it.

Five extraordinary Americans […] can remember nearly every single moment of their lives.

Scientists hope that understanding their ability to recall absolutely everything will give new insights into memory loss and conditions such as Alzheimer’s.

[…] New York-based violinist, Louise Owen, says she can remember every day since she was 11 years old.

The 37-year-old said: ‘For me, I will often see a calendar in my head, and it’s usually a month at a time. When I hear the date, it’s like my brain immediately goes to a position on a calendar and once I locate it, I see what happened instantly. […] It’s almost as automatic as if you say, ‘What’s your name’ or ‘Where do you live?’ As soon as you say that date, I’m instantly there, I know how I felt, I know what happened that day. It’s as if it happened five minutes ago, as opposed to 22 years ago. It makes me want to live my life with much more intensity, connection and compassion.’

[…] The first person ever identified with this ability is Jill Price. She declined to appear on the show saying she is haunted by her constant memories.

[…] Dr James McGaugh, who has studied the condition, said: ‘It could be a new chapter. These people come and display a kind of memory we’ve never seen before, and we have to say, “What is that about?’ […] We’re going to take a look and see if we can figure that out. And it could be very important.’ 

… Death to a cardiologist means that your heart has stopped, and he can’t get it to restart. But to a neurologist, it might mean something else.

Medical journals continue to fill with conditions that mimic death but which are not death at all.

Often we’ll say ‘death is the absence of life,’ but then we have to define ‘life’ and that’s almost impossible. All we can really do is set criteria for who’s dead.

Death comes […] when the stability of the human body breaks down, and the system no longer works as a whole. Does that happen when the heart goes? The lungs? The lungs and heart together? The brain? That’s the debate. […] Brain-dead pregnant mothers can continue to gestate and give birth to their babies long after being declared brain dead.

An MRI that twenty years ago was considered a ‘photograph of death’ is now just an image of a sick but reparable brain.

Because ‘irreversible’ is locked into our present definition of death, I don’t think we can ever truly define it.

Death is the unknown and shall always be the unknown. We don’t know where we’re going, if anywhere. […] We all have to face the fact that at some point, the universe will exist without us. We are not special and are not ultimately needed. Neither science nor medicine is of much help here, and neither is most egocentric religion. […] In the end, it is of some comfort to know that whatever inequities exist in the world, we are all equal in this regard, and we all share the same fate.”

Benjaman Kyle is the pseudonym adopted by a man who […] was discovered unconscious on August 31, 2004, in Richmond Hill, Georgia and is believed to be about 60 years old.

Benjaman Kyle was discovered behind a Burger King […] lying on the ground inside the stone wall enclosing the dumpsters. […] He was assumed homeless and taken to a hospital for treatment. Officers who searched the scene found no clothes or wallet to identify the man. According to the manager, there were no weapons found at the scene. Paramedics reported that there were three depressions in his head, that may indicate blows by a blunt object. When found, he had no memory of who he was, and did not even recognize his own face. […] Initially, he was known as BK because he was discovered on the premises of a Burger King. Since then, he has chosen to live under the name Benjaman Kyle and insists that his real first name is Benjaman.

There have been major efforts to identify Kyle, but as of June 2009, none of them have been successful. […]

The hope of identifying him rests on finding a DNA match, or on attracting the attention of someone who recognizes him by his photograph.

There’s a small room in Minnesota that blocks out 99% of all external sound. […] Nobody can take more than 45 minutes alone in the room before they go nuts.

“When it’s quiet, ears will adapt. The quieter the room, the more things you hear. You’ll hear your heart beating, sometimes you can hear your lungs, hear your stomach gurgling loudly. In the anechoic chamber, you become the sound.” […] “How you orient yourself is through sounds you hear when you walk. In the anechnoic chamber, you don’t have any cues. You take away the perceptual cues that allow you to balance and manoeuvre.” […]

That sounds swell. Just the serene quiet of you, your thoughts, and the unceasing pounding of the human heart. Your brain can’t take it, apparently, and begins to fabricate sounds that aren’t really there—completely delusional noises meant to block out the churning of your own horrid biomass. 

[…] It goes without saying that being a parent is a life-altering, monumental decision. In talking to others, what I find to be remarkable is the universal nature of the message for having kids, “You’ll change your mind, you would be a great parent, you’re crazy.”

This is a major decision pushed on those who don’t want to have children so casually.

[…] What’s also remarkable to me is the sadness that comes across the faces of my friends when I tell them I don’t want to have kids. Shouldn’t the answer be, “It’s good to know what you want, especially when it comes to a major responsibility like parenting.”

[…] Despite the progress we’ve made as a culture, we still derive a great deal of comfort from women who fit into a prescribed, gender path. The negative responses women receive when they announce their choice not to have children is symptomatic of what we still expect women to do with their lives.

Astronomers have confirmed the existence of an Earth-like planet in the “habitable zone” around a star not unlike our own. […] It is the closest confirmed planet yet to one like ours - an “Earth 2.0”. However, the team does not yet know if Kepler 22-b is made mostly of rock, gas or liquid. […]

Kepler 22-b lies at a distance from its sun about 15% less than the distance from the Earth to the Sun, and its year takes about 290 days. However, its sun puts out about 25% less light, keeping the planet at its balmy temperature that would support the existence of liquid water.

… the results suggest that planets ranging from Earth-sized to about four times Earth’s size - so-called “super-Earths” - may be more common than previously thought.