– – I’m sure that you’ll all be pleased as punch to learn that scientists in the U.S. have created a free-swimming artificial jellyfish! I, for one, know that when at the ocean, I can never have enough of them bumping against me in the tide or lying on the beach.
It gets stranger, too; the team members built the replica using silicone as a base on which to grow heart muscle cells that were harvested from rats. They then used an electric current to shock the created Medusoid into swimming with synchronised contractions that mimic those of a real jellyfish! I swear that I am not making this up…
The finding serves as proof of concept for reverse engineering a variety of muscular organs and simple life forms. As jellyfish use a muscle to pump their way through the water, the way that they function is similar on a basic level to that of a human heart. Such similarities reveal what you need to do to design a bio-inspired heart pump.
Synthetic life is an emerging field of science that until now focused on replicating life’s building blocks. Now instead of just building a cell, researchers at Caltech and Harvard University have built a beast!
– – Some people have bucket lists of things that they want to do before they “kick the bucket,” that is, die…but I have a list of things to be worried about or afraid of, and I’ve just added something to that list…
– – Roughly 298 million years ago, a volcano erupted in the Inner Mongolian district near the modern-day city of Wuda, China raining down volcanic ash with such intensity that a forest was quickly buried and essentially preserved in remarkable detail down to branch and leaf structure. American and Chinese scientists have recently excavated this lost forest, ironically through coal mining activities in the region. 
FOXSYLVANIA 
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