How the Humble Inkjet Printer is the New Go-To in Organ Transplantation

2d_3d_organ_printing

From the perfect Super Venti Flat White (yes, it is ‘a thing’) crafted for us at the Starbucks drive-thru to the tailored Tesla designed to indulge our most whimsical aesthetic consideration, the world is becoming increasingly customized whether we like it or not. And however we perceive this transition – good, bad, or indifferent – […]

Goop Believes the Little Things Count – Truth in Advertising, Not So Much

fruitloopery

Fruitloopery In a Napa County Superior Court this month, actor Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle brand, Goop, accepted civil penalties in the amount of $145,000 for unsubstantiated health claims regarding some products sold on the company’s website. The online ‘wellness empire’ was found guilty of misbranding and false advertisement in a suit brought by the California Food, […]

Cadaver Bones vs. Synthetic

Radiologist checking an x-ray image

Near to an abandoned Mayan temple in the steamy jungles of Guatemala, camouflaged beneath a matrix of overgrown vine and lianas, nestles a small medical clinic catering to the needs of, at most, a handful of patients. A private facility, not marked on any known map, the clinic is an important link in the supply […]

Contamination Control vs Embryotoxicity

Mitochondria, a membrane-enclosed cellular organelles, which produce energy Mitochondria , Cell energy and Cellular respiration Mitochondrial disease Mitochondrial DNA

When you hear the phrase ‘designer babies,’ what springs most readily to mind? It’s an emotionally, socially, and politically loaded term that’s come to represent much of what’s ethically questionable in genetic research. Perhaps we might think of the movie Gattaca (that we referenced last week) in which genetics equal destiny. Or the 2003 German […]

Protecting NASA’s Parker Solar Probe

Parker solar probe

In 1941, John Gillespie Magee, Jr., a fighter pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force, was killed in a mid-air collision over the bucholic hamlet of Roxholme, England. Practicing maneuvers in his Spitfire VZ-H, an aircraft he’d flown in engagement with the German Luftwaffe just four weeks earlier, Magee was just 19 years old when […]

Smoking Kills – But Maybe Not in the Way You Think

Doctor is comparing electronic vaporizer and conventional tobacco cigarette.

Almost two years ago, we wrote a short article on the FDA regulation of a nascent industry, one that has the FDA sounding the alarm regarding contamination from carcinogens and the vaporizing of metal nanoparticles. Despite our concerns – and those of the FDA – this industry is still around, growing, and has set its […]

How The Promise of Stem Cell Therapy Can Blind Us to its Danger

stem cell therapy

In the Worlds Fair Exposition of 1893, one young entrepreneur, Clark Stanley, stood before an excited crowd of onlookers and plunged his hand into a sack of live rattlesnakes. Pulling out an unfortunate herpetological victim, he sliced it open and, in a technique that was about as far from aseptic processing and devoid of microbial […]

How Insect Droids Will Conquer Mars

robotic bees conquer mars

It’s an open secret that scientists tend to have a love-hate relationship with fiction. Not all fiction – less so the bodice-rippers or cozy thrillers that spill off the bookstore shelves – but one specific genre: science fiction. Sometimes known more prosaically as speculative fiction, this category of literature encompasses utopian/dystopian works, supernatural/superhero tropes, and […]

Welcome to the New Dawn of Cloning

Reproduction used to be simple. Boy meets girl. Egg meets sperm. Nine months, one baby shower, and a whole lot of trips to Buy Buy Baby later, a new addition arrives to much billing and cooing by the proud grandparents. Oh those halcyon days. Today, the landscape is so much more nuanced as advances in […]

Ancient and Futuristic – What is the Role of the Cleanroom in Advanced Sericulture?

Silk Cocoons with Worm

We have a riddle for you: what is both ancient and futuristic, biodegradable and naturally sustainable, is delicately engineered in a cleanroom with a tensile strength five times that of steel, is a simple formulation but has applications in materials science, medicine, and reforestation? Need some more clues? It is edible, reintegrating into the human […]

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