Robotic stingray made from rat cells
This is very cool and step in the right direction of mankind playing god. A scientist called Kevin Kit Parker went to an aquarium with his daughter and saw a stingray. Thinking, as I have often thought myself, ‘That’s pretty cool, we should have robots built from gold, silicone, and rat heart-cells that behave and act like that.’ Fortunately Mr Parker was an applied physicist/roboticist/bio-engineerist/very smart man at Harvard and has made is happen.
I won’t go into the science in too much detail because I don’t know what I am talking about. But basically, he got some rat heart cells, some silicone, some gold and has made an artificial creature. There are 200,000 heart cells, the silicone has a precise template that guides everything, and the gold is the skeleton. The stingrays are small – about half an inch – and are controlled by light thanks to a virus that delivers a gene that affects a switch that- Ok, I am out of my depth.
Find more information here from from a science magazine: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/07/robotic-stingray-powered-light-activated-muscle-cells
Or if you want more information from a less science-y source: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jul/07/made-of-gold-powered-by-heart-cells-of-rats-meet-the-robo-ray
There is a point to all this beyond just creating something that looks cool. Mr Parker wants to grow a human heart. I know you can grow human organs in pigs these days but if we can make organic body parts, it would be a huge step forward. Especially for the pigs. Here is a video that you should have just watched rather than read any of the above. Sorry about that but I have to make living.
