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Engineers Implant Vascularized 3D Muscles
An anonymous reader writes "A big hurdle to creating "replacement parts" for the human body is the lack of an internal, nourishing blood system in engineered tissues. Using a stem cell "cocktail," researchers say they've now overcome that, and successfully implanted engineered muscles in lab animals. Next stop, genuine implantable pecs?"
Well, it'll be nice to be able to graft some muscles on and all that, but I'll do what I do with software releases... I will wait until awhile after the technology is released, so that all the misfortunes occur to the impatiently eager... and then when the technology will not have a chance of leaving me a parapalegic or something, then I'll go for it...
... but this is fun stuff, especially considering the article on cloned brain cells... perhaps this means we are nearing cloned stem cells? ... and then the moral ambiguity of stem cell research is only in cloning issues, one step closer to pleasing everybody!
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Yee haw!
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Can't wait until I can order a Schwarzenegger upgrade module. :)
Now I'm even *less* motivated to exercise than before, which I thought was impossible. Maybe I could get really strong leg muscles implanted (like those of a cheetah) and then I wouldn't need to be stuck in traffic for 30-60 minutes a day. I'd just run to work at 60+ MPH!!! Abusing technology is what American's do best after all.... >_>
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
If they can get nerves to grow too, then perhaps they can grow things like a tail for a person - a tail that will actually move, wiggle around, twitch, etc...
Or imagine putting extra rings of muscles in certain orifices, or in certain appendages to give more movement?
"Body mod" could take on a whole lot of new meanings!
--LWM
http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9804/27/parkinsons.cloni ng/ ... [the cloned cells were bovine, but hey, its a start] ...
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If the future is going to be a scary place, at least I'll have the muscles to beat it up...
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
I for one welcome our new bio-engineered overlords.
The brain is organized in a certain way that I am not sure (as I am uneducated in that particular area) that it would work quite as one might hope.
Much like we need physical therapy to learn to use our muscles after an accident... I'd imagine that you'd need to go through tail therapy to be able to work in the control for those new muscles, if it is possible at all.
[Hard to say, I do know a bit about the language centers of the mind, and there is a set range of time that they need to be developed in or they can't be extensively developed at all... and I don't know if this is the case for muscle use, so I'm going to shush and just leave it at all of this]
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
These ideas are just the beginning...
How about, not just mods, but variable, adjustable ones?
Heading for the tropics? Forget sunscreen, turn your skin black, really.
Going to do ocean research, in the ocean? Grow yourself a sleek torpdeo shaped body with fins.
Time to head back to the lab? Grow your body into an eight armed lab 'bot.
Want to go hiking and backpacking this Summer? Start growing our feet into hooves and an extra pair of legs. Become a centaur for the Summer.
Having kids and need to watch everything? Grow some more eyes, even in the back of your head.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Did you see the article about the monkey's learning to move the robotic arm? If we can teach monkeys to use a third arm, why not teach people to wiggle their wangs (or tails if you want to be PG13) at will? Same idea!
Yeah, it'd take some effort, but it's certainly doable, and I expect it will be done.
--LWM
There will be all manner of new appendages, I'm sure, might even become a fad to have some new limb added ;) ... good excuse for people to get a personal trainer, too!
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
I'm sure it will take a while, but when it is a commercially viable procedure, this stuff will probably cost insane amounts of money.
This leads to an obvious problem: If the rich and powerful are also physically stronger than us, how are we gonna overthrow them?
Seriously, muscles harnessed for long toil under the blazing sun won't be able to compete with these cyborg implants!
We must act now, before the muscles are implanted, and before the damn upper class becomes impervious to our insurrection. To arms, comrades!
Viva la revolucion!
With so many ppl on
body parts which is all the rage with bio-this, clone-that marketing hype you guys seem to drool over so easily.
Surgeons most difficult obstacle to success isn't the surgery task but the _re_vascularization of the affected area. Skin grafts, tissue implants and such depend upon a *healthy* supply of bloodflow to nourish the new tissues as a result of surgical intervention.
The choice now is cut&paste, well scalpel and sew but one area has to sacrifice its vascularity for another area which has lost its vascularizion as a result of surgery.
This changes outcomes for the positive for surgeon and patient. Wahoo!
This happens in 5 years...
Arnold Schwartzanegger: but I'm the real actor, er, I mean the real senator!
some dude: Ivy league kids tell me that 5 times a day, and they're all exactly the same musculature up to the milimeter. So wait in line like everybody else, mr. terminator!
P.S.: The exercice programs are dying! )I guess the overlord thing is taken).
Microsoft is pure dog-ma. FreeBSD is pure cat-ma.
Growing muscle tissue on demand actually means growing meat. Which can be edible meat.
Is the science-fiction scenario of growing meat without farming closer? It sure would represent a whole new source of high-quality, "ethically correct" proteins.
But would you eat such a thing?
Hear, hear.
I've been quite surprised at the influx of "odd" observations over the past few years; I certainly wasn't expecting local pancake structures.
You raise a pretty good point, though, on the structure of disks, large and small, in the first place.
Plasma physicists jump up and down that the in-vogue theories treat large-scale magnetic fields and currents as non-existent, as though charge must cancel out on the large scale, therefore it has no effect. Sometimes, they make a good point - some of the disk systems do resemble dynamos.
Some of the papers I've read in passing on "push" gravity theories estimate that the force of gravity is proportional to 1/d**2 locally, but trends to 1/d on the outsides of the galaxy. Otherwise, there's a lot of unseen matter there (and we haven't seen anything resembling the high-velocity clouds gathering on the edges of the galaxy)... or, alternately, we're ignoring a dynamo effect.
Or... etc. (Assuming we stop before postulating that angels sit on the edge fanning galaxies with their wings ;)
It's the bank of poorly-explained pieces that will lead us to our next big theoretical breakthrough (or revolution) - but it takes some special vigilance to keep track of what hasn't actually been explained properly, and what's been merely papered over.
Too many tweaks. They should have realized something was wrong sometime between inflation theory, and dark-energy-requiring ever-increasing-acceleration theory. Plenty of duct tape on things already :)
By the way, speaking of aether... ;)
I can understand the establishment position somewhat... it's either duct tape or anarchy. There's got to be a standard to measure against, but if the explanations start stretching thin, they need an exit strategy.
If that day comes, they will need to exit to something, though. What's out there that can explain the pancakes at multiple scales of the universe and other phenomena as well?
Perhaps they need to take a page out of other research and development, and apportion some funds to "blue sky" research.
The biggest dividends will come from research that's reviewed for logic, self-consistency and explanation of phenomena without regard to how well it fits into prior patterns. Pro-Ams and people in fields with more easily measureable results (applied sciences, for one) realize these benefits, but being in a field where so many assumptions have to be made to interpret the results in the first place make this next to impossible for the theoreticians to condone dissent.
Everybody's MMV :)
-- Ritchie
Binary geeks can count to 1,023 on their fingers
woo hoo! :starts planning to create Molly:
Wow, talk about replying to the wrong post... Admittedly, at first I thought, "Maybe the 'local pancake structure' reference is some kind of complex food-related pun I'm just not getting..."
And by the way, Hell Yes I would eat vat-grown steaks. In a pinch I will occasionally eat the weird shit McDonald's sells. A little vat veal couldn't be any worse.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
I seriously doubt that vat-grown steak can cause your liver to fail like the mystery meats over at McDonald's...anyday of the week in my book :)
That would improve my ski-boxing, like, immensely!
I haven't wanted to mod somebody "Funny" so much in a long time. Maybe I'm just as tired : )
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