Tasmanian scientists have cloned what is believed to be the world's oldest living organism as part of a battle to save it from a deadly fungus.
The tree species commonly known as King's Lomatia was first discovered in Tasmania's remote south-west wilderness 70 years ago.
Carbon dating revealed the trees were more than 43,000 years old.
Botanist Natalie Tapson from the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens says the tree can only reproduce by cloning itself.
And she says all 500 stands of the tree - produced from one original plant - are under threat from the deadly root rot disease phytophthora, which is spreading rapidly through grass plains surrounding its habitat.
She says an insurance population is being established by creating clones through tissue cultures.
"When we first started we lost all the plants almost straight away," she said.
"We now have about 20 plants in tissue culture that have survived for about eight months and we're hopeful that we can keep tubing these on and get more and more plants that way."
SmartHand is a European collaborative project to develop a next-generation robotic prosthetic limb, and as part of the project Swedish researchers have successfully demonstrated a neat psychological trick that makes wearers feel like an artificial limb is actually part of their body.
A report published by the team at the Karolinska Institutet and Malmö University Hospital shows success in what's known as the "rubber hand" illusion. Amputees' brains can be fooled into thinking that a fake hand is actually wired into their nervous systems, despite the fact that the hand has no sensory inputs whatsoever.
It's a similar effect to the solution discovered by V.S. Ramachandran to alleviating phantom limb pain: In his work the brain is fooled into thinking it's getting sensory inputs from a missing limb by an optical illusion with a mirror, and the mental side-effects of this relieve pain. The work challenged the existing medical thinking that damaged severed nerve endings were the cause of the pain.
In the Swedish case, Prosthetic limb users were subjected to a different visual trick: Someone visibly touched the artificial hand while out of the patient's sight their arm stump was being stimulated. Apparently the illusion is very convincing, and the deep psychological basis for the effect was further demonstrated by subconsciously-induced sweating when the "rubber" hand was pricked by a needle. The results suggest that the artificial hand has been completely adopted into the user's body image at a neurological level.
The research team sees this as evidence for a possible new way of connecting up future prosthetic limbs sensor-equipped hands to a patient, and it's potentially a much simpler solution than having to directly couple electronics into the nervous system surgically. And since the illusion is similar to Ramachandran's study, there's a possibility that phantom limb pain may also be reduced.
The research into the more mechanical aspects of SmartHand have produced an amazing thought-controlled product that's ever-evolving, with the goal of totally replacing a missing forelimb with a sophisticated robot. But it's not alone: in the US there's Dean Kamen's robotic limb project.
This device is already so sci-fi-ishly sophisticated it's been dubbed the "Luke arm" after the artificial limb given to Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movies. Kamen's project is concentrating on developing the motorized engineering and nerve-input interface--it's directly wired into patient's nerves to control its motors--but has already shown remarkable results. Famously one test subject felt so much at ease operating the arm that he was able to rest a mug on a nearby table without watching, and carrying on a conversation at the same time.
Kamen's work was initially aimed at replacing limbs lost by soldiers on duty, but the Luke arm and SmartHand suggest that limb-loss victims of all types, through accidents and as civilian war casualties, have amazing artificial limbs to look forward to in the future. They'll work just like the real thing, maybe even being stronger, and they just might feel like they're a natural part of the body. But the costs will have to be driven down from multi-million-dollar levels.
The technology is the same as that of the simple inkjet printer found in homes and offices, but Japanese scientist Makoto Nakamura is on a mission to see if it can also produce human organs.
The idea is for the printer to jet out thousands of cells per second, rather than ink droplets, and to build them up into a three-dimensional organ.
"It would be like building a huge skyscraper on a micro level using different kinds of cells and other materials instead of steel beams, concrete and glass," he said.
"Ultimately I hope to make a heart," said Dr Nakamura, professor at the graduate school of science and technology for research at the state-run University of Toyama.
While Dr Nakamura says it would take him some 20 years to develop a heart, the feat could pave the way to mass produce "good hearts" for patients waiting for transplants.
A heart made of cells originating from the patient could eliminate fears that the body would reject it.
In the emerging field of organ printing, Dr Nakamura bills his work as the world's finest printed 3D structure with living cells.
The technology works a bit like dealing with sliced fruit: an organ is cut horizontally, allowing researchers to see an array of cells on the surface.
If a printer drops cells one by one into the right spots and repeats the process for many layers, it creates a 3D organ.
Much like a printer chooses different colours, the machine can position different types of cells to drop.
Dr Nakamura has succeeded in building a tube with living cells.
It measures one millimetre in diameter and has double walls with two different kinds of cells, similar to the three-layer structure in human blood vessels.
He has also made a smaller single-wall hydrogel tube that measures one-tenth of a millimetre, as narrow as human hair.
The tubes are made by a 3D inkjet bioprinter that Dr Nakamura's team developed in a three-year project completed earlier this year at Kanagawa Academy of Science and Technology, a foundation based south-west of Tokyo.
The printer can adjust where to drop cells in the order of one-thousandth of a millimetre and produce a tube at a speed of 3 centimetres per two minutes.
- AFP
This is from 2003. http://www.pbs.org/kcet/wiredscience/video/164-bod ... There is an awesome video demonstrating this and a doctor who has already transplanted multiple bladders with no rejection. The first part of the video is about successful limb regeneration.
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All you art collectors out there. Here is a chance to get a Giclee copy of some of Ian M Sherwin work. Ian is planning on doing a whole series of Marblehead, Massachusetts paintings. His work is amazing.
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