Claims that China harvests organs from live Falun Gong prisoners without consent — then destroys their remains — are real, according to a report from a human rights lawyer and a former MP in Canada. The document cites an organ price published online for a transplant centre in Shenyang City, China. Corneas are $30,000 US, kidneys $62,000 US, livers $130,000 US and lungs up to $170,000 US, which would make this a most profitable trade — via Boing Boing
Toronto researchers have discovered a method to utilise bone marrow cells in the repair of a damaged heart after a heart attack. While it has long been known that bone marrow cells have the ability to clear the dead tissue after a heart attack, what has not been known until now is the critically important role of bone marrow adult stem cells in repairing a damaged heart, restoring its function and enhancing the growth of new blood vessels
Australian scientists have developed a super-drug with potential to cure various illnesses including cancers, age-related blindness, heart disease and arthritis
Sticking a needle with a flaming plasma tip into your mouth may not at first strike you as much of an improvement on conventional dentistry. However, the plasma needle, which is cold and painless to the touch, could be just the panacea we have been waiting for
Recently, the FDA approved Gardasil, a vaccine against the human papilloma virus (HPV) which causes cervical cancer in women. The approval wasn’t without a fight, and even now it’s still being fought, primarily by the KKK-linked hate group, the Family
Research Council. Cervical cancer kills 4,000 women a year, and yet these people will still fight a vaccine that stops the virus that causes it. Why, you ask?
The morning after
lotion is called Dimericine, which is basically an enzyme cream that repairs the skin’s damaged DNA. The body does this process naturally, but this cream would significantly speed it up — via digg
The next generation of naturalistic and touch-sensitive artificial limbs are being worn by US soldiers. Instead of the old velcro strap and cup these new models are fused directly to the bone and are controlled by controlled by the wearer’s brain. Future prosthetic arms will fuse to existing bone, eliminating the need for awkward attachment systems. These more naturalistic limbs will use bionic nerves attached to natural nerves to send and receive signals from the brain. Chips embedded in the user’s brain will help command artificial-muscle-activated, touch-sensitive, fully articulating hands
Canadian Scientists have created the first device able to regrow teeth and bones. The researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton filed patents earlier this month in the United States for the tool based on low-intensity pulsed ultrasound technology after testing it on a dozen dental patients in Canada
Scientists have used embryonic stem cells and a soup of nerve-friendly chemicals to not just bridge a damaged spinal cord but actually regrow the circuitry needed to move a muscle, helping partially paralysed rats walk
A Florida-based company called Oragenics may have found a way to rid our mouths of a bacteria that thrives on sugars in the mouth, which it consumes while excreting lactic acid. On the surface it seems like an elegant solution, but clearly there is the potential to upset delicate systems in nature, resulting in possible larger-scale side effects — via digg
A major drug company, Genentech, is blocking access to a medicine that is cheaply and effectively saving thousands of people from going blind because it wants to launch a more expensive variant of the same product on the market
A team of scientists and surgeons at the Bernard O’Brien Institute of Microsurgery at Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital have developed a method of growing new organs within a patient’s body. The cells have been grown in a plastic chamber under the patients’ skin
Chemical abortion will be available in far north Queensland from next month following the importation of Australia’s first consignment of the RU486 abortion pill
Computer games in the hands of the elderly are shaping up as the latest weapons in the war against Alzheimer’s
Advances by CSIRO in material sciences are creating second skin technology that can protect the body against wounds and major traumas
The UMass Lowell research group has joined groups from five other institutions and secured funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to pursue the possibilities of causing a limb to re-grow in an adult mammal. One form of newt, the Eastern or red-spotted newt‚Äîcapable of limb regeneration, will be studied — via digg
An artificial insect eye that could be used in ultra-thin cameras has been developed by scientists in the US.The dimpled eye, contains over 8,500 hexagonal lenses packed into an area the size of a pinhead. The dome-shaped structure, described in the journal Science, is similar to a bee’s eye. The researchers, from the University of California, Berkeley, say the work may also shed light on how insects developed such complex, visual systems. Darpa is also funding this project with applications expected for digital cameras and high speed motion detectors
A rat nerve cell attached to a semiconductor chip has exchanged a signal with the chip, an achievement that could lead to organic computers that process information like a brain — via Discovery
Sitting in a culture dish, a layer of chicken heart cells beats in synchrony. But this muscle layer was not sliced from an intact heart, nor even grown laboriously in the lab. Instead, it was printed
, using a technology that could be the future of tissue engineering. Droplets of bio-ink
— clumps of living cells a few hundred micrometres in diameter — flow together and fuse when squirted close to each other. They can be made to form layers, rings and tubes — which could serve as blood vessels — depending on how they are deposited. Bioprinting could develop into a fast and cheap way to engineer a variety of tissue types
Neurosurgeon Kenneth Smith has performed a revolutionary operation on St Louis resident Cheri Robertson, connecting a camera directly to her optic nerve. The rig is in principle similar to Geordi La Forge’s visor, albeit in very rudimentary form. At present, the image
consists of a number of white dots, as on an LED display. There are also governmental restrictions on this research, forcing Kenneth and his team to fly to Portugal to carry out the operation. If this technology takes off, the future will be bright for the sight-impaired — via Slashdot
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