Whoa!

Courtesy of purplespark: Scientists create mice able to regenerate lost limbs and regrow damaged organs.

The experimental animals are unique among mammals in their ability to regrow their heart, toes, joints and tail.

And when cells from the test mouse are injected into ordinary mice, they too acquire the ability to regenerate, the US-based researchers say.

Their discoveries raise the prospect that humans could one day be given the ability to regenerate lost or damaged organs, opening up a new era in medicine…

“We have experimented with amputating or damaging several different organs, such as the heart, toes, tail and ears, and just watched them regrow,” she said.

Now, this kind of stuff has always been within the laws of physics, but development of new techniques in genetic engineering and nanomedicine are both progressing faster than even the most optimistic of us transhumanists had expected. And speaking of biomedical nanotech, I bring you another article, Research scientists at Georgia Tech have built nano-scale detectors so sensitive that they will be capable of spotting individual cancer cells.

The detectors are based on a new kind of quasi-one dimensional nano material, dubbed nanobelts or nanoribbons, which can be made from a variety of materials, like zinc or tin oxides. They are typically between 30nm and 300nm wide, and can be a few millimetres long.

The semiconducting nanobelts, first synthesised in 2001, can be tuned to exhibit certain behaviours. Introducing oxygen vacancies can affect their conductivity, surface and optical properties…

These nanostructures are ideal objects for building sensors with biomedical applications, Professor Wang said, ahead of a presentation at the EMAG-Nano 2005 conference in Leeds yesterday, such as force sensors, blood flow sensors and cancer detectors.

I think a lot of people who aren’t really paying attention now are going to be very surprised when these things start hitting the market. I also suspect that people fifty or seventy-five years from now are going to look back on this as the Age of Barbarism: “Someone had a heart attack and you savages thought the best solution was to SLICE HIM OPEN??!!”