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3D Printing with Stem Cells
Transplants are expensive and risky, and donor organs are in short supply. Researchers at UC San Diego are working on technology to change all of that. It’s called bioprinting. In simple terms, bioprinting is 3D printing with living tissue. Researcher Shaochen Chen has been perfecting the process in his lab for years. Bioprinting is a…
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Brain-Powered Robot
It sounds like the plot of a science fiction movie. Scientists grow brains in a lab and use them to power robots. But, it’s really happening at UC San Diego – to a degree. Stem cell researcher Alysson Muotri has teamed up with a high school student for the groundbreaking project. It’s called the Neurobot,…
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Neanderthal Among Us? Science Meets Fiction
What makes us human is a question that not only science asks, but all disciplines of mind from philosophy to religion to sociology and ethics, and even to storytelling and the arts. Tim Disney’s new movie “William” is about a Neanderthal living in the modern world and forces us to ask about humanness and many…
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Searching for a Cure for Blindness
There are a number of diseases that can lead to blindness. But, a researcher at UC San Diego thinks there might be one way to cure them all. It’s called endogenous regeneration. Think of a lizard re-growing a lost tail. Zebrafish can do something similar with retinal tissue. Researcher Karl Wahlin says there is evidence…
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Building the Brain With Alysson Muotri
Inside of each brain, there is the possibility to understand how trillions of neural connections come to sense the world, record memories, create an individual, and shape who you are and who you will become. Can we ever learn how this happens? By using cortical organoids – self organized clusters of neurons generated by stem…
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Neuroscience, Mini Brains, and Your Health
“All the best models are the ones that you can improve in complexity to get closer and closer to the reality.” The idea of a brain in a dish may sound like science fiction to some but scientists are becoming more and more adept at creating cortical organoids in the lab. The organoids are models…