Forums: Artificial Insemination

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. researchers have created a primitive artificial lung that rats used to breathe for several hours and said on Tuesday it may be a step in the development of new organs grown from a patient's own cells. The finding, reported in the journal Nature Medicine, is the second in a month from researchers seeking ways to regenerate lungs from ordinary cells. In the latest study, Harald Ott and colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston removed the cells from rat lungs to leave a scaffolding or matrix. They soaked these in a bioreactor...

ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. - Fishermen often brag about catching one as long as your arm. Sam Newton caught the arm. Newton, 66, was throwing his cast net off the St. Simons Island pier last week when he pulled up an artificial arm. "It scared the heck out of me,'' he said. "Hell, I'm hoping the rest of the person ain't coming up."

Live video feed from Key West of the sinking of former USNS Vandenberg to form an artificial reef

A newly made synthetic ribosome is an important step in the quest to create artificial life forms. By Emily Singer Researchers at Harvard University have built a functional ribosome--the cell's protein-making machine--from scratch, molecule by molecule. The creation represents a significant step toward making artificial life, and it could ultimately fill a major gap in our understanding of the origins of life. But the scientists who made the ribosome are most interested in its industrial applications. They plan to genetically tinker with the molecular machinery so that it can make proteins more efficiently, as well as proteins that are the...

A new molecule that performs the essential function of life - self-replication - could shed light on the origin of all living things. If that wasn't enough, the laboratory-born ribonucleic acid (RNA) strand evolves in a test tube to double itself ever more swiftly. "Obviously what we're trying to do is make a biology," says Gerald Joyce, a biochemist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. He hopes to imbue his team's molecule with all the fundamental properties of life: self-replication, evolution, and function. Joyce and colleague Tracey Lincoln made their chemical out of RNA because most researchers...

Scientists develop artificial heart that beats like the real thing Adam Sage in Paris An artificial heart that beats almost exactly like the real thing is to be implanted in patients within three years in a trial that may offer hope to heart disease sufferers unable to receive a transplant. The device, which uses electronic sensors to regulate the heart rate and blood flow, was developed by Alain Carpentier, France's leading cardiac surgeon, and engineers from the group that makes Airbus aircraft. Presented yesterday, it was described by its inventors as the closest thing yet to the human heart. “If...

SACRAMENTO -- Iris and Joseph Kievernagel disagreed about having children during their 10-year marriage, and their argument moved into the courts - and the casebooks of legal precedent - after his death in a helicopter crash. In a ruling made public Friday, a state appeals court said the Sacramento County woman has no right to use her husband's frozen sperm to become pregnant because he had made it clear he did not want to father a child posthumously. If only one spouse has contributed genetic material, "the intent of the donor" must control its disposition after death, said the Third...