Lab Grown Blood Successfully Experimented on a Human

Luc Douay, a researcher at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris was successful in creating artificial red blood cells in a lab. The researchers were also able to inject it into a human and the results were positive without any side-effects.

A healthy volunteer was first selected for the program, and his hematopoietic stem cells were extracted from his bone marrow. Some of the basic growth factors that are required for the growth of a red blood cell were also mixed with this sample. Luc’s team labelled these cultured cells for tracing, and injected 10 billion of them (approximately equal to two millilitres of blood), back into the same donor’s body.



They found out that almost the whole percentage of blood cells remained circulating in the body for the first five days. Like in the case of naturally produced red blood cells, about (45-65)% of the blood cells remained in the body after 26 days of experimentation. As no serious conditions were registered for a month after the experiment was conducted, it was sure that the red blood cells injected were working like a normal blood cell, and carried the oxygen around the whole body.

This experiment is sure going to be a stepping stone to further technologies, and a clear way to produce an artificial blood reserve without the help of any blood donor. Though the numbers of blood donors have increased in the past couple of years, their reserve list is still short in some parts of the world, where the number of people suffering from HIV and blood cancer are comparatively more.

There are also researches going on in developing an artificial blood substitute that is known to be less toxic than the protein in its unbounded state. Such a substitute was first developed by Chris Cooper of the University of Essex in Colchester. He was able to develop a haemoglobin based blood substitute that could easily provide a solution for transfusion in worst cases like natural disasters, and combat fields. The main advantage of such a system is that there is no need to store it in a cool place like a fresh and stem cell-grown blood.

But the former technology has more advantages than this one. Since the blood grown through stem cell method resembles a real blood cell, it can easily alleviate some of the safety concerns that continue around the use of the current generations of artificial products.
Posted by Unknown at 8:56:00 am 0 comments
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World’s Lightest Material Discovered !!!

When it comes to light weight materials, the first thing that comes to our mind is Thermocol. 
Since its discovery in the year 1941, it has been used in many applications that are suitable for the common man like small life raft, disposable coffee cups, cushioning material in packaging, and so on. Since then, the weights of most light weight materials are compared to Thermocol, and have been given a special category called Ultra-light materials. A team of researchers from HRL Laboratories (Hughes Research Laboratories), in collaboration with Caltech and the University of California, developed a new material that weighs only 1/100th of the weight of Thermocol.  The material is also known o be lighter than a diamond aerogel, one of the best ultra-light materials in the world. Before going into detail about the lightest material, let us make a brief study about diamond aerogels.



Diamond aerogel was discovered by researchers at the Lawrence Rivermore National Laboratory by combining high density diamond substances and least dense materials called aerogels. Aerogel is known to be a porous, diffuse rigid material that looks similar to a solid block of smoke and with the texture of a chunk of thermocol. They are industrially manufactured by constructing a conventional gel and then removing the liquid though supercritical drying. The material finds various applications in the making of insulate space suits, pick up cosmic particles, and even home insulation.

The combination of both the materials gave birth to a spongy, translucent version of a diamond. This material when tested was found out to be the least dense diamond ever, and thus the most expensive aerogel ever. They called it a diamond aerogel, definitely the least dense diamond ever and perhaps one of the most valuable aerogels ever. The material was found to be a little denser than air and has all the physical capabilities of a non-liquid gel component. This material also found many applications in the field of structural engineering, optical engineering, and quantum computing and so on.

The lately found ultra-light material has a density of 0.9 mg/cc, and is known to have its own unique kind of “micro-lattice” cellular architecture. The researchers were successful in making a material that consists of 99.99% open volume by designing the 0.01% solid at the nanometer, micron and millimetre scales.

The material was developed for DARPA so that it could be used for applications in battery electrodes, catalyst supports, vibration or shock energy damping applications and so on. The material has shown excellent mechanical behaviour for a metal, including complete recovery from compression exceeding 50% strain and extraordinarily high energy absorption, when compared to its compact architecture.

This discovery has led the researchers to bring in more ideas to revolutionalize lightweight materials by using this concept to the materials level and designing their architectures at the nano scale.
Posted by Unknown at 8:51:00 am 0 comments
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