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Someone Please Build This Woman a Webcam Eye
Posted by Sean Fallon at 5:40 AM on November 13, 2008
In 2005, Tanya Vlach lost an eye in a car accident and has since worn the prosthetic pictured above. While the artificial eye is "an excellent aesthetic replacement," Tanya notes that she is "interested in capitalising on the current advancement of technology to enhance the abilities of my prosthesis for an augmented reality." In other words, she is calling out to skilled DIY'ers across the internet to help her build a high-tech "eye-cam." But this isn't just about helping people—what she has in mind is just plain cool.
Artificial heart technology has been around a while, but this new invention by European scientists is so convincing in its emulation of a real heart's action that if you plot its output blood flow and show "the graphs to a cardiac surgeon, he will say it's a human heart" apparently. It also beats previous designs in that it shouldn't need external wiring connectors and its biosynthetic "skin" means it won't develop clots that pose a stroke risk to patients.
Artificial diamonds are forever,
A team at MIT and Harvard Medical School has worked out how to cast bricks of artificial tissue into different shapes, and then get them to assemble automatically. The "living Lego bricks" are cast of polyethylene glycol—a biocompatible polymer—and solidified with light exposure. The self-assembling part happens when the bricks absorb water and are then agitated in a bath of mineral oil: The oil/water mix means the bricks move around and can be fixed when they're in the right place with more light (as shown in the picture here, rod-shaped bricks in red stuck to a central green-stained piece).
John Seabrook wrote a 
British biotech company Intercytex shows that its artificial skin might make painful grafts a thing of the past. Intercytex's ICX-SKN is made out of fibrin–the same stuff your body uses to heal wounds–and fully integrates with test subjects' skin in 28 days, leaving little behind to show for the damage. The fibrin matrix that ICX-SKN takes advantage of also contains fibroblasts, the little guys in your body that create and maintain animal tissue, so the artificial skin bonds naturally and seamlessly over a wound with natural skin. Intercytex has managed to clear a few of the hurdles when it comes to skin replacement, though challenges remain. More after the jump.
