Artificial

Artificial retinas have the potential to restore some sight to people with certain kinds of blindness, but they contain complex electronics that can overheat. Now a Stanford team has found a way to potentially bypass the issue.

Proteins are the workhorses of the cell, but nature sometimes has room for improvement. Now a team from the Institute for Protein Design and the University of California San Francisco has created a new artificial protein that acts like a switch, turning regular cells into “smart cells.”

Engineers have recently focused on trying to emulate the structure of the brain with artificial synapses. Now, a team of researchers have made a new artificial synapse design that works using a light-based biotechnology technique called optogenetics.

Over the last few years humans have tried to mimic nature with artificial leaves, but they’re never quite up to scratch. Now, researchers have designed a new version that could work under real-world conditions, sucking carbon dioxide out of the air and creating oxygen and synthetic fuels.

Scientists have created the most lifelike artificial embryos ever, guiding them through “the most important event in life” – a key development stage known as gastrulation. The researchers combined three types of mouse stem cells into an embryo that was just about ready to be implanted into a womb.

Researchers from Imperial College London have managed to fuse living and non-living cells together, creating tiny chemical factories that might one day aid drug delivery.

Scientists may eventually be able to biologically engineer unique artificial lifeforms from scratch. A new study from Princeton has brought that future a step closer, by confirming that an artificial protein the team developed functions as an enzyme in living bacteria.

A new development from scientists at the University of North Carolina and NC State could do away with the need for injections and glucose monitoring​ for diabetics through the use of artificial beta cells that mimic the insulin-secreting function of healthy cells​.

Whether artificial sweeteners make you gain weight has been hotly debated, with numerous studies showing correlations between a tendency to obesity and consumption of low-calorie sweeteners. A new study could have uncovered one of the biological mechanisms behind this counter-intuitive phenomenon.

Artificial blood has been held back by the fact that the stem cells it’s grown from can only produce so many red blood cells. Now, researchers have developed immortalized cell lines that can be cultured indefinitely to produce artificial blood on a much larger scale.

​The human brain is nature’s most powerful processor, so developing computers that mimic it is a long-term goal. Neural networks are the closest models we have, and now Stanford scientists have developed an organic artificial synapse, inching us closer to making computers more efficient learners.

Lightweight and extremely strong, spider silk is ideal for use in many applications. Unfortunately, large numbers of spiders are hard to handle and produce very little silk individually. Now researchers have created a prototype process to spin silk thread grown by bacteria on a large scale.