While some other creatures, most notably salamanders and starfish, can regenerate entire limbs, mammals don't have this evolutionary superpower. The big question is: Why are mammals limited?
U.S. District Judge Christina Reiss ruled that the government unlawfully canceled Petrova's J-1 visa, stating that the government failed to cite any authority allowing Customs and Border Protection officers to cancel the visa for failing to declare the embryos.
Chronic inflammation is a central driver of pathological fibrosis after ischaemic or haemodynamic stress, but strategies that locally rebalance injurious and reparative immune responses without systemic immunosuppression are lacking.
Cortical Labs in Melbourne taught a dish of lab-grown neurons to play Pong in 2022. Now it has built what it describes as the world's first code-deployable biological computer, running on living human tissue rather than silicon chips, which is happily playing the 1993 shooter Doom. At first it didn't know how to move, aim or shoot. Then it would shoot two enemies and stop. So it's definitely learning.
January 22, 2026 2 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm The National Institutes of Health's move to end support for research using fetal human tissue is clearly a political decision, not a scientific one, one expert says By Dan Vergano edited by Claire Cameron National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya speaks at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C., in 2025.
When mitochondria are exposed to tissue or blood, they lose the electrical gradient across their outer membrane. Mitochondria that lack such a gradient are recognized by a cell's internal machinery as damaged and quickly destroyed. The vast majority of previous studies involved injecting 'naked' mitochondria directly into the bloodstream or tissue sites, but the approach isn't very efficient, so researchers often have to use 'ridiculous' doses of mitochondria.
Last November, the UK government announced a bold plan to phase out animal testing in some areas of research. Animal tests for skin irritation are scheduled for elimination this year, and some studies on dogs should be slashed by 2030. The long-term vision is 'a world where the use of animals in science is eliminated in all but exceptional circumstances'.
The pig organ filtered the man's blood for a few days while he waited for a human liver transplant. The man has since received a human liver and is recovering well, says Lin Wang, one of the surgeons who led the procedure in January at Xijing Hospital of the Air Force Medical University in Xi'an, China.
Mini 3D 'organoids' are slowly phasing out animal testing in some areas of research. These laboratory-grown tissue structures can model human biology more accurately than traditional animal models, reducing the need for animal experimentation while providing more relevant data for drug development and disease research.
Biology is undergoing a transformation. After centuries of studying life as it evolves naturally, researchers are now using a combination of computation and genome engineering to intervene, generating new proteins and even whole bacteria from scratch. The use of artificial-intelligence tools to design biological components, an approach known as generative biology, is set to turbocharge this area of research. Just last year, scientists used AI-assisted design to produce artificial genes that can be expressed in mammalian cells.
Martschenko's argument is largely that genetic research and data have almost always been used thus far as a justification to further entrench extant social inequalities. But we know the solutions to many of the injustices in our world-trying to lift people out of poverty, for example-and we certainly don't need more genetic research to implement them. Trejo's point is largely that more information is generally better than less.
A trial in the US found that applying stem cells from the mother's placenta to her baby's spine while it was being repaired was safe and improved the child's mobility and quality of life. Dr Diana Farmer, who led the study, said it was conceivable that the experimental therapy could become the usual way that spina bifida is treated before babies are born.
