1267 replies to this topic

[Mr. Roboto]

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[Mr. Roboto]

Your sarcasm has been noted and will be filed on your permanent record. 

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[Mr. Roboto]

This was great. I needed the laugh. 

 

[freedom78]

I'm sure those of you who attended a university or are around them are aware of the phenomenon of preachers who come to campus to warn us about our sins. 

 

Well, today took the cake.  My ears perked up when I heard him shout "Ejaculation is temporary" and I broke into a full grin upon hearing the my university is "a top ten campus for masturbation", as if someone actually studied that. 

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[freedom78]

See, but what if it doesn't land on the ground?  Not my fault they didn't have Kleenex in the olden days.

[Mr. Roboto]

I'm sure those of you who attended a university or are around them are aware of the phenomenon of preachers who come to campus to warn us about our sins. 

 

Well, today took the cake.  My ears perked up when I heard him shout "Ejaculation is temporary" and I broke into a full grin upon hearing the my university is "a top ten campus for masturbation", as if someone actually studied that. 

 

I was not aware they did this...the preachers I mean. 

[Mr. Roboto]

See, but what if it doesn't land on the ground?  Not my fault they didn't have Kleenex in the olden days.

 

Just yesterday the Missus asked me why I haven't thrown away that "old green hand towel." Not sure why, but I guess I'm attached to it. I have a surplus of beige ones that also do a fine job, but the green one is my fav.

 

 

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[Arminius]

Funny, but this is the same reason Catholic girls think it's ok to do anal and blow a guy but not have vaginal sex.  They take something out of context and then try to avoid that one act.  So to your point, as long as you catch it, no harm no foul!

 

They're not as stupid as you think, if only inadvertently. The chastity rule was created to ensure girls didn't have children out of wedlock. The filthy, sin part came later.

 

So as long as they are not getting pregnant they are adhering to the core principles of the rule.

 

Though they could just use a condom instead of taking it up the ass.

[freedom78]

Though they could just use a condom instead of taking it up the ass.

 

No way.

 

[Mr. Roboto]

We have decided to join the Church Of Bacon. It's based here in Vegas, and founded by friends of Penn and Teller. 

[Mr. Roboto]

Scientists have grown a first-of-its-kind functional heart muscle from stem cells

 

Organ transplants are an invaluable way of saving people's lives when their own organs fail, but organ shortages, waiting lists, and the powerful drugs required to help recipients' bodies accept their new parts are just some of the difficulties with existing transplant processes.

 

But what if there were another way of replacing organs, one that was less reliant on sourcing whole, living organs from other people's bodies? Scientists in the US have made progress towards creating bioengineered human hearts in the lab, by regenerating a functional human heart muscle. In this case, the procedure still requires using a donated organ, but one that's fused with cells from the recipient.

 

The technique involves repopulating a decellularised organ – stripped of the original donor's living cells – with new cardiac tissue grown from the potential recipient's induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). In effect, the donor heart is stripped of the components that would trigger an immune response from the recipient, and is replaced with the recipients' own cardiac muscle cells.

 

"Regenerating a whole heart is most certainly a long-term goal that is several years away, so we are currently working on engineering a functional myocardial patch that could replace cardiac tissue damaged due [to] a heart attack or heart failure," said researcher Jacques Guyette from the Massachusetts General Hospital Centre for Regenerative Medicine (CRM).

 

The study, documented in Circulation Research, was led by CRM surgeon Harald Ott, who previously developed a decellularisation procedure to strip living cells from rat organs with a detergent solution, before repopulating them with organ-appropriate grown cells. In the new study, this multi-stage process has been scaled up and conducted on human hearts for the first time.

 

"Generating functional cardiac tissue involves meeting several challenges," said Guyette. "These include providing a structural scaffold that is able to support cardiac function, a supply of specialised cardiac cells, and a supportive environment in which cells can repopulate the scaffold to form mature tissue capable of handling complex cardiac functions."

 

In the study, which drew upon 73 human hearts authorised for scientific research, the researchers induced pluripotent cells to differentiate into around 500 million cardiac muscle cells (cardiomyocytes), then seeded them into the tissue of the decellularised hearts.

 

After several days in culture, the cardiomyocytes developed into spontaneously contracting tissue, which the researchers say represents the first regeneration of human heart muscle from pluripotent stem cells within a cell-free, human heart matrix. The beating organs were then mounted in an automator bioreactor system (pictured), which provides the muscle with a nutrient solution and reproduces certain conditions within a living heart.

 

The research might seem a bit grisly – the team is veering close to Re-Animator territory, after all – but the future applications for healthy, lab-grown organs hold a huge amount of promise.

 

"Among the next steps that we are pursuing are improving methods to generate even more cardiac cells – recellularising a whole heart would take tens of billions – optimising bioreactor-based culture techniques to improve the maturation and function of engineered cardiac tissue, and electronically integrating regenerated tissue to function within the recipient's heart," said Guyette.

 

http://www.scienceal...es&limitstart=1