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I suppose it's an interesting article on its own, but I don't know that any of its suggested premises are true. The most obvious difference between this thing
by bmelton 14y ago
I suppose it's an interesting article on its own, but I don't know that any of its suggested premises are true. The most obvious difference between this thing and a jellyfish is that a jellyfish doesn't need an electrical bath to exist in. There are other differences of course, but if they'd built a more analogous 'jellyfish robot' that at least functioned on its own, perhaps I'd be more receptive to the article's claims.
As it stands, the notion of 'testing heart medicine' on it seem exceedingly optimistic as it's fairly hard to test a heart in isolation. Also, this isn't a heart analogue, it's a jellyfish analogue. Also, a heart doesn't react to external impulses in the same way.
It's neat. There's no taking that away from it, but I just don't see how any of what the inventor claims is actually practical.
- mekwall 14y agoYeah I agree with you that they haven't really created a jellyfish. It's not much more then a muscle that contracts in the same way as a jellyfish when subjected to an electrical charge. But if you read it all you'll notice the following paragraph, "Parker’s lab works on creating artificial models of human heart tissues for regenerating organs and testing drugs, and the team built the medusoid as a way of understanding the “fundamental laws of muscular pumps”. It is an engineer’s approach to basic science: prove that you have identified the right principles by building something with them." - This in itself is a very nice feat.
- Cogito 14y agoThe thing I took away from it was that they suspected that all muscular pumps work in a similar way. > "My bet is that to get a muscular pump, the electrical activity has got to spread as a wavefront.” They were then able to re-purpose heart muscle into a different form that still functioned as a muscular pump. Really quite interesting :)