First Artificial Beef steak was produced in Israel. The "Future Food" is obtained from only a few cells extracted from a living animal

Can Cultured Meat Save the Planet? - leapsmag

"The meat"of the future comes from the laboratory, not from the slaughterhouse. An Israeli company boasts that it produced the first artificial beef steak. The strips were grown in the laboratory, from cells harvested from live animals, without harming them and without polluting the environment. Artificial meat could reach gallantry in 3-4 years.

The mission of the chef in the pictures is a historical one - he cooks the first beefsteak raised in the laboratory. He first prepares his vegetables for the garnish and sauces. Then comes the turn of the resistance piece - the meat fresh out of the lab. It is cooked like any classic piece of meat.

"This meat looks great and has the texture of classic steak," says Amir Ilan, chef.

Variety Club Meat

The strips of meat shown are the size of a card and are only 5 millimeters thick. Despite its small size, such a delicacy comes at a price

 - $ 50 artificial strip.

Artificial meat is obtained from only a few cells extracted from a living animal, without causing pain. The cells are nourished and grown to produce muscle tissue.

Artificial meat: UK scientists growing 'bacon' in labs - BBC News

"Meat is a complex tissue. This realization includes several types of cells, which we find in different pieces of classic meat, raised together, independently of an animal, to form a 3D structure similar to meat, but using much safer, sustainable and ethical methods. "Says Didier Toubia, executive director of Aleph Farms.

Artificial meat is now made in space Telangana Today

Those who have tasted what could be the meat of the future, say that the taste is very close to the classic one. And if he hadn't known in advance what they had for dinner, he probably wouldn't have realized it wasn't a classic steak.

Muscular Dystrophy Includes A Group Of Inherited Diseases That Getty Images

The problem of food will be ensured in this way in the future. If it has succeeded with beef, it will succeed with fish, pork, poultry. When it comes to mass production, the price of these products will fall significantly.



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Amazing Spider Silk properties will lead to the creation of artificial muscles

Our muscles are amazing structures. With the trigger of a thought, muscle filaments slide past each other and bundles of contracting fibers pull on the bones moving our bodies. The triggered stretching behavior of muscle is inherently based in geometry, characterized by a decrease in length and increase in volume (or vice versa) in response to a change in the local environment, such as humidity or heat.

Variations of this dynamic geometry appear elsewhere in nature, exhibiting a variety of mechanisms and structures and inspiring development in artificial muscle technology. 

Spider silk, specifically Ornithoctonus Huwena spider silk, now offers the newest such inspiration thanks to research from a collaboration of scientists in China and the U.S., the results of which are published today in Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing.

Credit: British Tarantula Society

"Spider silk is a natural biological material with high sensitivity to water, which inspires us to study about the interaction between spider silk and water," said Hongwei Zhu, a professor in Tsinghua University's School of Material Science and Engineering in Beijing and part of the collaboration. "Ornithoctonus Huwena spider is a unique species as it can be bred artificially and it spins silk of nanoscale diameter."

Besides the shrink-stretch ability of muscles, the way in which the motion is triggered -- how the muscle is actuated -- is a key part of its functionality. These spider silk fibers, actuated by water droplets, showed impressive behavior in all the ways that matter to muscle performance (or to super heroes that may need them to swing from buildings).

"In this work, we reveal the 'shrink-stretch' behavior of the Ornithoctonus Huwena spider silk fibers actuated by water, and successfully apply it on weight lifting," said Zhu. "The whole process can cover a long distance with a fast speed and high efficiency, and further be rationalized through an analysis of the system's mechanical energy."

The research team looked at the actuation process in a few different scenarios, capturing the macro dynamics of the flexing fibers with high speed imaging. They actuated bare fibers on a flat surface (a microscope slide) and while dangling from a fixed point (held with tweezers) before adding a weight to the dangling configuration to test its lifting abilities.

Zhu and his group also investigated the micro structure of the proteins that make up the fibers, revealing the protein infrastructure that leads to its hydro-reflexive action.

Electron microscopy gave a clear picture of the smooth inner threads that make up the fibrous structure, and a laser-driven technique, called Raman spectroscopy, revealed the precise conformation of the protein folding structures making up each layer. Fundamentally, the specific molecular configurations, in this case having proteins that have a strong affinity for water and that rearrange in the presence of water, give rise to the spider silk's actuation.

"Alpha-helices and beta-sheets are two types of secondary protein folding structures in spider silk proteins," said Zhu. "Beta-sheets act as crosslinks between protein molecules, which are thought relevant to the tensile strength of spider silk. A-helices are polypeptide chains folded into a coiled structure, which are thought relevant to the extensibility and elasticity in spider silk protein."

Returning the fiber back to its relaxed state (as one-use muscles are far less useful) requires only removing the water, which offers conservation along with its simplicity. With some fine tuning, there is also potential for designing the precise behavior of the shrink-stretch cycle.

"In addition, as the falling water droplet can be collected and recycled, the lifting process is energy-saving and environmentally friendly," said Zhu. "This has provided the possibility that the spider silk can act as biomimetic muscle to fetch something with low energy cost. It can be further improved to complete staged shrink-stretch behavior by designing the silk fiber's thickness and controlling droplet's volume."

Understanding this remarkable material offers new insight for developing any of a number of drivable, flexible devices in the future.

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Sciencedaily . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Advanced prosthetic robot arm the free solution for all war veterans.

Updated 04/05/2020

One of the most advanced prosthetic arms yet is coming to market this year, brought to you by robot-friendly U.S. military agency DARPA and the Segway inventor Dean Kamen.

Mobius Bionics LLC, a medical device company, will produce the Luke arm commercially, named for the life like replacement Luke Skywalker received at the end of Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. 

The Daily Wildcat - University of Arizona

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded the arm and Dean Kamen's DEKA company designed it, with the goal to "develop an advanced electromechanical prosthetic upper limb with near natural control that would dramatically enhance independence and improve quality of life for amputees," according to the Mobius Bionics press release.

Advanced Prosthetics Help a Dog Run And a Man Move Robotic Arms Smithsonian Magazine

The prosthesis combines a number of features to accomplish that goal. The system can accommodate people with varying levels of amputation. It's durable and can withstand water, its grip is delicate enough to hold an egg, and strong enough to lift heavy weights like a carton of milk from the floor to a table.

The arm isn’t a perfect fit for every patient yet. Angel Giuffria, actress and congenital amputee (meaning she was born missing an arm) was part of the arm's clinical trials and got to wear it three years ago. "When I first got it, I thought it was heavy for someone of my stature," she told Popular Science. The arm was modeled "based on the weight of a statistically average female arm," according to an article published in 2008 in IEEE Spectrum, but that's still a lot of weight if it's just hanging from a residual limb.

Angel Giuffria

Actress and self-proclaimed "cyborg" Angel Giuffria tried out the Luke hand.

Giuffria's arm prosthesis with its Bebionic hand can lift eggs and gallons of milk as well, is lighter, and assumes more grip patterns, meaning the fingers can arrange themselves to hold things in more ways. Also, the Luke arm is controlled with both myoelectric muscle-controlled sensors on the arm and a foot sensor; using your foot to control your hand could be confusing for people learning to use the system.

The Luke arm excelled in other ways, though. "The grip strength is amazing and it’s very durable," said Giuffria. 

"I know for a fact I dropped the DEKA arm a couple times and it was fine." 

Most importantly, the Luke hand has flexion and extension, meaning the wrist can pivot the hand up and down. 

"After getting used to it, the flexion and extension was amazing to me," she said. 

"I really liked the arm." Giuffria is taking part in another DEKA clinical trial and is excited to see the arm continue improving.

The system will probably cost a lot, maybe in the $10,000 to $100,000 price range, according to The Verge, more expensive than some of the 3D printed options available to amputees. Insurance usually only covers one limb, though those rules sometimes change for veterans. And military vets might be the exact people who'd benefit from the strong, durable and nimble Luke arm.

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