zerostatereflex:

Water Experiment No. 33 Automata

What a beautiful work of craftsmanship.

By: Dean O’Callaghan

spectacularuniverse:

I’ve seen this photograph very frequently on tumblr and Facebook, always with the simple caption, “Ghost Heart”. What exactly is a ghost heart?

More than 3,200 people are on the waiting list for a heart transplant in the United States. Some won’t survive the wait. Last year, 340 died before a new heart was found.

The solution: Take a pig heart, soak it in an ingredient commonly found in shampoo and wash away the cells until you’re left with a protein scaffold that is to a heart what two-by-four framing is to a house.

Then inject that ghost heart, as it’s called, with hundreds of millions of blood or bone-marrow stem cells from a person who needs a heart transplant, place it in a bioreactor - a box with artificial lungs and tubes that pump oxygen and blood into it - and wait as the ghost heart begins to mature into a new, beating human heart.

Doris Taylor, director of regenerative medicine research at the Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in Houston, has been working on this— first using rat hearts, then pig hearts and human hearts - for years.

The process is called decellularization and it is a tissue engineering technique designed to strip out the cells from a donor organ, leaving nothing but connective tissue that used to hold the cells in place. 

This scaffold of connective tissue - called a “ghost organ” for its pale and almost translucent appearance - can then be reseeded with a patient’s own cells, with the goal of regenerating an organ that can be transplanted into the patient without fear of tissue rejection.

This ghost heart is ready to be injected with a transplant recipient’s stem cells so a new heart - one that won’t be rejected - can be grown.


(Source)

Brendon Flynn.

A few paintings by artist Brendon Flynn:

Brendon Flynn: Website

A few years ago I was working as a tester on a AAA title that you’ll all have heard of, when I ran into one of the most amusing and bewildering bugs I have ever experienced. After around 20 minutes of play, all projectiles in the game would turn into chickens. Your guns would fire chickens, the enemy guns would fire chickens, and tanks would fire chickens as shells. Whilst this was initially rather amusing, it was obviously not intended behaviour. Furthermore, it wouldn’t reproduce on any other computer but my testing station. I filed a bug, and was instructed by

rlmjob:

minishcap:

can the science side of tumblr explain THIS

this is the mitochondria hard at work, truly the powerhouse of the eukaryotic cell

i managed a bookstore in LA for two years in the 90’s. this had me actually scream out with laughter.

other favorites i recall:

• "it’s a mystery series by a woman"
• "the one by that guy that isn’t grisham"
• "that career book about balloons or something"
• "women are from somewhere, men are from somewhere else"
• "which of these bible versions is the original?"
• "it’s a book with little wood chips in it"

i’ll never forget when that lady came in looking for that last one. we actually did have it and the other staff were sorta in awe that i knew where it was. dined on that one for a while i’ll tell ya.

First: watch the video. Created by Swedish designer Erik Åberg the Ghostcube is a fascinating system of interlocking wood cubes that can be twisted, turned, and folded to create increasingly complex shapes reminiscent of origami. The Ghostcube variations demonstrated in the video above seem to rely on hinges that connect all of the various pieces together. Åberg appears to have open-sourced the design in 30 minutes of video footage which you can purchase from his website. (via The Awesomer)

Teodoru Badiu.

3D renders of classic cartoon characters as wooden sculptures by Teodoru Badiu.  I’d love to see these be actual wooden pieces!  See more:

Teodoru Badiu: Website

via http://unrestinsane.tumblr.com/page/16

lordwanjavi:

The Surf, Skate & Rock Art of Ben Brown

via http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3230/2607150959_192902142f.jpg?v=0

via http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3044/2680712854_59f7e5fa5f.jpg?v=0

Share and Enjoy:

New Comic: Patrimancy

95 seconds of improbable laughter - great editing!

via http://beautifullymarlane.tumblr.com/post/10338341473

Kuno.

Paintings and illustrations by Kuno:

Kuno: Website