NASA is offering $500,000 to split between the first three teams that can successfully grow human organ tissue in a laboratory. The agency then hopes to study this tissue in an effort to make deep space travel less harmful to the body and save astronauts from extreme experimentation.
Our bodies aren’t built for outer space. The cold, dark, and remote environment poses potential risks from gravity fields, isolation, space radiation, and confined quarters just to name a few. It’s a NASA priority to understand astronauts’ physical and mental health while in space – but this can prove difficult as any experimentation puts the subject at risk.
NASA’s Twins Study saw astronaut Scott Kelly spend a year up in space while his twin brother, Mark, hung around on Earth. Scott took various measurements will living in the International Space Station – records which NASA has called “invaluable” to determining how spaceflight affects physiology, behavior, microbiomes, and even genes. Scott’s mission was twice the normal length but just a fraction of what would be a three-year trip to Mars.
Through the Vascular Tissue Challenge, NASA and the nonprofit Methuselah Foundation’s New Organ Alliance hope bioengineers can create physiologically precise models of human tissue to save astronauts like Kelly from playing guinea pig.
Humans are made up of organs, which are are composed of tissue, which is made up of cells. Around these cells, blood vessels vascularize to circulate fluids and supply tissue with nutrients. Lab-grown, physiologically precise organ tissue will allow scientists to test extreme levels of radiation, gravity, and various other stresses on realistic tissue, without potentially harming a human.
“The humans who will be our deep space pioneers are our most important resource on the Journey to Mars and beyond,” Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate in Washington, said in a news release. “The outcome of this challenge has the potential to revolutionize healthcare on Earth, and could become part of an important set of tools used to minimize the negative effects of deep space on our future explorers.”
Google has been finding more ways to make Gemini a part of your daily routine, from putting together playlists to ordering groceries through your favorite apps. Now it's expanding those capabilities to more services, with Google Search joining in, too.
The company has announced a new Connected Apps Platform that makes it easier for developers to bring their services to both Gemini and Search. Alongside this, Google is adding new partners to its growing lineup, bringing more of the apps people already use into its AI ecosystem.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.