Friday Fragments (7/15/11)

Well, it's that time of the week again folks! Do you ever have one of the weeks that seems to have a crazy flow and ebb like a roller coaster? That was my week in a nutshell, but I did get some really interesting micrographs of my new model drug and I hope to share a couple pictures with you, but I need to get approval before I put them up on the web.  Anyway, here are my favorite links of the week...

The trachea grown from a person's stem cells and successfully
transplanted into the patient.

-Scientists in Sweden have successfully grown the first "organ" from a patients own stem cells.  I say "organ" because it is actually the patients trachea, which isn't an organ by itself, but it is a huge step forward. I remember sitting in a lecture hall at Indianapolis my junior year in high school during a field trip for my AP Biology.  A visiting professor gave a 4 hour lecture about Biomedical Engineering and he described how they were growing ears in petri-dishes!  He said the technology was still ten years away at best and here we are 6 years later, did I  mention this is big news!

-Here is a video of a pretty cool optical illusion...of women's faces, enjoy!

-Another video, this time of a guy playing the guitar from inside the guitar.  The strings seem to bounce around in crazy designs, but it's just the rolling shutter of the iPhone.  The camera not the guy is inside the guitar (I know you were thinking it).

Euthanasia Coaster [wikipedia.org]
That's a 1600 foot drop and 7 loops!

-I went to King's Island a few week back and really enjoyed just riding roller coasters instead of blowing my money of carnival games because I was too scared to ride the coasters.  Anyway, I had heard of a new coaster which hopefully will just intrigue you but might also offend you.  It's a concept coaster named "The Euthanasia Coaster" because it kills all of it's passengers.  Yep, it is designed as a form of capital punishment. Basically it makes up blackout then kills you from oxygen deprivation.  Here is an article, and here is the wikipedia page.

-These kilobots from Harvard University are both really cool and a little disturbing because they could eventually rule the world.  And they cost $14 each!

-Earlier this week the space shuttle Discovery had it's last launch and I spent a good half hour looking at space shuttle stuff on the web.  Here's the best link, a 360 panoramic view of the cockpit.  See if you can find the duct-tape job that I could have engineered as a 12 year old! I also think that regardless of what the next space rocket is going to be, it better have a cockpit that at the very least looks like it's from this millennium.

Until next week!