Tag: science

Carbon capture

Neat Rosetta@Home project:

2C02 + 2e- + H20 -> C2O3H2 + O2 the product is a simple sugar that could be used in a variety of ways, and the removal of C02 from the atmosphere would be great for countering global warming.

2007-05-11: Iron Fertilization

If you seeded the algae with iron dust, you could radically accelerate the rate at which it consumed CO2. The money quote: “Give me a half tanker of iron, and I will give you an ice age.”

2011-01-23: Genocide carbon capture. The mongol conquest killed 40m people and reabsorbed 700m tons of CO2 due to reforestation.
2012-10-24: CO2 negative fuels. What Iron fertilization does for geoengineering the oceans, this contributes to carbon sequestration on land, with the following claims:

    • 1% of planetary landmass to drive all cars
    • 2% to bring net CO2 emission to 0 by 2030
    • bring 100M people out of extreme poverty

The crucial difference, this proposal makes revenues instead of the $30B / year the iron fertilization would cost.

2013-05-10: Geoengineering is no longer a theory, for better or worse.

In a large ocean eddy west of Haida Gwaii the project has replenished vital ocean mineral micronutrients, with the expectation and hope it would restore 10K square kilometers of ocean pasture to health. Indeed this has occurred and the waters of the Haida eddy have turned from clear blue and sparse of life into a verdant emerald sea lush with the growth of a 100M tons of plankton and the entire food chain it supports. The growth of those tons of plankton derives from vast amounts of CO2 now diverted from becoming deadly ocean acid and instead made that same CO2 become ocean life itself.

2014-07-10: The first planet we’ll terraform will be our own.

Once you know what plankton can do, you’ll understand why fertilizing the ocean with iron is not such a crazy idea

2014-10-09: Greening deserts are very bad for the oceans
2014-12-13: For Geoengineering

it’s not perfect and there are some things it won’t do. Turning down the sun does nothing for ocean acidification. But it looks like it can cut 80% of the total variation in climate, which is really stunning.

the deserts are becoming more green and are producing less dust. This is driving the steady reduction of iron into the oceans by ~1% per year. 42% more CO2 in the atmosphere means that plants in the desert need to breathe less and keep more water. Less dust from the desert means less iron into the ocean. Iron shortage in the ocean is the key factor that is reducing algae and plankton in the ocean.

2015-09-26: Microscopic carbon capture

Engineers have designed enzyme-functionalized micromotors the size of red blood cells that rapidly zoom around in water, remove CO2, and convert it into a usable solid form. The proof-of-concept study represents a promising route to mitigate the buildup of carbon dioxide


2017-08-01: 9% Ocean kelp farm. Now that’s geoengineering:

There is a proposal to use 9% of the ocean’s surface for massive kelp farms. The Ocean surface area is 360m km2. This would offset all CO2 production and provide 0.5 kg of fish and sea vegetables per person per day for 10b people as an “incidental” by-product. 9% of the world’s oceans would be equivalent to 4.5x the area of Australia.

2017-10-12: Kelp for carbon capture

These methods will be faster to scale than complicated and industrial intensive carbon capture at coal and natural gas plants and factories and creating massive national and global pipelines to move the captured gas into underground storage.

  • Expand Commercial Kelp Growth by 100x
  • Iron sulphate in the ocean
  • Biochar sequestering
  • Diesel particulate filters
  • Lighter colored roofs and roads

2017-12-04: Suberin CO2 Fixation

Suberin has a lot of unique properties that could make it useful for storing CO2 from the atmosphere. It’s primarily composed of CO2 and it’s not biodegradable, which means it will last a few 1000 years. You need 5% of the world’s farmland growing highly-enriched suberin crops to fix 50% of all the CO2 that we’re putting up there.

2018-07-16: Artificial Azolla Events

The great Azolla boom was so successful that it lasted for 800k years, and is now known to paleobotanists as the “Azolla event.” Green plants suck up carbon dioxide; Azolla is particularly good at doing so. Over that period, it sequestered 10t tons of CO2 from the Earth’s atmosphere, or 200x the total amount of CO2 humans currently release into the atmosphere every year. The plant’s shape contains specialized little indents where it houses cyanobacteria, a form of blue-green algae that acts as a nitrogen fixer—that is, converting nitrogen in the atmosphere into a fertilizer. The fern hosts the bacteria, providing it with sugary fuel, and in doing so, helps make its own fertilizer.

2018-09-14: Geoengineering is necessary

The world needs to cut 70% of greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 to have any chance of avoiding 2 ˚C of warming.


2019-04-26: Plant Carbon Fixation

Right now, the Salk team is at the beginning phases of this project. They’ve identified genetic pathways that control for the 3 traits they want to bring out in plants: increasing suberin, enlarging root systems, and making the roots grow down deeper into the ground. Now they will begin to test combining those 3 traits in a model plant called arabidopsis in the lab, before moving on to crop plants like corn, soybean and rice. They hope to have prototypes of souped up versions of major crops within 5 years, and are already in talks with agricultural companies to partner on testing them.

2019-04-30: CO2 negative AC

Scientists propose a framework for modifying AC units to suck in CO2 and spit out fuels for use in vehicles like cargo ships.

2019-05-02: What would it look like if a small group of billionaires took unilateral climate action through solar radiation management?

The Triumvirate, as the 3 billionaires came to be known, was used to having the world’s attention. 1 of them had led the charge to colonize Mars, landing 2 probes on the Red Planet and, almost as a sideshow, a crew on the moon in 2026. Another had cleverly engineered his way around the slowing of Moore’s law, and by 2029 owned 60% of the world’s server space. The 3rd had started with a social media platform before selling high and expanding into cars in the Philippines and Indonesia, simplified mobile payment systems in Africa, and other projects. Their extra-boardroom activities, alternately adulated and mocked across the world’s Twitter feeds, ranged from the absurdly dangerous (BASE jumping off an erupting volcano) to the simply absurd (Periscoped comparisons of McDonald’s fries in 63 countries).

2019-06-05: Geoengineering estimate

From the time of the industrial revolution, humanity has generated 2.3t tons of CO2 and we now have 1t tons more CO2 in the atmosphere than there was around 1800. Where did the other 1.3t tons of CO2 go? 50% was absorbed into the soil and plant mass and 50% went into the ocean. Our CO2 problem would be 2x as bad if not for the soil, trees and ocean. By doubling the existing CO2 absorption process of the soil, plants and ocean we can offset the excess CO2 and other gases. This is not just the 50b ton per year amount generated by the vehicles, buildings and factories but the whole 1t tons.

2019-07-26: Geoengineering Governance

Integrating SRM and other geoengineering methods under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) regime can make those methods legitimate objects of global climate governance. The UNFCCC could also facilitate trust-building and surveillance measures to lessen the concern that a handful of the largest and richest countries might seize the reins of planetary modification. The convention and its associated regime would offer a framework for “climate-bargaining” between countries with the means and will to undertake geoengineering measures and those that lack sufficient resources or prove reluctant to undertake such activities. The UNFCCC and other institutions, such as the World Meteorological Organization, should play an important role in sharing information and best practices, serving as international clearinghouses for SRM and other geoengineering research. Project funders and national research organizations can also play an integral role by incentivizing adherence to codes of conduct for responsible SRM research.

2019-08-02: Solar geoengineering

Although solar geoengineering is typically conceived of as centralized and state-deployed, we explore highly decentralized solar geoengineering. Done perhaps through numerous small high-altitude balloons, it could be provided by nonstate actors such as environmentally motivated nongovernmental organizations or individuals. Conceivably tolerated or even covertly sponsored by states, highly decentralized solar geoengineering could move presumed action from the state arena to that of direct intervention by nonstate actors, which could in turn, disrupt international politics and pose novel challenges for technology and environmental policy. We conclude that this method appears technically possible, economically feasible, and potentially politically disruptive.

2020-05-28: Stripe emissions purchases

Today, after a rigorous search and review by a panel of independent scientific experts, we’re excited to announce our first purchases. Our request for projects garnered a wide range of negative emissions technologies which came in 2 broad categories.

2020-11-26: Lanternfish are the largest animal migration in the world, and removes 50% as much CO2 from the atmosphere as humanity emits from the burning of fossil fuels.

2020-11-27: Stripe is buying carbon removal to bring it down the cost curve. It needs to get at least 3x cheaper to scale.
2021-01-19: A snapshot of developments in carbon removal, with the typical NYT hand wringing and concern trolling thrown in:

“It’s a chicken-or-egg problem. The best way to bring down the cost is to start deploying these technologies at scale. But until there are actual customers, no one’s going to build them.”

To help break the impasse, Stripe announced in 2019 that it would begin spending at least $1M annually on carbon removal, without worrying about the price per ton initially. The goal was to evaluate companies working on promising technologies and offer them a reliable stream of income.

2021-07-07: Seagrass Restoration

Over the last 20 years, supported by an army of volunteers, the project team has sown nearly 75M seeds. Around 36 km2 of coastal bays are now blanketed with eelgrass, which has improved water quality, increased marine biodiversity and helped mitigate climate change by capturing and storing CO2. Despite covering less than 0.2% of the ocean, it is responsible for 10% of the ocean’s ability to store CO2. It provides a vital habitat for marine life, boosts commercial fishing, helps purify water, protects coastlines and even traps and stores microplastics.


2021-07-27: No Humus

A new generation of soil studies powered by modern microscopes and imaging technologies has revealed that whatever humus is, it is not the long-lasting substance scientists believed it to be. Even the largest, most complex molecules can be quickly devoured by soil’s abundant and voracious microbes. The magic molecule you can just stick in the soil and expect to stay there may not exist. “Now it’s really clear that soil organic matter is just this loose assemblage of plant matter in varying degrees of degradation.” Some will then be respired into the atmosphere as CO2. What remains could be eaten by another microbe — and a third, and so on. Or it could bind to a bit of clay or get trapped inside a soil aggregate: a porous clump of particles that, from a microbe’s point of view, could be as large as a city and as impenetrable as a fortress. Studies of carbon isotopes have shown that a lot of carbon can stick around in soil for centuries or even longer. If humus isn’t doing the stabilizing, perhaps minerals and aggregates are.

2021-11-05: The NYT wrote a more optimistic article:

Getting from 4000 tons a year to 5b tons quickly enough to help limit climate change may seem fanciful but there is an intriguing comparison with the world’s first commercial wind farm, which opened in 1980 on Crotched Mountain in New Hampshire. That project consisted of 20 turbines with a combined output of 600 kW. In 2020, the wind capacity installed around the world was 1.23m times larger, at 740 gigawatts. Increasing Orca’s annual output at the same rate would yield a CO2 removal capacity of 5b tons by around 2060. “That is exactly what climate science asks us to do to achieve climate targets”. The challenge will hinge on reducing costs, which are now $600-$800 per ton. Increased output could bring those costs down to $200-$300 per ton by 2030, and $100-$150 somewhere around 2035. DAC would already be competitive if it received the subsidies that helped electric vehicles and solar panels deploy and flourish. A fundamental difference from wind and solar power is that they were ultimately driven by the profit motive because once subsidies had helped to make them competitive they were producing a valuable asset: cheap electricity.

2022-04-15: And a scientifically literate take:

The growing resources available to support carbon capture technologies along with domestic and foreign policy changes and increasing levels of public support make it likely that we will see significant commercialization of carbon capture technologies in the next 10 years. Carbon capture technologies fill 1 of 2 roles: 1) reducing CO2 emissions from industrial processes, making them more carbon neutral, or 2) removing CO2 from the air, acting as a negative emissions technology (NET).

Large projects (>1 million tonnes of CO2 per year) that reduce emissions by capturing CO2 from industrial sources and non-utility power plants will be a steady but slow area of growth, given long project timelines and the large quantities of capital required (>$500m). With only the existing US tax credits to incentivize carbon capture, such projects will be led by large corporate entities (likely oil & gas majors), rather than electric power utilities or midsize companies.

At a carbon tax level of $50–60 per metric tonne of CO2, removing CO2 from the emissions of large industrial facilities could be cost-neutral with today’s technologies. Liquid amine scrubbing technologies will likely remain the technology of choice for CO2 capture from large industrial sources, unless there is significant process innovation around solid adsorbents or membranes. Svante, a leader in carbon capture process innovation, is a possible disrupter, and research continues into fluidized beds and other types of processes that could make CO2 capture with solid materials more cost effective for gases with high CO2 contents (5–30% CO2).

The cost of directly capturing CO2 from air has the potential to fall significantly due to innovations in solid materials for CO2 capture, material heating and cooling strategies, and optimization of carbonation technologies. This field is currently led by new companies rather than large established ones: specifically Climeworks and Carbon Engineering are currently deploying carbon capture plants. Business model innovation may enable “crowdsourcing” or corporate funding of capturing CO2 directly from the air if capture costs can be reduced to $100 per metric tonne or less. In all cases, the ability to site carbon capture systems near pipelines, storage sites or other CO2 users is critical.

If small scale CO2 capture plus utilization or chemical conversion technologies mature, CO2-to-products plays at smaller scales of 10k–100k metric tonnes of CO2 per year could become an area of rapid growth. These technologies require either very low capture costs ($40/tonne or less), or the ability to use non-pure CO2.

2023-02-24: Seawater capture is far superior

The ocean currently soaks up 30-40% of all humanity’s annual carbon emissions, and maintains a constant free exchange with the air. Suck the carbon out of the seawater, and it’ll suck more out of the air to re-balance the concentrations. Best of all, the concentration of carbon dioxide in seawater is 100x greater than in air.
Previous research teams have managed to release CO2 from seawater and capture it, but their methods have required expensive membranes and a constant supply of chemicals to keep the reactions going. MIT’s team, on the other hand, has announced the successful testing of a system that uses neither, and requires vastly less energy than air capture methods.
The team projects an optimized cost around US$56 per ton of CO2 captured – although it’s not fair to compare that directly against full-system direct air capture costs. The study cautions that this does not include vacuum degassing, filtration and “auxiliary costs outside of the electrochemical system” – analyses of which will have to be done separately. Some of these, however, could potentially be mitigated by integrating the carbon capture units in with other facilities, for example desalination plants, which are already processing large volumes of seawater.

2023-03-23: Another approach that can work with seawater

CO2 is relatively diluted in the atmosphere at 400 ppm. So big machines that require large amounts of energy are needed to both absorb and discharge the CO2. This new approach, using off-the-shelf resins and other chemicals, promises far greater efficiency and lower cost. The new hybrid absorbing material was able to take in 3x as much CO2 as existing substances. “To my knowledge, there is no absorbing material which even at 100k ppm, shows the capacity we get it in direct air capture of 400 ppm”. This new approach can remove CO2 for less than $100 a ton. With the addition of some chemicals the captured CO2 can be transformed into bicarbonate of soda and stored simply and safely in sea water.

2023-05-25: Olivine weathering

What would it take to start making a serious dent in atmospheric CO₂? Say we shot for 80 gigatons of olivine a year, locking away 100 gigatons of the stuff when fully weathered. Unlike many proposals for carbon sequestration, olivine intervention is not contingent on undiscovered or nascent technology. Let’s take a look at the process through the lens of an increasingly small grain of rock.
Once a suitable olivine formation has been located, quarrying rock out of the formation is cheap. Even in high-income countries like Australia or Canada where mine workers make top-notch salaries, the cost of quarrying rock and crushing it down to gravel size is $3 / ton, and it requires very little energy. Since reversing global warming would entail the biggest quarrying operation in history, we might well expect costs to drop further.

Depending on the deposit, haul trucks might prove unnecessary; it may be most cost-effective to have the crusher and mills follow the front lines. The wonderful thing about paying people to mill rocks is that we don’t have to know for sure from our armchair; the engineers tasked with keeping expenses to a minimum will figure it out as they go.

What is quite certain is that the vast majority of that expense, both financially and in terms of energy, comes not from mining or crushing but from milling the crushed rock down to particle size.
Though there’s no way to know for sure until and unless the sequestration industry reaches maturity, a reasonable upper estimate for capital investment is $1.60 per ton of CO₂ sequestered, giving a total cost per sequestered ton of $9. The resulting bill of $900b per year might sound gargantuan – but it’s worth remembering that the world economy is a $100t / year behemoth, and each ton of carbon dioxide not sequestered is 20x as costly.

2023-06-19: For scale, you want a liquid process, not gas or solid.

Demand for direct air capture depends on government policy, “green” hydrogen prices, the success of point source capture, and the acceptance of more creative sequestration technologies. Government policy might encourage DAC with subsidies or by taxing carbon. The cheaper green hydrogen is, the more competitive chemicals will be. Point source capture is a direct substitute for DAC in providing chemical feedstock and sequestration if it becomes easier to permit wells. Potentially cheaper interventions like mineral weathering can replace carbon sequestration but aren’t acceptable chemical feedstock.

The carbon capture method depends heavily on project needs. Burying carbon is method-agnostic, while feedstocks need a certain quality and quantity. Solid sorbents will likely rule for small-scale applications, but traditional methods using big pipes and fans get more competitive as demand increases. Energy availability is also an influence. “Baseload” sources favor traditional methods, while solar PV works better with solid sorbent systems that can concentrate energy use during peak daylight hours.

Cheaper carbon capture encourages government policy and industrial adoption. $1000/ton is a non-starter. Chemicals become competitive at $50-$100/ton while capture and sequestration become cheaper than the cost of pollution. These prices are achievable, and climate change will be just another scare solved by human ingenuity.

2023-06-22: Kenya is ideal

Because the earth’s crust is thinner than usual along the rift, it has vast geothermal potential. The American government reckons Kenya alone could generate 10gw of geothermal power, 10x the amount it currently produces. A by-product of such power stations is plenty of waste steam, which can then be used to heat dac machines. Moreover, since close to 90% of Kenya’s power is renewable, the electricity these machines consume does not contribute to more global warming.
Capturing CO2 is just part of the process. Next it has to be safely locked away. The rift’s geology is particularly good for this, too. It has bands of porous basalt (a volcanic rock) that stretch across 1000s of km2. This makes the region “ideal” for carbon capture and storage. After CO2 has been sucked from the air it is dissolved in water (in the same way one would make sparkling water). This slightly acidic and bubbly liquid is then injected into the rock. There it reacts with the basalt to form carbon-rich minerals—in essence, rocks—which means the gas will not leak back into the atmosphere.

2023-08-07: Accidental geoengineering

Regulations imposed in 2020 by the United Nations’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) have cut ships’ sulfur pollution by 80% and improved air quality worldwide. The reduction has also lessened the effect of sulfate particles in seeding and brightening the distinctive low-lying, reflective clouds that follow in the wake of ships and help cool the planet. By dramatically reducing the number of ship tracks, the planet has warmed up faster. That trend is magnified in the Atlantic, where maritime traffic is particularly dense. In the shipping corridors, the increased light represents a 50% boost to the warming effect of human carbon emissions. It’s as if the world suddenly lost the cooling effect from a fairly large volcanic eruption each year.

Telescopes

Phased Array Optics

It’s now been over 15 years since cryonics pioneer, molecular nanotechnologist, and optics buff Dr. Brian Wowk came up with the super-cool idea of phased array optics. Essentially, the plan is to use a 2D array of micron-sized screens to emit light at the precise amplitude and phase necessary to create the illusion of a 3D image. This technology could be fantastically effective: even using binoculars or a telescope, a person looking at the screen would be able to see details “km away” (if the image were high enough resolution) even if the screen were right in front of their face. Outside of tapping into the optic nerve directly, this may be the most convincing display technology ever. The limits of optics. The only problem is that it would require a metric truckload of computing power, but it’s nothing that specialty nanocomputers won’t be able to handle, right? Here is a diagram of the apparatus:


2008-06-03: GLIMPSE

GLIMPSE (Galactic Legacy Infrared Midplane Extraordinaire) is a survey of the inner part of the Milky Way Galaxy in which we reside. The images come from the IRAC instrument on board the Spitzer Space Telescope. These surveys have 100x the sensitivity and over 10x the resolution of previous surveys, allowing us to see stars and dusty objects throughout most of the Galaxy for the first time.

2008-09-19: Space flux telescopes

Holding the mirror pieces together magnetically seems the only practical way to reach the 40m+ diameter required to detect extrasolar planets directly
2009-06-11: The new refraction limit is wavelength / 20, a 10x improvement. This allows imagining of molecules with optical microscopes, and maybe also improvements for telescopes.
2013-12-09: DARPA MOIRE. The thickness of plastic wrap, each membrane serves as a Fresnel lens, which unfold in orbit. The diameter of 20 m would be the largest telescope ever made and gives it ~30x the light-gathering power of the HST.

2015-09-01: 3.2 Gigapixel

The US Department of Energy has approved the start of construction for a 3.2-gigapixel digital camera—the world’s largest—at the heart of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. Assembled at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the camera will be the eye of LSST, revealing unprecedented details of the universe and helping unravel some of its greatest mysteries.

2016-08-15: LUVOIR

The Large Ultraviolet Optical Infrared Surveyor is a proposed space telescope that would be 5x as big and 100x as sensitive as the Hubble, with a 12m mirror, and would orbit the sun ~1.6m km from Earth. The revolutionary HDST space-based observatory would have the capability to find and study 10s of Earth-like worlds in detail. The 10 milliarcsec resolution element of a 12 meter telescope (diffraction limited at 0.5 micron) would reach a new threshold in spatial resolution. It would be able to take an optical image or spectrum at ~100 parsec spatial resolution or better, for any observable object in the entire Universe. Thus, no matter where a galaxy lies within the cosmic horizon, we would resolve the scale at which the formation and evolution of galaxies becomes the study of their smallest constituent building blocks—their star-forming regions and dwarf satellites. Within the Milky Way, a 12 m telescope would resolve the distance between the Earth and the Sun for any star in the Solar neighborhood, and resolve 100 AU anywhere in the Galaxy. Within our own Solar System, we would resolve structures the size of Manhattan out at the orbit of Jupiter

2017-04-08: Planet wide radio telescope

VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) now links radio telescopes spread across the globe into a telescope the size of our planet– extending the array to millimeter wavelengths achieved a further boost in resolving power. The result is a 10x increase in the sensitivity of the world’s millimeter VLBI networks.


2018-07-30: Adaptive optics Neptune

In astronomy, adaptive optics refers to a technique where instruments are able to compensate for the blurring effect caused by Earth’s atmosphere, which is a serious issue when it comes to ground-based telescopes. Basically, as light passes through our atmosphere, it becomes distorted and causes distant objects to become blurred (which is why stars appear to twinkle when seen with the naked eye).


2018-09-08: Imaging Oort Cloud objects

The most distant galaxies can be seen by our telescopes but smaller and closer objects in the Oort clouds cannot be seen. The Oort cloud objects are too faint to see with the James Webb Space Telescope, but it should be able to see bright galaxies and quasars even at 13B light years. Detecting Oort cloud dwarf planets would likely take a space telescope with an 11 kilometer mirror.

2019-03-21: Exoplanet Gigapixel Imaging

If we send a telescope to the solar gravitational lens (SGL) point on the opposite side of our sun then light from objects like exoplanets will be focused to provide 100B times more magnification. The Sun becomes a telescope that is 1.4M kilometers wide for the SGL regions.

We could resolve exoplanets around Proxima B to 450-meter resolution using a 1-meter telescope SGL mission. If there was an earth-sized planet around Proxima B, we could resolve to 800 megapixels. We would only be able to resolve 10 square kilometers at a time. The space telescope would have to roam around the einstein-ring image of the target object to assemble the full image. The image would need to be converted from an einstein ring back into the image of the exoplanet. A giant 1.3 kilometer focus line diameter space telescope would be able to resolve an entire einstein-ring image of an earth-sized exoplanet at 100 light years from the right SGL location.

2019-12-04: 1000km Space Telescopes

The 1000km baseline arrays would have over 400K times the light collection of the Hubble Space telescope.

2020-07-08: Gravity Lenses. If we send telescopes out to 4 light days we can use the gravity of the sun to amplify the power of telescopes by 100B times.
2021-05-14: Quantum Interferometry

A quantum hard drive at each telescope can record and store the wavelike states of incoming photons without disturbing them. After a while, you transport the hard drives to a single location, where you interfere the signals to create an incredibly high-resolution image. Not everyone thinks it’ll work. “In the long run, if these techniques are to become practical, they will require a quantum network”. Bartholomew counters that “we have good reasons to be optimistic” about quantum hard drives. “I think in a 5-to-10-year time frame you could see tentative experiments where you actually start looking at real [astronomical] sources.” By contrast, the construction of a quantum internet is decades from reality.

Tissue engineering

Researchers have identified the electrical switch that turns on a tadpole’s regeneration system. Someday this could possibly lead to a way to stimulate human tissue regeneration

2007-02-27: human bladders can now be grown in the lab.

2008-03-15: making materials more like biological systems: self healing.

Whichever system is adopted (and both might be, for different applications), 2 further things are needed. 1 is a way of checking that a component really has healed. The other is a way to top up the healing molecules once some of them have been used. 1 way to make healed “wounds” obvious would be to add a bit of color. A repaired area would develop a bruise. Topping up the supply of healing fluid might be done by mimicking another biological system—the network of blood capillaries that supplies living tissues with the stuff they need to thrive. Both Dr Moore and Dr Bond are attempting to borrow from nature this way. If they succeed, the machines of the future will have longer and healthier lives.

2008-09-26: The potential of regenerative medicine

engineered tissue has helped a man regrow his lost fingertip, stem cells can rebuild damaged heart muscle, and cell therapy can regenerate the skin of burned soldiers. This new, low-impact medicine comes just in time — our aging population will otherwise cause a crisis in health care systems around the world.

2008-12-21: Extracellular Matrix

Extracellular Matrix cells have been found to cause regrowth and healing of tissue.

Fingertips have been grown back with this, limbs are next.

Researchers had the idea of giving wounded muscle cells a healing boost with a substance that normally surrounds cells — the extracellular matrix. “The matrix can be thought of simply as the glue that holds all of the different cells in different tissues together. There are all these hidden signals in the matrix that instruct the cells on what to do.”

They transplanted matrix cells derived from pig bladders into the legs of patients whose muscles had been partially destroyed. Before the experimental treatment, “some of them could not get out of a chair without help. Some of them walked with a cane. This was not just a mild loss of strength. They had real problems.” After successful treatment with the matrix, 1 patient “now [rides] mountain bikes and does jumping jacks.”

Studies of deep wounds have shown that at least 2 populations of fibroblasts invade an injury during healing. Some of these cells are fibroblasts that reside in the dermis, and the others are derived from circulating fibroblast-like stem cells. Both types are attracted to the wound by signals from immune cells that have also rushed to the scene. Once in the wound, the fibroblasts migrate and proliferate, eventually producing and modifying the extracellular matrix of the area. This early process is not that dissimilar to the regeneration response in a salamander wound, but the mammalian fibroblasts produce an excessive amount of matrix that becomes abnormally cross-linked as the scar tissue matures. In contrast, salamander fibroblasts stop producing matrix once the normal architecture has been restored.

2009-03-04: they can now control how cells connect with one another in vitro and assemble themselves into 3D, multicellular microtissues.
2009-07-24: Heart Cartilage

heart cartilage growing into beating hearts, molars, ears, bladders, all in a petri dish.

2010-04-27: Wnt proteins. If you break your arm it will heal in 2 weeks.

Compared to untreated bones, a broken bone heals 3.5x faster after treatment with liposomal Wnt3a. The discovery raises the possibility of a stem cell–free route to regeneration. The researchers are now conducting mouse tests of Wnt proteins for skin wounds, stroke and heart-attack recovery, and cartilage injuries. The protein enhancement of healing is applicable to all kinds of tissues.

2010-07-26: The octogenarians on 60 minutes informing their equally ancient audience about organ regeneration. Truly mainstream now, with a hint of desperation in the reporting.
2011-11-11: future already here, not evenly distributed, etc.

A few pig cells, a single surgery and a rigorous daily workout: They’re the 3 ingredients that patients will need to re-grow fresh, functional slabs of their own muscle, courtesy of Pentagon-backed science that’s already being used to rebuild parts of people.

2012-03-03: ~10-20% of the way to growing hearts in vitro.

A heart with visible blood vessels and newly-formed tissues obtained by seeding a heart scaffold with stem cells

organ engineering here we come.

By using a process called whole organ decellularization, scientists from the University of Minnesota Center for Cardiovascular Repair grew functioning heart tissue by taking dead rat and pig hearts and reseeding them with a mixture of live cells.

2012-12-30: this is really fascinating. get a swab from 1000 people, convert it to pluripotent stem cells, install it in an array and speed up drug testing enormously.

2013-06-13: The previous state of the art was dubious, but this is properly peer-reviewed. Induced pluripotency is absolutely miraculous in its implications.

The digit bones can regenerate only if the amputated stump still has some nail stem cells, the researchers found. But the cells alone are not enough; also crucial is a zone of tissue that grows from the stem cells during normal nail growth. After amputation, this tissue sends signals that attract new nerves into the end of the stump and begin the bone regeneration process. If amputation removes the nail zone or if the signals are blocked, the digits will not regenerate.

2013-08-08: includes pictures of printed ears, kidneys, blood vessels, skin and bones.

At Wake Forest, Yoo’s and Atala’s teams built custom bioprinters that are faster than modified inkjets and can print with many more cell types—including stem cells, muscle cells, and vascular cells. They also designed one printer to create both the synthetic scaffold and tissue in one fell swoop; they’re now using it to produce intricate ears, noses, and bones.

2013-09-09: new meat source or spare parts?

2013-12-08: A lung on a chip, complete with air and “blood” flow, allows to study white blood cells in a realistic environment and design new drugs.

2013-12-21: biological printing

There are similarities to what is being achieved with biological 3D printing in other fields, but this is the first time nerve cells from the mature adult central nervous system have been successfully inkjet printed.

2014-02-19: tissue regeneration has come a long way from just 4 years ago:

the most profound change seems to be the in vivo bioreactor: bone can be grown right in the body without the need for painful grafts from other body sites.

2014-04-19: Growing new objects

Scientists and engineers around the globe dream of employing biology to create new objects. The goal might be building replacement organs, electronic circuits, living houses, or cowborgs and carborgs (my favorites) that are composed of both standard electromechanical components and novel biological components. Whatever the dream, and however outlandish, we are getting closer every day.

2014-10-29: Stomach tissue

Scientists used pluripotent stem cells to generate functional, 3D human stomach tissue in a laboratory — creating an unprecedented tool for researching the development and diseases of an organ central to several public health crises, ranging from cancer to diabetes. Scientists used human pluripotent stem cells — which can become any cell type in the body — to grow a miniature version of the stomach.

The grown tissue will allow researchers to better study illnesses of the stomach, like those that cause ulcers and even cancer. The tissue may even be used as a treatment in and of itself by way of tiny grated patches that would grow over ulcerated stomachs.

2015-01-15: Soon at your local gnc

Duke researchers have grown human skeletal muscle that contracts and responds just like native tissue to external stimuli such as electrical pulses, biochemical signals and pharmaceuticals.

2015-02-28: Brain Organoids

Researchers have used brain organoids for an investigation of microcephaly, a disorder characterized by small brain size. Using cells derived from a patient with microcephaly, the team cultured organoids that shared characteristics with the patient’s brain. Then the researchers replaced a defective protein associated with the disorder and were able to culture organoids that appeared partially cured. This is just the beginning. Researchers are using brain organoids to investigate autism, schizophrenia, and epilepsy.

2015-06-04: Limbs

The report describes engineering rat forelimbs with functioning vascular and muscle tissue. The same approach could be applied to the limbs of primates. They can maintain the matrix of all of these tissues (muscles, bone, cartilage, blood vessels, tendons, ligaments and nerves) in their natural relationships to each other, they can culture the entire construct over prolonged periods of time, and that we can repopulate the vascular system and musculature. 1.5M individuals in the US have lost a limb, and although prosthetic technology has greatly advanced, the devices still have many limitations in terms of both function and appearance.

2015-06-30: Pulsed electric fields

Researchers have devised a novel non-invasive tissue-stimulation technique using pulsed electric fields (PEF) to generate new skin tissue growth. The technique produces scarless skin rejuvenation and may revolutionize the treatment of degenerative skin diseases

2015-08-01: Organoids

Madeline Lancaster realized that she had accidentally grown a brain. Since the late 2000s, biologists have grown a wide variety of rudimentary organs to understand development and for medical uses.

2015-09-12: 3D printed rib cage

A Spanish cancer patient has received a 3D-printed titanium sternum and rib cage. Suffering from a chest wall sarcoma (a type of cancerous tumor that grows, in this instance, around the rib cage), the 54 year old man needed his sternum and a portion of his rib cage replaced. This part of the chest is notoriously tricky to recreate with prosthetics, due to the complex geometry and design required for each patient.

2015-09-23: Organoids

A new technique for building organoids (tiny models of human tissues) turns human cells into LEGO bricks: These mini-tissues can be used to study how particular structural features of tissue affect normal growth or go awry in cancer. They could be used for therapeutic drug screening and to help teach researchers how to grow whole human organs.

2015-11-05: embryoid body printing

Scientists have developed a 3D printing method capable of producing embryoid bodies — highly uniform “blocks” of embryonic stem cells. These cells, which are capable of generating all cell types in the body, could be used to build tissue structures and potentially even micro-organs.


2015-11-06: Simulated blood vessels

Scientists have designed an innovative structure containing an intricate microchannel network of simulated blood vessels that solves one of the biggest challenges in regenerative medicine: How to deliver oxygen and nutrients to all cells in an artificial organ or tissue implant that takes days or weeks to grow in the lab prior to surgery.

2016-03-11: Eye lens

Scientists grow eye lens from patients’ own stem cells, restoring vision. In pioneering new cataract treatment of 12 pediatric patients, the eye grew a new lens from its own stem cells after cloudy lens was removed.

2016-04-09: Mammal Limb regeneration

We have an encouraging proof of concept that these elements possess all the sequences necessary to work with mammalian machinery after an injury. Genetic elements like these could be combined with genome-editing technologies to improve the ability of humans to repair and regrow damaged or missing body parts.

2017-02-27: Printed skin

This new human skin is one of the first living human organs created using bioprinting to be introduced to the marketplace. It replicates the natural structure of the skin, with a first external layer, the epidermis with its stratum corneum, which acts as protection against the external environment, together with another thicker, deeper layer, the dermis. This last layer consists of fibroblasts that produce collagen, the protein that gives elasticity and mechanical strength to the skin.

2017-07-28: could have been stolen from the westworld opening

2017-11-13: Brains on Mice Substrate

“These micro quasi-brains are revolutionizing research on human brain development and diseases from Alzheimer’s to Zika, but the headlong rush to grow the most realistic, most highly developed brain organoids has thrown researchers into uncharted ethical waters….In the previously unreported experiments implanting human brain organoids into lab rodents, most of the transplants survived….More notably, the human organoids implanted into mice connected to the rodent’s circulatory system, making this the first reported vascularization. And mature neurons from the human brain organoid sent axons, the wires that carry electrical signals from 1 neuron to another, into “multiple regions of the host mouse brain”.

2018-01-03: Bone gap filler

US Army researchers are using a synthetic bone gap filler that heals bones and reduces infection by infusing those grafts with a variety of antimicrobials, hoping to figuratively bridge the gap between current regenerative techniques and the ideal: people regrowing lost limbs.

2018-04-28: Pig brain revival 1

Yale University neuroscientist Nenad Sestan disclosed that a team he leads had experimented on between 100 and 200 pig brains obtained from a slaughterhouse, restoring their circulation using a system of pumps, heaters, and bags of artificial blood warmed to body temperature. BrainEx technology involves connecting a brain to a closed loop of tubes that circulate heated artificial blood throughout the brain’s vessels – allowing oxygen to flow to cells even deep in the brain. This is similar to the way scientists preserve other organs such as heart or lungs for transplants.

2018-06-15: Human limb regrowth

We have enriched for a pluripotent stem cell population, which opens the door to a number of experiments that were not possible before. The fact that the marker we discovered is expressed not only in planarians but also in humans suggests that there are some conserved mechanisms that we can exploit.

2018-12-03: Pig-Human Hybrid Brains

If a pig embryo is given an infusion of human stem cells, which can become nearly any tissue in the animal’s body, are we potentially creating animals with partial human brains? Could we accidentally bestow human-style awareness into a pig? Could human cells find their way into the sperm and egg cells of animals? And if so, what are the consequences?

2019-07-03: Pig brain revival 2

The thorniest issue centered on consciousness and whether the Yale team, inadvertently, might somehow have figured out a way to elicit it from dead flesh. Brain death — and thus complete loss of consciousness — has become something of a moving target. Patients we once thought were in deep comas as a result of a traumatic brain injury are actually able to communicate

2019-08-01: Pig brain revival 3

“Scientists Are Giving Dead Brains New Life. What Could Go Wrong?” (““What’s happened, I’d argue, is that a lot of things about the brain that we once thought were irreversible have turned out not necessarily to be so.””

2020-09-04: it is possible to induce the growth of neurons.
2021-05-15: Bioelectricity for regrowth

“Regeneration is not just for so-called lower animals”. Deer can regenerate antlers; humans can regrow their liver. “You may or may not know that human children below the age of 11 are able to regenerate their fingertips”. Why couldn’t human-growth programs be activated for other body parts—severed limbs, failed organs, even brain tissue damaged by stroke?

Levin’s work involves a conceptual shift. The computers in our heads are often contrasted with the rest of the body; most of us don’t think of muscles and bones as making calculations. But how do our wounds “know” how to heal? How do the tissues of our unborn bodies differentiate and take shape without direction from a brain? When a caterpillar becomes a moth, most of its brain liquefies and is rebuilt—and yet researchers have discovered that memories can be preserved across the metamorphosis. “What is that telling us?”. Among other things, it suggests that limbs and tissues besides the brain might be able, at some primitive level, to remember, think, and act. Other researchers have discussed brainless intelligence in plants and bacterial communities, or studied bioelectricity as a mechanism in development. But Levin has spearheaded the notion that the 2 ideas can be unified: he argues that the cells in our bodies use bioelectricity to communicate and to make decisions among themselves about what they will become.

2022-03-18: State of tissue engineering

But all this illustrates the trickiness of making new human tissues from stem cells. Recapitulating human tissue development is no easy task; the amount of signaling that goes into these processes is mind-boggling. And as these beta-cell efforts show, we don’t quite understand the details, both what to leave in and what to leave out. In this case, we ended up with something that still seems to work fairly well, somehow, but many times you won’t. So all the talk about growing and transplanting new stem-cell derived nerve tissue, new liver and pancreas tissue, new cardiac muscle, etc. still (after all these years) comes under the “Should be possible but not really yet” heading. It is a long hard road, and we’re only partway along it – we can make islet-ish tissue, neural-like tissue, muscle-oid cells, that sort of thing, but are these useful for human therapy or not? We might be within range of useful effects with these new islets, but as mentioned, that remains to be proven. Overall, it’s a good thing that the hype has died down over the years so the real work can go on.

2022-06-02: printed ear

A 20-year-old woman who was born with a small and misshapen right ear has received a 3D printed ear implant made from her own cells. The clinical trial, which includes 11 patients, is still ongoing, and it’s possible that the transplants could fail or bring unanticipated health complications. But since the cells originated from the patient’s own tissue, the new ear is not likely to be rejected by the body.


2022-07-21: Nerves not required for limb regeneration

When the limbs were suspended, even though they still had lots of nerves and could move around, they couldn’t actually put pressure on their limbs so the digit tips wouldn’t regenerate. It just completely inhibited regeneration. But once the load returns, there will be a couple weeks of delay, but then they’ll begin to regenerate. Mice can still regrow their digit tips even without any nerves in their affected digit — the process was just a bit slower. This suggests that nerves aren’t actually essential to mammal regeneration.

“These 2 studies counteract the 200 year dogma that you need nerves to regenerate. What replaces it in mammals is that you need mechanical loading, not nerves.”

2022-08-05: OrganEx

Researchers have restored circulation and cellular activity in the vital organs of pigs, such as the heart and brain, 1 hour after the animals died. The research challenges the idea that cardiac death — which occurs when blood circulation and oxygenation stops — is irreversible, and raises ethical questions about the definition of death. The work follows 2019 experiments by the same scientists in which they revived the disembodied brains of pigs 4 hours after the animals died, calling into question the idea that brain death is final.
1 hour after the pigs died, they restarted the ventilators and anesthesia. Some of the pigs were then attached to the OrganEx system; others received no treatment or were hooked up to an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine, which some hospitals use in a last-ditch effort to supply oxygen to and remove CO2 from the body.
After 6 hours, circulation had restarted much more effectively in pigs that received the OrganEx solution than in those that received ECMO or no treatment. Oxygen had begun flowing to tissues all over the bodies of the OrganEx animals, and a heart scan detected some electrical activity and contraction. But the heart had not fully restarted, and it’s unclear what exactly it was doing in those animals.

2022-08-12: Synthetic mouse embryos

scientists have created mouse embryos in the lab without using any eggs or sperm and watched them grow outside the womb. To achieve this feat, the researchers used only stem cells. The breakthrough experiment, took place in a specially designed bioreactor that serves as an artificial womb for developing embryos. Within the device, embryos float in small beakers of nutrient-filled solution, and the beakers are all locked into a spinning cylinder that keeps them in constant motion. This movement simulates how blood and nutrients flow to the placenta. The device also replicates the atmospheric pressure of a mouse uterus.


2022-10-13: Human brain organoids in rat substrate are much more human-like than in vitro

Neuroscientists have found a new way to study human neurons — by transplanting human brainlike tissue into rats that are just days old, when their brains have not yet fully formed. The researchers show that human neurons and other brain cells can grow and integrate themselves into the rat’s brain, becoming part of the functional neural circuitry that processes sensations and controls aspects of behaviors.

Using this technique, scientists should be able to create new living models for a wide range of neurodevelopmental disorders, including at least some forms of autism spectrum disorder. The models would be just as practical for neuroscientific lab studies as current animal models are but would be better stand-ins for human disorders because they would consist of real human cells in functional neural circuits. They could be ideal targets for modern neuroscience tools that are too invasive to use in real human brains.


2023-03-11: Organoid Intelligence

  • Biological computing (or biocomputing) could be faster, more efficient, and more powerful than silicon-based computing and AI, and only require a fraction of the energy.
  • ‘Organoid intelligence’ (OI) describes an emerging multidisciplinary field working to develop biological computing using 3D cultures of human brain cells (brain organoids) and brain-machine interface technologies.
  • OI requires scaling up current brain organoids into complex, durable 3D structures enriched with cells and genes associated with learning, and connecting these to next-generation input and output devices and AI/machine learning systems.
  • OI requires new models, algorithms, and interface technologies to communicate with brain organoids, understand how they learn and compute, and process and store the massive amounts of data they will generate.
  • OI research could also improve our understanding of brain development, learning, and memory, potentially helping to find treatments for neurological disorders such as dementia.
  • Ensuring OI develops in an ethically and socially responsive manner requires an ‘embedded ethics’ approach where interdisciplinary and representative teams of ethicists, researchers, and members of the public identify, discuss, and analyze ethical issues and feed these back to inform future research and work.

2023-07-07: Organ vitrification and reanimation worked (barely)

When vitrifying, scientists first infuse the organ or tissue with magnetic nanoparticles and safeguarding chemicals called cryoprotective agents that serve as a kind of antifreeze. Afterward, they cool it quickly — 24 degrees Celsius per minute — to bypass the formation of cell-shredding ice crystals and directly enter a glass-like state. Bischof and his colleagues have spent years developing technology that can rewarm vitrified materials fast enough to avoid ice-crystal formation in the physical transition back from glass. This rewarming, critically, also must be uniform, to avoid an organ cracking and splitting from its outside surfaces being too different a temperature from its core — like an ice cube in a glass of room-temperature water.
That’s not to say the nanowarmed kidneys performed exactly like any other. They worked — but they didn’t work perfectly. The experimental kidneys produced urine within 45 minutes of transplantation, compared to a few minutes for their fresh counterparts. And for the first days after surgery, they were slower to clear out creatinine, a chemical waste product that kidneys remove from the body. Though “by 3 weeks, they look like normal kidneys”.

“The biggest issue is that the kidneys were, in fact, badly damaged. The function of those kidneys was cut by 50%. These were kidneys in the peak of life, in perfect health — and they barely made it. If they’d been any more damaged than they were they wouldn’t have made it.”

On the other hand, the degree to which the kidneys did heal and recover was “remarkable and encouraging.” In the paper, the researchers also noted that because they ended the study 30 days post-transplant, they weren’t able to assess longer-term survival.

The researchers plan to scale their cryopreservation method up to pig organs — a size change, kidney-wise, from a large grape (in rats) to about a pear (in pigs). As they go, they will continue to study whether rewarmed animal organs recover their original physiological, chemical, and electrical properties.

Down the line, if all goes well, the future might hold living banks where organs, skin, nerves, blood vessels, cartilage and stem cells are preserved in liquid nitrogen for years until they’re matched with the right patients.


2023-07-28: Xenotransplantation progress

Genetically modified xenografts are one of the most promising solutions to the discrepancy between the numbers of available human organs for transplantation and potential recipients. To date, a porcine heart has been implanted into only 1 human recipient. Here, using 10-gene-edited pigs, we transplanted porcine hearts into 2 brain-dead human recipients and monitored xenograft function, hemodynamics and systemic responses over the course of 66 hours. Although both xenografts demonstrated excellent cardiac function immediately after transplantation and continued to function for the duration of the study, cardiac function declined postoperatively in one case, attributed to a size mismatch between the donor pig and the recipient. For both hearts, we confirmed transgene expression and found no evidence of cellular or antibody-mediated rejection, as assessed using histology, flow cytometry and a cytotoxic crossmatch assay. Moreover, we found no evidence of zoonotic transmission from the donor pigs to the human recipients. While substantial additional work will be needed to advance this technology to human trials, these results indicate that pig-to-human heart xenotransplantation can be performed successfully without hyperacute rejection or zoonosis.

2023-09-29: Cognition without a brain

A tiny jellyfish has, for the first time, demonstrated a mighty cognitive capacity — the ability to learn by association. Although it has no central brain, the finger-tip-sized Caribbean box jellyfish (Tripedalia cystophora) can be trained to associate the sensation of bumping into something with a visual cue, and to use the information to avoid future collisions.

Investigations

Few people have thought as long and as hard about the origin of life and the emergence of complexity in a biosphere as Stuart Kauffman. Medical doctor, geneticist, professor of biochemistry and biophysics, MacArthur Fellow, and member of the faculty of the Santa Fe Institute for a decade, he has sought to discover the principles which might underlie a “general biology”—the laws which would govern any biosphere, whether terrestrial, extraterrestrial, or simulated within a computer, regardless of its physical substrate. an overview of the principles he suspects, but cannot prove, may underlie all forms of life, and beyond that systems in general which are far from equilibrium such as a modern technological economy and the universe itself.