If you watch the mesmerizing pulses of a jellyfish in water, it might occur to you that they sometimes resemble the pulses of the human heart. A jellyfish doesn't swim so much as it beats, pushing its way forward.
Kevin Kit Parker, a professor at Harvard University, had that thought on a visit to the New England Aquarium, and teamed up with John Dabiri and Janna Nawroth of the California Institute of Technology. They all work in the nascent field of bioengineering, and they and their team might have started something.
They created a sort of artificial jellyfish -- it looks like one, and swims like one but doesn't have a single cell of jellyfish tissue in its body. The image to the right is a close-up view of engineered rat cardiac muscle researchers used to power an artificial, tissue-engineered jellyfish.
Instead, they grew their jellyfish from the heart muscle cells of a rat. Yes, a rat. They gave it the nickname "Medusoid" and published their results in the journal Nature Biotechnology. Check out the video below:
[ame=http://youtu.be/2spbFpzyiJ0]Caltech and Harvard Bioengineers Explain Artificial Jellyfish Research - YouTube[/ame]
Artificial Jellyfish ...from Rat Hearts
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