this curious life

Animals have been cranking out architectural marvels since humanity was still trying to figure out how pooping works.

 

beavers, gophers, spiders, termites, birds - animal engineering ingenuity

The reverse-engineered life form could be used to test drugs...

 

“Morphologically, we’ve built a jellyfish. Functionally, we’ve built a jellyfish. Genetically, this thing is a rat,” says Kit Parker, a biophysicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the work. The project is described today in Nature Biotechnology.

 

Parker’s lab works on creating artificial models of human heart tissues for regenerating organs and testing drugs, and the team built the medusoid as a way of understanding the “fundamental laws of muscular pumps”. It is an engineer’s approach to basic science: prove that you have identified the right principles by building something with them.'