Longevity science

According the UK’s National Health Service, one person in 50 over the age of 80 will develop venous leg ulcers.

The ulcers occur when high blood pressure in the veins of the legs causes damage to the adjacent skin, ultimately resulting in the breakdown of that tissue.

While the ulcers can be quite resistant to treatment, a team of scientists is now reporting success in using a sort of “spray-on skin” to heal them.

We all know that you need to exercise if you want to develop your muscles. As it turns out, however, exercise also makes lab-grown muscle implants more effective when introduced to the body.

Tissue engineering is definitely an exciting field – the ability to create living biological tissue in a lab could allow scientists to do things such as testing new drugs without the need for human subjects, or even to create patient-specific replacement organs or other body parts.

While some previous efforts have yielded finished products that were very small, a microfluidic device being developed at the University of Toronto can reportedly produce sections of precisely-engineered tissue that measure within the centimeters.