Transhumanismus

Meta’s New AI Translates Speech in Real Time Across More Than 100 Languages

Singularity HUB - 16 Leden, 2025 - 23:24

It’s accurate and nearly as fast as expert human interpreters.

The dream of a universal AI interpreter just got a bit closer. This week, tech giant Meta released a new AI that can almost instantaneously translate speech in 101 languages as soon as the words tumble out of your mouth.

AI translators are nothing new. But they generally work best with text and struggle to transform spoken words from one language to another. The process is usually multistep. The AI first turns speech into text, translates the text, and then converts it back to speech. Though already useful in everyday life, these systems are inefficient and laggy. Errors can also sneak in at each step.

Meta’s new AI, dubbed SEAMLESSM4T, can directly convert speech into speech. Using a voice synthesizer, the system translates words spoken in 101 languages into 36 others—not just into English, which tends to dominate current AI interpreters. In a head-to-head evaluation, the algorithm is 23 percent more accurate than today’s top models—and nearly as fast as expert human interpreters. It can also translate text into text, text into speech, and vice versa.

Meta is releasing all the data and code used to develop the AI to the public for non-commercial use, so others can optimize and build on it. In a sense, the algorithm is “foundational,” in that “it can be fine-tuned on carefully curated datasets for specific purposes—such as improving translation quality for certain language pairs or for technical jargon,” wrote Tanel Alumäe at Tallinn University of Technology, who was not involved in the project. “This level of openness is a huge advantage for researchers who lack the massive computational resources needed to build these models from scratch.”

It’s “a hugely interesting and important effort,” Sabine Braun at the University of Surrey, who was also not part of the study, told Nature.

Self-Learning AI

Machine translation has made strides in the past few years thanks to large language models. These models, which power popular chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude, learn language by training on massive datasets scraped from the internet—blogs, forum comments, Wikipedia.

In translation, humans carefully vet and label these datasets, or “corpuses,” to ensure accuracy. Labels or categories provide a sort of “ground truth” as the AI learns and makes predictions.

But not all languages are equally represented. Training corpuses are easy to come by for high-resource languages, such as English and French. Meanwhile, low-resource languages, largely used in mid- or low-income countries, are harder to find—making it difficult to train a data-hungry AI translator with trusted datasets.

“Some human-labeled resources for translation are freely available, but often limited to a small set of languages or in very specific domains,” wrote the authors.

To get around the problem, the team used a technique called parallel data mining, which crawls the internet and other resources for audio snippets in one language with matching subtitles in another. These pairs, which match in meaning, add a wealth of training data in multiple languages—no human annotation needed. Overall, the team collected roughly 443,000 hours of audio with matching text, resulting in about 30,000 aligned speech-text pairs.

SEAMLESSM4T consists of three different blocks, some handling text and speech input and others output. The translation part of the AI was pre-trained on a massive dataset containing 4.5 million hours of spoken audio in multiple languages. This initial step helped the AI “learn patterns in the data, making it easier to fine-tune the model for specific tasks” later on, wrote Alumäe. In other words, the AI learned to recognize general structures in speech regardless of language, establishing a baseline that made it easier to translate low-resource languages later.

The AI was then trained on the speech pairs and evaluated against other translation models.

Spoken Word

A key advantage of the AI is its ability to directly translate speech, without having to convert it into text first. To test this ability, the team hooked up an audio synthesizer to the AI to broadcast its output. Starting with any of the 101 languages it knew, the AI translated speech into 36 different tongues—including low-resource languages—with only a few seconds of delay.

The algorithm outperformed existing state-of-the-art systems, achieving 23 percent greater accuracy using a standardized test. It also better handled background noise and voices from different speakers, although—like humans—it struggled with heavily accented speech.

Lost in Translation

Language isn’t just words strung into sentences. It reflects cultural contexts and nuances. For example, translating a gender-neutral language into a gendered one could introduce biases. Does “I am a teacher” in English translate to the masculine “Soy profesor” or to the feminine “Soy profesora” in Spanish? What about translations for doctor, scientist, nanny, or president?

Mistranslations may also add “toxicity,” when the AI spews out offensive or harmful language that doesn’t reflect the original meaning—especially for words that don’t have a direct counterpart in the other language. While easy to laugh off as a comedy of errors in some cases, these mistakes are deadly serious when it comes to medical, immigration, or legal scenarios.

“These sorts of machine-induced error could potentially induce real harm, such as erroneously prescribing a drug, or accusing the wrong person in a trial,” wrote Allison Koenecke at Cornell University, who wasn’t involved in the study. The problem is likely to disproportionally affect people speaking low-resource languages or unusual dialects, due to a relative lack of training data.

To their credit, the Meta team analyzed their model for toxicity and fine-tuned it during multiple stages to lower the chances of gender bias and harmful language.

“This is a step in the right direction, and offers a baseline against which future models can be tested,” wrote Koenecke.

Meta is increasingly supporting open-source technology. Previously, the tech giant released PyTorch, a software library for AI training, which was used by companies, including OpenAI and Tesla, and researchers around the globe. SEAMLESSM4T will also be made public for others to build on its abilities.

The AI is just the latest machine translator that can handle speech-to-speech translation. Previously, Google showcased AudioPaLM, an algorithm that can turn 113 languages into English—but only English. SEAMLESSM4T broadens the scope. Although it only scratches the surface of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken, the AI inches closer to a universal translator—like the Babel fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which translates languages from species across the universe when popped into the ear.

“The authors’ methods for harnessing real-world data will forge a promising path towards speech technology that rivals the stuff of science fiction,” wrote Alumäe.

The post Meta’s New AI Translates Speech in Real Time Across More Than 100 Languages appeared first on SingularityHub.

Kategorie: Transhumanismus

China Is About to Build the World’s Biggest Hydropower Dam—With Triple the Output of Three Gorges

Singularity HUB - 15 Leden, 2025 - 18:45

Medog Hydropower Station, as it will be called, will blow other hydropower dams out of the water.

China’s electricity use over the last 30 years is a hockey-stick curve, climbing steeply as the country industrialized, built dozens of mega-cities, and became the world’s manufacturing center. Though China’s economy has slowed in recent years, electricity demand is only climbing. Given the country has pledged to reach carbon neutrality by 2060, they’re going to need much more renewable power than they currently have.

To help them achieve that goal, the government recently announced plans to build the biggest hydropower dam in the world.

Medog Hydropower Station, as it will be called, will blow other hydropower dams out of the water (pun intended), with an estimated annual generation capacity triple that of the world’s largest existing dam (which, perhaps unsurprisingly, is also in China). The 60-gigawatt project will be able to generate up to 300,000 gigawatt-hours (or 300 terawatt-hours) of electricity per year. That’s equivalent to Greece’s annual energy consumption.

The dam will be built on a river in Tibet called the Yarlung Tsangpo, with construction carried out by the government-owned Power Construction Corporation of China. It will not only be one of China’s biggest infrastructure projects ever, it will be one of the most expensive infrastructure projects ever, with an estimated cost of a trillion yuan or $136 billion (yes, billion with a “b”).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, China is already home to the world’s largest existing hydropower dam: Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River stands 594 feet tall (Arizona’s Hoover Dam is taller, but Three Gorges is wider) and has a generating capacity of 22.5 gigawatts. By comparison, the biggest hydropower dam in the US is the Grand Coulee in Washington state, and it has a generating capacity of 6.8 gigawatts. China is the world leader in hydropower deployment, accounting for almost a third of global hydropower capacity. Many of those dams are on the Yangtze (some of them built by robots!) and some are on the same river where the Medog project will be built.

The Yarlung Tsangpo river starts in western Tibet, flowing east and then south, where it merges with India’s Brahmaputra then flows south through Bangladesh and into the Bay of Bengal. It is the highest river in the world, and a 31-mile (50-kilometer) section in the South Tibet Valley drops by a sharp 6,561 feet (2,000 meters); there’s loads of untapped potential for all that moving water to turn some turbines on its way down.

But the project is not without its challenges, both engineering and political.

Environmental groups say the dam will disrupt ecosystems on the biodiverse Tibetan Plateau. Tibetan rights groups see the project as a prime example of China exploiting Tibet’s natural resources while harming local communities. The dam’s construction will require people to be relocated, though likely not as many as Three Gorges, which uprooted and moved 1.4 million people. The Medog dam will be bigger, but it’s in a more sparsely populated area.

India and Bangladesh have both expressed concerns about the dam, as it could alter the flow of the river downstream where it runs through these countries. There are also concerns about the area’s geological stability, as it sits at the convergence of the Indian and Eurasian continental plates and is considered tectonically active. An earthquake could destroy the dam and cause catastrophic flooding. In fact, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake killed 126 people and damaged 4 reservoirs just last week.

However, Medog won’t be a conventional dam in the form of one giant wall built to hold water behind it, like Three Gorges or the Hoover Dam. Instead, four 12.4-mile (20-kilometer) tunnels will be blasted and excavated through a mountain called Namcha Barwa to divert the river. The water flowing through these tunnels will turn turbines attached to generators before running back into the Yarlung Tsangpo.  

The Chinese government says the Medog project will help it achieve the country’s carbon neutrality goals. In 2023, coal was still China’s main source of electricity generation by a long shot, supplying 61 percent of the country’s electricity. Hydropower was a distant second at 13 percent, followed by wind, solar, nuclear, and gas, in that order.

Construction is slated to start in 2029, and if all goes as planned—which would be impressive for a project of this scale—it will take four years to complete, with the dam beginning commercial operation in 2033.

The post China Is About to Build the World’s Biggest Hydropower Dam—With Triple the Output of Three Gorges appeared first on SingularityHub.

Kategorie: Transhumanismus

Here’s What It Will Take to Ignite Scalable Fusion Power

Singularity HUB - 14 Leden, 2025 - 23:19

There’s a growing sense that developing practical fusion energy is no longer an if but a when.

The way scientists think about fusion changed forever in 2022, when what some called the experiment of the century demonstrated for the first time that fusion can be a viable source of clean energy.

The experiment, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, showed ignition: a fusion reaction generating more energy out than was put in.

In addition, the past few years have been marked by a multibillion-dollar windfall of private investment in the field, principally in the United States.

But a whole host of engineering challenges must be addressed before fusion can be scaled up to become a safe, affordable source of virtually unlimited clean power. In other words, it’s engineering time.

As engineers who have been working on fundamental science and applied engineering in nuclear fusion for decades, we’ve seen much of the science and physics of fusion reach maturity in the past 10 years.

But to make fusion a feasible source of commercial power, engineers now have to tackle a host of practical challenges. Whether the United States steps up to this opportunity and emerges as the global leader in fusion energy will depend, in part, on how much the nation is willing to invest in solving these practical problems—particularly through public-private partnerships.

Building a Fusion Reactor

Fusion occurs when two types of hydrogen atoms, deuterium and tritium, collide in extreme conditions. The two atoms literally fuse into one atom by heating up to 180 million degrees Fahrenheit (100 million degrees Celsius), 10 times hotter than the core of the Sun. To make these reactions happen, fusion energy infrastructure will need to endure these extreme conditions.

There are two approaches to achieving fusion in the lab: inertial confinement fusion, which uses powerful lasers, and magnetic confinement fusion, which uses powerful magnets.

While the “experiment of the century” used inertial confinement fusion, magnetic confinement fusion has yet to demonstrate that it can break even in energy generation.

Several privately funded experiments aim to achieve this feat later this decade, and a large, internationally supported experiment in France, ITER, also hopes to break even by the late 2030s. Both are using magnetic confinement fusion.

Challenges Lying Ahead

Both approaches to fusion share a range of challenges that won’t be cheap to overcome. For example, researchers need to develop new materials that can withstand extreme temperatures and irradiation conditions.

Fusion reactor materials also become radioactive as they are bombarded with highly energetic particles. Researchers need to design new materials that can decay within a few years to levels of radioactivity that can be disposed of safely and more easily.

Producing enough fuel, and doing it sustainably, is also an important challenge. Deuterium is abundant and can be extracted from ordinary water. But ramping up the production of tritium, which is usually produced from lithium, will prove far more difficult. A single fusion reactor will need hundreds of grams to one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of tritium a day to operate.

Right now, conventional nuclear reactors produce tritium as a byproduct of fission, but these cannot provide enough to sustain a fleet of fusion reactors.

So, engineers will need to develop the ability to produce tritium within the fusion device itself. This might entail surrounding the fusion reactor with lithium-containing material, which the reaction will convert into tritium.

To scale up inertial fusion, engineers will need to develop lasers capable of repeatedly hitting a fusion fuel target, made of frozen deuterium and tritium, several times per second or so. But no laser is powerful enough to do this at that rate—yet. Engineers will also need to develop control systems and algorithms that direct these lasers with extreme precision on the target.

A laser setup that Farhat Beg’s research group plans to use to repeatedly hit a fusion fuel target. The goal of the experiments is to better control the target’s placement and tracking. The lighting is red from colored gels used to take the picture. David Baillot/University of California San Diego

Additionally, engineers will need to scale up production of targets by orders of magnitude: from a few hundreds handmade every year with a price tag of hundreds of thousands of dollars each to millions costing only a few dollars each.

For magnetic containment, engineers and materials scientists will need to develop more effective methods to heat and control the plasma and more heat- and radiation-resistant materials for reactor walls. The technology used to heat and confine the plasma until the atoms fuse needs to operate reliably for years.

These are some of the big challenges. They are tough but not insurmountable.

Current Funding Landscape

Investments from private companies globally have increased—these will likely continue to be an important factor driving fusion research forward. Private companies have attracted over $7 billion in private investment in the past five years.

Several startups are developing different technologies and reactor designs with the aim of adding fusion to the power grid in coming decades. Most are based in the United States, with some in Europe and Asia.

While private sector investments have grown, the US government continues to play a key role in the development of fusion technology up to this point. We expect it to continue to do so in the future.

It was the US Department of Energy that invested about $3 billion to build the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the mid 2000s, where the “experiment of the century” took place 12 years later.

In 2023, the Department of Energy announced a 4-year, $42 million program to develop fusion hubs for the technology. While this funding is important, it likely will not be enough to solve the most important challenges that remain for the United States to emerge as a global leader in practical fusion energy.

One way to build partnerships between the government and private companies in this space could be to create relationships similar to that between NASA and SpaceX. As one of NASA’s commercial partners, SpaceX receives both government and private funding to develop technology that NASA can use. It was the first private company to send astronauts to space and the International Space Station.

Along with many other researchers, we are cautiously optimistic. New experimental and theoretical results, new tools and private sector investment are all adding to our growing sense that developing practical fusion energy is no longer an if but a when.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Here’s What It Will Take to Ignite Scalable Fusion Power appeared first on SingularityHub.

Kategorie: Transhumanismus

Donald J. Robertson on How to Think Like Socrates in the Age of AI

Singularity Weblog - 9 Leden, 2025 - 16:36
In this episode of Singularity.FM, I sit down with renowned author and philosopher Donald J. Robertson to explore his latest book, How to Think Like Socrates: Ancient Philosophy as a Way of Life in the Modern World. As we navigate the crossroads of ancient wisdom and modern challenges, Donald shares timeless insights from Socrates that […]
Kategorie: Transhumanismus

Make Music A Full Body Experience With A “Vibro-Tactile” Suit

Futurism - Enhanced Humans - 27 Září, 2018 - 16:09
SYNESTHETES

Tired: Listening to music.
Wired: Feeling the music.

A mind-bending new suit straps onto your torso, ankles and wrists, then uses actuators to translate audio into vivid vibration. The result: a new way for everyone to experience music, according to its creators. That’s especially exciting for people who have trouble hearing.

THE FEELIES

The Music: Not Impossible suit was created by design firm Not Impossible Labs and electronics manufacturing company Avnet. The suit can create sensations to go with pre-recorded music, or a “Vibrotactile DJ” can adjust the sensations in real time during a live music event.”

Billboard writer Andy Hermann tried the suit out, and it sounds like a trip.

“Sure enough, a pulse timed to a kickdrum throbs into my ankles and up through my legs,” he wrote. “Gradually, [the DJ] brings in other elements: the tap of a woodblock in my wrists, a bass line massaging my lower back, a harp tickling a melody across my chest.”

MORE ACCESSIBLE

To show the suit off, Not Impossible and Avnet organized a performance this past weekend by the band Greta Van Fleet at the Life is Beautiful Festival in Las Vegas. The company allowed attendees to don the suits. Mandy Harvey, a deaf musician who stole the show on America’s Got Talent last year, talked about what the performance meant to her in a video Avnet posted to Facebook.

“It was an unbelievable experience to have an entire audience group who are all experiencing the same thing at the same time,” she said. “For being a deaf person, showing up at a concert, that never happens. You’re always excluded.”

READ MORE: Not Impossible Labs, Zappos Hope to Make Concerts More Accessible for the Deaf — and Cooler for Everyone [Billboard]

More on accessible design: New Tech Allows Deaf People To Sense Sounds

The post Make Music A Full Body Experience With A “Vibro-Tactile” Suit appeared first on Futurism.

Kategorie: Transhumanismus

“Synthetic Skin” Could Give Prosthesis Users a Superhuman Sense of Touch

Futurism - Enhanced Humans - 20 Září, 2018 - 20:37
IN THE FEELS

Today’s prosthetics can give people with missing limbs the ability to do almost anything — run marathons, climb mountains, you name it. But when it comes to letting those people feel what they could with a natural limb, the devices, however mechanically sophisticated, invariably fall short.

Now researchers have created a “synthetic skin” with a sense of touch that not only matches the sensitivity of natural skin, but in some cases even exceeds it. Now the only challenge is getting that information back into the wearer’s nervous system.

UNDER PRESSURE

When something presses against your skin, your nerves receive and transmit that pressure to the brain in the form of electrical signals.

To mimic that biological process, the researchers suspended a flexible polymer, dusted with magnetic particles, over a magnetic sensor. The effect is like a drum: Applying even the tiniest amount of pressure to the membrane causes the magnetic particles to move closer to the sensors, and they transmit this movement electronically.

The research, which could open the door to super-sensitive prosthetics, was published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics.

SPIDEY SENSE TINGLING

Tests shows that the skin can sense extremely subtle pressure, such as a blowing breeze, dripping water, or crawling ants. In some cases, the synthetic skin responded to pressures so gentle that natural human skin wouldn’t be able to detect them.

While the sensing ability of this synthetic skin is remarkable, the team’s research doesn’t address how to transmit the signals to the human brain. Other scientists are working on that, though, so eventually this synthetic skin could give prosthetic wearers the ability to feel forces even their biological-limbed friends can’t detect.

READ MORE: A Skin-Inspired Tactile Sensor for Smart Prosthetics [Science Robotics]

More on synthetic skin: Electronic Skin Lets Amputees Feel Pain Through Their Prosthetics

The post “Synthetic Skin” Could Give Prosthesis Users a Superhuman Sense of Touch appeared first on Futurism.

Kategorie: Transhumanismus

People Are Zapping Their Brains to Boost Creativity. Experts Have Concerns.

Futurism - Enhanced Humans - 19 Září, 2018 - 20:56
BRAIN BOOST

There’s a gadget that some say can help alleviate depression and enhance creativity. All you have to do is place a pair of electrodes on your scalp and the device will deliver electrical current to your brain. It’s readily available on Amazon or you can even make your own.

But in a new paper published this week in the Creativity Research Journal, psychologists at Georgetown University warned that the practice is spreading before we have a good understanding of its health effects, especially since consumers are already buying and building unregulated devices to shock them. They also cautioned that the technique, which scientists call transcranial electrical stimulation (tES), could have adverse effects on the brains of young people.

“There are multiple potential concerns with DIY-ers self-administering electric current to their brains, but this use of tES may be inevitable,” said co-author Adam Green in a press release. “And, certainly, anytime there is risk of harm with a technology, the scariest risks are those associated with kids and the developing brain”

SHOCK JOCK

Yes, there’s evidence that tES can help patients with depression, anxiety, Parkinson’s disease, and other serious conditions, the Georgetown researchers acknowledge.

But that’s only when it’s administered by a trained health care provider. When administering tES at home, people might ignore safety directions, they wrote, or their home-brewed devices could deliver unsafe amounts of current. And because it’s not yet clear what effects of tES might be on the still-developing brains of young people, the psychologists advise teachers and parents to resist the temptation to use the devices to encourage creativity among children.

The takeaway: tES is likely here to stay, and it may provide real benefits. But for everyone’s sake, consumer-oriented tES devices should be regulated to protect users.

READ MORE: Use of electrical brain stimulation to foster creativity has sweeping implications [Eurekalert]

More on transcranial electrical stimulation: DARPA’s New Brain Device Increases Learning Speed by 40%

The post People Are Zapping Their Brains to Boost Creativity. Experts Have Concerns. appeared first on Futurism.

Kategorie: Transhumanismus

Military Pilots Can Control Three Jets at Once via a Neural Implant

Futurism - Enhanced Humans - 19 Září, 2018 - 15:25
MIND CONTROL

The military is making it easier than ever for soldiers to distance themselves from the consequences of war. When drone warfare emerged, pilots could, for the first time, sit in an office in the U.S. and drop bombs in the Middle East.

Now, one pilot can do it all, just using their mind — no hands required.

Earlier this month, DARPA, the military’s research division, unveiled a project that it had been working on since 2015: technology that grants one person the ability to pilot multiple planes and drones with their mind.

“As of today, signals from the brain can be used to command and control … not just one aircraft but three simultaneous types of aircraft,” Justin Sanchez, director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, said, according to Defense One.

THE SINGULARITY

Sanchez may have unveiled this research effort at a “Trajectory of Neurotechnology” session at DARPA’s 60th anniversary event, but his team has been making steady progress for years. Back in 2016, a volunteer equipped with a brain-computer interface (BCI) was able to pilot an aircraft in a flight simulator while keeping two other planes in formation — all using just his thoughts, a spokesperson from DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office told Futurism.

In 2017, Copeland was able to steer a plane through another simulation, this time receiving haptic feedback — if the plane needed to be steered in a certain direction, Copeland’s neural implant would create a tingling sensation in his hands.

NOT QUITE MAGNETO

There’s a catch. The DARPA spokesperson told Futurism that because this BCI makes use of electrodes implanted in and on the brain’s sensory and motor cortices, experimentation has been limited to volunteers with varying degrees of paralysis. That is: the people steering these simulated planes already had brain electrodes, or at least already had reason to undergo surgery.

To try and figure out how to make this technology more accessible and not require surgical placement of a metal probe into people’s brains, DARPA recently launched the NExt-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3) program. The plan is to make a device with similar capabilities, but it’ll look more like an EEG cap that the pilot can take off once a mission is done.

“The envisioned N3 system would be a tool that the user could wield for the duration of a task or mission, then put aside,” said Al Emondi, head of N3, according to the spokesperson. “I don’t like comparisons to a joystick or keyboard because they don’t reflect the full potential of N3 technology, but they’re useful for conveying the basic notion of an interface with computers.”

READ MORE: It’s Now Possible To Telepathically Communicate with a Drone Swarm [Defense One]

More on DARPA research: DARPA Is Funding Research Into AI That Can Explain What It’s “Thinking”

The post Military Pilots Can Control Three Jets at Once via a Neural Implant appeared first on Futurism.

Kategorie: Transhumanismus

Lab-Grown Bladders Can Save People From a Lifetime of Dialysis

Futurism - Enhanced Humans - 12 Září, 2018 - 21:54
ONE IN A MILLION TEN

Today, about 10 people on Earth have bladders they weren’t born with. No, they didn’t receive bladder transplants — doctors grew these folks new bladders using the recipients’ own cells.

On Tuesday, the BBC published a report on the still-nascent procedure of transplanting lab-grown bladders. In it, the publication talks to Luke Massella, who underwent the procedure more than a decade ago. Massella was born with spina bifida, which carries with it a risk of damage to the bladder and urinary tract. Now, he lives a normal life, he told the BBC.

“I was kind of facing the possibility I might have to do dialysis [blood purification via machine] for the rest of my life,” he said. “I wouldn’t be able to play sports, and have the normal kid life with my brother.”

All that changed after Anthony Atala, a surgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital, decided he was going to grow a new bladder for Massella.

ONE NEW BLADDER, COMING UP!

To do that, Atala first removed a small piece of Massella’s own bladder. He then removed cells from this portion of bladder and multiplied them in a petri dish. Once he had enough cells, he coated a scaffold with the cells and placed the whole thing in a temperature controlled, high oxygen environment. After a few weeks, the lab-created bladder was ready for transplantation into Massella.

“So it was pretty much like getting a bladder transplant, but from my own cells, so you don’t have to deal with rejection,” said Massella.

The number of people with lab-grown bladders might still be low enough to count on your fingers, but researchers are making huge advances in growing everything from organs to skin in the lab. Eventually, we might reach a point when we can replace any body part we need to with a perfect biological match that we built ourselves.

READ MORE: “A New Bladder Made From My Cells Gave Me My Life Back” [BBC]

More on growing organs: The FDA Wants to Expedite Approval of Regenerative Organ Therapies

The post Lab-Grown Bladders Can Save People From a Lifetime of Dialysis appeared first on Futurism.

Kategorie: Transhumanismus
Syndikovat obsah