Comment on This smiling robot face made of living skin is absolute nightmare fuel
0x0@programming.dev 4 months agoThe human mind is a curious mind.
If that skin is just copy/pasted without nourishment it’ll rotten away, decaying in a sea of pus and putrid, gangrenic tissue, festering away as maggots feast on it.
So if these scientists are half-serious about their grants then they should consider a way to feed the skin.
notabot@lemm.ee 4 months ago
I was more suggesting that it might be a bit eldritch, but sometimes humor doesn’t come across quite right/
The linked paper is focused on studying the ‘perforation-type anchor’ they use to hold the tissue to the mold as it grows, rather than keeping it alive afterwards. During growth the tissue and mold were submerged, or partially submerged, in a suitable medium to keep the cells healthy, and it was only when the resulting models were tested that they were removed (although one test did seem to involve letting it dry out to see if the anchors held). Growing the various layers of cells seems to be a solved problem, and I suspect that includes keeping them supplied with nutrients and such, so the authors aren’t examining that. What’s not solved is how to keep the tissue attached to a robot, which is what the authors were studying.