The way we construct homes, cars, and even food is changing thanks to 3D printers. They may alter how transplant patients receive new organs in part because of researchers at Stanford University. Their innovative method might eventually enable the printing of organs from the patient’s own cells on demand.

Bioengineers Mark Skylar-Scott and his group have created a method that enables them to 3D-print living heart tissue. One day, they hope to print vital components of the heart, such as valves and ventricles, that would really develop with the patient.

In the US, one in every 100 babies is born with a cardiac problem. Even though they can receive transplants, the body may reject the transplants up to 20 or 30 years after they were given. Using a patient's own cells to bio-print a new organ could lower those incidences.

"It is ambitious, but we believe that a lot of the basic building blocks to start a project like this are in place," Skylar-Scott said.

The method is an illustration of bio-printing, a technique that uses living cells to produce structures that resemble organs. Although the idea of modern bio-printing is not new, the process is laborious. Typically, one cell must be printed at a time. A single human heart would require more than a thousand years to create, even if 1,000 cells were printed per second.

By printing with organoids, collections of tens of thousands of cells, Skylar-Scott and his team have created a technique for accelerating the process. “We take millions of those and condense them into what is essentially a human stem cell mayonnaise, that we can then print through the printer,” he said.

Once the cells are printed, they take on the general shape of tissue that can then have blood vessel networks printed within them.

The group has already created a self-pumping structure that resembles a human vein and is made of tubes. Printing a larger structure, such as a useful chamber that could be grafted onto an existing heart, would be the next stage.
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Although we're probably at least two decades away from a fully printed heart, Skylar-Scott said he believes a heart valve printed using this technique could be implanted in a human patient in as little as five years.

Even while there is rising concern about how generative AI can disrupt the world's labor markets, accountants may be able to sigh with relief, even if only temporarily. Recent studies show that my chosen profession may be spared replacement since the ChatGPT language model doesn’t do well with math!

The fastest growing and most well-known AI platform to date, ChatGPT's artificial intelligence language model, which excels at behavioral learning, storytelling, and other creative tasks, has prompted questions about its potential to enable students to cheat on assignments and exams. The bot passed the bar exam with a 90th percentile score, completed 13 out of 15 AP tests, and scored almost perfectly on the Graduate Record Exam (GRE).

"When this technology first came out, everyone was worried that students could now use it to cheat," Brigham Young University accounting professor David Wood noted. "But opportunities to cheat have always existed. So, for us, we’re trying to focus on what we can do with this technology now that we couldn’t do before to improve the teaching process for faculty and the learning process for students. Testing it out was eye-opening."

However, as a later study led by Wood discovered, the platform often has trouble comprehending mathematical procedures and frequently embellishes data to hide errors when they occur!

According to Wood's research, ChatGPT's ability to pass accounting tests was compared to that of actual accounting students. 186 academic institutions from 14 countries submitted 25,181 questions on information systems, auditing, financial accounting, managerial accounting, and taxation. Undergraduate students at BYU added 2,268 more textbook test bank questions to the repository used for the study.

A combination of multiple choice, true/false, and written response prompts were used to deliver the questions in various formats with varied degrees of difficulty.

According to the survey, students outperformed ChatGPT by almost 30%, scoring an average of 76.7% compared to ChatGPT's 47.4%.

Only 11.3% of the questions were answered correctly by ChatGPT, mostly in the areas of auditing and accounting information systems. The chatbot scored substantially worse on short-answer questions, only scoring between 28.7% and 39.1%. It also performed better while answering multiple choice and true/false questions, earning 59.5% and 68.7% on each format, respectively.
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According to a press release from Jessica Wood, a BYU student who took part in the study, "It's not perfect; you're not going to be using it for everything. Using ChatGPT alone to learn is a fool's errand,"

It's not always better to go bigger, especially when it comes to technology. The InfiRay P2 Pro thermal camera then comes into play. It promises to be the tiniest thermal camera in the world and connects directly to your smartphone's tiny USB port.

It is incredibly tiny, weighing only 9g, and about a quarter's diameter at just over an inch. So it's cool. Why do you need a thermal camera on your smartphone?


Because it uses the phone to display its photographs. One important use case is HVAC engineers and electricians who frequently require access to a thermal camera for their work.
The size of this camera doesn’t prevent it from packing a punch, however. Many thermal cameras suffer from a stutter image. However, because the P2 Pro runs at 25Hz, it can record both motion and still images. At 256 x 192 pixels, the resolution is also higher than most other thermal cameras. Compared to what photographers are often used to, this seems laughably low, but for a thermal camera, that is very good.

The P2 Pro also boasts a magnetic macro lens, which is an intriguing feature. This handy flat addition simply clips onto the device's front. It's rather ingenious and foolproof. The camera is available both with and without this lens.
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The camera's temperature range, which is sufficient for most needs, is -20ºC to 550ºC (-4ºF to 1044ºF). The camera is available for $249 or $299 with a macro lens.

According to a study lead by Li Qian, PhD, at the UNC School of Medicine, a protein that aids in the formation of neurons also functions to reprogram scar tissue cells into heart muscle cells, particularly when working with another protein.

Researchers at the UNC School of Medicine have made important strides in the exciting fields of cellular reprogramming and organ regeneration, and their findings could have a substantial impact on the development of future treatments for damaged hearts.

Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found a more streamlined and effective way to transform scar tissue cells (fibroblasts) into healthy heart muscle cells (cardiomyocytes) in a study that was published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

The fibrous, stiff tissue that causes heart failure after a heart attack or because of cardiac disease is created by fibroblasts. Researchers are looking into the possibility of treating or maybe one day curing this widespread and deadly illness by converting fibroblasts into cardiomyocytes.

Surprisingly, a gene activity-controlling protein called Ascl1, which is well recognized to be an essential protein involved in converting fibroblasts into neurons, turned out to be the key to the new cardiomyocyte-making approach. Ascl1 was once assumed to be neuron-specific by researchers.

“It’s an outside-the-box finding, and we expect it to be useful in developing future cardiac therapies and potentially other kinds of therapeutic cellular reprogramming,” said study senior author Li Qian, PhD, associate professor in the UNC Department of Pathology and Lab Medicine and associate director of the McAllister Heart Institute at the UNC School of Medicine.

In the past 15 years, researchers have created several methods to convert adult cells into stem cells and then drive those stem cells to differentiate into other types of adult cells. Recently, researchers have discovered strategies to reprogram cells directly from one mature cell type to another.

It has been hoped that once these techniques are as safe, effective, and efficient as possible, clinicians will provide a straightforward injection to patients to transform harmful cells into helpful ones.

“Reprogramming fibroblasts has long been one of the important goals in the field,” Qian said. “Fibroblast over-activity underlies many major diseases and conditions including heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, liver disease, kidney disease, and the scar-like brain damage that occurs after strokes.”

In the new study, Qian's team used three currently used approaches to reprogram mice fibroblasts into cardiomyocytes, liver cells, and neurons. This team also included co-first authors Haofei Wang, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher, and MD/PhD student Benjamin Keepers. Their goal was to document and contrast the variations in gene activity patterns and variables that control gene activity during these three separate reprogrammings.

Unexpectedly, the scientists discovered that converting fibroblasts into neurons activated a group of genes related to cardiomyocytes. They quickly discovered that Ascl1, one of the master-programmer "transcription factor" proteins that had been employed to create the neurons, was the cause of this activation.

The researchers added Ascl1 to the three-transcription factor cocktail they had been using to create cardiomyocytes to see what would happen because Ascl1 activated cardiomyocyte genes. They were shocked to see that it significantly increased reprogramming efficiency—the percentage of effectively reprogrammed cells—by over ten times. In reality, they discovered that only Ascl1 and another transcription factor known as Mef2c remained from their original cocktail of three factors.

Further research revealed that Ascl1 activates the genes for both cardiomyocytes and neurons on its own, but that it shifts away from the pro-neuron position in the presence of Mef2c. Ascl1 activates a wide range of genes related to cardiomyocytes in cooperation with Mef2c.

“Ascl1 and Mef2c work together to exert pro-cardiomyocyte effects that neither factor alone exerts, making for a potent reprogramming cocktail,” Qian said.

The findings show that the key transcription factors involved in direct cellular reprogramming are not always exclusive to the cell type being altered.
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More importantly, they represent a development toward potential cell-reprogramming treatments for serious diseases. To repair failing hearts, Qian and her team plan to create a two-in-one synthetic protein that combines the active components of Ascl1 and Mef2c.