Artificial muscle?

[`Eylan Ayfalulukanä]

I think a while back, we had a discussion on artificial meat. Most meat is animal muscle. The idea of trying to create this material seems to me to be an exercise in bizarreness, as we have a reasonably abundant supply of animal muscle and animals to 'build' it for us (although the argument is made that we could save animals from having to die to give up their muscle tissue). (Remember the 'runny eggs' from 'the Matrix'? That was their 'artificial meat'.)

But now, researchers are taking it a step further-- artificial muscle that is meant to do what living muscle does-- contract on command. But as you will read, the artificial muscle still relies on living animal muscle cells.

Some thing simply cannot be synthesized. But still, this is interesting...

http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1386&doc_id=250592&cid=N&dfpPParams=ht_13,industry_medical,aid_250592&dfpLayout=blog