'Spider style' blood vessel building

A "living scaffold" made by electrospinning

Another technique has been to take a body part from a dead body, just like an organ transplant, and use a detergent to strip out the native cells leaving a protein scaffold behind. This is then seeded with the target patient's cells. New windpipes have been made through this process.

Spinning

The team at the University College London are using "electrospinning" technology to produce organs. They think it will overcome some of the challenges of seeding a scaffold by building the cells into the transplant in the first place.

It starts with a broth of cells and polymer. A 10,000 volt electric needle is then used to draw out a fibre.

Dr Suwan Jayasinghe told the BBC: "Like a spider weaves its web we are able to draw out this continuous fibre of polymer and cells and weave a web.

"We could make one as thick as a mattress and the cells will be embedded right through it."

The electrospinning technology has been used to create blood vessels by cross-stitching the fibres on to a rotating cylinder which is half submerged in a liquid to nourish the living cells.

The latest studies published in the journal Small showed mouse blood vessels with three distinct layers could be produced.

Dr Jayasinghe said: "At the moment no technology can make an organ, we are coming up with the process to patch up a defective organ not replace an organ."

The idea is that a patch of heart muscle could improve function after a heart attack.

However, it is early days for the field of electrospinning. In comparison, other methods for producing body parts are already being used in patients.

"There have been some successes in the field which is great, but I don't think it is as easy as some people portray and I don't think we'll have it easy either," Dr Jayasinghe said.

Organic Farming Just as Productive as Conventional, and Better at Building Soil, Rodale Finds

By Tom Philpott
Organic agriculture is a fine luxury for the rich, but it could never feed the world as global population moves to 9 billion.

That's what a lot of powerful people -- including the editors of The Economist -- insist. But the truth could well be the opposite: It might be chemical-intensive agriculture that's the frivolous luxury, and organic that offers us the right technologies in a resource-constrained, ever-warmer near future.

That's the conclusion I draw from the latest data of the Pennsylvania-based Rodale Institute's Farming Systems Trial (FST), which Rodale calls "America's longest running, side-by-side comparison of conventional and organic agriculture." Now, Rodale promotes organic ag, so industrial-minded critics will be tempted to dismiss its data. But that would be wrong -- its test plots have an excellent reputation in the ag research community, and the Institute often collaborates with the USDA's Agricultural Research Service.

Housed on Rodale's 330 acre farm, the FST compares three systems for growing corn and soy, the first two organic and the third conventional: 1) one based on rotating feed crops with perennial forage crops for cows, and fertilizing with manure; 2) another based on rotating grains with cover crops, with fertility coming from nitrogen-fixing legumes; and 3) a system reliant on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.