When a salamander loses a leg, it can re-grow a perfect replacement within a couple of months.
How? When a leg is cut off, blood vessels in the stump close up immediately to stop bleeding. Then new skin cells grow over the injury. A few days later, the same type of cells that grew the salamander’s legs when it was an embryo are activated, and the replacement begins to form.
University of California researchers are studying this phenomenon in hopes of transferring the regenerative ability to humans.
(Source: Scientific American)
Similar Articles:
- Making Lab Mice Talk – File this under “freaky science experiments.” Molecular biologists in Leipzig recently spliced human…
- The Language Perfectionist: People Who Need People – Some language issues don’t lend themselves to a judgment of right or wrong, but rather are matters o…
- It’s Fun to Know: Your Best Chance to Get a Lost Wallet Returned – From the annals of unnecessary scientific research and “that’s quite a reach” conclusions… Universit…
- 4 Aggressive Approaches to Warding Off Cancer – Everyone has cancer. Johns Hopkins recently reminded us of this fact while studying how most of us …
- Desperate Measures for Dry Times – California is suffering from the second straight year of a drought. So far, the result has been $260…
- Green Tea May Protect Women From Cancer – Not only is green tea a great source of powerful antioxidants, new research suggests it is one of y…
- It’s Good to Know: Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go in the Water – Great white sharks, it turns out, are calculating hunters. University of Miami researchers have disc…