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Pigs not only inspire scientists via delicious, brain-sustaining pork products. See the latest pig-influenced developments in medicine and tech, from diabetes treatments to pig-urine-flavored cigarettes

We’ve got pork on the brain here this week at PopSci. Earlier today we told you about how cells from a pig’s bladder helped a man regenerate part of his severed finger, and if you’re a PPX player, you know we just rolled out an IPO regarding PETA’s recent offering of a million dollar prize for anyone who can grow meat sans-animal in a lab, hoping to negate the necessity for livestock. However, it will probably be a while before anything created in the lab will rival the one food that we can’t ever manage to stop thinking about, even for dessert—bacon.

As it turns out, pigs have been the inspiration for several other recent medical and technological innovations in the last few months.

One such instance of pig science is a report from a group of Russian scientists who are implanting pancreatic cells from young pigs that produce insulin into diabetics. The sample size is still quite small (only 4 people have received the treatment), but the results are worth watching. It seems that some of the patients with the injected insulin-producing pig cells have been able to drastically reduce their insulin intake over long periods of time. This could be a significant step towards the cure for a syndrome that has become exceedingly common within the past few decades. One drawback, however, are the fears that this could lead to the cross-species transmission of pig-borne viruses.

If pig-based diseases aren’t disturbing enough, how about we turn our attention to pig urine? High-density industrial pig farms serve as home to a large percentage of the world’s nearly 1 billion pigs, and with high-concentrations of pigs comes high concentrations of their often toxic waste products, which can wreak havoc on the environment. However, one company has devised a novel way of disposing of the urine by rendering the urea into plastics for household items, such as pig urine cups, pig urine bowls and pig urine spoons. Once the process is perfected it could be cheaper and more environmentally advantageous than the regular fossil fuel-based plastics. Other manures can be used, as well, and the organic compounds that are extracted can be potentially used in a variety of ways, including as flavoring for cigarettes. A line of pig urine flavored cigarettes could be an alternative stop smoking product if the patches, pills or gum just aren’t doing it for you.

Finally, out on the extreme end of pig-based research is the glow-in-the-dark pig. A while back Taiwanese scientists were able to genetically modify a litter of pigs with jellyfish DNA so that they would fluoresce green. Though the visual results are striking enough to justify the experiment, the true reasoning behind the experiment is to show that stem cells can be tagged with the same fluorescent molecules allowing their growth and development to be easily observed and studied.

I personally like to think that these scientists wanted to secondarily cure a condition that has plagued man since his inception: the late-night munchies. And what better way to solve it than with glow-in-the-dark bacon?

Researchers are developing mechanical mitts with better grip

No, we’re still not up to the level of Luke’s mechanical hand in Star Wars, but progress does seem to be accelerating. The i-LIMB, from Touch Bionics, debuted last year, and German researchers recently tested it against a new prototype, the Fluidhand. The researchers say both are more dexterous than the industry standard, given that the individual fingers of the mechanical hands can be controlled independently.

A patient at the Orthopedic University Hospital in Heidelberg tried out the i-LIMB and the Fluidhand, and found both to be an improvement over the other models. The battery-powered i-LIMB picks up muscle signals from the patient’s stump, and translates them into movement. The Fluidhand is powered by hydraulics, and reportedly makes it easier to grip and hold on to certain objects.

Apparently the patient gave the Fluidhand the edge, but it’s not marked for commercial production just yet.

Via PhysOrg

As the cost of genome sequencing drops, questions about its role in society are becoming more pressing

Just as CD players, personal computers, and HDTVs were prohibitively expensive when they were first released, so too was the cost of sequencing the entire genome of an individual. In 2003 that feat was accomplished for the staggering amount of $437,000,000 after 13 years of work. Today, CD players are ubiquitous and cheap; HDTVs are steadily entering the realm of affordability; and so, too, has the cost of sequencing a genome fallen precipitously. It will still set you back $1,000,000 and two months of time, but that is a tremendous savings over just five years ago. The inevitable is easy to see: one day—2015 by one predictive model’s account—the task of sequencing will cost $10 and take a handful of hours. And when the cost of sequencing a person’s genome becomes cheaper than a movie ticket, we have entered the time in which a person’s most private information is as accessible as a web page.

The immediate moral and ethical questions are boundless. Will fetuses be scanned for inherited traits? Will a mandatory national DNA registry be instituted? Will law enforcement use it as a blanket to throw over every crime scene? What is most important to keep in mind is that as sophisticated as genome sequencing is and with all the information it reveals, it is still at its core nothing more than a tool. It won’t replace good police work. It won’t replace a healthy diet and exercise. It won’t be an accurate indicator for a lot of things—we have only begun to understand how particular genes interact with their environment to bring a condition from a predisposition to a reality.

It’s time for us to think about these questions before we’re holding the results in our hands.

Via The Guardian