Somebody Post Something Fantastic Please

[M.D. Holloway]

No disrespect guys but I need some cortal stimulation - the threads lately have been interesting, amusing, touching and funny but I thirst for the WOW. Is there anything out there with that WOW factor? Anything?

[Steve Carlton]

I shot 1 over par through the first 10 holes golfing yesterday...

[M.D. Holloway]

respectable but not a real WOW - now if you had pics of the cart girl you had bent over the water cooler with your golf glove in her mouth on the 12th then that would aprouch a WOW maybe...

[Dueller]

Scientists Develop Lab Grown Penis...Helps Rabbits Mate


* Functioning penises grown from animals' own cells

* Approach could work for other organs

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON, Nov 9 (Reuters) - Researchers have engineered artificial penises in rabbits, using cells from the animals, who then used their new organs to father baby rabbits.

The work takes scientists closer to making other complex solid organs such as livers using a patient's own cells, the researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.

It provides a tailor-made transplant, said Dr. Anthony Atala of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center's Institute for Regenerative Medicine, who led the study.

"Once the tissue is there, the body recognizes the tissue as its own," Atala said in a telephone interview.

Atala focused on the penis because he is a pediatric urologist, who has specialized for years in disorders and congenital defects of the bladder and sexual organs.

"That was the inspiration for this work. We are seeing babies born with deficient genitalia all the time. There are no good options," Atala said.

He is also a specialist in regenerative medicine, which uses the body's own cells to repair damage. In this case, Atala's team used ordinary cells, not the stem cells often used in such research.

Companies such as Geron and privately held Advanced Cell Technology have business models based on such technology.

Atala's team first created a scaffold using the penis of a rabbit, and removed all the living cells from it, leaving only cartilage. They then took a small piece of tissue from the penis of another rabbit and grew the cells in a lab dish.

Atala said the work has taken his team 18 years to complete. "We had to find the right growth factors, the right soup to grow the cells in," he said.

They made sure to have two cell types, smooth muscle cells and endothelial cells, the same type of cells that line blood vessels. The smooth muscle cells made the organ's spongy tissue and the endothelial cells grew into blood vessels -- very important in an organ like the penis, which requires good blood supply.

The cells were seeded onto the scaffold, and six weeks later the researchers had penises to graft onto rabbits that had their penises removed.

MAKING BUNNIES

The animals seemed to realize they had working organs again -- the 12 with the grafts tried to mate with female rabbits within one minute of being put into cages with them, and four of the female rabbits became pregnant.

Those with the scaffolding alone and no working tissue did not even try.

Atala is hoping the procedure will work with people, perhaps starting with adult men who have had damage to their organs.

"Patients with congenital anomalies, penile cancer, traumatic penile injury, and some types of organic erectile dysfunction could benefit from this technology in the future," the team wrote in the report.

The process takes six weeks from beginning to end, he said, and there is reason to believe a penis grafted onto a baby would grow with the child.

Atala hopes the approach will work with other organs. "We have made clitoral tissue in the past," he said. "We have extensive work going on with kidneys and livers."

Atala's team started their experiments with replacement bladders grown from patients' cells. Patients fitted with artificial bladders have been enjoying good function for 10 years now, Atala said. (Reporting by Maggie Fox, Editing by Julie Steenhuysen, Toni Reinhold)

[RWebb]

hey Mike - how about some hot pics of dynamic viscosity & streamlines?

[Shadetree930]

Try this ...

[tangerine911S]

How about a joke made all the more funny by the fact that its told by a monkey.


Penguin Car Joke

Magnificent_Mike | MySpace Video

[sammyg2]

[stomachmonkey]

Something Fantastic - Pacwoman

[rcecale]

This thread always works for me!

And if you remember, Mike, I did tell you that you would have been one helluva Marine yourself!

Randy

[M.D. Holloway]

Great stuff! Unfortunitly a few of those sites are banned here at work - I will have to be WOW'd at home.

Great link Randy. I wish I was 30yrs younger!

[nostatic]

[nostatic]

[nostatic]

this is fantastically bad

[LakeCleElum]

Any interest in my $500 1962 XKE Roadster Barn Find story? (Was $500 in 1977)....I'd have to scan the old photo's of what it looked like with the wood rotted off the steering wheel....

[cashflyer]

Ta-tas are fantastic.





The mods will not let me post anything here that is truly "fantastic" in the way you describe. This will have to do:

[svandamme]

i just made Geronimo a custom Avatar:

[Oh Haha]

I got nothing for you, LM but thanks Todd for that drum solo!!!!

Once of the most creative I've ever heard.

[gr8fl4porsche]

Did ya see that beautiful backdated Carrera in the Tech forum?

[Heel n Toe]