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[applesnail]

"Bioengineers have made an artificial jellyfish using silicone and muscle cells from a rat’s heart. The synthetic creature, dubbed a medusoid, looks like a flower with eight petals. When placed in an electric field, it pulses and swims exactly like its living counterpart."

“Morphologically, we’ve built a jellyfish. Functionally, we’ve built a jellyfish. Genetically, this thing is a rat,” says Kit Parker, a biophysicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the work. The project is described today in Nature Biotechnology¹.
Parker’s lab works on creating artificial models of human heart tissues for regenerating organs and testing drugs, and the team built the medusoid as a way of understanding the “fundamental laws of muscular pumps”. It is an engineer’s approach to basic science: prove that you have identified the right principles by building something with them.

http://www.nature.co...t-cells-1.11046

[CβL]

The plastic they grow the muscles on is the same one they put into fryer vats at McDonalds to stop the oil from frothing. ^^

"Nawroth created a structure with the same properties by growing a single layer of rat heart muscle on a patterned sheet of polydimethylsiloxane. When an electric field is applied across the structure, the muscle contracts rapidly, compressing the medusoid and mimicking a jellyfish’s power stroke."

http://en.wikipedia....imethylsiloxane
"This silicone can be found in many processed foods and fast food items such as McDonald's Chicken McNuggets and Wendy's French fries."


So I guess we've all tasted artificial jellyfish (Polydimethylsiloxane and rat cells) before. ^^