Certain kinds of sound waves can do something pretty astonishing: they can create bone cells.
This is from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
The researchers there took stem cells and treated them with high-frequency sound waves.
That was enough to convert them into bone cells.
It’s not the first time scientists have been able to make this conversion.
But those methods usually needed to get stem cells from a patient’s bone marrow, which is painful.
And the process and the equipment in the previous methods were pretty expensive and not easy to scale up.
The sound wave method can use a wider range of stem cells.
It uses a low-cost device, it’s several days faster than the other methods and it can be very precisely targeted toward a patient’s needs.
It’s not yet at the point where you could dial up a leg bone; the researchers are working on the scale and making their method as practical as possible.
But what they’ve done so far with making bone cells out of sound waves… sounds good already.
I had to say it.
Around here we love stories of people who run into an obstacle and find a way forward anyway.
There was a good one on this day in 2018.
At the IAAF World Indoor Championships, Murielle Ahoure (a-HORR-ay) of Cote D’Ivoire, or Ivory Coast, won the women’s 60 meter race.
It was the first time a runner from that country had ever won a gold at a world event.
But when she went to celebrate, she couldn’t find her country’s flag anywhere – it’s has orange, white and green vertical stripes.
So Ahoure found a solution: she found a flag of Ireland, which has green, white and ORANGE vertical stripes, and turned it upside down.
Sonic advance: How sound waves could help regrow bones (RMIT)
World Indoor Championships: Ivory Coast’s Ahoure celebrates 60m gold with Irish flag (BBC)