Humanoid robots could be used to stretch and strain bioengineered tissues, providing them a suitable environment for growth:
Right now, tissue engineering relies on bioreactors to grow sheets of cells. These machines often look like large fish tanks, filled with a rich soup of nutrients and chemicals that cells need to grow on a specialized trellis. The problem, explain Mouthuy and Carr, is that bioreactors currently "fail to mimic the real mechanical environment for cells." In other words, human cells in muscles and tendons grow while being stretched and moved around on our skeletons. Without experiencing these natural stresses, the tissue grafts produced by researchers often have a broad range of structural problems and low cell counts.
That's where robots come in. The researchers propose a "humanoid-bioreactor system" with "structures, dimensions, and mechanics similar to those of the human body." As the robot interacted with its environment, tissues growing on its body would receive the typical strains and twists that they would if they grew on an actual human. The result would be healthy tissue, grown for the exact area on the body it was destined to replace. Mouthuy and Carr note that this would be especially helpful for "bone-tendon-muscle grafts... because failure during healing often occurs at the interface between tissues."
What would this humanoid-bioreactor system look like? It could possibly be built on top of a humanoid robot with "soft robotics" muscles made from electroactive polymers, and the growing muscles could piggyback on those to get their exercise. It would also need to be covered in soft, stretchable sensors to monitor the health of the growing tissues.
Growing tissue grafts on humanoid robots: A future strategy in regenerative medicine? (open, DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.aam5666) (DX)
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(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 02 2017, @10:30PM
We already use babies/adolescents for this purpose: They provide a nice scaffolding for highly sophisticated tissue, which is then forcibly cut away from their sexual organs and sold as "harvested foreskin tissue" for the purposes of skin grafts and cosmetic research.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday March 02 2017, @10:35PM
MMMmmm... soup.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday March 02 2017, @11:21PM (1 child)
I, for one welcome our new robot . . . Hey! Get these things off me! Owww, that hurts! It pinches! Oww! Where did they all come from? Oww.... Ow... ow... o....... .
(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Friday March 03 2017, @01:26PM
oh, mein gut freund, you will not feel the nanobotz...
whether you go down like hal with your circuits pulled one by one, or there is one switch off; you will not feel the nanobotz...
(Score: 3, Funny) by archfeld on Friday March 03 2017, @01:29AM
Here is our Ed Gein special anniversary model robot, 1 skin suit/face included, accessories sold separately.
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 2) by drussell on Friday March 03 2017, @03:01AM (3 children)
This sounds an awful lot like the Borg queen trying to graft human flesh onto Data... :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 03 2017, @06:59AM
"You know how to whistle, don't you? You just put your lips together, and blow."
But wait, that was Lauren Bacall, not the Borg Queen. Hmm. Hmmmmmmm. Hmmmmmmmmmmmm. I you know what I mean.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Friday March 03 2017, @12:35PM (1 child)
Except the flesh grafted onto Data likely came from another crew member, and not grown in a vat.
(Score: 2) by drussell on Friday March 03 2017, @01:38PM
Except the flesh grafted onto Data likely came from another crew member, and not grown in a vat.
Indeed... :)
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday March 03 2017, @08:38AM (1 child)
what's this abomination?
you couldn't keep harvesting small meatbags for organs, could you? you had to bother us bots.
sheesh.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Friday March 03 2017, @01:28PM
GTFOH, everyone knows botz don't have real feels...
(Score: 2) by captain_nifty on Friday March 03 2017, @02:42PM (1 child)
It's like some people are actively trying to create the terminator robot, do these people watch dystopian science fiction and miss the fact that these ideas usually have terribly bad outcomes for most of humanity.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday March 03 2017, @04:44PM
Considering the way humanity acts all by itself, I'm not sure that having a bunch of killer machines trying to exterminate them is such a bad thing. In the machines' view, they're valiantly working to contain and neutralize a dangerous threat to the rest of the universe.
Besides, it could be really useful having my own personal Terminator.