Month: January 2017

It’s hard to imagine that anything literally hanging from utility poles across Manhattan could be considered “hidden,” but throughout the borough, about 18 miles of translucent wire stretches around the skyline, and most people have likely never noticed. It’s called an eruv (plural eruvin), and its existence is thanks to the Jewish Sabbath.

On the Sabbath, which is viewed as a day of rest, observant Jewish people aren’t allowed to carry anything—books, groceries, even children—in public places (doing so is considered “work”). The eruv encircles much of Manhattan, acting as a symbolic boundary that turns the very public streets of the city into a private space, much like one’s own home. This allows people to freely communicate and socialize on the Sabbath—and carry whatever they please—without having to worry about breaking Jewish law.

Along with everything else in New York City, the eruv isn’t cheap. It costs a group of Orthodox synagogues $100,000 a year to maintain the wires, which are inspected by a rabbi every Thursday before dawn to confirm they are all still attached. While wires do occasionally fall, the overall eruv has survived events such as the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and Hurricane Sandy. When eruv wires do break, it can cause enough of a stir to make news. Most notably, in 2011 a wire broke near the United Nations building, which caused a problem when repair crews couldn’t get past security to fix it. The issue was eventually resolved, but not before a good deal of panic set in.

Manhattan has had an eruv in one form or another since the early 20th century, but the present-day incarnation began on the Upper West Side in 1994. It has since expanded from 126th Street to Houston Street, and its exact locations can now be viewed on Google Maps (and an intermittently updated Twitter feed). The city does have some rules in place regarding the eruv: The wires can only be a quarter-inch thick, and they must be hung at least 15 feet off the ground.

New York City isn’t the only metropolis in the U.S. with an eruv. They can also be seen (or not seen) in St. Louis, Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, and numerous other cities across the country. Rabbi Adam Mintz, co-president of the Manhattan eruv, talks more about it in the video below, courtesy of Business Insider:

This may be technology at its coolest. Or grossest. Or both. We’d say both. Scientists in Madrid have figured out a way to produce functional sheets of human skin using a 3D printer. They published their results in the journal Biofabrication.

Scientists have really seized 3D printing as a solution to all kinds of problems. In the last few years, they’ve developed techniques for printing cardiac stents, artificial rat models to spare real rats from dissection—even human jawbones and ears. Other researchers have been hard at work growing human skin in the laboratory.

The team in Madrid decided to put the two concepts together. As you can imagine, this was not a simple matter of loading up the ink and hitting a button. The team built a brand-new type of bioprinter that uses human plasma as a medium, or scaffolding.

Co-author Juan Francisco del Cañizo is a surgeon at Madrid’s Hospital General Universitario Gregorio Marañón. He said it was tricky to create an automated process that could create a friendly environment for skin to grow. “Knowing how to mix the biological components, in what conditions to work with them so that the cells don’t deteriorate, and how to correctly deposit the product is critical to the system,” he told The Independent.

The printed skin includes the same functional layers as the home-grown variety: a tough, epidermis-like outer layer; a thick middle layer; and a layer of collagen-producing cells to make the skin stretchy and strong.

The research team believes their new skin printer has huge potential for helping burn patients and other people who need skin grafts. The printer could include the patients’ own cells in the plasma medium, which would significantly decrease the odds that their bodies would reject the new skin.

Animal advocates see the skin as a chance to put an end to cosmetic companies’ animal testing, which currently relies on rabbits, guinea pigs, mice, and dogs as surrogates for human skin.

A bioengineering firm called the BioDan Group has already expressed an interest in mass-producing the skin printers.