wounds

The Cheyenne and Arapaho author Tommy Orange’s astonishing 2018 debut novel, There There, offered a kaleido­scopic portrait of urban Native American identity. Composed of an all-Native cast, it ruminated on power, storytelling, dispossession, erasure and historical memory. The novel’s off-the-wall structure placed its central event – a mass shooting at an Oakland powwow – at the book’s end, leaving its aftermath largely unattended.Now comes an emotionally incandescent and structurally riveting second novel, Wandering…

In a world first, researchers have printed multi-layered, living skin directly onto significant injuries in rats for scar-free skin repair. It's not sci-fi – they're genuinely 3D-printing skin (and possibly hair) right into damaged areas.The skin of the head and face is vital to protecting the structures underlying it. It’s also integral to our identity. Full-thickness skin damage caused by traumatic injury to or extensive surgery on the face or head – to remove a cancerous tumor, say – can negatively impact a person’s…

Though many doctors today get help from robots for procedures ranging from hernia repairs to coronary bypasses, those are used to assist surgeons, not replace them. This new research marks progress toward robots that can operate more autonomously on very intricate, complicated tasks like suturing. The lessons learned in its development could also be useful in other fields of robotics. “From a robotics perspective, this is a really challenging manipulation task,” says Ken Goldberg, a researcher at UC Berkeley and…

Using a cold plasma jet to activate hydrogel, researchers have created a dressing with antibacterial and wound-healing properties. The technology could be used as an alternative to current treatments that rely on antibiotics to treat chronic wounds, such as diabetic foot ulcers.The growing global number of diabetics means that there will be more people who experience a foot ulcer in their lifetime. For 60% of diabetics, these ulcers will become infected, and because of poor wound healing associated with the condition, the…

While sutures and staples suffice for closing most wounds, they can damage delicate tissue, plus they may allow fluids to leak out when applied to internal organs. Scientists have thus set about improving an alternative wound-closure method known as tissue soldering.Putting it simply, tissue soldering is an experimental technique in which a gelatinous paste is applied to the pressed-together edges of a wound, then heated with a laser. The heat causes the paste to polymerize and bond with the collagen in the underlying…

As the race for the 2024 Oscars heats up, Martin Scorsese’s epic Killers of the Flower Moon, adapted from David Grann’s nonfiction 2017 book of the same name, is widely tipped as a frontrunner for the top prizes. Last month, the drama about the real-life Osage murders, masterminded by white men intent upon stealing the oil-rich land “headrights” of the Indigenous people in early 20th-century Oklahoma, topped Sight and Sound’s poll of best films of 2023. In the run-up to Christmas, Awards Daily placed Killers of the Flower…

It has been known for some time now that chemicals produced by certain ants have antibiotic properties. For the first time ever, however, one species of ant has recently been observed actually using those chemicals to treat infected battle wounds on others of its kind.The species in question, the Matabele ant (Megaponera analis), is found in various regions of Africa south of the Sahara Desert.It feeds exclusively on termites, meaning that groups of the ants periodically have to perform raids on nearby termite colonies.…

In the best proof there is that, whatever happens, the MCU will keep on turning, just days after Jonathan Majors’ removal from the franchise as Kang, Marvel is already unleashing its latest offering in the form of What If…? season 2. Meanwhile, although the MCU is indomitable, its old rival the DCEU is finally calling it a day with the release of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, ahead of James Gunn’s DCU reboot. But, true to form, its already losing a box office battle with Marvel… Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom faces worse…

A mysterious miracle is at the heart of this absorbing and superbly acted film from the Italian director Andrea Pallaoro, which refuses the cliched “issue movie” beats of confrontation, catharsis and resolution. Like his previous work Hannah, which starred Charlotte Rampling as the haunted, troubled woman of that name, Monica is marked by its cool compositional rigour: scenes from a life are evoked with studied, often wordless vignettes and middle-distance shots from fixed camera positions, combined occasionally with…

In 2020 biologist Michael Levin and his colleagues reported that they had made “biological robots” by shaping clusters of cells into tiny artificial forms that could “walk” around on surfaces. Levin’s team argued that these entities, which it dubbed xenobots because they were made from skin and heart muscle cells of the African clawed frog Xenopus laevis, could be considered a new kind of organism. That claim became perhaps more compelling when a year later the researchers showed that xenobots could self-assemble…