Weird Science Weekly: Lab-grown vaginas implanted for the first time

In this week's installment of Weird Science Weekly, we're looking at some of the strangest (but coolest) science stories from recent days, including vaginas grown in the laboratory, jellyfish being made into paper towels, and a new twist on the famous Twin Paradox...

Laboratory-grown vaginas implanted into patients for the first time

Four young women from Mexico, who all suffer from a very severe form of Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser Syndrome (MKRH), now have a chance at leading a normal sex life and even having children thanks to doctors from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina. The cause of MKRH syndrome is unknown, but it affects about 1 in every 5,000 newborn girls, causing the vagina and uterus to be either underdeveloped or absent. The four girls treated in this study all had a vulva (the external part of female genitalia), but each had an underdeveloped vagina and an abnormally-developed uterus.

Each had tissue samples taken from their genitals, which were then grown into vaginal canals in the lab. This video shows the process of growing the tissues:

After the tissues were grown and molded into the proper shape canal to fit the individual patients, doctors performed surgery to form a canal and then implant the grown tissues inside. After just six months, the implanted tissues had formed fully-functional vaginal tissues, with no distinction between the girls' native cells and the implanted ones, and annual followup visits over the next eight years showed the organs were normal and functional. One of the four even reported that she hopes to have a big family one day.

The techniques used in this study have even been applied to other parts of the body, such as the bladder and urethra, and doctors hope that they can be useful for other types of structures and organs as well.

[ Related: Weird Science Weekly: Is it safe to pee in the pool? ]

Jellyfish to be made into paper towels and diapers

A popular children's activity seems to be turning paper plates into jellyfish, but Israeli company Cine'al Ltd. wants to turn that whole idea around, quite possibly for the betterment of our planet. They want to turn jellyfish into what's called 'hydromash' — a biodegradable absorbent material that can replace our current paper towels and the absorbent material in diapers.

Jellyfish blooms are becoming a big problem these days, as chemicals and nutrients are washed into the oceans, upsetting the ecological balance. This is expected to get even worse as our climate continues to change. This not only starves out other aquatic species, but it can have a serious effect on our technologies — just consider the bloom that shut down a Swedish nuclear reactor last October. One solution at the time was to create robots to eradicate the blooms, but capturing them and turning it into this biodegradable hydromash would be a much better solution.

[ Related: Weird Science Weekly: Bionic kangaroo is the future of robotics ]

NASA twins will give us insights into the effects of space travel

The Twin Paradox is a thought experiment dealing with space travel and relativity, where one twin leaves Earth travelling on a rocket near the speed of light, and when they return home, their twin sibling has aged much more than them (due to time dilation). We don't have any way of testing this at the moment, simply because we don't have the technology to travel near the speed of light, but that's not holding NASA back from getting the help of a set of twins to test other aspects of space travel.

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Keep your eyes on the wonders of science, and if you spot anything particularly strange you'd like me to check out for next week, comment below, email me using the link in the banner above, or drop me a line on Twitter!

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