It would be quite a superpower to regrow entire body parts. CrowdScience listener Kelly started pondering this after a discussion with her friend on whether human tongues could regrow. Finding out that they couldn't, she asked us to investigate the extent of human regenerative abilities. Presenter Alex Lathbridge travels to Vienna, a hotbed of research in this area. He meets an animal with much better powers of regeneration than humans - the axolotl. In Elly Tanaka’s lab he finds out how she studies their incredible abilities – and shows off his new axolotl tattoo. Why can these sweet-looking salamanders regrow entire limbs while we can’t even regrow our tongues? Palaeontologist Nadia Fröbisch has looked into the evolutionary origins of regeneration, and it goes a lot further back than you might think. And in fact, even humans are constantly regenerating, by renewing the building blocks of our bodies: cells. New cells grow and replace old ones all the time – although, in some parts of the body, we do keep hold of the same cells throughout our lives. However, cell turnover isn’t the same as regrowing entire organs or limbs. But can we grow new body parts in the lab instead? We meet Sasha Mendjan, who creates heart organoids using our cells’ innate ability to self-organise. How far off are we from implanting organs, grown from a patient’s stem cells, back into the human body? Contributors: Dr Elly Tanaka, Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) Prof Martin Hetzer, Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) Prof Nadia Fröbisch, Natural History Museum Berlin Dr Sasha Mendjan, Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) Presenter: Alex Lathbridge Producer: Florian Bohr Editor: Cathy Edwards Production Co-ordinator: Ishmael Soriano Studio Manager: Bob Nettles
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So a neutron star is kind of about the size of Chicago.
Unexpected Elements from the BBC World Service.
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Hi, I'm Alex.
Nice to meet you.
Hello and welcome to Crowd Science from the BBC World Service.
Ready?
I'm.
Yes.
I'm Alex Lethbridge and I'm in the Austrian capital of Vienna to see a small aquarium.
Sometimes we're not even convinced they're in here, but if you look around, you can find them.
Helping me here is Eli Tanake, director of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology, Austria.
She's got a keen eye because just then, here, this one, there's the white one.
Oh, wow.
That's a.
Such an expressive face.
From under a round tree stump, a white face with beady half olive eyes is looking up at me and to either side of its face are three pink fuzzy extrusions.
They're gills which suddenly fan in and out again.
Did you see the gills?