Image Credit: Discovery News

First, the background.  When you electrically charge a block of plastic and then strike the plastic with a nail you get what we see on the left there, termed “frozen lightning”.  In truth it’s actually a series of tunnels carved out of the middle of the plastic when the electrically charged particles race toward the nail to escape the plastic, forming what looks like a lightning bolt frozen in the plastic.  Cool huh?  Good for a Mr. Wizard episode or making some scientifically interesting art … or maybe something else?

How about a vascular system?  Turns out that the tunnels are remarkable similar to the capillary system within the human body with the vein or artery at the point of the nail and the smaller tunnels the size of capillaries.  All created in only a few seconds.

So what?  Well scientists think that it will be possible to use biodegradable plastic blocks about the size of an inch thick block of post-it’s to build artificial organs.  You see the tunnels could provide a blood system and …

With a blood system, scientists can now work to implant cells that will become the actual blood vessels. Then the cells that would become the actual liver, kidney or heart would have to be implanted. As the cells grow, the plastic would harmlessly degrade, until only the organ remained.

Freaky cool, yeah?  And a whole lot faster than the usual method of photolithography (how they make computer chips) to create the tunnels.  Don’t get too excited (or freaked out) just yet though as it will be several years before they make anything that they would begin to test in animals, let alone humans.  The full scoop is on Discovery.