The free Human Organ Atlas gives users an up-close-and-personal look at 56 human organs. The Human Organ Atlas portal is open-access and includes the kidneys, brain, heart, and more. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. If watching is giving you a renewed interest in the human body in all of its gory glory, there's a new tool that will help satisfy your curiosity. An international team of scientists developed an open-access 3D portal where users can explore human organs in detail.

Advanced in organs on chips, digital twins, and AI are ushering in a new era of research and drug development. Earlier this week, the UK's science minister announced an ambitious plan: to phase out animal testing. Testing potential skin irritants on animals will be stopped by the end of next year, according to a strategy released on Tuesday . By 2027, researchers are "expected to end" tests of the strength of Botox on mice. And drug tests in dogs and nonhuman primates will be reduced by 2030. The news follows similar moves by other countries.

In the age of Big Data in biology, data science and machine learning have flourished and benefitted from their interdisciplinary application to biology. As a graduate student in this discipline, I read a lot of papers to stay up to date on the literature (and still have a large reading list to catch up on!), and thought I would share what have been some of the best papers I've read this year. In about 80–90% of the single-cell papers you'll encounter, depending on the research question, there will be at least one or two tSNE or UMAP plots to visualize the data they've collected, usually single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) data, where individual cells are profiled for their RNA abundance across the genome. These unsupervised dimensionality reduction methods have been more or less accepted as the status quo for data visualization in the world of single-cell genomics, so it took Academic Twitter by storm this summer when a new preprint boldly challenged that norm, arguing that these methods do little to preserve the latent structure of the data it seeks to convey to our 3D minds. Using the extreme example of preserving equidistant cells in high-dimensional space, and later relaxing it to near-equidistance, they show how tSNE and UMAP distort the orientation of groups of cells with near-equidistance spacing in the original space, clustering them with groups of cells that are evenly spread further apart.

A new'cyborg-like' technology has been developed to safely merge electronic devices with human tissue to better monitor health and track tumours. Scientists from the University of Delaware found a way to attach devices inside a human body by connecting it to tissue using a coating that is more energy efficient. Connecting electronics to tissue is a'huge challenge', researchers say as materials used in technology like gold and silicon cause scarring that can interrupt data flow. For applications inserted into muscle or brain tissue, electrical signals need to flow for them to operate properly, but scars interrupt this activity, the team explained. The US researchers have developed new coatings for'human-machine' devices that counteract issues from scarring caused by materials used in microelectronics.

For the first time, researchers have managed to make intact human organs transparent. Using microscopic imaging, they revealed complex underlying structures of the transparent organs at the cellular level. The resulting organ maps can serve as templates for 3-D bioprinting technologies. In the future, this could lead to the creation of on-demand artificial organs for many patients in need. The findings have been published in Cell.

Experts are warning against the creation of hybrid lab animals for fear of causing them undue suffering through potentially unethical research. One such proposed hybrid would be monkeys with partially human-derived brains. These'chimeras' -- so named after the mythical beast made of different animals -- could let us better study diseases like Alzheimer's in a model more like humans. Chimeras have already been created to explore the possibility of creating transplantable human organs in animals to relieve donor organ shortages. And recently Chinese researchers reported creating the first monkeys with human brain genes.

Drone technology is increasingly proving itself across a variety of industries, including the medical field where the machine's ability to be quickly deployed and move at speed across urban areas for vital deliveries can be a literal lifesaver. In what's believed to be a world first, researchers at the University of Maryland this week announced the successful transportation of a kidney for a woman needing a transplant. "This whole thing is amazing," the unnamed patient said. "Years ago, this was not something that you would think about." Following the successful operation, the 44-year-old Baltimore resident was discharged from hospital on Tuesday.

This story was originally published by Undark and has been republished here with permission. In the United States, the clock is ticking for more than 114,700 adults and children waiting for a donated kidney or other lifesaving organ, and each day, nearly 20 of them die. Researchers are devising a new way to grow human organs inside other animals, but the method raises potentially thorny ethical issues. Other conceivable futuristic techniques sound like dystopian science fiction. As we envision an era of regenerative medicine decades from now, how far is society willing to go to solve the organ shortage crisis? I found myself pondering this question after a discussion about the promises of stem cell technologies veered from the intriguing into the bizarre.

Scientists have reversed diabetes in mice by giving them an organ grown in a different species - rats. This is the first time an inter-species organ transplant has successfully treated a medical condition. The breakthrough is seen as proof of principle that'spare-part surgery' could one day be used to overcome disease in humans. Scientists have reversed diabetes in mice (stock image pictured) by giving them an organ grown in a different species - rats. Hiromitsu Nakauchi, a genetics professor at Stanford injected rat embryos with mouse stem cells.

The federal government is planning to lift a moratorium on funding of controversial experiments that use human stem cells to create animal embryos that are partly human. The National Institutes of Health has unveiled a new policy to permit scientists to get federal money to make the embryos, known as chimeras, under certain carefully monitored conditions. The NIH imposed a moratorium on funding these experiments in September because they could raise ethical concerns. Scientists have started to grow human organs inside pigs, in an attempt to solve the worldwide shortage for transplants. Researchers are interested in growing human tissues and organs in animals by introducing pluripotent human cells into early animal embryos.