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Producing biomaterials that match the performance of cartilage and tendons has been a elusive goal for scientists, but new materials created at Cornell represent a promising new approach to mimic natural tissue. The results are published July 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and provide a new strategy for synthesizing clinical solutions for damaged tissue. The tissue must be soft enough to bend and flex, but durable enough to withstand prolonged loads – for example, the loads that the knee tendons have to support. When tissues are worn or damaged, collagen hydrogels and synthetic materials have the potential to serve as substitutes, but they do not have the right combination of biological and mechanical properties of natural tissues. Now, Cornell researchers have engineered a biohybrid composite material with essential characteristics of natural tissue. It consists of two main ingredients: collagen – which provides softness and biocompatibility to the materia...

The strange creatures that raged in Earth’s oceans more than half a billion years ago appear to be the earliest vertebrate relatives we’ve found to date. They are called yunnanozoans, dating from the Early Cambrian about 518 million years ago. The cartilaginous features found in their fossil remains are comparable to those of modern vertebrates, paleontologists have found. This suggests that these animals were stem vertebrates, an extinct sister group to the original group of modern vertebrates. “The pharyngeal curvature is a key innovation that likely contributed to the evolution of the vertebrate jaw and braincase,” wrote the team led by Qingyi Tian of Nanjing University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in China. “The pharyngeal skeletons of controversial Cambrian animals called yunnanozoans may contain the oldest fossil evidence limiting the early evolution of arches, but their correlation to vertebrates is debated. “By examining additional spe...