Sometimes here at io9, we have to stretch a little to fit cool sci-fi buzzwords like "cyborg" or "post-apocalypse" into our science headlines. But sometimes the scientists do it for us. A team of scientists recently grafted vascular smooth muscle cells and epithelial umbilical cells onto a scaffold of poly-urethane, forming flexible artificial veins and arteries. They referred to this as "cyborg engineering." Once they started pumping blood through them, they found the cyborg veins worked better under vascular pressure. They hope to use them in coronary bypass surgeries, in which a vein from another part of the body is used to shunt a vein around a blockage.

Artificial veins are just a first step toward engineering artifical organs. Not only would this give us a near limitless supply of replacement organs (no more dramatic "tricking hospital administrators into allowing a patient onto the donor waiting list" scenes on House), but we could design the organs to be more healthy and perfect than real ones. You could celebrate your 50th birthday with a batch of fresh, young organs. Your cyborg grandpa might live to be 200. Image by: Science Daily.

'Cyborg Engineering' Enables Coronary Bypass Grafting Using Artificial Veins And Arteries. [Science Daily]

In Hiltner's latest work, she satirizes our crazy paranoia about pandemics, fed by the big pseudo-science media. The "Pathology" exhibit also includes some wall art by Suzy Greenberg. Says Hiltner:

My current work focuses on the secret life of micro organisms, drawing from the hysteria of mass media science. I create humorous and disturbing situations in which our bacterial cohabiters cultivate a visible imprint on our everyday lives. I am fascinated with the discrepancies of rhetoric versus reality both in science and human nature. In "Pathological," these persistent life forms attempt to adapt, evolve and thrive, revealing beckoning landscapes instead of disease infested traps. Perhaps it is a well packaged con or a sincere plea for acceptance, depending on your point of view... In creating these formations that are at once familiar yet novel I want to establish a bridge between fears of the unknown and the exhilaration of discovery.

And here are some pictures from her earlier exhibitions. We Will Rebuild You (2006) includes weird artificial organs, like a ceramic artificial lung and a metal-and-plastic artificial heart. Her Supervillain Start-Up Kit (2004) includes the aforementioned hypno-goggles, along with some truly amazing advertisements aimed at the supervillain on the go. No evil lair should be without them!

She explains:

Our biology is the one persistent truth to our existence, but as technology evolves even this truth will become malleable. And if that is the case, how will it change they way we coexist with this awkward corporeal shell we call the human body? The writer Mary Roach sums up this uncomfortable relationship perfectly: "We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget." Our society is immersed in the business of easing the inevitability of that rather unpleasant reality, full of remedies to improve our fragile temporal predicament.

My work is a whimsical and at times sardonic examination of how popular cultural can influence societies' interpretations of biology, creating a tenuous relationship between necessity and desire. I alter the familiar objects of our daily existence into pseudo scientific products that ponder our ceaseless drive to conquer the biological limitations we where born with. These gleaming tidbits of technology I create are preposterous, materialistic, amusing and strangely optimistic, representing a slice of the complex tapestry that is human nature.