Scientists Built a Cell, a Heart, and a Mini-Universe This Week

The Signal

This week, three separate research teams showed that the boundary between "natural" and "built" is getting thinner by the day. A physicist in Birmingham created a miniature universe from a cloud of ultracold atoms and watched time emerge from inside it. A separate team unveiled a synthetic cell nicknamed SpudCell that can feed, grow, and divide like the real thing. And engineers built a soft robotic heart that can mimic one of the most common and mysterious forms of heart failure....