This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. This week I’ve been working on a piece about teeth. Well, sort of teeth. Specifically, lab-grown bioengineered teeth. Researchers have created these teeth with a mixture of human…
The other day I idly opened TikTok to find a video of a young woman refinishing an old hollow-bodied electric guitar. It was a montage of close-up shots—looking over her shoulder as she sanded and scraped the wood, peeled away the frets, expertly patched the cracks with filler, and then spray-painted it a radiant purple.…