Scientists Use Hard Sugar To Create Dissolvable Mold For Delicate Research
Hard candy molds soft silicone Joseph Xu, Michigan Engineering via University of Michigan News Scientists at the University of Michigan were experimenting with delicate silicone to better understand tissue scarring, but they had a problem: The molds in which the silicone needed to sit in were too hard and kept damaging the silicone. But they found a sweet solution: molds made of sugar that kept the silicone intact and could dissolve away after use, according to a recently published a paper in the journal Lab On A Chip. In order to better understand how tissue scarring occurs on the cellular level, the researchers were testing cells inside of super-soft silicone that was less than a millimeter wide. To see how scarring might affect the individual cells, they squeezed the silicone with the cells...