New Hope For Regrowing Severed Limbs, Just Like Lizards' Tails
Wrinkly Finger Wikimedia Commons Pretty good superpower to have, if you ask me. Some lizards and amphibians have the ability to regrow severed tails or limbs--in fact, the blue-tailed skink abandons its tail intentionally to distract predators. But humans, despite our amazing advancements in the field of spying on each other, are typically thought to lack this superpower-like ability. But in fact, we're more like blue-tailed skinks than you'd think! Back in 2010, a woman named Deepa Kulkarni lost the tip of her finger to an altercation with a slammed door. She was able to grow it back with the use of a powder made of ground-up pig bladder (seriously) called MatriStem which, according to ACell, the company that makes it, "incorporates into the surrounding tissue during the healing process and leaves new tissue where scar tissue formation is normally expected." Basically, MatriStem works as a sort of scaffolding--it attracts stem cells...