The team has made the technology work in laboratory settings but there are a number of challenges in applying it to real-life settings.

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The first of those took place last July, when Abderrahmane Kheddar, director of the CNRS-AIST joint robotics laboratory at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan, and his team used FMRI to allow someone to control a robot located thousands of miles away using only their thoughts.

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Diversa has a patented technology that produces 100% human antibodies synthetically, in the laboratory.

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In early experiments, Bhatia's lab, called the Laboratory for Multiscale Regenerative Technology, was able to infect her liver cells with malaria for the first time two weeks ago and hopes to be able to offer malaria researchers a way to test drugs that will kill the hypnozoites.

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In a third study published in Nature, Jeffrey Andrews-Hanna and Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, and Bruce Banerdt of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, provide impact evidence from gravitational and topographical signatures on Mars.

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But Prof Partha Mitra, a neuroscientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York state, says we need to be aware of the limitations of the technology in use.

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