Putting squish into artificial organs

Doctors may someday routinely replace failed organs with substitutes made in a factory. One leading strategy for making artificial tissues is to supply a scaffold of a material, such as a biodegradable polymer, on which cells organize themselves into replacement body parts. However, most scaffold materials now available are much stiffer than natural, soft tissue. To confront that shortcoming, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have made potential scaffold material by mimicking the microstructure of ordinary, vulcanized rubber.