MacGyver can use spare change and a can of deodorant to build a nuclear missile, but that's Hollywood (or whatever the Canadian equivalent is) taking liberties, right? High technology is not a slapdash matter of stringing together office supplies and Easy Cheese until you have a laser ... or at least that's what they want you to think. In reality, human progress is often a matter of grabbing a fistful of whatever mundane object is nearest to you, then thinking at it as hard as you can until it turns into science. For example ...

5 Cotton Candy Can Be Used to Create Artificial Human Organs

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Cotton candy is one of those weird things that are absolutely worthless outside of a carnival setting, like bumper cars or people who fold balloons for a living. OK, fine, there's one use for cotton candy outside of tricking people into thinking they bought food: helping to grow artificial organs, thus saving countless human lives. But that's all we're giving you, Cotton Candy Industry.

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You've got your pink-stained fingers wrapped around the world too tightly as it is.

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This revelation came about when one Leon Bellan, a graduate student, was listening to a lecture in Cornell's Nanobiotechnology Center and the not-at-all-creepy thought came to him that cotton candy must look a lot like human veins under a microscope. (He had previously observed that nanofibers also look remarkably like Cheez Whiz, so apparently we have the perpetually hungry and penniless state of most students to thank for scientific breakthroughs.)

The microscopic size of human capillaries is both the key to and the major challenge of creating working organs from scratch. You can make as many fake spleens as you want, but if their cells aren't properly irrigated with blood, they won't be able to ... uh, spleen things out properly. Bellan's solution: Place some glittery sugar fluff in an organ-shaped mold, fill it with a special polymer, and then soak it in hot water and alcohol for several days to let the candy melt away. The result? The "organ" was now filled with an almost completely natural-looking network of microscopic channels.

Leon Bellan et al., via Soft Matter

Just remember to remove all the candy to prevent diabetes. Leave the alcohol.

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To confirm that the new capillaries worked, Bellan pumped them with some fluorescent rat blood he presumably had laying around (you don't ask too many questions about the guy that sees human veins in carnival snacks) and just watched it flow. We still have to figure out how to hook up this artificial vascular network to a living host body, which isn't as easy as buying some knockoff Chinese adapter on eBay. However, this isn't the only recent advancement in the growing field of cotton candy-related nanobiotechnology: Scientists at Harvard have created a new method of manufacturing nanofibers that's based on cotton candy machines. And, yes, among the many possible applications are artificial organs and tissue regeneration.