That makes it possible to create minutely filigreed structures, such as concentric rings and scaffolds.

ECONOMIST: A new way to build complicated materials, micron by micron

Nuclear-pore complexes are elaborate protein scaffolds that sit in the membrane around a cell's nucleus.

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Dr. Anthony Atala at Wake Forest University generated bladders and a urethra using scaffolds and patients' stem cells.

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The circles thus stand at different depths in the hill, and have been connected by various wooden scaffolds, ladders, and walkways.

NEWYORKER: The Sanctuary

The scaffolds were then seeded with the patient's own stem cells.

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Langer envisions a time in the future when tissue banks are full of hearts, lungs, livers and pancreases, all grown on polymer scaffolds from stem, donor or host cells.

FORBES: Innovators

Heart stents, the tiny metal scaffolds used to prop open arteries, certainly could be subject to medical bean counters, as this front page Wall Street Journal story ably documents.

FORBES: Playing Politics With Clinton's Heart

The church smelled of candle wax and wet plaster, and most of the space had been sectioned off with scaffolds, leaving a high-ceilinged room the size of a small cellar.

NEWYORKER: The Repatriates

Sheep with 25 mm lesions in their hoof bones were then implanted with the coral scaffolds alone or with coral scaffolds infiltrated with either expanded MSCs or fresh bone marrow.

BBC: Coral heals serious fractures

But time has passed, and scaffolds have come to seem more and more a part of ordinary life, so much so that the citizens of Kabul grow anxious at the thought that an execution might be postponed.

NPR: 'The Swallows of Kabul' Book Excerpt