A tiny animal with an extraordinary ability could teach us how to regenerate lost or damaged body parts.

A beheading is lethal for most animals, but not for the flatworm . Chop its head off, and it will simply grow back . The disembodied head, too, can grow itself a whole new body in a matter of days – in fact, almost any fragment of this worm can regenerate an entire body.

This remarkable power comes down to stem cells , and new research into flatworm biology shows that we've much more to learn about how these self-renewing, undifferentiated cells work to rebuild body parts.

Schmidtea mediterranea , a freshwater flatworm (or planarian), has adult pluripotent stem cells spread all throughout its oblong pancake of a body. These cells have the potential to grow into any other kind

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