Briefly

NICARAGUA

Passenger truck crash claims at least 17 lives

An aging passenger truck plunged off a road in a mountainous part of northeastern Nicaragua on Monday, killing at least 17 people and injuring 25 more, according to police. The accident occurred in a region devastated by the recent passage of Hurricanes Eta and Iota. The National Police said the dead included 12 women－at least one of them a girl－and five men. Television images showed the truck, an old East German IFA military vehicle converted for hauling passengers, overturned on a narrow, muddy road. Mayor German Vargas of nearby Waslala told Channel 8 television that the truck lost its brakes going down a hill.

AUSTRALIA

Breakthrough made for bio-printed kidney

By using a technology involving a process similar to 3D printing, Australian researchers have produced a large number of man-made tiny kidneys with stable quality, taking one step closer to the reality of bio-printed kidney for human organ transplantation. The research, which was led by the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Australia and the bio-tech company Organovo in the United States, was published in Nature Materials journal on Monday. Although those bio-printed kidneys were of the size of a fingernail, they all came with a similar structure to a real kidney, including the filtering structures called nephrons, and had been used by researchers to screen drug toxicity from a class of drugs known to cause kidney damage in people.

Agencies - Xinhua