A sliver of lab-grown wood has been made from stem cells

What may be the world’s first piece of lab-grown wood isn’t quite big enough to qualify as a woodchip – it’s more like a splinter. But the tiny fragment could be a big step towards reducing the number of trees chopped down to meet our lumber demands, if it holds up to the task.

“As far as we know, our early prototype is the first piece of interconnected wood-like tissue ever produced from cell culture,” says Tom Clement at start-up New Dawn Bio.