Printing new skin

Saving Lives with Ink jet Printers

By modifying an ink jet printer and growing skin cells taken from a patient's body, a U.S. Army research lab has developed an amazing treatment for severe burns: printing new skin.

Once the patient's skin cells are in a sterile ink cartridge, a computer uses a three dimensional map of the wound to guide the printing.

“The bio-printer drops each type of cell precisely where it needs to go," explains Kyle Binder, a biomedical scientist at the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine's Wake Forest lab. "The wound gets filled in and then those cells will become new skin.”



NDEP

Thanks Jonathan.

Making surgery scalpels from sound waves

Sound waves are used in many imaging applications, but they're often underpowered and hard to focus. But focus them into "sound bullets" and all sorts of interesting things happen.

A paper published in PNAS this week describes how scientists might transition from creating sound-based images with linear acoustic dynamics to using nonlinear approaches. Researchers created a system with an acoustic lens that can focus highly tunable and accurate signals into "sound bullets." Once researchers have slightly better control over them, the bullets could be used for everything from detecting objects underwater to acting as nonintrusive scalpels in certain kinds of surgery.

ars technica