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

Years of the Modern

Years of the modern! years of the unperform'd!
Your horizon rises, I see it parting away for more august dramas,
I see not America only, not only Liberty's nation but other nations
preparing,
I see tremendous entrances and exits, new combinations, the solidarity
of races,
I see that force advancing with irresistible power on the world's stage,
(Have the old forces, the old wars, played their parts? are the acts
suitable to them closed?)
I see Freedom, completely arm'd and victorious and very haughty,
with Law on one side and Peace on the other,
A stupendous trio all issuing forth against the idea of caste;
What historic denouements are these we so rapidly approach?
I see men marching and countermarching by swift millions,
I see the frontiers and boundaries of the old aristocracies broken,
I see the landmarks of European kings removed,
I see this day the People beginning their landmarks, (all others give way;)
Never were such sharp questions ask'd as this day,
Never was average man, his soul, more energetic, more like a God,
Lo, how he urges and urges, leaving the masses no rest!
His daring foot is on land and sea everywhere, he colonizes the
Pacific, the archipelagoes,
With the steamship, the electric telegraph, the newspaper, the
wholesale engines of war,
With these and the world-spreading factories he interlinks all
geography, all lands;
What whispers are these O lands, running ahead of you, passing under
the seas?
Are all nations communing? is there going to be but one heart to the globe?
Is humanity forming en-masse? for lo, tyrants tremble, crowns grow dim,
The earth, restive, confronts a new era, perhaps a general divine war,
No one knows what will happen next, such portents fill the days and nights;
Years prophetical! the space ahead as I walk, as I vainly try to
pierce it, is full of phantoms,
Unborn deeds, things soon to be, project their shapes around me,
This incredible rush and heat, this strange ecstatic fever of dreams
O years!
Your dreams O years, how they penetrate through me! (I know not
whether I sleep or wake;)
The perform'd America and Europe grow dim, retiring in shadow behind me,
The unperform'd, more gigantic than ever, advance, advance upon me.

Walt Whitman

Format shifting dead trees: can e-book piracy be ethical?

A question of ethics: say you want a new novel bad—really bad—but you want the digital version for your Kindle/iPad/Sony Reader. The publisher, hoping to goose sales of the book in hardcover for $28, isn't about to offer a $10 e-book version until the novel comes out in paperback. So you buy the hardcover and then pirate a homebrew e-book, which someone has helpfully made available in one of the darker corners of the Internet. Should you be fitted for an eye patch and peg leg?

ars technica

Hewlett Packard outlines computer memory of the future

Researchers at computer firm Hewlett Packard (HP) have shown off working devices built using memristors - often described as electronics' missing link.

These tiny devices were proposed 40 years ago but only fabricated in 2008.

HP says it has now shown that they can be used to crunch data, meaning they could be used to build advanced chips.

That means they could begin to replace transistors - the tiny switches used to build today's chips.

And, crucially, the unique properties of memristors would allow future chips to both store and process data in the same device.

Today, these functions are done on separate devices, meaning data must be transferred between the two, slowing down the computation and wasting energy.

"The processor and memory could be exactly the same thing," Professor Stan Williams of HP told BBC News. "That allows us to think differently about how computation could be done."

BBC News

Events in the Landscape and their Acoustic Shadows

While writing the previous post, about sound and warfare in Iraq, I came across a brief description of something called an acoustic shadow and its occurrence during the American Civil War.
An "acoustic shadow" is when the sounds of an event—here, a battle—cannot be heard by people nearby—say, in the neighboring valley or a parallel city street—but those same sounds can plainly be heard over much larger distances. This effect is caused by "a unique combination of factors such as wind, weather, temperature, land topography, forest or other vegetation, and elevation," we read. For example, "battle sounds from Gettysburg fought on July 1, 2, and 3, 1863 could be heard over one hundred miles away in Pittsburgh, but were not heard only ten miles from the battlefield."

BLDGBLOG

Running barefoot is the way to go for that gold

Some of Kenya’s star athletes at the world cross-country championships in Bydgoszcz, Poland, sprinted to the finishing line barefoot.

Would they have done even better in shoes?

“Hardly not – they had got it right”, says Prof Daniel Lieberman of Harvard University.

After sampling 200 elite runners from Kenya and the US, Prof Lieberman and colleagues from the universities of Moi, in Eldoret, and Glasgow, in the UK, say barefoot running is safer and more comfortable than shod feet.

Daily Nation

As Obama Hails Arms Pact, Applause in Kremlin Is Faint

MOSCOW — On a Friday that began in Washington with a triumphant presidential news conference about the conclusion of arms talks with Russia, Moscow seemed to have its mind on other things.

President Dmitri A. Medvedev was in Sochi, scolding Olympic trainers over their athletes’ dismal showing in Vancouver. Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin gave a speech on the dangers posed by spring flooding. The highest-ranking Russian official to address reporters about the treaty was Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov, who hastily gathered the press at dinnertime in a tiny ministry conference room.

Mr. Lavrov called the agreement “real progress” in the relationship between Russia and the United States, but added that Russia could pull out if it concluded that the American missile defense plans had compromised its nuclear deterrent. Indeed, unease over missile defense was seeping into commentary even as officials hailed a mutual success.

The New York Times

Rulers, Ruling All Things-Midlake

Thanks Melvillian

Levin on China