Amazing Science

The Pirate Bay (TPB), which allows users to share media files via BitTorrent, plans to avoid shutdown by Hollywood by putting some of its servers in GPS controlled drones hovering over international waters, the TPB team told TorrentFreak.

“With the development of GPS controlled drones, far-reaching cheap radio equipment and tiny new computers like the Raspberry Pi, we’re going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air,” TPB revealed in a blog post.

http://tinyurl.com/895vsmb

Surgeon Anthony Atala demonstrates an early-stage experiment that could someday solve the organ-donor problem: a 3D printer that uses living cells to output a transplantable kidney. Using similar technology, Dr. Atala's young patient Luke Massella received an engineered bladder 10 years ago; we meet him onstage.

It's exciting to see the development of 3D printing move from little objects to human organs. This advancement illustrates soon many objects will be printable from home - with a printer we drop resources into, or even a sorter that breaks apart other objects to salvage resources for new products.

Researchers are hopeful that new advances in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine could one day make a replacement liver from a patient’s own cells, or animal muscle tissue that could be cut into steaks without ever being inside a cow. Bioengineers can already make 2D structures out of many kinds of tissue, but one of the major roadblocks to making the jump to 3D is keeping the cells within large structures from suffocating; organs have complicated 3D blood vessel networks that are still impossible to recreate in the laboratory.

Now, University of Pennsylvania researchers have developed an innovative solution to this perfusion problem: they’ve shown that 3D printed templates of filament networks can be used to rapidly create vasculature and improve the function of engineered living tissues.

A line appears on the monitor and becomes longer within seconds. It bends off at a right angle, changes direction several times and crosses itself on a couple of occasions until a tangle of lines emerges. Then the line grows more slowly, appears darker, stops and darkens further in a dot of a consistent size. Then it continues: a line, another dot, line, dot, line, dot.

What may sound a bit like Morse code is actually a demonstration of a new technique that ETH-Zurich researchers have developed at the Laboratory of Thermodynamics in Emerging Technologies. The method enables them to print the tiniest of structures on a micro- and nanoscale.

Using this printing method, ultrafine particles are transferred onto a surface from a capillary in a targeted fashion with the aid of an electrical field. Depending on how long material accumulates at the same spot, the structure grows taller, producing a nano-tower.

Paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara is looking to print out some robot dinosaurs.

He wants to use a 3-D printer to create dinosaur bones, based on real fossils, to use in scaled-down robo-saurs. In the same way that document programs can shrink a page to 50 or 20 or 2 percent of its original size, a 3-D printing program can shrink a blueprint for 100-foot-long skeletons to a more manageable size for study.