The Ultimate Burger, declares Modernist Cuisine, is no simple creation. It requires a bun with the perfect--not overpowering!--degree of sweetness, a cheese made with sodium hexametaphosphates, and a meat patty ground in such a way that every strand is aligned to produce an even texture. The meat is then cryofried--dipped in liquid nitrogen and then fried in hot oil--to keep the burger as juicy as possible. It's complicated, but it's still simple (and cheap) compared to a new $325,000 hamburger that will be eaten in London in the near future.

While Modernist Cuisine uses science to find the perfect way to prepare and combine foods, Dr. Mark Post of the Netherlands, creator of this burger, is doing something different--he's trying to prove that we can grow edible meat in a laboratory through the use of stem cells.

Photo credit: Francois Lenoir/Reuters

"In a lab with incubators filled with clear plastic containers holding a pinkish liquid, a technician was tending to the delicate task of growing the tens of billions of cells needed to make the burger, starting with a particular type of cell removed from cow necks obtained at a slaughterhouse," writes The New York Times. "Dr. Post, one of a handful of researchers in the field, has made strides in developing cultured meat through the use of stem cells — precursor cells that can turn into others that are specific to muscle, for example — and techniques adapted from medical research for growing tissues and organs, a field known as tissue engineering...His burger consists of about 20,000 thin strips of cultured muscle tissue. Dr. Post, who has conducted some informal taste tests, said that even without any fat, the tissue 'tastes reasonably good.' For the London event he plans to add only salt and pepper."

Growing the meat for a lab burger isn't cheap--the research has cost $325,000 so far, which means Post's technique poses little threat to the existing meat business. It's a slow process. Post's work uses myosatellite cells, taken from the muscle tissues in a cow's neck. He uses myosatellite cells because they're able to produce new muscle tissue. The cells are placed in a growth medium--in this case, fetal calf serum--and then encouraged to divide and multiply.

The red barns that dot the American countryside are, more often than not, painted red. They're not red because they would otherwise be too hard to see--they're big buildings. They're not red to be fashionable. They're red because red paint is historically the cheapest. And the next logical question--if you haven't dozed off thinking about barns and red paint--is why red is the cheapest. And that question, as answered by Google's Yonatan Zunger in a Google+ post and picked up by BoingBoing, is actually fascinating. Red paint is cheap because of billions of years of nuclear fusion.

Photo credit: Flickr user swainboat via Creative Commons.

Heavy, right? Zunger titled his post "How the price of paint is set in the hearts of dying stars," but before he arrives at his explanation, he offers a crash course in how colors work and how we create paints. Nuclear fusion comes into play when he gets into the root of how and why pigments are formed. But at the high level, we have to start with paints; paints are formed by the combination of a pigment, typically formed from a mineral, and a binding agent, like an oil or acrylic, that makes the liquid stick to something when it dries.

Zunger first posed this question: what makes a good, cheap pigment? "To be a good pigment, first and foremost, something has to have a nice, bright color," he wrote. "The way pigments produce color is that light shines on them, and they absorb some, but not all, of the colors of light. (Remember that white light is a mixture of many colors of light) For example, red ochre, a.k.a. hematite, a.k.a. anhydrous iron oxide (Fe2O3), absorbs yellow, green and blue light, so the light that reflects off of it is reddish-orange. (This happens to be the pigment that’s used in barn paint, so we’re going to come back to it.) Light is absorbed when a photon (a particle of light) strikes an electron in the pigment and is absorbed, transferring its energy to the electron. But quantum mechanics tells us that an electron can’t absorb just any amount of energy: the particular energies (and therefore colors) that it can absorb depend on the layout of the electrons in the material, which in turn depends on its chemistry."

Photo credit: Flickr user hiddenson via Creative Commons.

His explanation of quantum mechanics gets more involved at this point, but here's the most important part: the rotational speed of an atom's outermost electrons affect its ability to become a pigment. There are fixed increments of this property, called angular momentum, and this shows up in the periodic table in different blocks of elements. The only one we really care about is the "d" block, which is the big section in the middle. The "d" electrons produce an amount of energy that corresponds with visual light. These elements, then, tend to make for excellent pigments.

Now we get to the good stuff: Why red pigments are cheap.

Robert Downey Jr. owned the screen in all of his scenes in 2008's Iron Man, but the next-most popular characters in the film weren't human beings--they were robots. Tony Stark's robotic assistants, which he constantly chides and quips at, are imbued with a ton of personality through simple sound effects and exaggerated mannerisms, drooping sheepishly when they fail Stark. Those are emotions--not real ones, because Iron Man is a movie. But a very interesting, and very detailed, article from science publication Nautilus questions whether robots may be capable of the kinds of emotions Iron Man's robots exhibit. The answer starts with reconsidering how we define emotions.

Having feelings, we usually assume, and the ability to read emotions in others, are human traits," writes Nautilus' Neil Savage. "We don’t expect machines to know what we’re thinking or react to our moods...Special and indecipherable, except by us—our whims and fancies are what makes us human. But we may be wrong in our thinking. Far from being some inexplicable, ethereal quality of humanity, emotions may be nothing more than an autonomic response to changes in our environment, software programmed into our biological hardware by evolution as a survival response."

Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux compares emotions to survival circuits ingrained in living things, from humans down to amoebas. A stimulus in the environment flips that circuit and makes us react in a certain way to encourage survival. "Neurons firing in a particular pattern might trigger the brain to order the release of adrenaline, which makes the heart beat faster, priming an animal to fight or flee from danger. That physical state, LeDoux says, is an emotion."

Obviously not all organisms share the same circuitry--our brains, and emotional reactions, are more complex than an amoeba's or even another mammal's. But there are other elements of how we express our emotions (and how we're coming to understand them) that bring us a step closer to seeing how robotic "emotions" could be real.

When you're young, your first job is to take care of other people and keep them fed. As you grow older, you feel like expanding your horizons. You roam, and start taking cleaning jobs wherever you can find them. Finally, when you're older and wiser to the ways of the world, you venture outside the safety of your society to find food and bring it back to a colony that relies on your survival instincts and resourcefulness in the outside world. Also, you're an ant.

Photo credit: Alessandro Crespi

Nature published about an interesting ant study on Thursday that highlights the findings of a Swiss research paper published in science. For 41 days, the researchers tracked every single ant in six different carpenter ant colonies raised in their lab. Cameras positioned above the flat colonies captured the ants' every movements. More importantly, each ant was tagged with a paper barcode, allowing a computer to follow individual ants through their lives. After 41 days of noting each ant's position twice every second, the researchers amassed more than 2.4 billion readings.

Now for the really interesting part:

"The researchers found that around 40% of the workers were nurses, which almost always stayed with the queen and her brood. Another 30% were foragers, which gathered most of the colony’s food and were found near the entrance to the nest. The rest were cleaners, and these were more likely to visit the colony’s rubbish heaps.

The workers move between jobs as they get older — nurses are generally younger than cleaners, which are younger than foragers. Honeybees go through similar transitions from young nurses to older foragers, but this study provides the clearest evidence yet that ants do the same."

The study helped them deduce that foragers and nurses rarely interacted, likely to isolate the queen from any diseases brought in from the outside. But the study also raised questions, like why the ants change jobs. And sometimes they don't--sometimes they'll stay nurses, or become foragers at young ages. It's also possible that the study's laboratory setting, where there was no danger to foragers leaving the colony, affected behavior.

Still, ant behavior? Really complex! See also: How ants affect to being pulled around by magnets.

Green Bank, West Virginia, a town of 147, sits inside the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000 square mile area of land near the Virginia border. Green Bank is surrounded by national and state forests and parks like so many other secluded rural towns in the United States. It is not, however, surrounded by the radio signals that crisscross the rest of the country. There are no cellphone towers, no AM or FM radio stations. Thanks to the National Radio Quiet Zone, the skies above Green Bank are effectively dead air.

The radio-free Quiet Zone fills one important purpose and a second coincidental one. It was established by the FCC in 1958 to protect the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank from interference; the observatory operates the largest steerable radio telescope in the world. Of growing importance, however, is the fact that the Quiet Zone protects its inhabitants from radio signals as well.

Most of us don't think twice about needing to protect ourselves from radio signals. We use Wi-Fi and cell phones every day. Everything plugged into a wall socket gives off some low level radiation. While some studies have raised concerns about cell phones eventually causing cancer, we never think twice about the electromagnetic fields emitted by our refrigerators, televisions, or microwaves. Some of Green Bank's residents, however, worry about all of those things. In fact, they moved to Green Bank specifically to get away from it all.

Slate just published an article titled Refugees of the Modern World, detailing the issues some people have with electromagnetic hypersensitivity, or EHS. As the name implies, EHS sufferers are unusually sensitive to radiation that isn't harmful to the rest of us, and several dozen have moved to Green Bank in recent years to live in relative isolation. Some still use electronics in their homes, but they're still protected from the radio signals that would fill the air in most other parts of the country.

EHS is fascinating because the symptoms are most definitely real, but scientists aren't convinced that electromagnetic radiation is the cause. Slate details the conviction of several Green Banks residents and how much the National Radio Quiet Zone has improved their health. But it also dives into studies that have returned inconclusive results about EHS:

"James Rubin, a psychologist at King’s College London who studies psychogenic illnesses, has analyzed the literature on provocation studies and conducted some at his own lab. His most recent meta-analysis—which covered 1,175 participants in 46 studies—found no rigorous, replicable experiment in which radio frequencies were identified at rates greater than chance. 'It is definitely the case that some people experience symptoms that they attribute to electromagnetic frequencies,' he told me. 'But is it really these frequencies causing the symptoms? At the moment, we can say that there simply isn't any robust evidence to support that.' "

Slate also covers the opposition--some claim that the settings those tests were conducted under (in labs where other devices emitting radiation would be present) undermines the test. But there's a counter to that, too:

Mysteries that have persisted for more than 100 years have finally been laid to rest, as chemists at the University of Detroit Mercy recently studied and identified dozens of liquid compounds collected at the Henry Ford Museum. Those liquids belonged to the slippery self-identified "doctors" and peddlers of the 1800s and early 1900s more commonly known as snake oil salesmen. Their snake oil, as the chemists discovered, sometimes contained healthy vitamins and minerals. But that wasn't always true.

Surprising Science reports that other bottles sitting on the shelves at the Henry Ford Museum contain toxins. It's no wonder snake oil salesmen garnered such a legendery reputation--poor, ignorant townsfolk buying magical potions to cure their sore backs sometimes ended up chugging lead, mercury and arsenic, three ingredients that are not good for curing back pain.

Photo credit: Smithsonian

The chemists point out that these ingredients weren't necessarily used maliciously. After all, it's against a salesman's best interests to kill his buyers. Often, these compounds resulted from ignorance and experimentation and operating on common sense rather than meticulous research. "Mercury was long used as the primary treatment for syphilis, as it kills the spirochete bacteria that cause the disease, though it can also harm the patient," writes Surprising Science.

To analyze the liquids that have been sloshing around in glass bottles for over a century, the chemists used nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, which determines the chemical properties of molecules. And snake oil, despite its name, didn't always indicate a liquid. The chemists also used X-rays to study snake oil powders and pills.

Their findings will help the Henry Ford Museum entertain and inform visitors exploring their collection of snake oils. Well, Hollister's Golden Nugget Tablets would help you cure your syphilis, but taken in large quantities they would also give you mercury poisining and potentially kill you. The more you know!

A breakthrough in biology research may hold the key to producing everything from thin, flexible electronic displays to harder-than-steel kevlar and medical bandages. The magic ingredient, which biologists hail as a wonder material thanks to its versatility, is called nanocellulose. And how do biologists plan to produce enough of the material to change the world? They'll grow it in algae.

Biology Professor R. Malcolm Brown, who has been working on nanocellulose research for decades, believes his recent success with algae is a major landmark for biological research, reports The Verge. reports The Verge. Brown presented his research at a recent American Chemical Society talk. His presentation summarized that cellulose "is the most abundant organic polymer on Earth, a material, like plastics, consisting of molecules linked together into long chains. Cellulose makes up tree trunks and branches, corn stalks and cotton fibers, and it is the main component of paper and cardboard. People eat cellulose in "dietary fiber," the indigestible material in fruits and vegetables."

Nanocellulose, or microfibrilliated cellulose, is a bit different. Brown's presentation explained nanocellulose "shares the unique properties of other nanometer-sized materials — properties much different from large quantities of the same material. Nanocellulose-based materials can be stronger than steel and stiffer than Kevlar. Great strength, light weight and other advantages has fostered interest in using it in everything from lightweight armor and ballistic glass to wound dressings and scaffolds for growing replacement organs for transplantation."

So where does the algae come in? In the past, Brown studied producing nanocellulose through the bacterium Acetobacter xylinum, which secretes nanocellulose into its culture medium. This helped them learn how to turn nanocellulose into a polymer, linking its molecules together into long chains, and how to crystallize it into a stable material. But acetobacter xylinum isn't ideal for large-scale production.

The wonder material can be produced from a self-sustaining algae that actually benefits the environment as it creates nanocellulose.

Blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, offers several advantages: they "make their own nutrients from sunlight and water, and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while doing so. Cyanobacteria also have the potential to release nanocellulose into their surroundings, much like A. xylinum, making it easier to harvest."

Brown's wonder material isn't just flexible enough to be used in a variety of applications; it can be produced from a self-sustaining algae that actually benefits the environment as it creates nanocellulose. His lab is still experimenting with producing nanocellulose in a form that is both polymer and crystalline in structure. He predicts that actually being able to produce nanocellulose on a large, industrial scale is 5-10 years out, but the real barrier to productio nisn't science. It's money--the more government and industry invests in biofuels and sustainable energy, the sooner nanocellulose can have a shot at changing the world.

Since we first read about the inkjet printer that spits out living tissue instead of ink for essays and birthday cards, we've been waiting for the day a 3D printer rises to the challenge of producing human flesh. There's precedent for 3D printing in the medical community: Just recently, a 3D printed implant was used to replace part of a man's skull. And now the inevitable's happened: Surprising Science posted a blog on Thursday about a 3D printer producing a material similiar to human tissue.

"Graduate student Gabriel Villar and his colleagues at the University of Oxford developed tiny solids that behave as biological tissue would. The delicate material physically resembles brain and fat tissue, and has the consistency of soft rubber," writes Surprising Science.

Villar's study explains that they used a specially designed 3D printer to print "tens of thousands of picoliter aqueous droplets," which isn't so unlike how a normal inkjet printer would operate. The difference, of course, is that the drops contain lipids, much like tissue. The drops are also absolutely tiny--a picoliter is one trillionth of a liter, and it's hard to appreciate how small these tissue arrangements are.

The structure of the printed tissue allows for electrical signals to travel across specific pathways like the neurons in brain tissue. The 3D printed material is hardly a replacement for real, living tissue at this point, but it's a step in that direction. The study notes "printed droplet networks might be interfaced with tissues, used as tissue engineering substrates, or developed as mimics of living tissue." 3D printed skin is coming. It's just a matter of time.

Have you ever stopped to think about that fresh, Earthy smell that permeates the air after heavy rainfall? It's rich and inviting, and we always notice it when we walk outside in the moments after the rain has stopped, but that smell doesn't just come from moisture. Someone--more specifically, a pair of someones, Australian scientists Isabel Joy Bear and R. G. Thomas--wondered why rain sometimes produces such a powerful smell, and set out to research the answer. That was decades ago, but Surprising Science's blog on their research is still illuminating today. The smell we so strongly associate with rain actually comes from oils secreted by plants; Thomas and Bear coined the term petrichor to give a name to this phenomenon.

Photo credit: Flickr user dpstudent via Creative Commons

The smell of rain comes from a number of chemicals plants produce during dry periods. Those oils are secreted and absorbed into soil, and when it rains, they're activated by the water and released into the air. After a long dry period, the smell is understandably stronger--there are more oils covering rocks and soil, and the buildup produces a more intense reaction. Surprising Science writes "The duo also observed that the oils inhibit seed germination, and speculated that plants produce them to limit competition for scarce water supplies during dry times."

These chemicals aren't alone in producing odors we experience after a rainstorm. Another, called "Geosmin," is described by Wikipedia as having "a distinct earthy flavor and aroma, and is responsible for the earthy taste of beets and a contributor to the strong scent (petrichor) that occurs in the air when rain falls after a dry spell of weather or when soil is disturbed."

Photo credit: Flickr user daniel-pertovt via Creative Commons

The scientists discovered that geosmin is produced by bacteria in soil and is especially common in heavily forested areas. The bacteria release spores which are released up into the air when it rains, which is when we smell the geosmin. And apparently the human nose is extremely sensitive to geosmin--we can detect it in quantities as small as 5 parts per trillion.

Check out the rest of Surprising Science's story, which includes the smell of ozone produced by lighting, and a more nebulous psychological question--why do we find the smell of rain universally pleasing? According to at least one anthropologist, the answer may be human evolution.

What could be more harmless, more innocent, than a potato? The common nickname spud makes potatoes sound so ordinary, so dull. They're small, and brown, and not especially tasty until they're coated with butter or fried. Harmless. Unless you eat them green. Then, suddenly, you're looking at possible nausea, diarrhea, headaches, vomiting, and death.

Such is the curse of solanine, an alkaloid chemical in potatoes designed to protect them from harm. It's a classic defense mechanism--potatoes produce solanine to ward off insects and fungi--so the more solanine inside a potato, the more likely it is to survive. Unfortunately, that chemical also makes the potato poisonous.

Photo credit: Flickr user hippie via Creative Commons.

Food researchers ran into solanine problems when they tried to breed a special potato, called the Lenape, back in the 1960s. BoingBoing's Maggie Koerth-Baker has the story. The great thing about the Lenape was its sugar and starch content. Fried into potato chips, it turned a perfect golden brown. The bad thing about the Lenape was that it made people sick. Here's the explanation:

Even today, after decades of research, artificial hearts are not well-suited to permanently replacing the human heart. They are most often used as a temporary measure to help patients survive while they wait for heart transplants. It turns out permanently replacing an element of biology as complex as the heart is enormously challenging; one of those challenges, providing a reliable power source, still eludes us.

For example, the modern AbioCor heart relies on wireless charging from an external wearable battery pack that holds a charge for a few hours. An internal, implanted battery can only hold about 30 minutes' worth of charge by itself. If only the heart had an unlimited power source like Tony Stark's arc reactor--or, perhaps, the energy provided by nuclear decay? If you're thinking the human chest doesn't sound like a very safe place to store nuclear material, well, you're right--but scientists still wanted to try it 50 years ago.

Image credit: Shelley McKellar

The Atlantic writes that, from 1967 to 1977, medical researchers in two government-funded programs attempted to develop a nuclear-powered artificial heart for use in humans. One model hoped to use radioactive decay, the other nuclear fission. Neither was successful--which is why we don't currently have human beings walking around with nuclear-powered hearts--but it's an interesting story because they were just so sure nuclear power was the right way to go.

The reason for seeking a nuclear solution is perfectly sane: there was simply no battery technology at the time that could last in a permanent artificial heart. And that's essentially true four decades later.

The Atlantic quotes this explanation from Shelley McKellar, who wrote a paper about the nuclear heart programs for journal Technology and Culture: "Each proposal declared the radioisotope-powered engine as the only possible energy solution for a completely implantable device...The ideal implantable device meant no external lines or connections from the patient to outside power sources and a ten-year reliability span. By comparison, conventional batteries required recharging multiple times each day from an external source and would need to be explanted from patients every two years."

Image credit: Paramount/Marvel

Amazingly, the programs didn't end because researchers decided that radioactive materials would be really bad for human beings.

Hydrophobic nano-coatings like Liquipel have the potential to be the Next Big Thing for electronics. We were impressed with Liquipel at CES 2013. Who wouldn't want a smartphone impervious to the threats of rain and an accidental drop in the ocean (or a toilet)? While Liquipel is focused on electronics, there are other companies selling waterproof nanocoatings for other purposes. Like--just for example--ketchup resistance.

Ars Technica took up the challenge of testing out a nanocoating called Ultra-Ever Dry by exposing it to a battery of tests. They applied the coating to a toilet bowl, sheet of glass, concrete driveway, clothing, and, of course, a slip-and-slide. Their experiments revealed some surprising results. In some cases, the Ultra-Ever Dry worked just as well as it appears to in this commercial, which parades waterproof object after waterproof object across the screen.

But Ars' tests also showed that the coating, which requires a two layer application process, isn't as transparent or safe as it first appears. "The Ultra-Ever Dry coatings in their liquid state are based on xylene (bottom coat) and acetone (top coat) and emit powerful amounts of fumes," writes Ars' Lee Hutchinson. The Ultra-Ever Dry coating itself is not transparent; it leaves a whitish haze on things when applied...Applying the coatings to anything inside a house or apartment is absolutely out of the question. Even outdoors, coming anywhere near the stuff requires nitrile gloves and a P100-rated respirator fitted with organic vapor filters."

Hutchinson does note that better equipment, like an air compressor, could apply the coating more evenly, producing less cloudy results. But it's still not a perfectly transparent solution. For some purposes, that's okay, and each of the video tests Ars shot are interesting. Make sure to check out the slip-and-slide video, which answers an important question: Which wins out, hydrophobia or the rough, textured surface of the Ultra-Every Dry coating?

Dinosaurs occupy an important role in education: In addition to being every kid's favorite creatures, they're often used to explain the concept of extinction. They're hardly the only extinct animals, of course--many, many species have been killed off since the days of the dinosaurs. And ever since Jurassic Park, dinosaurs have taken on another role that veers closer to science fiction. What if we could bring extinct animals back to life?

The fiction in that story is slowly fading, as Wired's story "The Plan to Bring the Iconic Passenger Pigeon Back From Extinction" proves. The story focuses on scientist Ben Novak and his research into "de-extinction," or the process of reviving an extinct species through cutting-edge DNA manipulation. It's Jurassic Park, except the focus of Novak's obsession is the North American passenger pigeon, which isn't quite as dangerous as a Tyrannosaurus Rex or raptor.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Which isn't to say the passenger pigeon was totally harmless. Wired writes that flocks of several hundred million passenger pigeons roamed the east coast of the United States in the mid-1800s, destroying forests by landing on trees by the thousands and devouring acres of acorns and nuts. Their mass migration patterns made them easy picking for predators--including humans, who would stand below trees of the birds and fire guns into the branches, guaranteed to shoot down scores of birds. By the end of the 19th century, thousands of birds remained where there were millions decades before. And then they were extinct.

Novak's research focuses on reassembling the DNA of those birds to eventually recreate them. "Every cell in its fleshy toe pads contains the 1.5 billion base pairs of DNA that spell out the bird’s identity, from the color of its eggs to the sound of its voice," writes Wired. "But this DNA has seen better days. It has been broken apart by enzymes and oxygen, zapped with ultraviolet radiation and contaminated by other organisms."

Next-generation DNA sequencing makes it possible to analyze those DNA fragments. Modern sequencing led to the passenger pigeon's closest living relative, the band-tailed pigeon, which may provide similar enough DNA to allow scientists to piece together the passenger pigeon's missing pairs. But that's just the beginning of the de-extinction process.

The space toilet. It looks familiar and foreign at the same time. The body of the toilet is still white, still shaped like an elongated bowl. But where a regular toilet would be austere porcelain, the space toilet is loaded down with tubes, levers, and foot straps that astronauts can use to stay in place. Also, unlike a regular toilet, the space toilet cost about $30 million to engineer.

Photo Credit: Flickr user richard_wasserman via Creative Commons

Smithsonian Mag posted a long look at the space toilet on Wednesday, detailing what it's like to go to the bathroom in space and picking out some of the differences between the original toilets used in the NASA shuttle missions and the current model installed on the International Space Station. Apparently the space toilet is an extremely popular subject; a former astronaut and a staff member at the National Air and Space Museum both said that how astronauts relieve themselves is one of the most common questions about space travel.

A $50,000 replica of the shuttle waste disposal system sits in the National Air and Space Museum's "Moving Beyond Earth" exhibit (that name surely isn't meant to be a double entendre, but it's hard not to consider it one, given the toilet's popularity at the exhibit). The International Space Station's newer toilets took a paltry $19 million to engineer and is actually more advanced than its shuttle-based predecessor. It can purify urine into drinkable water. In general, though, the ISS toilets rely on the same technology as the models NASA invented decades ago.

Photo Credit: Air & Space Museum

The toilets use air pressure to suck out liquid waste, which is jettisoned into space. Solid waste is a bit tricker to deal with. Enter the thigh braces and foot straps. Using the bathroom in space is serious business, but NASA still has a sense of humor about it, as you can see in this video describing the training process astronauts go through to prepare themselves for the space toilet.

3D printing is working its way into the medical field in projects like the Robohand, a prosthetic built for a kid who had no fingers on his right hand. Prosthetics and 3D printing makes a likely couple--as prosthetics need to be customized person-to-person, working from a 3D model and printing in small batches fits the situation. But the latest medical implementation of 3D printing goes beyond prosthetics into the more delicate realm of implants. The idea moves from believable to incredible as soon as you hear about the first use case of a new 3D printed material called OsteoFab: a patient in the United States had 75 percent of his skull replaced with a custom-printed implant.

Oxford Performance Materials received FDA approval for OsteoFab in mid February. Their process starts with a CT or MRI scan of whatever area needs an implant. Within two weeks, that scan can be configured as a CAD file, printed out as a PEKK polymer, and used in surgery. "One very desirable use of patient specific implants and the indication for the OPSCD is cranial implants to replace bony voids in the skull due to trauma or disease," notes OPM.

Photo via Oxford Performance Materials.

OPM's site says the PEKK material is "biocompatible, mechanically similar to bone, and radiolucent so as not to interfere with X-Ray equipment." Surface details printed in the additive manufacturing process are designed to encourage cellular or even bone growth around the implant.

The original article about the patient surgery, published in Australia, doesn't specify exactly what the 75 percent figure refers to: the density of the skull, or perhaps the surface area? It's an impressive number either way. The recent FDA approval also poses long-term questions about the OsteoFab material.

Will the 3D printed implants be good for life, or break down after a certain period of time? Does the new material make surgery more or less expensive than it was before? And when can we start printing replacement skulls on the weekly MakerBot Mystery Build?

Graduate students at the University of Illinois in Chicago's Electronic Visualization Laboratory has used comic book superpowers as inspiration for their research projects. Namely, the extrasensory abilities of Spider-Man and Daredevil. In comics, Spider-Man has an acute sixth sense--Spider-Sense--that alerts him of danger before it happens in the form of a tingling sensation. Daredevil, who is blind, uses sonar to map out his environment in order to navigate the world (like bats). Researcher Victor Mateevitsi and his team believe those abilities could be applicable in the real world for people with sensory dysfunctions, and built a suit to test that theory.

Their suit, the SpiderSense experiment, is actually a collection of sensor modules connected to one large controller box, all strapped to various points of the wearer's body. Each of the sensor modules contains a ultrasonic sensor for measuring distance (with a 200 inch range) and a servo motor connected to a pressure arm. The idea is that the module can be programmed to apply slight pressure to the body depending on how close it is to foreign objects, such as walls or other people. The "suit" is composed of up to thirteen of the sensor modules, strategically affixed on the chest, arms, and legs of the subject and programmed to work together to recognize objects in tandem. It's not exactly 360 degree coverage, but worked suitably for the experiments.

Four experiments were conducted to test the extrasensory effects (and effectiveness) of SpiderSense. The first three involved asking subjects to navigate a hallway, recognize pedestrians outdoors, and also traverse a cramped library. Researchers noted that navigation through tactile feedback worked well outdoors where the number of obstacles was low, but frustrated subjects indoors with overwhelming tactile feedback. But it was the fourth test that was really fun--simulating Daredevil's defenses against attackers:

"In this last experiment the subjects were asked to stand still in an open space, while the experimenters approached him from random directions. The subject was asked to throw a cardboard shuriken to the direction of the approaching experimenter. In all the trials the subject successfully recognized when somebody was approaching andfrom which direction, and was able to hit the experimenter with the shuriken. Furthermore, when somebody was inside the sensing distance and was walking around the subject, the subject could localize and describe the direction of the movement."

The SpiderSense system is still very rudimentary and purely electronic, but Mateevitsi believes that biologic sensory systems could be in our future with advancements in bioengineering and genetics. At that point, we'll be in real comic book territory--just make sure those laboratories are free of spiders and lizards.