Futurology 223: body upgrades
Monday, 06 February 2012
New jaw printed — The University of Hasselt (in Belgium has announced that Belgian and Dutch scientists have successfully replaced an 83-year-old woman's lower jaw with a 3D-printed model. According to the researchers, it's the first custom-made implant in the world to replace an entire lower jaw. The 3D printer prints titanium powder layer by layer, while a computer-controlled laser ensures the correct particles are fused together. Using 3D printing technology, less materials are needed and the production time is much shorter than traditional manufacturing. The artificial jaw is slightly heavier than a natural jaw, but the patient can easily get used to it.
In related news, human enhancement technologies are quickly evolving, making it easier to treat health conditions and to make us more powerful. Neural implants are already being used to restore vision, but in the future it could be used to give us better than 20/20 eyesight. Bionic arms will extend beyond prostheses ...
Comment — New hips that can already tango, next?
First sound recordings based on reading people’s minds — Neuroscientists have developed a way to listen to words you've heard, by translating brain activity directly into sound. Their findings represent a major step towards understanding how our brains make sense of speech, and are paving the way for brain implants that could one day translate your inner thoughts into audible sentences.
Comment — Which could be awesome for stroke victims.
Video of the moon's far side — A gravity-mapping spacecraft orbiting the moon has beamed home its first video of the lunar far side – the view Earth people never see because the moon only presents one face to the planet's surface (the near side).
Only robotic spacecraft and Apollo astronauts who orbited the moon in the 1960s and 1970s have seen the far side of the moon directly ... until now. Or check out NASA's video channel.
Comment — Shame it looks just like the near side!
Fuel-saving cooking bags — Wonderbag founder Sarah Collins from South Africa has already saved enough CO2 emissions to travel the globe 9,452 times with an unbelievably simple innovation that I can remember my Dutch mother-in-law talking about (so it's hardly a new idea – they used to pack hot pots into boxes of hay to continue cooking).
The insulated bag that cooks food even after it has been taken off the stove. Originally devised as a solution for very poor South Africans who scarcely have enough money for food much less the energy and water necessary to cook it, these bags cut fuel use by 30% and give the family's cook extra time to tend to their relatives. Fully recyclable, the cooking bags are so practical and effective that Unilever has already ordered five million of them, and Wonderbag has ambitions to sell enough in the next five years to save 8 million carbon tons annually. (Picture from Inhabitat.)
Comment — It also frees up an element for another use. But what's it insulated with? Aha! Polystyrene!
Russian scientists prepare to explore most alien lake on Earth — Buried over two miles beneath the East Antarctic Ice sheet is Lake Vostok, an isolated (no kidding!) body of subglacial water, removed from the rest of the world for over twenty million years. Russian researchers are just a few meters of ice away from entering an environment unlike any we've ever seen... at least, not here on Earth.
Vostok is thought to harbour conditions similar to those of Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus, and the discovery of life in the lake's inky depths would significantly strengthen the prospect of discovering life on either of these icy bodies. Does support for the existence of exobiological life thrive in Lake Vostok? After 20 years of drilling, we're about to find out.
Comment — And I'm guessing it's quite cold.
Arctic comes to Europe — The loss of Arctic sea ice may be influencing the development of the high-pressure weather systems over northern Russia, which bring very cold winds from the Arctic and Siberia to Western Europe and the British Isles, scientists believe. An intense anticyclone over north-west Russia is behind the bitterly cold easterly winds that have swept across Europe. Some climate scientists think the lack of Arctic sea ice brought about by global warming is responsible.
For while the sea ice has retreated, temperatures over what remains are lower than usual.
Comment — Maybe we should stop saying 'global warming' in favour of 'global aren't we clever we have messed up the weather systems' ...
Mona Lisa's underdrawings reveal twin painting — For years, art historians thought a second version of Leonardo Da Vinci's famous painting was a copy from years after the original. But now that the painting has been restored, it appears it may have been painted at the same time, and in the same room, as its famous sibling.
This junior Mona Lisa had a blacked-out background prior to its restoration. The Madrid Prado museum's conservators had long believed the painting was a much younger copy of the Mona Lisa, but after comparing infrared images of the Prado Mona Lisa with similar images of the painting at the Louvre, they realised the paintings' underdrawings were strikingly similar. This indicates that the Prado Mona Lisa was most likely composed at the same time as Da Vinci's, probably by a student carefully studying his master's great work in progress.
Comment — What a shame there's no name on the back.
