Last year, scientists achieved a historic first by providing a patient with the first-ever corneal implant made solely of human cells grown in the lab.

Corneal transplants are used to treat severe corneal scarring and inflammation, eye injuries and complications from eye surgeries. They replace the clear dome at the front of the eye, and usually, the tissues for the procedure are collected from organ donors after death. But in this case, one donor's corneal tissue was used to create hundreds of implants through sophisticated laboratory culture techniques and 3D bioprinting.

This technology, created by Precise Bio, an Israeli regenerative medicine company also based in North Carolina, produces a transparent, layered structure that resembles a healthy, natural cornea. The approach could help to reduce the scarcity of donor corneas worldwide, the company says. An early-stage trial, known as a Phase I trial, is currently underway to evaluate the technique's safety in human patients.

To learn more about the science behind the 3D-printed corneas and the next steps for development, Live Science spoke with Precise Bio co-founders Aryeh Batt and Dr. Anthony Atala.

Neelanjana Rai: How are most corneas for transplants sourced and prepared, currently?

Anthony Atala: They are typically recovered from deceased donors within a few hours of death and then banked. They go through screening and testing, and are then preserved until implanted — usually within a couple of weeks — before being transplanted to patients in need.

NR: Are there problems or limitations with this approach?

AA: Absolutely. In fact, availability is a major challenge. There is a very limited donor supply and a significant worldwide shortage of transplantable corneas, meaning a lot of patients lack access to corneas for implantation, which is a huge deficit.

Aryeh Batt: Today, for every cornea transplant performed worldwide, roughly 70 people remain without one because there are not enough donor corneas. There are between 12 million to 15 million people worldwide in need of a cornea transplant who do not have access to donor tissue.

AA: The ultimate goal is to completely eliminate the shortage of these corneas.

NR: How does Precise Bio's approach aim to solve those problems?

AB: At Precise Bio, what we do is fabricate tissues, starting with a donor cornea as our first product. We begin by isolating the cells and developing a proprietary process for proliferating and expanding them. From a single donor tissue, we are able to generate enough cells, a bank of cells, to fabricate over 400 new corneas, which can effectively solve the shortage of donor tissue related to corneal transplants.

​There are various other advantages to our tissue as well. For example, it is much easier to transplant than donor tissue. We engineered it with very unique mechanical properties, which shorten operating times and make the procedure much easier for the surgeon.

Another advantage is that, because we print the cells, we can precisely define the cell density of the tissue. While a standard donor tissue provides about 2,000 to 2,500 cells per square millimeter, our tissue has over 4,000 cells per square millimeter. This means the optical outcome of our tissue is expected to be superior to donor tissue.

[Editor's note: Laboratory and animal studies show promising results regarding the ease of the surgery to insert the implants, as well as the cell density within the printed tissue. However, human clinical trials are still ongoing, and therefore, claims that this printed tissue performs better than human donor tissue still need to be confirmed.]

Another important advantage of our tissue, in addition to the availability, is the fact that it is fully tested. We have a production line. And in the production line, the tissue goes to a full quality control test, which also includes viruses and fungus. So when you receive a cornea from our production line versus a donor cornea, ours is fully tested and quality controlled. There's no chance that you're going to have a virus or a fungus that later will affect the tissue in the patient's eye. So these are the advantages of our tissue versus a traditional donor tissue that exists as a treatment today.

[Editor’s note: Traditional donor corneas already undergo rigorous safety screening, including blood testing of the donor for infectious diseases, such as HIV and hepatitis, along with tissue-culture checks of the transplant for fungal and bacterial contamination. Precise Bio's manufacturing model allows for controlled batch testing throughout production and up to transplantation.]

NR: How does the technology work, and how does your printing system ensure that the cornea is uniform and smooth so light can pass through?

AB: The technology is not just the printer; the printer is simply the production tool with which we fabricate the tissue. The technology is a combination of many elements. When we look at natural body tissues, they are composed of cells and the ECM [extracellular matrix], which is the structural material. When we fabricate a tissue, we start from these two components, trying to stay as close as possible to natural tissue by using human cells and natural materials [such as collagen and ECM].

The fabrication process combines the ECM — in most cases, a human collagen-based material — into two layers. One layer is made of collagen, and upon that collagen layer, we print the cells. When I talk about printing cells, think of a standard color printer with red, green and blue cartridges; in our printer, we load human endothelial cells [flat cells that form linings in the body]. We flow these cells through the printhead inside a material called bio-ink, and every laser pulse deposits the cells. This enables us to arrange the cells in the exact anatomical structure they occupy in the body. Post-printing, we manually transfer the tissue from the printer into an incubator, though this final handling will be fully robotic and automated in the future.

NR: The implant can be rolled up, loaded into an injector, and then unrolled inside the eye. What makes the printed material flexible enough to do this without breaking?

AA: Basically, we're using the same material that is present in your very own cornea [collagen] to maintain flexibility, and the printer allows us to deposit the cells precisely where they are needed.

NR: The platform has "single-cell resolution."Why is that important?

AB: The fact that we can arrange cell by cell enables us to mimic the anatomical structure, the exact structure of the tissue of our body. Depositing cells one at a time at very high viability gives us a major advantage in replicating what the body naturally expects.

AA: The best way to explain it is that nature has already figured out the best design through evolution. What this technology does is effectively replicate what nature has already achieved.

NR: You say these implants could be frozen and shipped worldwide — has that been tested?

AB: While we are currently conducting our Phase I study in Israel, product development has included extensive testing on shipment. We shipped the product from the Middle East to the U.S. and back and transplanted the tissue into animals to verify that it functions after international transit. We had to evaluate shipment times, transport environments and how to maintain tissue properties on a plane.

To assist that, we also developed various technologies related to cryopreservation of the cells and prior preservation of the tissues, which enables us to, at the end of the day, have a supply-on-demand mechanism so we can manufacture anywhere and ship it anywhere in the world for the patient's benefit worldwide. Currently, our tissue is shipped very similar to the tissue that is shipped from a donor tissue, where we have a shelf life of around four or five days.

NR: You've recently conducted the world's first transplant of these new corneas as part of the trial. Could you describe the procedure and how well it worked?

AA: The first patient had been legally blind [in the treated eye] for 14 years.

AB: This specific patient had a non-functioning cornea and could not even count fingers [before the procedure]. This was due to pseudophakic bullous keratopathy, a condition where the cornea swells permanently and forms fluid blisters following cataract surgery.

She is close to nine months now since her transplantation, and she sees well. After several weeks, she was already able to read the menu in a restaurant and subtitles on the television. The most important outcome of this is that now, she can see normally — with her new cornea.

We continue to follow her progress and we will follow up again at the nine-month point and then at the year point. This is essentially the way we do with all of our patients. Now, we already have five patients [who have gotten the new transplants].

AA: [Based on the trial participants they've treated so far] patients recover similarly to those receiving a traditional corneal transplant; visual recovery occurs quickly at first, but continues to improve over time, with initial recovery taking place within days to weeks.

NR: Is there a risk of immune rejection with this kind of implant?

AA: With current techniques using corneas from deceased donors, the cornea is considered "immune privileged," meaning it has features that reduce immune response. Because it lacks blood vessels and lymphatic vessels, the risk of rejection is much lower than with other transplanted organs.

Of course, a small risk always exists with any medical procedure, but even with human bio-printed corneas, the risk is very low and most rejection episodes can be reversed if treated promptly.

AB: There is always some risk of rejection in the eye, but this is taken care of with very mild steroids. In the first weeks, the frequency of the drops is higher, then as the patient moves forward we reduce the need for these steroids.

NR: What are the next steps for developing this treatment?

AB: We are in the process of developing longer cryopreservation of the tissue, and we will be completing the Phase I trial in 2026, completing the transplants. And then we will move forward to a more advanced stage. We are planning to transplant an additional 10 patients until the end of the year [as part of the ongoing trial].

After Phase I, we will be submitting an Investigational New Drug [IND]application to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, where we are targeting to do the more advanced studies. [Approved IND applications grant permission to give a new, unapproved medicine or biological product to clinical trial participants.] The primary focus of this study will be in the U.S., while continuing clinical sites in Europe and Israel, and exploring regions with high demand like India.

In the future, the extended studies that are planned for 2027 will open up to other patients also with other health indications [such as diabetes or high blood pressure].

NR: What timeline do you foresee for getting these new bioprinted corneas fully approved?

AB: We anticipate commercial distribution of our corneas in the U.S. by 2030, followed by expansions into Europe and other regions.

AA: These current studies are still in their very early stages, which is why we are carefully assessing the technology and following patients long-term to ensure the approach can be successfully expanded. As soon as that groundwork is complete, the next phase will move forward in the U.S.

This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.

Scientists have cooked up a new kind of building material from an ingredient more often found in bread, beer and pizza dough: baker's yeast.

The squishy, yeast-based paste can be squeezed through a 3D printer, dried at room temperature and turned into lightweight architectural pieces, such as wall panels, room dividers and screens that soften harsh sunlight.

Unlike concrete, plaster, or many plastics used in interior decorating, which all use plastic and are difficult to recycle, the new material is designed to minimize waste as it uses renewable ingredients and could eventually draw on industrial leftovers from brewing, agriculture or other yeast-rich processes.

"The interest stemmed from a broader goal of combining circularity-oriented architectural design, sustainable biomaterials, and digital fabrication to develop a fully bio-based architectural material from abundant, renewable resources," Malgorzata Zboinska, a professor of architecture at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and an author of the study, told Live Science in an email.

The study was published on March 5 in the journal Frontiers of Architectural Research.

Building with yeast

To make the biomaterial, the researchers first heated up the yeast to deactivate it, so it would not be alive in the finished product. They then mixed it with wood-derived cellulose fibers, algae-derived gel, called alginate, plant-based sugars and water. The mixture resulted in a smooth hydrogel, a soft jelly-like material that can hold a specific shape and be molded with a 3D printer.

"We use pressure-based 3D printing at room temperature, which is important due to its sustainable aspects — it does not require energy-intensive heating or additional support structures," Zboinska said.

After printing, the pieces were left to dry in room temperature conditions. As the water left, the gel stiffened into a stable, lightweight solid. The strongest versions reached an average tensile strength of 2.7 megapascals (391.6 psi) — around the strength of a fruit roll-up (or fruit leather) — and stretched up to 25.2% before breaking. While the material isn't that strong, it is effective at holding its shape, which is key for making products like screens and wallpaper.

"Structurally, we found that yeast contributes differently depending on how it is processed," Zboinska said. "This allows us to tune the material’s properties through relatively simple formulation changes."

The researchers found that when the yeast cells remain intact, they act mostly like a filler, giving the material volume. But when the yeast is deactivated, they release internal components that help bind the mixture together.

By changing the recipe and printing pattern, the team could alter the material's color, texture, porosity and translucency. In the study, printed prototypes measured 7.87 by 19.69 inches or (20 by 50 centimeters), and let through between 5.6% and 31.6% of light, depending on their design.

A greener future for interior designers

The construction sector uses huge amounts of raw material and energy, and researchers are hunting for lower-impact alternatives. Zboinska and her team hope yeast-based materials could replace some fossil fuel-derived interior products, like synthetic tiles, drapes or plastic panels, rather than load-bearing materials like steel and concrete.

"Biomaterials are … commonly viewed as safer for the environment upon disposal," Timothy Long, center director and professor for the Biodesign Center for Sustainable Macromolecular Materials and Manufacturing at Arizona State University, who wasn't involved in this study, told Live Science via email. Long cautioned that even if biomaterials like this yeast-based product are designed to minimize waste, they only work if protocols are in place to help with proper disposal.

"So even though they are biobased materials, we need to focus as a community to collect, recycle, and reuse these materials," he said.

Yet, Long believes that even if there aren't proper recycling practices for these special materials, they can still have a positive impact on the environment.

"There is also evidence that if biomaterials remain in a biological environment then their decomposition products are more likely to be safer to humans and safer for the Earth" than non-biodegradable materials, he said.

Still, for the yeast-based material, big questions remain. The team has not tested how long the material lasts, how it handles moisture over time or how it behaves thermally or acoustically. They have also not explored whether the deactivated yeast could trigger reactions in people with yeast allergies.

Before the material could move into real buildings, the researchers would also need to improve printing precision, scale-up methods and further fine tune how the material bends and shrinks as it dries, Zboinska said.

But for now, the work suggests that the future of interior design could begin with a vat of humble yeast.

"The research points toward new ways of thinking about circular design and sustainable manufacturing in architecture, where fabrication processes, material behavior, and environmental considerations are closely integrated from the outset," Zboinska said.

Science fiction, be it in the form of a book, movie, game or comic, is often a rich vein to tap for predictions of what technology could be on the horizon, or a sign as to where existing tech could go next. But you may be surprised to know that a good swath of what may seem like sci-fi actually exists in one form or another today. 

Sure, we’ve yet to find ways to jump to hyperspace or have robots take care of our every whim, but there’s a lot of technology available right now that would have seemed like the fever dream of an impassioned fiction writer only a handful of years ago. 

So here are 32 science fiction technologies that exist today — many of which you can try out for yourself.

3D printing

Star Trek’s replicator gave sci-fi fans the idea of creating things quickly out of some mystery energy/genetic material, with Captain Jean-Luc Picard barking "Tea, Earl Grey, hot."

Once total fantasy, 3D printers have made it possible to make a lot out of base polymers or even 3D print food. Modern 3D printers can create all manner of products out of polymers, metal and resin in a matter of hours, from car and vacuum cleaner components to toys, guns, models and more. And food can even be 3D printed by making use of paste-like foodstuffs such as gels and doughs.

Electric cars

The idea of cars powered by anything other than gasoline — and steam in the late 19th century — used to feel like a fantasy, with 1910’s Tom Swift and His Electric Runabout; Or, The Speediest Car on the Road envisioning an electric car that could travel 300 to 400 miles (480 to 640 kilometers) on a single charge and hit speeds of 100 mph (160 km/h). But what was fantastical 100-plus years ago is now a stone-cold reality. 

Driven forward by the likes of Tesla, modern electric cars can go hundreds of miles on a single charge and hit top speeds well in excess of 100 mph, with instant torque delivered via battery-powered motors offering huge acceleration. The only real limits to EVs are a still fledgling charging infrastructure and concerns over the lifespan of lithium-ion batteries.

Video calls and conferences

The idea of long-distance visual communications has been a staple in sci-fi for years, arguably iconified in Star Trek’s barking command of “on screen” resulting in a ship's forward window becoming a video feed of an often disgruntled alien. Fast forward a handful of decades and video calling has become commonplace in all manner of jobs where the need to be in an office or set location is no longer paramount.

The likes of Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams surged in popularity during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, not only facilitating remote working amid lockdowns and stay-at-home directives, but also providing a social outlet for people isolated at home. 

Of course, before that the rise of smartphones and Apple’s FaceTime had already made video calling seem only moderately novel, with rapid adoption by other phone brands and technology companies democratizing video communication and conferencing for pretty much anyone with an internet connection and even a basic smartphone.

Creative AI and virtual assistants

JARVIS in Marvel’s Iron Man and Samantha from Her cemented the idea of AI-powered virtual assistants that can aid their users in everyday life; be it creating a new element or simply being around to discuss one’s love life in natural, spoken language.

With ChatGPT, Claude 3, Google Gemini and other multimodal generative AI systems, we now have smart tools that can intelligently create things rather than simply seek out existing information. This can manifest itself in asking ChatGPT to come up with a haiku based on alliteration or create images of a dog on a moon, via simple commands spoken or written in natural language. Such AIs can still be a bit hit and miss, but they open a whole new avenue to creating content even if you don’t have the requisite art or Photoshop skills, or providing a virtual friend for times when one feels lonely.

4D movies

The creepily named “Feelies” of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 Brave New World conjured up the idea of movies that are not just seen and heard, but also felt and smelt via physical feedback through the arms of a seat and via a "Scent-Organ" producing smells relating to what’s on-screen. 

Roll on 52 years and we got the first 4D movie with The Sensorium, which released scents into the theater and used bodysonic seats to provide some physical sensations. Such 4D movies and cinemas haven’t taken over from the more traditional 3D viewing experience, but improvements in sound, lighting and haptics have made them more convincing. And immersive cinema experiences from the likes of Secret Cinema can incorporate people into a movie setting in a blend of film and live action, adding an extra dimension again to the watching experience.

Driverless cars

The original Total Recall featured a taxi driven autonomously by sporting a robotic driver. What seemed fanciful in the 1990s is now a reality. No, there aren’t robot taxi drivers, but there are driverless cars. Some of these are at the trial stage, in that they are used in restricted areas for full autonomous driving. Others offer autonomous driving so long as there’s a person behind the wheel to deal with the unexpected maneuvers of fallible humans. 

Legalization and insurance hurdles are the main roadblock to a driverless car future. But with a lot of work being done in everything from autonomous driver aids to full driverless systems, the future of cars may kill the idea of an enthusiastic motorist. 

Jetpacks

An iconic moment in the James Bond film Thunderball was when Sean Connery’s Bond uses the Bell Rocket Belt to escape a villain's chateau and get to his Aston Martin DB5. Such compact jetpacks are also a dime a dozen in all manner of far-future sci-fi, but while these have yet to be created, there are some real-world jetpacks that use clusters of small-scale turbo jet engines that can be vectored to provide some form of flight. Their major limitation is fuel consumption, with flight times limited to mere minutes. 

For those with an affinity for the sea, there are jetpacks like the JetLev that use jets of high-pressure water sucked up from the sea to provide a form of flight. These aren't exactly the tools one would want at hand for escaping a building full of murderous mercenaries, but they show that jetpacks aren’t completely limited to sci-fi.

Cloning

From A Brave New World to Blade Runner and beyond, clones or replicated humans are a regular fixture in science fiction. Human cloning has yet to happen, but cloning animals is very much a reality, first established with Dolly the sheep in 1996. 

Technical obstacles — it took 270 trials to get Dolly — and ethical concerns mean directly cloning a human, called reproductive cloning, remains in the realms of fiction, and even researching techniques for doing so is illegal in many nations. However, therapeutic cloning, whereby stem cells with the same DNA as the donor are created to aid with regenerative medicine such as bone marrow transplants, is an active area of science and is being researched in nations like the U.K., Australia and China.

Humanoid robots

Robots have been around in manufacturing industries for decades, but humanoid robots that can provide a convincing human-like impression, such as those in 2004’s I, Robot, remained very much in the realms of sci-fi until recently, 

Now with Engineering Arts’ Ameca, the so-called “world’s most advanced robot” powered by generative AI, there exists a humanoid robot that can interact with people in a — mostly — near-natural manner, and pull convincing facial expressions thanks to its intricately articulated joints and a flexible, skin-like coating on a robotic skeleton. Having seen Ameca in action, the robot’s ability to create human expressions is almost uncanny. 

Robotic limbs

Many a cyberpunk novel, comic or game has explored the idea of robotic limbs as a form of human augmentation. The Deus Ex games stand out in particular, with robotic limbs being used for both curative surgery, as well as elective replacement of inferior flesh and bone body parts. 

Human augmentation hasn’t reached cyberpunk levels yet, but there are now robotic arms and hands that can carry out far more dexterous movements than prosthetics of the previous few decades. As medical science and robotics advance, we’re likely to see robotic limbs become just as capable as their biological counterparts — maybe even more so. 

Talking cars

Think about talking cars and your mind’s eye will surely think of KITT from Knight Rider. But talking cars are a reality… sort of. 

Thanks to the integration of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto into many modern cars, you can access virtual assistants like Siri and Google Assistant to respond to voice commands in natural language — modern car infotainment systems have some voice control but aren’t as sophisticated as the dedicated assistants in iPhones and Android phones. Meanwhile, chipmaker Qualcomm has its Snapdragon Digital Chassis platform, designed to bring generative AI into cars and let people have discussions with an AI about where to eat nearby and what problem a warning light on the dashboard is indicating. 

Holodecks via virtual reality

Star Trek: The Next Generation conjured up the idea of a Holodeck where the crew of the USS Enterprise could go into an expansive room that would realistically replicate all manner of settings, though commonly the crew would go back into 20th century settings or earlier. While true Holodecks have yet to arrive, University College London has the Immersive VR Lab, which lets people explore a virtual setting without the need to wear a virtual reality headset. 

But that’s more for experimental purposes. In the consumer world, a form of Holodeck exists via virtual reality headsets, ranging from simple ones that use mobile-grade chipsets to provide virtual experiences and games, such as the Meta Quest 3, to advanced headsets like the Valve Index and PlayStation VR 2 that can deliver high-fidelity virtual reality games, complete with room-scale VR, eye-tracking and advanced haptic feedback to simulate things like climbing a mountain or the tension of a taut bowstring. Such headsets can effectively turn a room into a form of Holodeck, albeit with a few limitations such as cables.

Virtual worlds

Building upon the concept of Holodecks is the idea of virtual worlds — think the simulated Earth in The Matrix. Thankfully we’ve yet to build AIs that enslave humanity as biological batteries and control them in a virtual take on the late 20th century, but we do have some fairly advanced virtual simulations. 

Games like Second Life provide virtual communities, with people exploring them via avatars and interacting with real humans. Second Like has grown to support some one million players at its peak and has seen people foster real friendships and even relationships that have resulted in real-world marriages. 

Elsewhere, sci-fi space massively multiplayer games like Eve: Online have bloomed into virtual economies with a real-life monetary value — this has seen virtual corporate wars, conspiracies and theft at a massive scale, resulting in the loss of thousands of dollars of virtual assets. And the now venerable World of Warcraft gives people a vast and evolving fantasy world to explore with interwoven quests and storylines.

Food in pills

Food in pill form is a classic staple of space-based sci-fi, but even Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory featured a gum that could impart the flavors and feeling of a roast dinner. 

That level of tech remains the stuff of fiction, but food supplements and the ability to create meals by simply adding hot water to a dried food mix are the real-world parallels. And appetite suppression pills are arguably one way to help people feel full without ever taking a bite out of anything solid.

Rebreathers

Another iconic moment in Thunderball was when Bond was thrown into a shark tank and managed to escape with the assistance of a pair of tiny oxygen tanks connected to a mouthpiece. And in the maligned Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Jedis Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi use similar devices to dive down into the underwater cities of the Gungan.

Such tiny tanks and rebreathers are still fiction, with their size unlikely to provide much more than a few breaths in a real-world application. However, compact oxygen tanks with a mounted mouthpiece are used as emergency backups when a SCUBA aqualung runs out of air or malfunctions. Furthermore, air scrubbing and recycling can act as a form of rebreather on the International Space Station, and in the Extravehicular Mobility Units (spacesuits) used by Space Shuttle astronauts when spacewalking. 

Exo-skeletons

Powered exo-skeletons have featured in sci-fi for years, with some popular examples being the P-5000 Powered Work Loader in Alien, which Ellen Ripley uses to battle a Xenomorph queen, and more recently the exo-skeleton battle suits in Edge of Tomorrow and Elysium. 

But they exist in the real world too. Notably, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Warrior Web program developed prototype exo-skeletons to enable soldiers to carry heavy loads. And Lockheed Martin’s Human Universal Load Carrier allows soldiers to carry loads of up to 200 pounds (91 kilograms) thanks to the use of titanium legs and onboard computers to mimic human movements.

Nuclear-powered vehicles

In 1914, H.G. Wells’ The World Set Free envisioned vehicles running on atomic power, and more recently the Fallout game and TV series ran with his idea, with an alternative history that saw the Atomic V-8 car powered by a nuclear fusion engine. 

Now, while nuclear fusion-powered cars are theoretically possible, safely shrinking a reactor to car engine size is a technical challenge that humans have yet to overcome. However, we do have nuclear-powered vehicles in the form of nuclear submarines and ships. For example, the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier that operated up until 2012 was powered by an unprecedented eight nuclear reactors. And the U.K.’s Royal Navy's Vanguard Class submarines make use of a Rolls-Royce PWR 2 reactor. Unlike their land-based equivalents, these marine reactors use a metal-zirconium alloy rather than ceramic uranium dioxide as fuel, with the goal of having a long core life, so that refueling is only needed after 10 years or more.

Living in space

OK, so the ideal of living in space under giant domes or in vast space stations such as Star Trek’s Deep Space Nine are far from reality. But humans have been living in space for decades, notably with the International Space Station. 

A joint effort between the space agencies of the U.S., Russia, Japan, Europe and Canada, the ISS can support astronauts and scientists living in the zero gravity of space while orbiting Earth. Solar panels harvest energy, while supply runs via space shuttles and unmanned rockets keep people in the ISS alive. Resistance training is needed to keep muscles from atrophying in zero-g and the space station is far from self-sufficient, but the ISS does provide a gateway to living in space.

Railguns

Featured a lot in so-called hard sci-fi, railguns can be found mounted on spaceships like The Expanse’s Rocinante, the Daedalus in Stargate, and a lot more. Also known as gauss guns or mass drivers — such as the mass accelerator guns in BioWare’s space opera games Mass Effect — railguns work around the idea of using electromagnetism to accelerate a slug along twin rails, bypassing the need for a combustible accelerant like gunpowder. In fiction, these weapons are generally line-of-sight, firing unguided tungsten rounds at targets within a range where the shot can’t be easily dodged. 

Actually first conceived in 1879 as an electric cannon, functional railguns didn't become a reality until 2010, when BAE Systems developed one capable of firing a 7 lb (3.2 kg) projectile at 3,390 m/s. This used the same concept as the sci-fi equivalents, and saw the U.S. Navy flirt with railgun development until 2021, when it shelved the project. 

Other nations like Japan are also looking into developing rainguns. However, the biggest drawback is the huge energy needed to accelerate a slug. As such, gunpowder-based shells with large caliber guns are still used for close-quarters ship combat. Equally, there are consumer railguns that use electromagnets to accelerate small metal discs. Again, the charge they deliver doesn’t make them effective combat weapons; instead they are more niche guns for casual target practice. 

Space tourism

Exploring the stars is likely the fantasy of many people who’ve looked up at a star-studded sky on a clear night. But with a lack of an efficient fusion engine or faster than light travel, the sci-fi idea of space tourism — adventures to spa facilities on Titan or the joys of Starfield’s Neon city — are still stuck in fiction.

But a form of space tourism does exist, in the guise of Virgin Galactic, whereby a specially-designed ship can take a handful of people to the sub-orbit of Earth — near enough space with low gravity and all. Just be aware you need a spare $450,000 and likely a direct line to Sir Richard Branson.

Stealth tech

Star Trek’s Klingons and their Bird of Prey ships are iconic for their ability to cloak and avoid detection by the likes of the USS Enterprise. The idea here is that the ship can bend light around it to become invisible. In more realistic sci-fi, stealth is less about being invisible than about hiding a ship’s heat signature and radar profile, as seen in Mass Effect’s Normandy stealth frigate and the angular Anubis class stealth frigates in The Expanse. 

Currently, humanity has no spacefaring stealth ship, but stealth ships and craft are very much real. The U.S. navy’s experimental Sea Shadow (IX-529) used an angular design to give it a low-radar profile in order to avoid detection, while the French frigate Forbin has a faceted appearance to reduce its radar cross-section. 

Stealth aircraft work in a similar way, with passive low observable features to minimize their radar profile, while they also use surfaces that can absorb radar energy, preventing it from being bounced back to a receiver.

Smartwatches

Dick Tracey and the likes of Thunderbirds introduced the idea of being able to speak into a watch, even one with video displayed, while the Seiko G757 Sports 100 watch in James Bond film Octopussy, could display messages from MI6 on a small digital display. 

These days this all seems very basic, thanks to smartwatches, led by the Apple Watch. Not only can calls be handed via these watches, the latest smartwatches can track your health metrics, intelligently assess your physical performance, act as an organizer of daily life, control smart home gadgets and more. In the nine years since the original Apple Watch was launched, smartwatches have evolved from phone accessories into wearable computers that arguably eclipse even much of what sci-fi envisioned.

Smartphones

The idea of handheld, do-everything computing devices is a staple in sci-fi, with the likes of Star Trek’s Tricorders purportedly being the inspiration for flip phones. But the hand terminals of The Expanse series are smartphones that have the ability to spool through cross-solar system news feeds and alert people to take specific medication. 

Modern smartphones are arguably rather sci-fi devices in themselves, as they’re basically computers in slim, pocketable, rectangular form. Even budget phones are now capable of putting nearly any information you can imagine at your fingertips, as well as being a portable camera, video editing suite, games console, streaming device, media player, smart tech controller, productivity tool, home for an AI and a lot more. And now some of them fold.

Real-time translation

Universal translators, up to and including the Babel Fish in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, have long been a way for sci-fi to handwave away the problems of communication between “advanced” extraterrestrial lifeforms. However, thanks to Google Translate and now AI-powered translation apps and tools, we are approaching a reality where universal real-time translation is a district possibility. 

Right now, translation tools in phones like the Samsung Galaxy S24 can provide two-way audio translation of speech in select languages. We still need to discover extraterrestrial life before we can have the universal translators of sci-fi, but we have the rudiments of the technology. 

Targeted advertising

Minority Report envisioned targeted advertising dynamically adjusting ads to suit your interests back in 2002. Around a decade later, it became a reality. As you read this very article you’ll have likely encountered so-called cookies that can scrape what you’ve searched for on your computer or phone’s browser and serve up adverts that are (or should be) relevant to your browsing. 

This has evolved with apps like Google Maps serving up places you might be interested in visiting based on your trips and wandering, while algorithms in streaming services like Netflix and Spotify work to flag content they think is relevant to your tastes.

Sometimes today’s targeted advertising can be uncanny, with the feeling that a conversation you’ve had with friends about a holiday suddenly results in adverts about vacation services popping up on Instagram. However, there's no evidence of such apps being quite that advanced — and users can, thankfully, opt out of targeted advertising. 

Drones

1974’s Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy featured what was basically a drone, in the form of a tiny flying device packed with sensors that could be flown remotely. Now, some 40 years later, consumer drones are very popular, used to take photos and videos that would have previously needed a helicopter, or simply piloted around for fun. Furthermore, drone racing is a legitimate sport and drones can be had in all sizes. 

On the more sinister side, drones are used for military purposes, not only to deliver explosive payloads in a form of a bootstrapped pilotable bomb, but also as dedicated unmanned aerial vehicles armed with cutting-edge guns and missiles that well-equipped militaries can send into a battle zone without the need to risk manned aircraft. With drones being considered for delivery of goods and not just offensive payloads, expect drone use only to expand as this decade marches forward.

Mass surveillance

George Orwell’s 1984 envisioned a dystopian world where people could be watched by the governing powers in their own homes. While this has yet to happen in daily life, U.K. TV show Big Brother borrows from Orwell’s overseeing antagonist and puts willing contestants into a house where they are isolated from the outside world and are constantly monitored by the all-seeing-eye “Big Brother,” who also directs them to do various, often humiliating tasks.

This is entertainment, but mass surveillance also happens in a very real way in daily life. We now live in cities with interconnected surveillance cameras feeding into hub systems. Currently used predominantly as a crime prevention and law enforcement tool, as well as a way to monitor footfall, this level of surveillance can easily track suspicious people from street to street, acting as an eye-in-the-sky guide for police and security. Beijing and London are two of the most-surveilled cities in the world, with the latter having some 67 CCTV cameras per 1,000 people. 

Flying cars

The Jetsons seeded the idea that flying cars are the future, but while electrification of power trains was explored in the past few decades, the idea of flying cars had seemed pie-in-the-sky. 

Yet in recent years more concepts for short-range, electric vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) taxis and cars have popped up, with many looking set to become a reality this decade. We currently have the technology for somewhat efficient flying cars, but safety, legal and insurance hurdles currently stand in the way, though nations like the U.S. and China are working on establishing guidelines for safe, legal flying cars in the next decade. 

Wireless earbuds and communication

From Star Trek’s ComBadge to James Bond gadgets, the idea of wireless communication via a form of wearable device, mostly earbuds, permeates a lot of sci-fi. But the advent of Apple’s AirPods wireless earbuds galvanized not only cable-free audio but also wireless, hands-free communication. 

The latest iterations of wireless earbuds and headphones contain all manner of smart technology, from active noise cancellation to touch-sensitive controls and movement detection. And now we have bone conduction audio that allows one to receive audio via devices like smart glasses without the need for in- or over-ear headphones. 

World Wide Web

While the concept of the internet existed before William Gibson’s 1984 Neuromancer, the novel is credited with popularizing the term “cyberspace” and envisioned a global network of connected computers transferring information in a graphical interface. If this sounds familiar it’s because that’s the premise of the World Wide Web we have today, though back in the 80s when personal computers were a novel idea, the concept of such linked technology and information highways was science fiction. 

That really started to change in the 1990s, when the Web opened to the public. It has since blossomed to become the place where one can access pretty much the sum total of human knowledge, masses of entertainment, content both pure and sordid, and a whole lot more. Tim Berners-Lee’s invention may have seemed like sci-fi but has changed the way information is consumed, and economies and even societies are influenced at an unprecedented scale and pace; often for the better, but at times for ill.

Synthetic and plant-based meat

Both Bethesda’s Starfield space-exploration epic and the hard sci-fi of James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse series feature synthetic meat, with the idea being that getting fresh, real beef or pork out in deep space would be a logistical nightmare. 

But the idea of using either cultured meat proteins or alternative proteins to replicate meat is very much a reality today. Impossible Foods made waves in recent years by creating a beef burger out of soy protein that mimics the look, feel and flavor of real beef, with many people swearing they can’t tell the difference. 

And vegan food company Beyond Meat makes readily available, plant-based products that aim to replicate the flavor of their real meat counterparts, though discerning palates can still taste the difference between the real and fake. 

While we may hit a limit to how closely vegan foods can replicate real meat, lab-grown meat is being explored as an alternative to the traditional rearing and slaughtering of animals. This process grows meat from real animal cells, thus producing real meat — just without killing a pig or cow. Companies like Eat Just already sell cultured meat, but the problem is producing it at scale at an affordable price; expect things to develop over the next decade.

Household robots

Robot butlers and house-based bots are a staple of science fiction; a recent example being the Codsworth robot in the Fallout TV show and games. While we’ve yet to get humanoid robots to serve us martinis at leisure, many of us do have robots in our homes right now. 

Mostly, these come in the form of robot vacuum cleaners and grass mowers, many of which have advanced tracking and automation regimes so that you can simply leave them to their tasks. But there are also robot pets, most notably Sony’s AIBO robot dog, which can respond to voice commands and sense when it’s being petted. And Amazon’s Astro aims to be an automated home monitoring robot, complete with Alexa built-in to respond to natural language commands.

An ancient Egyptian mummified head displayed in a school library in Australia now has a fresh face, thanks to a meticulous scientific reconstruction.  

The ancient object is something of a mystery — it's unclear how it arrived at Grafton High School in northern New South Wales, about 300 miles (480 kilometers) north of Sydney, and a century-old note with it only said it was from a "genuine" Egyptian mummy. But it will now be displayed beside 3D-printed sculptures based on medical scans and forensic techniques, to show the reconstruction process and what the person would have looked like when they were alive.

"It takes the emphasis off the human remains," Jennifer Mann, the forensic sculptor who created the reconstruction, told Live Science. "And that's very important, because museums are more and more reluctant to display the remains of ancient people."

Mann works for the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine (VFIM) in Melbourne and has sculpted faces for several historical figures, including the reconstruction in 2016 of Meritamun, an ancient Egyptian woman whose mummified head was in the University of Melbourne's anatomy and pathology museum. (Some queens of Egypt had the same name.)

Related: 40 amazing facial reconstructions, from Stone Age shamans to King Tut

For this latest reconstruction, researchers scanned the ancient skull with computed tomography (CT) to create a digital model of the skull, which was then 3D printed in polymer resin so Mann could create a realistic reconstruction.

The scans and analysis by universities in Australia and Italy showed that the head had come from a woman who was between 50 and 60 years old when she died. Flecks of gold attached to the mummified head indicated that she had lived during the Greco-Roman period in Egypt (332 B.C. to A.D. 395), when gold leaf was used in the mummification process. The final sculpture is a lifelike portrayal of an older Egyptian woman with her hair in a Greek style that was popular at the time.

Mystery mummy

According to a report by the Australian Broadcast Corporation (ABC), the mummified head was donated to the school in 1915, after being gifted either by a local doctor — who may have purchased it while he was a medical student in Scotland — or by a local man who was a world-famous Egyptologist.

The school had previously used the head as an educational tool, but it was reportedly rebuffed when it tried to repatriate the object to Egypt or to donate it to a museum in Sydney.

News of the mysterious mummy gained traction, however, when it was reported last year on the ABC's "Stuff the British Stole" podcast, which arranged for the CT scans and the facial reconstruction.

Once Mann received the 3D-printed skull, she added eyes and markers to represent the tissue depth, which were based on ultrasonic measurements of Egyptians living today.

She then created musculature around the markers and used formulas to estimate the soft-tissue features, which can be determined from the measurements of the skull. The nose, for instance, was reconstructed from the angles of bone around the nasal aperture in the skull and from careful measurements of the aperture itself, Mann said.

The mouth on this skull is badly damaged, so Mann determined its structure in consultation with a forensic odontologist, or tooth specialist, at the VFIM.

The next stage was to create the skin around the eyes and over the musculature. Mann then finished the reconstruction with a hairstyle and earrings from Egypt's Greco-Roman period, based on the Fayum mummy portraits. 

The final sculpture is finished with a bronze-colored resin, which Mann said is better than guessing a skin tone, as people with Egyptian, Greek, Roman and other ancestries lived in Egypt at the time.

"I now prefer to finish these as a bronze sculpture, so that people are appreciating the facial features," she said. "This is a deliberate choice, because there is no scientific evidence [from recovered DNA in this case] for things like skin tone and eye color."

One of Mann's next projects will be to reconstruct faces of skulls found at Herculaneum, a town near Mount Vesuvius that, like Pompeii, was destroyed in the A.D. 79 eruption.

"I'm very excited about it," she said. "It's fascinating, because the skulls are really well preserved."

Extremely realistic-looking prosthetic eyes can now be 3D-printed in a fraction of the time it would normally take to produce the eyes by hand, scientists demonstrate in a new study.

This 3D-printing technology could be used to help create realistic prosthetic eyes for the 8 million people worldwide who need at least one, either due to a birth defect that causes an eye to be small or missing or because they've lost an eye.

The new technology can create a prosthetic eye in just 90 minutes, compared with the eight hours it would normally take a skilled technician, or ocularist, to produce one by hand. The 3D-printed eyes require five times less labor to make than traditional methods, the scientists behind the technology wrote in a new paper published Tuesday (Feb. 27) in the journal Nature Communications. 

The 3D-printed eyes also look more natural than traditional prostheses; this could help improve a patient's self-confidence in using the devices. 

"Patients are very conscious about wearing a prosthesis, and they don't want others to notice," Johann Reinhard, lead study author and a researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research in Germany, told Live Science. "With these more realistic eyes, it might help them to participate more in society," he said.  

Related: Scientists develop 'crying' model of human eye tissue

So far, this approach has been used to create prosthetic eyes for more than 200 adult patients at the Moorfields Eye Hospital (MEH) in London, including 10 people who were described in detail in the new study, Reinhard said. 

Normally, to craft a prosthetic eye, an ocularist makes a mold of the patient's eye socket by temporarily filling the cavity with a soft molding material. That material is then removed and used as a template to make a wax impression that can fit in the person's eye socket. The wax is smoothed, tested and reshaped until it fits comfortably and is then used to make a plastic version. The final, plastic eye is hand-painted to match the patient's healthy eye. 

Such artificial eyes usually have to be replaced every five to 10 years, in part due to wear and tear to the plastic that they're made of. However, because this is a manual process, there's always a chance that subsequent eyes produced for the same person could differ in their appearance and shape. 

Instead, the new printing approach involves taking a specialized image of a patient's empty eye socket and of their healthy eye. These images are then processed and used to draft blueprints that can be sent to be 3D-printed in the lab. This printing process usually takes around 90 minutes, but it can be sped up if multiple eyes are printed at once — for instance, it would take just 10 hours to print 100 prosthetic eyes, Reinhard said.  

These 3D-printed eyes closely replicate the color, size and structure of the patient's healthy eye and are particularly good at capturing the colored part of the eye, known as the iris, and the white part of the eye, called the sclera. Once finished, the eyes take 15 to 30 minutes to be installed by an ocularist, Reinhard said. 

About 80% of adults in need of prosthetic eyes could theoretically have one made this way, the team said. However, this wouldn't be possible for all patients, such as those who have a very complex eye socket, as the software wouldn't be able to find a matching shape for the prosthetic eye, Reinhard said. 

More data are needed to see if this technique could also be used to make prosthetic eyes for children, which would require more regulation, Reinhard said. 

For now, though, the team intends to test the approach in more clinics. Sometime this year, they hope to publish the results of a clinical trial that explored the long-term performance of these 3D-printed eyes in 40 patients at MEH, compared with the performance of manually made prostheses. 

Ever wonder why some people build muscle more easily than others or why freckles come out in the sun? Send us your questions about how the human body works to community@livescience.com with the subject line "Health Desk Q," and you may see your question answered on the website!

Scientists are working to build blood vessels from human cells using tiny ice sculptures — these frigid 3D forms twist and branch like real arteries and can be used as temporary scaffolds that later get melted away, to be replaced by living cells.

The researchers demonstrated the first step of this blood-vessel-building process in a recent study by creating the scaffolds using a 3D "ice printing" technique. The scaffolds were then coated in a gel that was embedded with human cells, which the team grew for about two weeks.

The ice printing technique could one day be used to make realistic, lab-grown blood vessels from human cells that capture the "complex geometries" of real vascular networks in the body, study researcher Feimo Yang, a doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, told Live Science.

"Currently, this is more of a proof of concept," Yang said, but with development, this technique might be useful for fabricating blood vessels that could be transplanted into a person when they need an artery or vein repaired, replaced or bypassed.

Related: 3D-printed human brain tissue works like the real thing

Doctors currently harvest blood vessels for transplant from elsewhere in a patient's body or from a donor. For some procedures, clinicians may use artificial blood vessels made from synthetic polymers; natural materials, such as proteins; or a mix of the two. However, these artificial blood vessels don't perfectly replicate real ones and can fail, in part because they're non-living.

That's where ice printing could provide an advantage; it could help scientists create more realistic structures from real human cells.

Ice printing at tiny scales could also be helpful for crafting so-called organ-on-a-chip devices, Yang added. Such devices use fluids that flow through many tiny channels to sustain the growth of cells, and they act as miniature models of organs in the human body.

The team's new work — which Yang will present at the 68th Biophysical Society Annual Meeting being held from Feb. 10 to 14 in Philadelphia — was built on the back of a printing technique called 3D-ICE, first described in a 2022 paper in the journal Advanced Science.

The printer uses water as its "ink" and works by dripping drops of water onto a cold copper surface, which is kept at minus 31 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 35 degrees Celsius). When a water drop strikes the surface, it quickly freezes, and each successive drop adds to the growing ice sculpture.

The printer spits out about 200 drops of water per second, Yang said. This rate is slow enough to enable one water drop to start to freeze before the next one hits but fast enough that the drops still freeze together in a smooth structure, rather than creating defined layers. If the drops fell too fast, one liquid water drop would merge into the next and spread out before freezing, Yang explained.

The drops themselves are about 50 micrometers in diameter, so the resulting structures can be made with micron-level details. And the printing technique is fast. The sculptures the team made stood about 0.1 inch (3 millimeters) tall and 0.008 inch (0.2 mm) in diameter, and "it takes maybe 20 seconds" to print, Yang said.

Related: 'Organ-on-chip' shows how uterus coaxes embryo to implant in early pregnancy

There are other ice printing techniques that build small sculptures layer by layer or volume by volume, but these are not great at creating smooth surfaces. 3D-ICE, by contrast, can create smooth, free-flowing shapes closer to what one sees in the human circulatory system.

After creating a tiny sculpture with their ice printer, Yang and colleagues coated the structure in a gelatin-based material. Because their printer specifically uses "heavy water" — in which the hydrogen atoms are replaced by deuterium — the ice stays frozen at above-freezing temperatures. That meant the researchers could work at temperatures where their gel stayed malleable while the ice remained frozen.

Using ultraviolet light, they melted the ice away and hardened the gel, leaving smooth channels that closely resemble blood vessels. The team then added cells that line blood vessels, called endothelial cells, to the gel and showed that they could grow the cells for two weeks. In the future, they'll experiment with growing the cells for longer.

While it will be some time before 3D-ICE could be used to craft blood vessels destined for a human patient's body, "hopefully, we'll be able to expand the use of this technology," Yang said.

Ever wonder why some people build muscle more easily than others or why freckles come out in the sun? Send us your questions about how the human body works to community@livescience.com with the subject line "Health Desk Q," and you may see your question answered on the website!

For the first time, scientists have generated functional human brain tissue using a 3D printer.

Scientists printed the tissue to be less than 0.01 inch (0.02 centimeter) thick, and it contains both nerve cells and supporting cells called glia. All of these cells can communicate with one another and form networks, as they would in a real human brain. 

The tissue was created using a biological "printer" that churned out stem-cell-laden gel in horizontal layers. The stem cells were then coaxed to become brain cells with chemicals that stimulate this development. The tissue layers were carefully stacked, one by one, on a lab dish to form a complete tissue model. 

The researchers behind the printed tissue described their accomplishment in a paper published Feb. 1 in the journal Cell Stem Cell. They hope it will complement other models of the human brain — such models, crafted from actual human cells, more accurately represent the intricate and unique features of the human brain than traditional animal models do. These include so-called brain-on-a-chip technologies, which mimic brain tissue on credit-card-sized devices, and cerebral organoids, which are miniature, simplified models of brains that self-assemble in dishes. 

Related: How scientists 3D-printed a tiny heart from human cells

However, unlike organoids, the printing technique gives scientists more control over which cells end up where in the final tissue. Nerves within the printed tissue also form connections with each other within two to five weeks — a process that can take many months in organoids, Dr. Su-Chun Zhang, co-senior study author and a professor of neuroscience and neurology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Live Science in an email. 

Thanks to this speed, different versions of the 3D-printed brain tissue can also be made much more easily than organoids, Zhang said. This technology could therefore be particularly useful for testing new drug candidates for diseases that affect brain function, such as neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders, he added. That's because the different printed models could be made to display characteristics of each disorder.

Scientists have previously tried to print human brain tissue. However, the neurons and glia within the final product couldn't form proper working connections with one another, the authors wrote in the paper. The new printing approach allowed networks to form because it used a gel that was soft enough to facilitate this process, allowing the cells enough give to reach out and connect. Plus, the gel had the added strength needed to still hold the layers of brain tissue together. 

And unlike traditional 3D-printing approaches, which stack layers of material vertically, the authors stacked their gel horizontally. This allowed the layers to be thinner, and thus the cells within them were exposed to as much oxygen and nutrients as possible. 

The printed stem cells developed into full-fledged neurons and glia, which formed networks resembling those found in the human brain, and they even communicated with each other via chemical messengers called neurotransmitters. The printed cells that normally belong to different parts of the brain — such as its outer layer, or cortex, and the striatum, which is involved in decision-making — also formed connections with one another. 

The new model still has flaws, the authors acknowledged. For instance, the softness of the gel means it can't print multiple layers in one go, because they'd collapse if the gel weren't allowed to set in between. This slows the printing process. Individual layers are also limited in thickness because of the nutrient demands of cells within them, which consequently restricts the overall size of the tissue. 

"A model is a model, not the real brain," Zhang said. However, the team is working to address these potential pitfalls and refine the technology going forward, he said. 

Ever wonder why some people build muscle more easily than others or why freckles come out in the sun? Send us your questions about how the human body works to community@livescience.com with the subject line "Health Desk Q," and you may see your question answered on the website!

China is investigating how to build ultra-large spacecraft that are up to 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) long. But how feasible is the idea, and what would be the use of such a massive spacecraft?

The project is part of a wider call for research proposals from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, a funding agency managed by the country's Ministry of Science and Technology. A research outline posted on the foundation's website described such enormous spaceships as "major strategic aerospace equipment for the future use of space resources, exploration of the mysteries of the universe, and long-term living in orbit."

The foundation wants scientists to  conduct research into new, lightweight design methods that could limit the amount of construction material that has to be lofted into orbit, and new techniques for safely assembling such massive structures in space. If funded, the feasibility study would run for five years and have a budget of 15 million yuan ($2.3 million). 

Related: Interstellar space travel: 7 futuristic spacecraft to explore the cosmos

The project might sound like science fiction, but former NASA chief technologist Mason Peck said the idea isn't entirely off the wall, and the challenge is more a question of engineering than fundamental science.

"I think it's entirely feasible," Peck, now a professor of aerospace engineering at Cornell University, told Live Science. "I would describe the problems here not as insurmountable impediments, but rather problems of scale."

By far the biggest challenge would be the price tag, noted Peck, due to the huge cost of launching objects and materials into space. The International Space Station (ISS), which is only 361 feet (110 meters) wide at its widest point according to NASA, cost roughly $100 billion to build, Peck said, so constructing something 10 times larger would strain even the most generous national space budget.

Much depends on what kind of structure the Chinese plan to build, though. The ISS is packed with equipment and is designed to accommodate humans, which significantly increases its mass. "If we're talking about something that is simply long and not also heavy then it's a different story," Peck said.

Building techniques could also reduce the cost of getting a behemoth spaceship into space. The conventional approach would be to build components on Earth and then assemble them like Legos in orbit, said Peck, but 3D-printing technology could potentially turn compact raw materials into structural components of much larger dimensions in space.

An even more attractive option would be to source raw materials from the moon, which has low gravity compared with Earth, meaning that launching materials from its surface into space would be much easier, according to Peck. Still, that first requires launch infrastructure on the moon and is therefore not an option in the short term.

Big spaceship, big problems

A structure of such massive proportions will also face unique problems. Whenever a spacecraft is subjected to forces, whether from maneuvering in orbit or docking with another vehicle, the motion imparts energy to the spaceship's structure that causes it to vibrate and bend, Peck explained. With such a large structure, these vibrations will take a long time to subside so it's likely the spacecraft will require shock absorbers or active control to counteract those vibrations, he said.

Designers will also have to make careful trade-offs when deciding what altitude the spacecraft should orbit at, Peck said. At lower altitudes, drag from the outer atmosphere slows vehicles down, requiring them to constantly boost themselves back into a stable orbit. This is already an issue for the ISS, Peck noted, but for a much larger structure, which has more drag acting on it and would require more fuel to boost back into place, it would be a major concern.

On the flip side, launching to higher altitudes is much more expensive, and radiation levels increase quickly the further from Earth's atmosphere an object gets, which will be a problem if the spacecraft houses humans.

But while building such a structure might be technically possible, it's not feasible in any practical sense, said Michael Lembeck, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who has worked on both government and commercial space programs.

"It's kind of like us talking about building the Starship Enterprise," he told Live Science. "It's fantastical, not feasible, and fun to think about, but not very realistic for our level of technology," given the cost, he said.

Given the research project's tiny budget, it is likely only meant to be a small, academic study to map out the very earliest contours of such a project and identify technological gaps, Lembeck said. For comparison, the budget to build a capsule to take astronauts to the ISS was $3 billion. "So the level of effort here is extremely small compared to the outcomes that are desired," he added.

There are also questions about what such a big spacecraft would be used for. Lembeck said possibilities include space manufacturing facilities that take advantage of microgravity and abundant solar power to build high-value products like semiconductors and optical equipment, or long-term habitats for off-world living. But both would entail enormous maintenance costs.

"The space station is a $3 billion a year enterprise," Lembeck added. "Multiply that for larger facilities and it quickly becomes a rather large, expensive enterprise to pull off."

China has also expressed interest in building enormous solar power arrays in orbit and beaming the power back to Earth via microwave beams, but Peck said the economics of such a project just don't stack up. Peck has done some back-of-the-envelope calculations and estimates it would cost around $1,000 per watt, compared with just $2 per watt for energy generated from solar panels on Earth.

Perhaps the most promising application for such a large space structure would be scientific, Peck said. A space telescope of that scale could potentially see features on the surface of planets in other solar systems. "That could be transformative for our understanding of extrasolar planets and potentially life in the universe," he added.

Original article on Live Science.

It has four chambers, blood vessels and it beats — sort of.

In a first, scientists have 3D printed a heart using human tissue. Though the heart is much smaller than a human's (it's only the size of a rabbit's), and there's still a long way to go until it functions like a normal heart, the proof-of-concept experiment could eventually lead to personalized organs or tissues that could be used in the human body, according to a study published Monday (April 15) in the journal Advanced Science.

To print the heart, researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel began by taking a small sample of fatty tissue from a patient. In the lab, they separated this tissue into its component cells and the structure on which the cells sit, called the extracellular matrix. [7 Cool Uses of 3D Printing in Medicine]

Using genetic engineering, the scientists then tweaked the various components, reprogramming some of the cells to become cardiac muscle cells, or cardiomyocytes, and some to become cells that generate blood vessels.

The researchers then loaded these cells — serving as "bioinks" — into the printer, which had been programmed to print a heart, based on CT scans taken from the patient and an artist's depiction of a heart. The printer took between 3 and 4 hours to print the small heart with basic blood vessels. The researchers then incubated the heart and fed it oxygen and nutrients. Within a couple of days, the cells began to spontaneously beat.

But this beating wasn't quite like what a healthy human heart would do. "We need the cells to beat synchronically not just individually," said study co-author Assaf Shapira, the lab manager in the Laboratory for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine at Tel Aviv University. In order for the heart to pump blood efficiently through the body, its cells need to beat in unison — something that the 3D-printed heart hasn't done yet. "Right now we're working to mature the tissue," Shapira said.

Eventually, a personalized 3D-printed heart might ease the shortage of transplant organs available to patients, and could also circumvent some of the risks associated with transplanting another person's organ — namely, that the body's immune system can reject these foreign tissues, Shapira told Live Science.

Camila Hochman Mendez, the assistant director of organ, repair and regeneration research labs at the Texas Heart Institute who was not a part of the study, said that the new findings are "really innovative and move the field forward" by demonstrating that something more complex than a single wall of the heart can be printed. But the results also "show all the hurdles that the field is still facing," she added.

In order to print a full-size, fully functioning heart, the scientists would need to print a higher-resolution organ — one with much more vasculature that could carry oxygen and nutrients through it, Hochman Mendez told Live Science. But doing this would require months of printing — a timespan during which the cells would not survive.

The researchers underscored that the tiny heart is still a "proof-of-concept," but that they hope to figure out a way to create more dense vasculature in the future.

"Of course, if we would need to fabricate a larger heart, it would be expensive, it would take much more time to print and much more material would need to be extracted from the patient," Shapira said.

Indeed, there's still much more research needed before it becomes commonplace to simply hit "print" on the 3D printer at the doctor's office.

• The 10 Weirdest Things Created By 3D Printing
• 7 Foods Your Heart Will Hate
• 15 Odd Things That Can Be 3D Printed

Originally published on Live Science.

How do you start a colony on the moon? Can you ship everything the colonists need from Earth? That's how NASA handled brief excursions to the lunar surface in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but astronauts couldn't haul that much with them — certainly not enough to sustain themselves over the long term.

Technology has improved since then, but most plans for a sustainable lunar base assume that its residents will use local resources, rather than hauling everything from Earth.

So that's why the European Space Agency (ESA) created a whole bunch of fake moon dust (fake "regolith" in technical terms) and used it to 3D print small screws, gears and even a fake coin.

These printed materials weren't carbon-based plastic or metal, according to a statement from the ESA, but rather a sort of lunar ceramic.

"Ground and sieved down to particle size, the regolith grains are mixed with a light-reacting binding agent, laid down layer-by-layer, then hardened by exposing them to light," according to the statement. "The resulting printed part is then sintered in an oven to bake it solid."

In other words, all these little gadgets had production histories closer to the dinner plate in your cupboard than the screws holding that cupboard together.

This is still an experimental project, so there's a lot more testing to be done — including whether these parts are strong enough to stand up to the stresses of real-world use.

But if this project does work out, the possibilities are exciting. Imagine a door on a future lunar base that's stopped working because the hinge won't close properly. In a world where every replacement part has to be shipped from Earth, the astronauts had better hope they can find the hinge in the spare-parts box — or else that it doesn't really matter whether the door closes in the few months before another hinge can arrive.

But in a regolith-printing world, the solution might be a lot more straightforward. Just ask mission control to send the design along and print it right up.

• Interstellar Space Travel: 7 Futuristic Spacecraft to Explore the Cosmos
• 7 Everyday Things That Happen Strangely in Space
• Photos: The 8 Coldest Places on Earth

Originally published on Live Science.

If you damage your cornea, the odds of eventually getting a brand-new one may have just gone up.

Researchers at the University of Newcastle in England report that they managed to replicate human corneas using a 3D printer and a "bio-ink" made of stem cells from a donor cornea, alginate (a substance found in algae) and the protein collagen. They printed the cells in concentric circles in the shape of a cornea, then sat back to wait while the cornea grew. [7 Cool Uses of 3D Printing in Medicine]

"Our unique gel, a combination of alginate and collagen, keeps the stem cells alive whilst producing a material which is stiff enough to hold its shape but soft enough to be squeezed out the nozzle of a 3D printer," Che Connon, a professor of tissue engineering who worked on the project, said in a statement.

The cornea is one of the outer layers of the eye that's involved in both focusing light and protecting the inner eye. When a person's cornea is damaged, it can lead to blurry vision or cause a glare, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

The cornea can be easily transplanted from deceased donors, without the compatibility issues that impact other organ transplants. (With corneal transplants, there's no need to find a "match" between the donor and the recipient.) But because organ donors with healthy corneas aren't very common, and because of high demand, there's a donor corneal shortage. A 2016 paper found, for example, that there's only one donor cornea available for every 70 needed worldwide. The new technique, which could produce multiple corneas per donor, might help reduce that deficit if put into practice.

According to the paper, which was published online today (May 30) in the journal Experimental Eye Research, and will appear in the August 2018 issue, the 3D-printed corneas are not yet ready to implant in people. The researchers still must ensure that human bodies won't reject them, that they'll fit properly and that they'll work properly to focus light. That could take several years at least before the first attempt at a surgery, Connon said.

Originally published on Live Science.

Introduction

3D printing isn't new to 2017, but this year, researchers pushed the boundaries of the seemingly sci-fi technique, printing objects that required intricate details — such as a lifelike model of a newborn and a microscopic camera — as well as objects made with materials that may sound surprising, including cheese and glass.

Read on for a roundup of the coolest and kookiest things that were 3D-printed in 2017.

A puppy mask

A 4-month-old Staffordshire bull terrier puppy became the first patient to use a new 3D-printed mask to help with recovery from serious facial injuries. The puppy's right cheekbone and jawbone, as well as her temporomandibular joint (the joint that connects the jawbone to the skull), were fractured when another dog attacked her.

The puppy, named Loca, was lucky it arrived at the University of California Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, where vets at the university had been cooperating with colleagues from the UC Davis College of Engineering on developing the "Exo-K9 Exoskeleton" mask for dogs. Loca was the ideal patient to test the technology on.

First, engineers scanned Loca's skull to design a custom-fit mask, which was then printed with a 3D printer. The mask held Loca's fractured face bones in place in the same way a cast holds fractured arm or leg bones. Within a month, the puppy could eat hard kibble, and a 3-month checkup showed that the temporomandibular joint was healing as expected.

Mouse ovaries

A female mouse fitted with 3D-printed ovaries gave birth to healthy pups in an experiment conducted at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

The result was hailed as a breakthrough, as it may one day lead to new ways to treat infertility in humans, though much more research is needed. It could be particularly useful to women whose ovaries have been damaged because of cancer treatment, the researchers said.

Using the 3D-printing technology, the researchers created an elaborate porous scaffold made of gelatin. (Gelatin is a type of collagen, a natural protein found in the human body in large quantities.) The structure was then populated with ovarian cells from another mouse. The researchers tested various shapes of pores before landing on the particular shape that provided the right amount of support to the ovarian cells.

The experiment was a success: The implanted cells started behaving as cells in natural healthy ovaries would, eventually producing hormones that drive the mouse's reproduction cycle. and enabling it to get pregnant.

A residential house

The first 3D-printed residential house was constructed in less then 24 hours in the suburbs of Moscow in March. The walls of the studio-like 400-square-foot (37 square meters) home were printed using a mobile construction 3D-printer developed by Moscow-headquartered startup Apis Cor.

Instead of printing individual concrete panels that would be later manually assembled, the 3D printer printed the walls and partitions as one fully connected structure, allowing for the house's unusual round shape.

The roof, doors and windows were the only components that had to be installed subsequently by human workers. The prototype house cost about $10,134, or $25 per square foot ($275 per square meter). The most expensive components, according to the developers, were the windows and the doors.

The company believes that 3D printing could make construction not only considerably faster but also more eco-friendly.

House of glass

Glass, a material used by humankind since ancient Egypt, has long resisted 3D-printing. This is because, to be processed, the material needs to be heated to extremely high temperatures of up to 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius). Though complex industrial 3D-printers exist that can heat materials to very high temperatures using lasers, when used on glass, the resulting product was rather course and unusable.

Researchers from Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen solved the problem with a new technique that enables creating complex glass structures with a conventional 3D printer — without the need of the laser heating.

As a starting material, the engineers used so-called liquid glass — a mixture of nanoparticles of silica, the material glass is made from ― dispersed in an acrylic solution. An object is 3D-printed and then exposed to UV light, which hardens the material into a kind of plastic like acrylic glass. Then, the object is heated to about 2,372 degrees F (1,300 degrees C), burning away the plastic and fusing the silica nanoparticles together into a smooth, transparent glass structure.

Cheese

Unlike glass, cheese can be melted easily. So it's not a surprise that researchers saw the dairy product as an ideal candidate for 3D-printing experiments with food.

A team of researchers from the School of Food and Nutritional Sciences at University College Cork in Ireland used a mixture that's similar to the one used for making processed cheese and squirted it through a nozzle of a 3D printer to create a "new" kind of processed cheese.

The mixture was heated to 167 degrees Fahrenheit (75 degrees Celsius) for 12 minutes, and then run through the 3D printer at two different extrusion rates. (The extrusion rate is the speed at which the printer pushes the melted cheese out through the syringe.)

Processed cheese contains a mixture of ingredients, including emulsifiers, saturated vegetable oils, extra salt, food coloring, whey and sugar. It might not be exactly the healthiest type of cheese, so it's not clear whether the new treat would receive a nutritionist's seal of approval.

Still, from the researchers' perspective, the 3D-printed cheese was a success. It was 45 percent to 49 percent softer than untreated processed cheese, a little darker in color, a bit springier and more fluid when melted. The study didn't provide any conclusions on taste.

Lifelike baby manikins

Babies that feel like real have been 3D-printed by Dutch researchers, who hope to improve training methods for doctors working with newborns.

The baby manikins that are currently used for doctors' training are too mechanical and don’t provide the real feel of treating a fragile infant, lead researcher Mark Thielen, a medical design engineer at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, told Live Science in March.

3D-printing enabled Thielen and his team to create anatomically accurate manikins that include realistic internal organs. To achieve the highest level of accuracy, the researchers used MRI scans of newborns' organs that were subsequently printed out with a high level of detail. For example, a 3D-printed heart would include detailed, working valves. The manikins even have blood-like fluid circulating in their veins.

The aim is to provide a high level of realistic tactile feedback when performing clinical interventions on manikins, Thielen said. In other words, when the surgeons move a part of the manikin or apply pressure to a certain area, it feels and moves like the real thing.

Eyes

3D-printed eyes have been created by Dutch researchers that can help children born without properly developed eyes look relatively normal. Unfortunately, the 3D-printed eye prostheses won't give the children the ability to see.

About 30 in every 100,000 children are born with conditions called microphthalmia and anophthalmia, which means that their eyes are either completely missing or underdeveloped. As a result, their eye sockets lack the structural support they need for the children's faces to develop in a normal way.

If an adult loses an eye, they will be given permanent eye prosthesis. This is not possible in children, however, who grow very fast, especially in the first months and years of their lives.

3D-printing of temporary supportive structures, called conformers, can be done quickly, cheaply and in a range of very precise sizes, the researchers said.

This is extremely important as, without the eye, the bone around the socket lacks proper stimulation and the face doesn't develop natural-looking proportions.

The conformers have already been tested on a small group of five children as of May.

A rock-climbing robot

A robot with soft rubbery 3D-printed legs demonstrated its superb abilities to conquer rough terrain, a task that usually paralyzes traditional robots.

Engineers from University of California, San Diego, digitally designed the robot's legs and modeled its performance and behavior in various situations ― for example, on a soft, sandy surface, in narrow spaces or when climbing over rocks.

They eventually chose a design that consisted of three connected spiral-like tubes that are hollow inside and made from a combination of soft and rigid materials.

As they are taking a step, the legs test out the surrounding terrain and then adjust instantaneously, through pistons that inflate in a certain order and determine the robot's gait.

The novelty of the design, according to the engineers, is the fact that the robot's legs can bend in all possible directions.

"Laughter"

The first-ever piece of art was created in space in February this year using a 3D printer aboard the International Space Station.

The piece of art represents human laughter, and was created in a collaboration between Israeli artist Eyal Gever and the California-based company Made In Space as part of the project called #Laugh.

Space enthusiasts were invited to participate in the creation of the piece of space art via an app that captures users' laughter and turns it into a digital 3D-model resembling a star.

More then 100,000 people contributed their laughter to the project, which started in December 2016. The app users then chose the best laugh star, which was based on the laughter of Naughtia Jane Stanko of Las Vegas. The design was subsequently beamed to the ISS and 3D-printed on a machine that is usually used for making spare parts.

Micro-camera

A micro-camera that could be used on miniature drones and robots or surgical endoscopes was created by German researchers with the help of 3D printing.

The camera provides eagle-eye vision — the ability to see faraway objects clearly while at the same time being aware of what's going on in peripheral vision.

To create the device, engineers from the Institute of Technical Optics at the University of Stuttgart in Germany printed clusters of four lenses onto an image-sensing chip using a technique called femtosecond laser writing.

The miniature lenses range from wide to narrow and from low- to high-resolution. This structure enables images to be combined into a bull’s-eye shape with a sharp image at the center, similar to how eagles see.

The four lenses can be scaled down to as small as 300 micrometers by 300 micrometers (0.012 inches, or 0.03 centimeters, on each side), about the size of a grain of sand. But the researchers say they might be able to make the device even smaller in the future when smaller chips become available.

At first glance, the wrinkled face of a dark haired-woman wearing round, gold earrings looks incredibly real. But it's not — it's a reconstruction crafted from modeling clay, based on the skull of a Wari queen who lived about 1,200 years ago in what is now Peru.

Peruvian and Polish archaeologists unearthed the queen in a pyramid mausoleum known as El Castillo de Huarmey (Huarmey's castle), located north of Lima, in 2012. The tomb held the remains of 58 noblewomen, including the queen, who was buried in private chamber, according to National Geographic. All of the women were part of the Wari culture, a people who lived in the region from A.D. 700 to 1000, long before the Inca rose to power.

The queen's tomb held jewelry and other lavish artifacts, including a copper ceremonial ax and a silver goblet. It also held her skull, which archaeologists gave to Oscar Nilsson, a forensic artist based in Sweden, so he could reconstruct her features for the world to see. [Photos: The Amazing Mummies of Peru and Egypt]

The skull was far too valuable to work on, so Nilsson used a computed tomography (CT) scanner to make a virtual, 3D image of the skull. He then sent the digital data to a 3D printer, which made a replica of the skull in vinyl plastic.

That's when the challenging work began. To forensically re-create a face, it's important to know the person's sex, age, weight and ethnicity — factors that influence the thickness of facial tissue, Nilsson said.

Nilsson knew the Huarmey Queen was at least 60 years old. Armed with that knowledge and more, he got to work putting 30 plastic pegs of a certain length all over the queen's replica skull. "After this, it was time to start up the fun; begin sculpting the face!" Nilsson wrote in an email to Live Science. "This was made from the 'inside out,' muscle by muscle."

He used plasticine clay to sculpt the muscles, relying on methods that help forensic artists reliably rebuild a person's eyes, nose and mouth. "The ears are more speculative," he said.

Next, he covered the muscles with a layer of skin. "Details, wrinkles and pores are sculpted to get it [to be] realistic," he said. "When I'm finished sculpting the face, I make a mold, in which I then cast the face in silicone. In this way, I can get it very realistic. It looks almost like a real person, even to me."

Nilsson used prosthetic eyes in the reconstruction, as well as real human hair that he inserted, strand by strand, into the silicon scalp. "We actually used Peruvian human hair, bought in Peru by the Polish archeological team," he noted.

He even gave the royal woman metal earrings with a golden and worn patina. "They are an exact replica of her actual earrings, found in her tomb," he said.

In all, Nilsson spent 220 hours on the queen's reconstruction, which he finished in late November. He described the restoration as "an elder woman's face with a lot dignity about it. She looks wise [and] experienced, as well as a bit tired and maybe sad, or thoughtful," he said. "She is thinking of something, maybe a memory way back, as older people do sometimes."

The technique Nilsson used to re-create the ancient queen's likeness is also used by law-enforcement agencies when a victim cannot be identified. About 70 percent of these cases are solved once a reconstruction is made, he said. "It is not a portrait of the deceased, but you get a good image of what the face looked like."

The Wari queen's reconstruction is now on display in a new Peruvian exhibit at the National Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw, Poland.

Original article on Live Science.

A new 3D-printed mask helped a puppy in California heal after its face was severely wounded in an attack by another dog.

The puppy, a 4-month-old female Staffordshire bull terrier named Loca, arrived at the University of California Davis School of Veterinary Medicine with a fractured cheekbone and jawbone — the result of a severe dog bite. In addition, she had a damaged temporomandibular joint (or TMJ, which connects the jawbone to the skull), and puncture wounds on her face and neck, according to a statement from the University.

Loca's doctors saw her case as an opportunity to use a new approach for treating facial fractures — a 3D-printed "exoskeleton" mask for dogs. Work on such a mask, known as the Exo-K9 Exoskeleton, was already underway at the university, as part of a collaboration between the veterinary hospital and the U.C. Davis College of Engineering.

The mask works much like a traditional cast for the arms or legs, meaning it holds the affected bones in place while they heal. [7 Surprising Health Benefits of Dog Ownership]

The engineers used a CT scan of Loca's skull to design a custom-fit mask, which was then printed with a 3D printer. Loca was the first patient to try the Exo-K9 mask, the university said.

After 1 month of wearing the mask, a CT scan showed that new bone was forming. Loca was then allowed to eat hard kibble to help her new TMJ become a functional joint — otherwise, it might fuse with her skull, the statement said. Another CT scan performed 3 months later showed that her TMJ healing was "progressing nicely," and that she is continuing to recover from her injuries.

Original article on Live Science.

If you've ever dreamed of suspending a spider in thin air or floating an ant in midair (and who hasn't?), new research has your back.

In a new open-access paper published in the journal Review of Scientific Instruments, researchers from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom lay out the instructions for making an at-home acoustic levitator. The gadget requires a microprocessor called an Arduino (available online) and access to a 3D printer, along with a few other pieces of hardware. The result is a device that uses the pressure of ultrasound waves to "float" tiny objects like water droplets, Styrofoam dots or even insects.

Acoustic levitation is nothing new, but until now, the levitators required precision-made parts and operated at high voltages. Asier Marzo, a mechanical engineer at the University of Bristol, and his colleagues developed a levitator that works with commercially available parts at low voltages. With just 10 watts of power, the levitator can trap objects up to about 0.15 inches (4 millimeters) in diameter, Marzo and his colleagues wrote in their paper. [Watch Sound Waves Cause Water Droplets to Levitate (Video)]

The researchers also posted user-friendly instructions online. They previously developed a sound-wave "tractor beam" that can pull objects toward it.

Acoustic levitation is about more than befuddling your neighborhood ants: Researchers can use levitation to study physical properties in microgravity, Marzo and his colleagues wrote. Because no container is used to hold the object, samples can be examined without the complications of interactions with a test tube or other repository, the researchers said.

"Levitating samples in midair can improve diagnosis from blood samples and detection of the structure of molecules," Marzo said in a statement. "Usually, a sample on a microscope slide is illuminated with X-rays, lasers or another type of radiation so the reflected radiation can be analyzed. However, no matter how transparent the microscope slide is, it will always interfere with the test. On the contrary, if the sample is levitated, all the reflections are going to be from the sample."

So how does this levitating device work?

The levitators position an array of speakers so that the sound waves interact to form a "standing wave," or one that vibrates up and down without traveling. Certain points on standing waves, called nodes, barely move. These nodes trap tiny particles or objects in the homemade levitators — so the particles are floating at those nodes.

The device consists of two disks of 36 sound transducers each, controlled by the Arduino and amplifier. Other than the 3D-printed plastic frame that holds the transducers, the rest of the parts can be bought off the shelf.  

"Now, not only scientists but also students can build their own levitator at home or school to experiment and try new applications of acoustic levitation," Marzo said.

Original article on Live Science. 

A 3D printer that could re-create itself from lunar material is in development at a university in Canada. 

The technology could one day enable humans to 3D-print lunar bases, as well as conduct in-space manufacturing of satellites and solar shields on the moon that could help fight global warming, according to Alex Ellery, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Carleton University in Ottawa, who is leading the project.

"I believe that self-replicating machines will be transformative for space exploration because it effectively bypasses launch costs," Ellery told Space.com. [How Moon Bases and Lunar Colonies Work (Infographic)]

The engineer envisions a single 3D printer could be delivered to the moon, where it would make thousands of its copies from surrounding lunar material. Once there would be enough 3D printers, the self-replicating factory would focus on building all other equipment and infrastructure needed for human exploration.

Ellery said he and his colleagues are close to being able to 3D-print a fully functioning electric motor from material similar to what can be sourced on the moon. Although some commercially available 3D printers can reprint some of their own parts, none of those printers can produce motors and electronics, according to Ellery.

"Our starting point is the RepRap 3D printer, which can print many of its own plastic parts," Ellery told Space.com, referring to the open-source device originally developed by the University of Bath in the United Kingdom. "In order to fully self-replicate itself, it needs to print its metal bars, its electric motors, its electronics and software, and self-assemble."

Ellery and his team, who described the project in an article published in the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets last year, are using a mixture of a plastic material and iron filings to 3D-print two parts of the motor, the stator and the rotor. 

"We need to maximize magnetic threading through the rotor, which requires more iron, but minimize eddy currents in the stator, which requires less iron," Ellery said. "So we have been varying the amount of iron in the plastic matrix."

Ellery said that elements needed for creating a similar mixture could be extracted from the lunar regolith. The lunar 3D-printer, fitted with a robotic arm, would scoop up the regolith and heat it to about 1,650 degrees Fahrenheit (900 degrees Celsius) using a so-called frensel lens to focus sunlight into a beam. The process would first remove volatile gases from the lunar soil. Subsequently, a component called ilmenite would be separated and used for extraction of iron, according to Ellery. 

"Although we are using [polylactic acid] plastic [to 3D-print components], I envisage replacing this with silicone plastic — this can be manufactured from lunar volatile carbon compounds and lunar water," Ellery explained. 

As a next step toward 3D-printing the motor, the researchers are aiming to replace the motor's wire coils with aluminum coils printed onto a polylactic acid plastic substrate (the latter is a common material used for 3D printing). On the moon, the aluminum would be replaced with fernico (iron-nickel-cobalt alloy) and the plastic would be replaced with a ceramic substrate made from melted lunar soil.

The magnetic field produced by the aluminum coils printed on the plastic substrate is "actually quite weak, so we are trying figure out ways to add more layers to increase the amount of current that goes through them," Ellery said. "But eventually, what we will do is that we will integrate that into the motor so that will give us a complete core, which is 3D-printed."

Ellery believes that he will have a fully functioning 3D-printed motor in a few months. The other prerequisite for a fully self-replicating machine — the electronics — is a problem that will probably take much longer to solve, he said. 

This small motor was made using some 3D-printed parts. Researchers at Carleton University are working to make the entire motor 3D-printable. Credit: Alex Ellery via GIPHY

"We have looked at vacuum tubes because trying to create solid-state electronics would be virtually impossible on the moon," Ellery said. "If you use vacuum tubes, the only materials you need are nickel, tungsten, glass, essentially, and Kovar, all of which you can make on the moon."

Ellery says that the self-replicating machine would use a neural network — a computing system modeled after the human brain — because it would be smaller and easier to 3D-print than a typical computing system. The Carleton team has built a trial neural network and used it to control a small rover.  

"Once motors and electronic controllers can be 3D-printed, we can print any kind of robot, including a 3D printer, as well as milling machines, drills, lathes, excavating machines and so on," Ellery said. "If you have a robotic self-replicating machine, you can grow an enormous manufacturing infrastructure on the moon robotically."

Such a machine could build habitats for astronauts before they arrive at a deep- space location. It could also be used to cheaply enable space-based solar power, in which satellites equipped with solar panels turn sunlight into energy, and send that energy down to Earth. Humans could also build space shields to protect the Earth against solar radiation, which could further combat the planet's warming trend Ellery said.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

As a headless robot crawls over a pile of pebbles, its jointless, rubbery legs carefully but confidently sample the terrain in steady, yet unrushed movements that resemble a turtle's. The robot's ability to reliably walk across different types of surfaces is unique, and so is the fact that its elaborately shaped legs were created with a 3D printer, according to the engineers who developed the bio-inspired creature.

"With soft robots, you can do a lot of things that are difficult for a hard robot," said Mike Tolley, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of California, San Diego, who led the research. "[F]iguring out exactly how to place parts of your body or get around in a very unpredictable environment becomes a lot easier when your body is soft."

The combination of soft and stiff materials enables living creatures to adjust to the irregularities in terrain that frequently stop current rigid robots in their tracks. [The 6 Strangest Robots Ever Created]

But the new robot, which will be presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Singapore next week, is a big step forward in robotic agility, according to Tolley.

In a video made by the researchers, the robot can be seen nimbly creeping into a narrowing corridor, just like a real animal would. Its four legs, positioned in an "X" shape, can alternate between walking, climbing and crawling — or even a type of motion that resembles swimming. The robot can move forward and backward, and can rotate and move sideways without needing any sensors to "see" the environment, the scientists said. Its speed, however, is rather modest — about 0.8 inches (20 millimeters) per second.

The researchers said this nimble bot could have a variety of future applications.

"We see it could be useful in search and rescue, being able to crawl through rubble, but we would also like to use it in the study of nature," Tolley told Live Science. "Biologists could, for example, send it into tunnels that turtles dig to see what is in there without being too disruptive."

The key to the robot's abilities is in its soft 3D-printed legs, which consist of three connected spiral-like tubes made of a carefully designed combination of soft and rigid materials.

"What people —including myself — have done previously, is make legs that are essentially bent in one direction, and that’s relatively easy to make with something like molding," Tolley said. "But when you want to make something that bends not only in one way but bends in any direction, then you need a more complicated design, and that's what we focused on."

The researchers first modeled the legs digitally and tried to predict how they would behave in certain situations — for instance, on a soft, sandy surface or when navigating over rocks and pebbles.

Subsequently, the scientists used a sophisticated 3D printer to create the legs, which are hollow inside and inflatable. The amount of pressure and order in which the pistons are inflated determines the robot's gait, the researchers said.

"This particular robot is tethered to a control system, and we are definitely looking at how we could get all the components on board so that we can make it untethered and completely autonomous," Tolley said.

Original article on Live Science.

A female mouse with synthetic ovaries created on a 3D-printer conceived and gave birth to healthy offspring. Researchers said the study could lead to an infertility treatment for women with cancer.

The ovary was created using a porous scaffold made from gelatin, according to the all-female research team, which described the study this week in the journal Nature Communications. Gelatin is a form of collagen, the most abundant protein in mammals. Compared to natural collagen, gelatin is more broken down and thus can be made into an ink that can be used in a 3D printer.

After making the gelatin scaffold, the researchers in the new study added ovarian cells taken from the ovary of another mouse. The ovarian cells form follicles that secrete hormones and release eggs.

"These ovarian cells are spherical. They are three-dimensional, and it's very critical that you maintain the right shape by giving them a three-dimensional structure" to live in, said Alexandra Rutz, one of the lead authors of the study, who participated in the project during her biomedical engineering graduate fellowship at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. [5 Myths About Fertility Treatments]

"That's where the scaffold comes in. It has pores in it like a sponge," Rutz said. The pores can have different shapes, and the researchers found that one particular shape best supports the ovarian follicles. "Supporting their shape keeps them alive, and that keeps them functional," she told Live Science.

The ovaries are referred to as "biosynthetic" organs because they contain both living material (ovarian cells) and nonliving material (gelatin). They release hormones in the same way a normal ovary would, allowing the animal to go through its natural cycle, including ovulation, the researchers said. Because gelatin is a natural material, the body recognizes the implant as a regular body part and allows blood vessels to grow into it.

"The biosynthetic ovary was implanted into the exact same place where we removed the originally ovary from," Rutz said. "As the vessels grew into it, they naturally started picking up the hormones secreted by the ovarian cells and distributing them throughout the body to the target organs."

Rutz said that the most challenging aspect of the study was designing the pores of the ovarian scaffold so they could properly support the ovarian cells in the long term.

The team is now preparing a similar trial on pigs, which are closer to humans in size and biology. Rutz said that scaling up the 3D-printed structure to the size needed for human use might be a challenge.

"In humans, the ovarian follicles can be as large as 15 millimeters [0.6 inches], which is huge, so we have to make sure that the scaffold design can actually accommodate such large cells," Rutz explained. "But we also have to look at the long-term performance of these implants in order to be able to provide an ovary replacement with a lifelong function that would last for years." [5 Things Women Should Know About Ovarian Cancer]

One day, such implants could be life-changing for women with impaired ovaries, the scientists said. The researchers added that they hope, in particular, to help survivors of childhood cancer whose cancer treatments damaged their ovaries.

"Their ovaries don't function at a high enough level, and they need to use hormone-replacement therapies in order to trigger puberty," said Monica Laronda, another lead author of the paper and a former postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern. "The purpose of this scaffold is to recapitulate how an ovary would function. We're thinking big picture, meaning every stage of the girl's life — so puberty, through adulthood, to a natural menopause."

Rutz said that in the future, such implants could help women who have impaired ovaries to conceive, and could naturally alleviate women's symptoms of menopause. Instead of having to use synthetic hormones that can cause unpleasant side effects, a woman could have an all-natural source of female hormones implanted directly into her body, Rutz said.

Originally published on Live Science.

The first printing segment of NASA's 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge is now complete, and the U.S. space agency has awarded $100,000 to the two winning teams. 

Based on a points system, the "Phase 2: Level 1 Compression Test Competition" winners are Foster + Partners | Branch Technology of Chattanooga, Tennessee (awarded $85,930), and the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (awarded $14,070), NASA officials said in a statement.

Through a partnership with both NASA's Centennial Challenges program and Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, the 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge aims "to foster the development of technologies to manufacture a habitat using local indigenous materials with, or without, recyclable materials," NASA officials wrote in the statement. [3D Printing in 10 Ways 3D Printing Will Change Space Travel]

When humanity eventually becomes an interplanetary species, settling on Mars and beyond, people will need to use the resources that are locally available as building material for habitats, agency officials have stressed. It would be expensive and unsuitable to ship building materials all the way from Earth, after all. 

Space industry experts also hope that the 3D-printing technologies developed for space exploration may also be used on Earth in the near term, for building shelters in regions where construction materials are in short supply. By setting up competitions, NASA hopes to attract "citizen inventors" from diverse backgrounds to develop 3D-printing technologies for space exploration. 

The 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge has three phases that are working toward this goal. The Phase 1 "Design Competition" was completed in 2015. The Phase 2 "Structural Member Competition" is now underway, with a total prize purse of $1.1 million; it focuses on material technologies that will be needed to build structural components. The Phase 3 "On-Site Habitat Competition" has a $1.4 million total prize allotment and will focus on fabrication technologies when Phase 2 is complete.

Phase 2 comprises three subcompetitions, the first of which was this "Compression Test Competition." For this competition, teams were asked to develop 3D-printable materials and to 3D print a truncated cone and a cylinder. Judges then carried out lab tests on the samples and determined a score based on a points system.

"Seeing tangible, 3D-printed objects for this phase makes the goals of this challenge more conceivable than ever," Monsi Roman, program manager of Centennial Challenges, said in the same statement. "This is the first step toward building an entire habitat structure, and the potential to use this technology to aid human exploration to new worlds is thrilling."

Next, the teams will be tasked with 3D printing a beam that could be used in habitat construction as part of the "Phase 2: Level 2 Beam Member Competition." Once again, the samples will be tested and judged on a points scale.

In addition to the winners, the other participating teams are Bubble Base of Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Pennsylvania State University of University Park; CTL Group Mars of Skokie, Illinois; ROBOCON of Singapore; and Moon X Construction of Seoul, South Korea.

Follow Ian O'Neill @astroengine. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

BALTIMORE — Scientists and engineers are 3D printing all types of objects these days, including eyes: A group of eye specialists and eye-care providers from the Netherlands has used 3D-printing technology to create artificial eye structures, called conformers, in a small study of five children.

The technique could help children with conditions called microphthalmia and anophthalmia, in which they are born with underdeveloped or missing eyes, respectively, the research team says. These conditions, which can occur in one or both eyes, affect more than 10 percent of blind children worldwide and as many as 30 in 100,000 children, according to previous studies.

Although the sculpted eyes don't enable the child to see, they do provide critical support of the eye socket so that the child's face can have a natural, proportional look, the researchers said today (May 11) here at the annual meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO), the world's largest gathering of eye and vision researchers.

"If there's no eye present, there's not enough adequate stimulus for the bone [around the eye socket] to grow," Maayke Kuijten, a postdoctoral fellow at the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam who conducted a study on five children fitted with the conformers, said at ARVO. [The 10 Weirdest Things Created by 3D Printing]

Because children with these conditions may have malformed eye sockets, the face and the areas around the eyes cannot expand to their natural contour, Kuijten said. The advantage of 3D-printed eye conformers is that they can be replaced often with slightly larger sizes by the parent at home as the child grows, or as frequently as weekly when the child is a few months old, she said.

"Symmetry of the face is our end goal," Kuijten told Live Science.

Traditionally, a child or adult who is missing an eye would be fitted with a device called an ocular prosthesis. (This was commonly called a "glass eye" because it was originally made with glass, but it is now mostly made of a medical-grade plastic acrylic.) These ocular prostheses are made by ocularists, professionals who are trained in both the fabrication and fitting of the prostheses.

The ocular prosthesis can be nearly spherical, like the eyeball, or cup-like, to fit over an existing, malformed and nonfunctioning eye. A conformer is often used for temporary support, such as after the accidental loss of an eye, to maintain the eye socket for several months until a more permanent prosthesis can be fitted.

But making and fitting an ocular prosthesis, or even a conformer, is a laborious process, Kuijten said. The ocularist typically must visually gauge the size of the socket, create an orb based on educated guesswork and polish it until it fits perfectly. It is as much artwork as it is medical care.

For infants with microphthalmia or anophthalmia, time is critical because their rapidly growing heads need the stimulation of a full-size eyeball for the frame of the eye socket to expand accordingly. Without such stimulation, that section of the skull can cave inward.

3D-printed conformers help address this challenge because they can be printed quickly, cheaply and in a range of sizes varying by less than a millimeter in diameter, Kuijten said.

To test the utility of 3D-printed conformers, Kuijten's team looked at patients being treated by Dr. Dyonne Hartong, an oculoplastic surgeon at the VU University Medical Center who is currently treating about 50 patients with microphthalmia or anophthalmia. Hartong was the senior investigator on the study.

As part of the standard care of children with these eye conditions in the Netherlands, they have several ultrasounds of their head taken during their first 3 months of age, followed by an MRI scan when they're about 3 months old. (MRIs require anesthesia because babies cannot be instructed not to move during the scans. But administering anesthesia to newborns under 3 months is considered too dangerous.)

Using data from these scans, the researchers determined the extent of the eye malformation and the size of the eye socket. The doctors also injected a soft gel into the affected eye socket to create a crude mold of its shape.

Based on these measurements and data on natural growth development, Kuijten devised an eye-growth chart for these children for their next 10 years of development. Then, her group used a 3D printer to create customized conformers in a vast array of sizes matching the prediction of the growth charts. [7 Cool Uses of 3D Printing in Medicine]

The conformers don't look like eyes. In fact, the original batch of eyes were green, with no pupils colored in. But they are convenient enough for parents to fit into their baby's eye socket after they're trained by ocularists on how to do so. Kuijten said the treatment is noninvasive and not painful for the child.

Early evaluation has shown that socket volumes of the treated eyes doubled, on average, over the treatment time of about a year, thus indicating that significant socket expansion occurred, the researchers said. The study on these children is ongoing.

"This is certainly a novel approach with several advantages," said Dr. Irene Gottlob, a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Leicester Ulverscroft Eye Unit at the Leicester Royal Infirmary who was not involved in the study. "This is a good example of individualized treatment, or 'precision medicine.' It is also a good example of how 3D printing can be used in medicine."

"However, so far, only five patients have been treated, and we need to see the results of a larger group," Gottlob added.

Gottlob said she was encouraged by the researchers' plan to improve mathematical models to better predict eye-socket growth and development. She also noted that better refinement of ultrasound scans could help bring the method to younger infants, before they reach the age when they can safely undergo an MRI scan.

"I think this is a very promising … method, but experience with more patients and further development will improve this even further," Gottlob told Live Science.

Follow Christopher Wanjek @wanjek for daily tweets on health and science with a humorous edge. Wanjek is the author of "Food at Work" and "Bad Medicine." His column, Bad Medicine, appears regularly on Live Science.

Intricate glass creations such as miniature castles and tiny pretzels can now be fabricated using 3D printing, according to a new study. The technique could one day be used to manufacture lenses for smartphone cameras as well as other key glass components, researchers said.

Archaeological research suggests humans have employed glassmaking for millennia. The process typically requires hot furnaces and harsh chemicals. Recently, scientists have investigated whether they could sidestep these drawbacks using 3D printing.

A 3D printer is a machine that creates items from a wide variety of materials: plastic, ceramic, metal and even more unusual ingredients, such as living cells. These devices work by depositing layers of material, just as ordinary printers lay down ink, except 3D printers can also deposit flat layers on top of each other to build objects in three dimensions. [The 10 Weirdest Things Created by 3D Printing]

Until now, the only methods for shaping glass using 3D printing also required using a laser or heating the materials to searing temperatures of about 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius), the researchers in the new study said. In both cases, the end products were coarse, rough structures that were not suitable for many applications, the researchers added.

"People thought glass was too difficult to work with via 3D printing," said study senior author Bastian Rapp, a mechanical engineer at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany

Now, scientists have developed a new technique to fabricate complex glass structures using a standard 3D printer. The secret, the researchers said, is something they call "liquid glass."

"What this work does is it closes an important gap in the palette of modern 3D printing," Rapp told Live Science.

The scientists began with particles made of silica, the same material used to make glass. These particles were only 40 nanometers, or billionths of a meter, wide, which is about 2,500 times thinner than the average strand of human hair.

These silica nanoparticles were dispersed in an acrylic solution. The researchers could then use a standard 3D printer to fabricate complex items using this "liquid glass," the study said. Ultraviolet light could harden these objects into a kind of plastic similar to acrylic glass.

When these pieces of plastic were exposed to temperatures of about 2,370 degrees F (1,300 degrees C), the plastic burned away while the silica nanoparticles fused together into smooth, transparent glass structures, the study said. With the aid of additives, this technique can print colored glasses, tinted green, blue or red, for example, the researchers said.

"Glass is one of the oldest materials that mankind has used, and it's still a high-performance material, and for many applications, the only choice of material," Rapp said. "What our research does is bridge a necessary gap between 21st-century manufacturing techniques and a material that's centuries old."

The commercial 3D printer the researchers used could print features as tiny as a few dozen microns. For comparison, the average human hair is 100 microns wide.

This new method does not require harsh chemicals, and it produces glass components smooth and clear enough for use as lenses and in other applications, the researchers said.

"You can think of creating tiny lenses for smartphone cameras," Rapp said. "You can think about creating chemically and thermally resistant micro reactors made from glass that chemical reactions can take place in."

This new technique could also help create optical and photonics components for high-speed data transmission, Rapp said. (Photonic devices manipulate light just as electronic circuits manipulate electricity.) "You can also think much bigger, with 3D curved pieces of glass for architecture," Rapp said.

"We are now spinning off a company to commercialize this technology," Rapp said. "We hope that in a few years' time, glass will be as convenient to 3D print as plastic is nowadays."

The scientists detailed their findings online April 19 in the journal Nature.

Original article on Live Science.

A new technique could allow the first humans on Mars to 3D print everything from tools to temporary housing out of a tough rubber-like material — using only Martian dust.

The method could enable the first humans who set foot on the Red Planet to print the tools and housing they need to survive without having to lug all the supplies aboard their spaceship.

"For places like other planets and moons, where resources are limited, people would need to use what is available on that planet in order to live," Ramille Shah, a materials scientist at Northwestern University in Illinois, said in a statement. "Our 3D paints  really open up the ability to print different functional or structural objects to make habitats beyond Earth."  [Sending Humans to Mars: 8 Steps to Red Planet Colonization]

Any trip to Mars would require spaceships big enough to carry much more fuel and supplies than past spacecraft could, but care packages from Mother Earth won't be enough for humans to make it on an alien planet. Almost all schemes for colonizing the Red Planet (or for colonizing the moon) require that at least some of the supplies for the expeditions come from the local environment.

One step toward that goal would be to develop a supertool that could be used to quickly manufacture any other desired tool or object, using local resources. To that end, Shah and her colleagues wanted to see what could be made with some of the most abundant material on Mars and the moon: dust. The researchers used simulated dusts based on real lunar and Martian samples. The synthetic dust contains mixtures of aluminum oxide, silicon dioxide, iron oxide and other compounds. The hard particles simulating the lunar surface often have jagged, sharp edges, while Martian simulated dust is made up of rounder, less irregular particles, according to the researchers.

The team developed a process that combines simulated lunar and Martian dust with solvents and a biopolymer to create these extraterrestrial inks. The inks were then 3D printed into different shapes using an extruder. In the end, the objects — which were composed of about 90 percent dust — were tough and flexible, and could withstand the rolling, cutting and folding needed to print almost any 3D shape, Shah and her colleagues reported online March 20 in the journal Scientific Reports.

"We even 3D-printed interlocking bricks, similar to Legos, that can be used as building blocks," Shah said.

While rubbery materials could have their uses, as a next step, Shah and her colleague David Dunand, a materials scientist at Northwestern University, are now trying to figure out ways to heat these rubbery polymers so they harden like ceramics.

Originally published on Live Science.

Objects that can change shape within seconds after being exposed to heat demonstrate a novel 4D-printing technique that could one day be used to create medical devices that unfurl on their own in the body during surgical procedures.

Engineers created a 3D-printed plastic lattice that quickly expands when submerged in hot water and an artificial flower that can close its petals similar to the way plants do in nature as experiments designed to demonstrate this method of 4D printing.  

The new technique significantly simplifies the process of "teaching" 3D-printed materials to change their shape when triggered to do so, said study co-author Jerry Qi, a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. [7 Cool Uses of 3D Printing in Medicine]

"Previously, we had to train and program the material after we 3D-printed it," Qi told Live Science. "We had to heat it up and stretch it and then cool it down again for the material to learn the new form. It was relatively tedious. With this new approach, we do all the programming already in the printer."

The researchers are using two types of materials that are carefully combined in the 3D-printed structure to create the desired shape-shifting effect. A soft material holds the energy that drives the shape-change but in the cool state, the energy of the soft polymer is contained by another, glass-like stiff material. This stiff material, however, softens when exposed to heat, allowing the soft polymer to take over. The material is designed to remember the second shape and default to it when it's heated.

"You can heat it up and deform the structure into a new, third shape and it will keep that shape until you heat it up again," Qi said. "Then it transforms back into the second shape."

Previous 4D-printing techniques were able to create materials that change their shape only temporarily, and then after a while, return to the original printed shape.

In the new study, the researchers used a material that changes shape when it is heated to about 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius), but Qi said that by engineering the characteristics of the stiff material, the researchers can choose the temperature at which the object transforms.Previous 4D-printing techniques were able to create materials that change their shape only temporarily, and then after a while, return to the original printed shape.

"It promises to enable myriad applications across biomedical devices, 3D electronics and consumer products," said Martin Dunn, a professor of mechanical engineering at Singapore University of Technology and Design, who worked with the Georgia team.

For example electronic components could be printed in the flat form and then once they are assembled into devices, they could "inflate" into their useful 3D shapes.

"It even opens the door to a new paradigm in product design, where components are designed from the onset to inhabit multiple configurations during service," Dunn said in a statement.

Qi thinks biomedical devices such as stents, which are tiny tubes that are used to widen clogged up arteries to prevent strokes, could be created using the technique. These 4D-printed stents would expand inside a blood vessel, automatically triggered just by exposure to the heat of the human body. Currently, surgeons have to inflate the stents with balloons attached to the end of the catheter through which the device is being inserted.

Qi said the new technique is more suitable for practical applications than approaches that rely on hydrogels. The objects described in the new study could transform completely in less than 10 seconds, compared to about 7 minutes required for a hydrogel-based material that was presented a few years ago by a team of researchers from MIT.

Hydrogel-based 4D printing relies on the combination of hydrogels and non-swelling polymer filaments. When immersed in water, the hydrogel swells, forcing the filaments into a new shape.

"In hydrogel-based materials, the shape-change is driven by the absorption of water," Qi said. "But that's a relatively slow process. It takes time, especially if you have large structures."

Engineers from China's Xi'an Jiaotong University also collaborated on the study, which was funded by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Singapore National Research Foundation.

The study was published online April 12 in the journal Science Advances.

Original article on Live Science.

Any way you slice it, cheese is considered by many to be a favorite food, whether cut into cubes as a snack, grated over pasta, layered in a sandwich or melted as a topping for pizza.

This beloved dairy treat can transform easily from a solid to a gooey liquid and back to a solid again. So it should come as no surprise that cheese is also a candidate for experiments with food and 3D printers. These projects involve squeezing a gel, paste or semiliquid material through a nozzle to shape it into a solid — and edible — object.

In a recent study, scientists 3D-printed cheese and conducted a series of tests evaluating its texture, resilience and "meltability," to see how this cheese from the future would stack up — on a structural level — against regular processed cheese. [3D Printing Cheese for Science | Video]

The inspiration for the researchers' investigation was a question posed by a cheese manufacturer, who wondered how cheese might be used as a raw material in kitchens that are likely to be equipped with 3D printers in the not-so-distant future, study co-author Alan Kelly, a professor in the School of Food and Nutritional Sciences at University College Cork in Ireland, told Live Science in an email.

Kelly was familiar with 3D printing and had studied cheese and dairy projects for 20 years, but this was the first time he'd thought to bring the two together, he said.

"It was a very speculative question which made me very curious," Kelly said. "We actually started by trying lots of cheese types, but found processed cheese to work best."

Processed cheese is produced using techniques that 3D printing mimics very closely —mixing ingredients and molding them into a new shape. And 3D-printing cheese could provide valuable insight for engineers who are still developing materials for 3D printing, which need to be fluid enough to flow through a nozzle but also capable of settling into "a buildable shape and structure," Kelly explained.

The scientists melted processed cheese at 167 degrees Fahrenheit (75 degrees Celsius) for 12 minutes, and then ran it through a 3D printer using two different extrusion rates — in other words, varying the speeds at which the printer pushed the molten cheese out through the syringe. They compared the 3D-printed results to processed cheese that had been melted and then cooled in a cylinder, and to processed cheese that was unchanged from its original solid state.

Cheese that was 3D printed was 45 percent to 49 percent softer than the untreated processed cheese, the study authors found. They also discovered that 3D-printed cheese was a little darker in color, a bit springier and more fluid when melted, though it melted at approximately the same temperature as untreated cheese, according to the study.

Now that the 3D-printed cheese hurdle has been cleared, Kelly and his colleagues are testing other types of dairy products that can be 3D-printed.

"We are using mixtures of milk proteins at present to build a product, perhaps a high-protein snack, from the basics up, and designing recipes which might work best for [a] 3D printer," Kelly said. "We are pretty early on to generalize about different food systems, but that makes printing really exciting, as there is enormous potential to explore and innovate."  

Innovation and exploration aside, what does 3D-printed cheese taste like? Alas, the samples were too small for detailed sensory analysis, so that question remains unanswered until it can be addressed in future studies, Kelly said.

"But we don't expect any changes in taste," he told Live Science.

The findings were published online Feb. 8 in the Journal of Food Engineering.

Original article on Live Science.

New, lifelike models of newborns that are as squishy as real babies and even include mimics of working organs could help surgeons and nurses train to perform life-saving procedures, researchers say.

The baby mimics were created using 3D printing and were designed to better replicate the anatomical complexity and feel of real newborns. This is important because doctors usually hone their surgical skills on life-size manikins.

And the more realistic the model, the better.

Currently, the manikins that are available to doctors "tend to feel very mechanical, rather than biological," said Mark Thielen, a medical design engineer at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. [5 Amazing Technologies That Are Revolutionizing Biotech]

For example, instead of a replica of a rib cage inside a manikin, there's usually "a central spring with a plastic plate on top, covered by rubber skin," Thielen said.

To make manikins of newborns more realistic, Thielen and his colleagues turned to 3D printing. Their 3D-printed manikins open up "the possibility of teaching and investigating clinical procedures to an extremely high level of accuracy and understanding," Thielen told Live Science.

3D printers make items by depositing layers of material just as ordinary printers lay down ink, except 3D printers can also layer materials on top of each other to build 3D objects. These creations are typically made of varieties of plastic or resin.

"Without 3D printing, this work would have been impossible," Thielen said in a statement. "The sheer complexity of human anatomy is very hard to re-create realistically with any other production method, not to mention the cost and time differences."

Making the models

To build the most lifelike model possible, Thielen and his team worked from the inside out, starting with the organs. 

Data from MRI scans of newborns was used to develop the 3D models for the manikins' organs. The realistic organs were printed with the help of 3D Hubs, an online network that connects people to 3D printing services. The goal was not only for the organs to look and feel like their real counterparts, but for them to function like real organs, too. For example, the 3D-printed heart had highly detailed, working valves. In the future, Thielen and his team hope to design model organs that function as similarly to real organs as possible.

Furthermore, there are no springs and plastic plates in these manikins. Rather, the printed organs are housed in manikins with 3D-printed rib cages and spines. To mimic blood, fluid is injected into tubes in the manikins. [7 Cool Uses of 3D Printing in Medicine]

"The aim is to provide a high level of realistic tactile feedback when performing clinical interventions on them," Thielen said. In other words, when the surgeons move a part of the manikin or apply pressure to a certain area, it feels and moves like the real thing.

In addition, the manikins have a variety of sensors embedded within them to measure movements such as bending and sliding, as well as to gauge pressure in different areas and the flow of fluids. These sensors can make measurements such as the angle at which the head is tilted backward during a procedure, the amount of air squeezed into the lungs or the amount of blood pushed out of the left and right sides of the heart during chest compressions, Thielen said.

Thielen plans to feed data from the sensors into computer models of the human body to predict how operations performed on the manikins might affect a real patient when performed in real life.

Although the manikins are still in development, the initial tests looked promising, Thielen said. If the newborn-baby manikins are successful, future work could focus on the development of more realistic manikins of adults and adult-sized organs, he said.

"I believe that developing and advancing what we started here can aid medical research in a broader scope," Thielen said. "We could potentially create realistic patient models of other body parts to strengthen medical training for emergency procedures and pregnancies."

Original article on Live Science.

Spring cleaning tip from Sweden: If you're wondering what do to with that extra space in the garage or den, why not turn the room into a giant 3D printer?

That's the Swedes for you — always thinking.

Swedish inventor Torbjørn Ludvigsen has spent the last three years developing a new kind of large-format 3D printer that can build furniture-sized objects in any room — surprisingly easily and relatively cheaply. Ludvigsen's invention, the Hangprinter, employs a system of wires and computer-controlled pulleys anchored to the walls, floor, and ceiling. Once installed, the Hangprinter essentially uses the room itself as a casing.

The Hangprinter isn't the first large-format, caseless 3D-printing system, but it is unique in several ways. For one thing, it's cheap. All the hardware and firmware components can be purchased for about $250. Also, the design is open source, meaning that anyone can download the instructions and add improvements — or incorporate upgrades designed by other makers. Finally, the Hangprinter is designed to self-replicate. Most of the component parts needed to make a Hangprinter can be printed out by the Hangprinter itself.

It all adds up to a system that, Ludvigsen hopes, will nudge the power and potential of 3D printing away from large corporations and back to the people. Ludvigsen said via email that the Hangprinter is an experiment in sociology as well as technology.

"Specifically, I want 3D printing to avoid the fate of the 2D-printing business, where machines are programmed to self destruct after a certain amount of prints," he said. "My best bet to avoid this is to go for not only open source, but self-replication by design. Hangprinter is designed to manufacture a large fraction of its own parts and to be easy to build, copy, and make money from."

The Hangprinter project is part of a larger initiative in the maker community known as RepRap, which stands for Replicating Rapid Prototyper. The idea is to disseminate 3D-printing technology to low- and medium-income communities by way of open-source design and self-replicating machines.

"In addition to avoiding self-destructing machines, open source machinery may also distribute wealth and power towards median families like the one I grew up in," Ludvigsen said.

This is no idle notion for Ludvigsen. A physics student at Umeå University in Sweden, he recently wrote his master's thesis on the topic.

In a demo video, Ludvigsen shows time-lapse video of the Hangprinter making a relatively simple and functional object — a lampshade.

The Hangmaker has also been cut loose on more artistic projects. Ludvigsen recently used the system to assemble a five-foot sculpture of the Tower of Babel.

As materials and resolution improve, Ludvigsen hopes the Hangprinter will become versatile enough to print out furniture, tools, and possibly fully functional additional machines with moving parts of their own. He's also hoping to raise money via crowdfunding to continue research and development.

While the current prototype version of the Hangprinter is fully operational, there's plenty of room for improvement, Ludvigsen said. In fact, improvement is another reason why he's chosen to distribute the design for free.

"This is a flexible manufacturing technique, so it will be useful in lots of different situations that I can not foresee," he said. "Some of them might be very important/cool/useful. I wouldn't want to stand in the way of important, cool, and useful things happening."

RELATED: This Is the First Privately Commissioned 3D-Printed Object Made in Space

Originally published on Seeker.

A new house has been erected in a town outside Moscow, but this home was not built in the traditional sense — it was constructed with 3D printing.

The first 3D-printed residential home, engineered by the tech startup Apis Cor, took less than a day to construct and cost under $11,000 to complete. A mobile 3D printer created the building's concrete walls and partitions as a fully connected structure, rather than printing the building in panels at an off-site facility as is usually done, the company said. The portable machine was then removed from the building, and a group of contractors completed the home — adding the roof and windows, and finishing the interior.

By shifting the construction of the building's shell to 3D printing, Apis Cor aims to prove that this type of construction can be "fast, eco-friendly, efficient and reliable." [The 10 Weirdest Things Created by 3D Printing]

"We want to help people around the world to improve their living conditions," Nikita Chen-yun-tai, Apis Cor's founder and inventor of the mobile printer, said on the company's website. "That's why the construction process needs to become fast, efficient and high-quality as well. For this to happen, we need to delegate all the hard work to smart machines."

The first example of this work is a cozy, 400-square-foot (37 square meters) home with an unusual, curved shape. The curved design of the home was chosen to demonstrate the 3D printer's ability to print the construction material in any shape, according to Apis Cor.

Inside, the 3D-printed home has all of the standard features of a traditionally built house. The studio-style dwelling has a hall, bathroom, living room and compact kitchen. Apis Cor partnered with Samsung on the demonstration house; the electronics giant provided the home's appliances, including a TV with the same curvature as the living-room wall.

Apis Cor estimated that the total cost of the demonstration house's construction was about $25 per square foot, or $275 per square meter. Of the total $10,134 it cost to build the home, the windows and doors were the most expensive components, the company said.

While the total construction savings of the demonstation house compared to a tranditional home are difficult to estimate, Apis Cor representatives said in a statement that savings from 3D printing the building walls are guaranteed.

Original article on Live Science.

Art just made a giant leap into the final frontier.

On Friday (Feb. 10), a 3D printer aboard the International Space Station (ISS) created a sculpture that represents human laughter, as part of a project called #Laugh.

Astronauts have sketched and photographed the vistas from the orbiting lab's windows, and artwork by Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst and others has flown to space in the past. But the new 3D-printed piece is the first sculpture to be produced off Earth, #Laugh representatives said. [3D Printing: 10 Ways It Could Transform Space Travel]

#Laugh is a collaboration between Israeli artist Eyal Gever and the California-based company Made In Space, which owns and operates the Additive Manufacturing Facility (AMF), the ISS' commercially available 3D printer.

The project began Dec. 1, 2016, when Gever and his team launched an app that converts the sound waves of users' laughter into a digital 3D model, or "laugh star." More than 100,000 people generated their own laugh stars throughout December, Made In Space representatives said.

App users then voted on their favorite laugh star. The winner was Naughtia Jane Stanko of Las Vegas, whose model was beamed up to the ISS and printed out Friday.

The sculpture has symbolic significance, Gever said.

"We live in epic times, where continuous disruption and rapid change exists against a backdrop of extremely volatile cultural shifts constantly challenging our human conscience," Gever said in a statement. "A laugh star floating in space, above all our heads, is my attempt to create a contemporary metaphor for the hanging 'Sword of Damocles,' a reminder that the beauty of human life is so fragile."

The AMF usually prints out spare parts, tools and other gear that astronauts can use aboard the orbiting lab. But Made In Space was happy to expand the machine's range.

"It's important for the world to see that technology and art are not independent of one another," Made In Space President and CEO Andrew Rush said in the same statement. "We've enjoyed being a part of this project, and hope that it communicates to the world that innovation and creativity are the driving forces behind humanity's future in space."

Gever and Made In Space Chief Technology Officer Jason Dunn will showcase the winning "laugh star" on March 13 at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. You can learn more about their presentation here: http://schedule.sxsw.com/2017/events/PP96556

The AMF, which arrived at the ISS in April 2016, is Made In Space's second 3D printer to make it to the orbiting lab. The company also built a machine for NASA that launched in September 2014 and began making parts two months later.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

A bird of prey on the hunt must be able to clearly see faraway objects while remaining aware of threats in its peripheral vision. In some cases, that's also true for a drone — even one so small that its eye must fit on the tip of a ballpoint pen. Now, a team of engineers has developed a camera that could provide eagle-eye vision to micro-drones.

The new camera could be used for medical procedures, such as endoscopies, or to build micro-robots specially designed to measure, explore or survey, the researchers said.

Previously, the engineers used a technique called femtosecond laser writing to 3D-print miniature lenses directly onto an image-sensing chip. To create sharp images like an eagle's eye, the researchers used this process to print clusters of four lenses at a time. The lenses range from wide to narrow and low to high resolution, and images can then be combined into a bull's-eye shape with a sharp image at the center, similar to how eagles see. [Photo Future: 7 High-Tech Ways to Share Images]

"This means that we still cover the whole object and get a better resolution in the center," said study lead author Simon Thiele, a scientist at the Institute of Technical Optics at the University of Stuttgart in Germany. "The drawback is that we lose information in the periphery."

The goal is to optimize the flow of information, Thiele told Live Science in an email.

The four lenses can be scaled down to a footprint as small as 300 micrometers by 300 micrometers (0.012 inches or 0.03 centimeters on each side), similar to a medium-size grain of sand. The researchers said the size of the entire camera setup could decrease with design tweaks to pack in or combine lenses, or as smaller chips become available.

In the animal kingdom, creatures must balance their visual needs and their brain power. The solution in humans and many other vertebrates is known as "foveated" vision, with the sharpest image in the center and a wide range of lower-clarity vision at the edges.

"If you had the resolution of the fovea all over your eye, you'd have to carry the visual part of your brain around in a wheelbarrow," said Wilson Geisler, a vision scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, who was not involved in the new research.

"If you've got the right application, this could be a very useful technology," Geisler told Live Science. The technology could be used in drones that face challenges similar to animals with foveated vision, with limitations on the bandwidth to send information, but the ability to control movement of the camera to focus on areas of interest, he said.

Thiele said the next step in the research will be to print a lens array on the smallest available image sensors, measuring about 0.04 square inches (1 square millimeter), with the lenses covering more of the surface of the sensor.

Details of the new technology were published online today (Feb. 15) in the journal Science Advances.

Original article on Live Science.

Ever wanted to be Darth Vader? Good news: You can now bring "Star Wars" to life with an actual "tractor beam" to move small objects using sound waves, in the comfort of your own home — at least if you own a 3D printer.

A team of physicists, led by research assistant Asier Marzo of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, has released instructions in the journal Applied Physics Letters and on YouTube for how to create a plastic tractor-beam device. When sound waves travel through the device — a collection of carefully calibrated tubes — they become organized in such a way as to form a true tractor beam. This acoustic beam can pull tiny objects, like beads or even small insects, toward it using only the power of sound.

"Previously, we developed a tractor beam, but it was very complicated and pricey because it required a phase array, which is a complex electronic system," Marzo said in a statement. "In this paper, we made a simple, static tractor beam that only requires a static piece of matter." [10 Futuristic Technologies 'Star Trek' Fans Would Love to See]

True tractor beam

The simple device is an advance of sonic levitation — the method of using the pressure of sound waves to move objects. It's very easy to push particles away with sound waves, Marzo said, but pulling a particle with a tractor beam is much harder.

"The most important thing is that it can attract the particle towards the source," he said.

Fittingly, the 3D-printed tractor beam device looks like half of the Death Star from the "Star Wars" films. A printed bowl is fitted with an array of different-sized tubes, through which sound waves travel and are directed. This "metamaterial" can hold a small fly in place, as demonstrated by a highlight video.

The rest of the device is made from standard electronics and open-source hardware components from the supplier Arduino.

"The components are very simple, like an Arduino [board] and a motor driver, and everything can be bought on Amazon for less than 50 British pounds [about $70]," [Marzo said.

Manufactured microgravity

The tubes in the tractor-beam device were a challenge to develop because they had to work despite the low precision of at-home 3D printers, Marzo said. The team developed three versions of the tractor beam, each of which can manage different wavelengths of sound to trap objects of varying sizes. (A few millimeters is the upper limit in size right now, even for devices used in laboratories.)

The tractor beam could be useful for studying cells and other biological samples in microgravity — experiments that are now frequently done in space, Marzo said.

"Recently, there have been several papers about what happens if we levitate an embryo. How does it develop? Or what happens if we levitate bacteria?" he said. "For instance, they discovered Salmonella is three times more [virulent] when it's levitated. Certain microorganisms react differently to microgravity."

Original article on Live Science.

Are you a chortler? What about guffaws, giggles or hyena laughs? If you have the best laugh, whatever the joyful sound, it could end up getting turned into a 3D-printed sculpture sent into space.

Israeli artist and computer programmer Eyal Gever is leading this collaborative project called #Laugh. Six years ago the 3-D manufacturing company Made In Space offered Gever the opportunity to become the first artist to create a piece in outer space. They're the folks behind the zero gravity 3-D printer launched to the International Space Station in 2014, which astronauts used to successfully print new parts.

In coming up with #Laugh, Gever had to come up with art that would have universal appeal, literally. The final piece couldn't be specific to any particular country or culture. His friend, the British spoken word poet Suli Breaks, suggested laughter. Gever is using crowdsourcing to gather laughter submissions and identify the most popular audio, which he'll turn into a file transmitted to Made In Space's 3-D printer aboard the ISS. The resulting sculpture will get released into space.

In describing the project online, Gever referenced early cave paintings of human hands. He called them a way of proclaiming and celebrating humanity's presence. "#Laugh will be the 21st Century version of that — a mathematically accurate encapsulation of human laughter, simply floating through space, waiting to be discovered," he said.

That does sound kind of cheesy, but I'm interested to see the final result. Gever's other projects are wild. He melds tech and art, developing his own engines to create physical works in three dimensions. Imagine a computer simulation that looks like a slice of ocean waves. Now picture that turned into a 3-D printed sculpture. Surreal is definitely the word.

RELATED: Superhuman 'Rainbow Vision' Common, But Untested

In order to participate, you need to download the free #Laugh app from iTunes, which only works on iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices that have iOS 7.0 or later. That knocks out a large segment of the world's population, but OK. Laughs submitted through the app have until midnight on December 31 to garner the most "likes" on social media.

The crowd-selected laugh audio submission will be announced next month and then heads to the International Space Station in February to emerge as a very strange star.

When I tried downloading the app, unfortunately it got stuck after the intro on a screen that said "loading." So I guess it's a sign from the universe. Either that or everyone else is getting the last laugh. Heh heh.

Original article on Seeker.

3D-printed bricks that look like Lego pieces could provide a simple, low-cost way of creating acoustic holograms — 3D shapes and structures made of sound — for applications as varied as entertainment, medicine or wireless charging, according to a recent study.

Anyone who's watched "Star Wars" will be familiar with the concept of an optical hologram — a 3D image that floats in midair — though real-life technology is significantly less advanced than what was portrayed on-screen.

Holograms are effectively a recording of a 3D light field that can project a reproduction of the original object when lit properly. (The term hologram can refer to both the recording medium and the resulting projection.) The hologram concept can be applied to sound waves to create acoustic holograms, though this field of research is still very new, according to the scientists who developed this new method. [10 Futuristic Technologies 'Star Trek' Fans Would Love to See]

Previous approaches have required complicated arrays of speakers and controlling electronic. But now, researchers have demonstrated how a wall of intricately designed plastic bricks can be used to bend sound waves from a single speaker into complex 3D shapes.

"What we've shown is that you can use carefully designed and engineered structures to create a very complicated sound field from a very simple source," said Steve Cummer, who led the research.

"This is a lot like a holographic sheet that you put in front of a light, and what gets transmitted is a much more complicated sound field," said Cummer, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University in North Carolina. "So, it doesn't require any extra sources — it's just an add-on to whatever sources you already have, and it's relatively easy to make," he told Live Science.

Building the "bricks"

The bricks are so-called metamaterials, a family of materials featuring specially engineered microstructures that result in unusual properties not found in nature. The team designed 12 different types of bricks that effectively slow down sound waves at different rates.

These bricks are fabricated using a conventional 3D printer and act as the pixels of the hologram. A modified version of an algorithm for designing optical holograms was used to determine the configuration of bricks needed to reproduce the desired 3D sound field.

In a paper published Oct. 14 in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers described using the approach to create a 256-pixel hologram that converted a uniform sound wave into a sound field in the shape of the letter A. The scientists created another hologram that acted as a holographic lens by focusing sound energy onto multiple circular spots of different sizes.

Cummer stressed that the research is exploratory at this stage. But Yangbo "Abel" Xie, a doctoral student in Cummer's laboratory and first author of the paper, said the approach has significant advantages over previous methods that relied on speaker arrays.

"[Other methods] consume a lot of power; they need fairly complicated controlling circuits and electronics," Xie told Live Science. "And since the system is more complicated, it tends to be more unstable. With our method, once you build the hologram, it will last a long time, be very stable and doesn't consume any electricity."

Xie added that one potential application for the technology is for audio speakers, and he said the university's commercialization office is actively looking for industrial partners to help develop the technology.

"Speakers don't just convey information on frequency and pitch; they also give you spatial information," he said. "If you have your iPhone playing back a cello suite, it sounds like a single speaker playing back a cello suite. One potential application is that we can use this hologram to reconstruct a better acoustic scene, where your sense of spatial information of sound is more real."

An innovative idea

Peer Fischer, a physical chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, who was not involved with the research, said the new method looks promising. His group recently created acoustic holograms from ultrasonic waves using specially designed 3D-printed plastic blocks.

"This is particularly promising for long-wavelength, low-frequency acoustics, as it allows the elements of the hologram to be very compact," he told Live Science. "Their approach will enable exciting possibilities in shaping sound fields."

However, the researchers also hope to adapt their approach to manipulate ultrasonic waves. Ultrasound operates at much shorter wavelengths, so this means shrinking the bricks to one-one-hundredth their current size, Cummer said.

Cummer and his colleagues have collaborated with scientists at MIT to create early versions of millimeter-size bricks with even smaller internal features.

The researchers think this could lead to better ultrasound imaging devices.

Current systems use arrays of transducers — basically, loudspeakers — that produce precisely controlled sound waves, but the small wand needs to be hooked up to a large machine that houses the complex control system. A system using their approach could be much more compact, Xie said.

A number of startup companies are also working on using ultrasound to wirelessly charge phones, and Xie said their approach could drastically simplify the way these systems are controlled, too.

Original article on Live Science.

Bendable 3D-printed structures that, when heated, quickly snap back to their original shapes could help make sophisticated drug-delivery devices or origami robots, researchers said.

Engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Singapore University of Technology and Design have devised a new fabrication process that uses ultraviolet (UV) light to print successive layers of polymers into 3D, Transformer-like structures that "remember" their shapes.

The creators call the process 4D printing, because the structures change over the fourth dimension — time — when subjected to a stimuli like heat. This is the first time 4D printing has been done on the submicrometer scale and with response times measured in tens of seconds rather than tens of minutes, the researchers said. [The 6 Strangest Robots Ever Created]

To demonstrate the power of the technique, the team printed a rubbery, claw-like gripper that could grasp and lift an object when heated. The researchers were able to use multiple materials and design actuators — components responsible for moving devices — at the scale of a human hair. This accomplishment means the technique could eventually allow the team to 3D print sophisticated, foldable, soft robots, the researchers said.

"Enabling all the different folding mechanisms in one structure would really require a complex geometry and also proper design of the actuation components, which is why I think this is really enabling technology and there is a lot of room for new innovation," study co-author Nicholas Fang, a mechanical engineer at MIT, told Live Science.

Printing bendable structures

The printed objects ranged from flowers to a 1-inch-tall (2.54 centimeters) replica of the Eiffel Tower. The structures could be stretched, twisted and bent at extreme angles before springing back to their original shapes within seconds of being heated. The researchers described the bendy polymers in a paper published in August in the journal Scientific Reports.

The rapid reaction times are a direct consequence of being able to print in smaller dimensions, because the higher surface-area-to-volume ratio transfers heat better, Fang said.

"We are sure that we can speed up the actuation even further," he added. "The next thing for robotics applications is to show how much force this is able to provide."

Aside from miniature robots, the researchers said the approach could create actuators that help solar panels track the sun as its rays heat the panels. The new structures' ability to change shape without extra moving parts could also enable the creation of systems for deploying antennae on satellites, and these systems would be much lighter than mechanical ones, the engineers said.

The temperature-driven response of the structures could also be used in drug-delivery capsules that open upon early signs of infection, such as a fever, the researchers said.

"A drug-release device is a very good example of an application for such a material, because body temperature is very often a trigger or indicator of some physiological or pathological event," Fang said.

Miniature robots

To create the miniature structures, Fang and colleagues first constructed a 3D model using computer-aided design (CAD) software. This 3D design was then divided into hundreds of slices, and the pattern from each slice was projected onto liquid resins that solidify when exposed to UV light, just like the material dentists use to fill cavities.

To control these patterns at the micro-scale, the team borrowed high-resolution lens technology from the semiconductor industry. By modifying the properties of the resin or by using different combinations of polymers, the researchers were also able to adjust both the stiffness of the material and the temperature at which the structure's memory is activated.

Fang's team has also created other materials that respond to pH rather than temperature. In the future, it should be possible to construct devices activated by other stimuli, such as concentrations of DNA, salts or organic solvents in the environment, Fang said. "You can program these polymers and make them responsive to different triggers," he said.

The materials survived roughly 100 cycles of bending and heating, says Fang [this wasn’t reported in the study, he just said it so feel needs emphasis immediately after] but the team now plans to properly test the effects of fatigue on the polymers. The researchers also plan to develop even finer control of the printing process, and could be printing at scales 20 times smaller than they are currently within a year, he said.

Original article on Live Science.

An Egyptian mummy's head and face have been reconstructed with forensic science and 3D printing, offering scientists a tantalizing glimpse of the individual's life and death.

The mummified head was discovered by accident in the collections of the University of Melbourne in Australia. A museum curator happened upon the remains during an audit and, concerned about the state of the specimen, sent it for a computed tomography(CT) scan.

"Turns out, [the skull] is actually quite intact; it has got bandages and looks well on the inside," said Varsha Pilbrow, a biological anthropologist in the University of Melbourne's Department of Anatomy and Neuroscience. "Of course, that then allowed us to think what to do next." [In Photos: Egypt's Oldest Mummy Wrappings]

With the help of an imaging specialist, Pilbrow and her team used the scans to create a 3D-printed replica of the mummy's skull. Then, the scientists studied the specimen's facial-bone features, such as the size and angle of the jaw and characteristics of the eye sockets, to determine that the head belonged to a female. The researchers are calling the specimen Meritamun. They say she was probably not more than 25 years old at the time of her death and was important enough to be mummified. 

"It is quite fascinating that we did all of this without destroying the specimen in any way, and that is important from a museum curatorial point of view," Pilbrow said.

The true origins of the mummified head are still unknown, though. Scientists think it belonged in the collections of Frederic Wood Jones, a professor who conducted archeological work in Egypt before joining as the head of anatomy at the University of Melbourne in 1930. From the distinctive style of the linen bandaging and embalming of the specimen, the researchers think Meritamun was mummified in Egypt and that she may have lived at least 2,000 years ago. They will now use radiocarbon dating to date the specimen more precisely, the scientists said.

Meanwhile, the CT scans and 3D-printed replica of the skull are revealing other details about Meritamun, including her dental abnormalities and diseases she might have had. 

"We noticed that the top of her skull is very thin. It is extremely porous," Pilbrow told Live Science. "It suggests that she would have suffered from severe anemia."

A deficiency of hemoglobin and oxygen would have led to the swelling of bone marrow — as it tried to produce more red blood cells — and thinning of the skull bone, Pilbrow said.

"Anemia and dental pathologies were quite prevalent among Egyptian populations," Pilbrow said.This provides just one possible clue about how Meritamun died, but Pilbrow and her co-workers are continuing to dig into other factors that may have cost the young woman her life.

The research has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Original article on Live Science.

We usually think of cyborgs as part human, part machine, but roboticists don't limit themselves that way. Researchers have developed a hybrid robot built with body parts from a novel source: sea slugs.

The new robot combines a Y-shaped muscle from the mouth of a California sea hare (Aplysia californica) with a 3D-printed skeleton.

Researchers surgically removed the so-called "I2" muscle from the mouths of sea slugs and glued them to flexible, 3D-printed plastic frames. When the muscles were subjected to an external electric field, the resulting contractions produced a deliberate clawing motion that was able to move the tiny robot up to 0.2 inches (0.5 centimeters) per minute. [The 6 Strangest Robots Ever Created]

The robot was modeled after the way sea turtles crawl, because the researchers wanted to create something that could move with only one Y-shaped muscle, study lead author Victoria Webster, a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, told Live Science in an email. But, it should be possible to apply similar techniques to create more complex robots with different movement styles, such as the inchworm-inspired version that the team is working on now, she added.

With a few more developments, the scientists said, teams of robots could be deployed for tasks such as searching for toxic underwater leaks or finding an airplane's "black box" flight data recorder after it has crashed into the ocean.

And one day, the designers would also like to make entirely biological robots by replacing the plastic parts of the new hybrid bot with organic material.

"We're building a living machine — a biohybrid robot that's not completely organic — yet," Webster said in a statement.

Sea slugs live in a wide range of temperatures and conditions, so their muscles can function in myriad environments. This natural versatility is key to developing biological machines that are capable of operating in different environments.

"By using the sea hare as our material source, we have obtained materials which are more robust than the cells which have been used in the past," Webster said.

The team is now experimenting with including the ganglia, or nervous tissue, that controls the I2 muscle. "They respond to direct chemical stimulation or to stimulation of the sensory system nerves," Webster said. "By stimulating the nerves, we may be able to steer the robot in the future."

The scientists also developed a method to mold collagen gel from the sea slugs' skin into "scaffolding" for completely organic machines. These nonhybrid robots would be inexpensive, nonpolluting and biodegradable, the scientists said, enabling them to release many robots without having to worry if some of them are lost.

"Our hope is to continue developing these devices to include organic controllers, sensors and skeletons," Webster said.

The study's findings were published online July 12 in the journal Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems.

Original article on Live Science.

It wasn't long ago that the idea of printing something in three dimensions sounded like science fiction. But over the past decade, 3D printers have become widespread and are now used to create everything from decorative baubles to robot parts to medical devices.

Still, using a 3D printer isn't always simple: The machine is frequently housed within a box the size of a microwave, and it requires technical software and, in some cases, a detailed knowledge of design. But now, a company called 3Doodler has transformed the standard 3D printer into a pen, allowing people to draw 3D creations freely in the air — without the need for a computer or any software.

In 2012, Maxwell Bogue and Peter Dilworth, co-founders of 3Doodler along with Daniel Cowen, were trying to come up with the next great kids' toy. They said they frequently used 3D printers to craft prototypes of their designs, and one night, they spent 14 hours printing a dinosaur leg, only to find that the printer had missed a section, leaving a gap in the model. [Best Educational Toys & Games for Kids]

The two wished they "could just take the nozzle off the 3D printer and fill in the missing gap," Bogue, now CEO of the company, told Live Science. So, the inventors set out to design a product that could do just that.

Bogue and Dilworth took apart a 3D printer and added a computer chip to the nozzle so that they could control the device. When that rudimentary model worked as a proof of concept, the team set out to streamline the design to create a more user-friendly pen, they said.

The first prototypes came straight from a standard 3D printer. "We printed the shells and the casings and everything that's held together," Bogue said.

When it was done, they pulled the hot nozzle off the printer and used it in their pen. Over about eight months, they refined the design, finally producing the first version of the product, Bogue said.

In a lot of ways, the 3Doodler works like a sophisticated hot-glue gun: A heating element melts plastic, and it is extruded out through a nozzle. But glue guns use a hand pump to push the plastic out of the tip, which can make it clump. The challenge with the 3Doodler was to find a way to make the plastic flow steadily and smoothly, so the inventors designed the pen with a motor to propel the plastic filament, they said.

The heater inside the 3Doodler runs about 355 degrees to 460 degrees Fahrenheit (180 to 240 degrees Celsius) to effectively melt the most common plastic filaments (known as PLA and ABS). But at that temperature, the plastic would take a long time to cool, making it impossible to draw in the air, Bogue said. As a result, Bogue and Dilworth added a cooling fan to the 3Doodler, which brings the temperature of the plastic down to about 280 degrees to 300 degrees F (140 to 150 degrees C) when it leaves the pen, and the plastic hardens within seconds, Bogue said. [The 10 Weirdest Things Created By 3D Printing]

The inventors ran a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign to raise money for the project, collecting more than $2.3 million from more than 26,000 backers. The pen is now in its third version, known as the 3Doodler Create, and it has been used for a variety of creations, including artwork, clothing and wallets.

But despite its early success, the initial iterations of the 3Doodler still didn't satisfy Bogue's original mission. "This would be an awesome kids' toy, but it's too hot," Bogue said.

The 3Doodler Create far exceeds the 127-degree F (53 degrees C) maximum temperature allowed for children's products, as set by the EU Toys Safety Directive. So the company teamed up with materials scientists to develop an entirely new type of plastic, and after three years, they created a biodegradable, food-safe plastic that melts at between 113 degrees and 122 degrees Fahrenheit (45 to 50 degrees C). This means that it is safe for kids and can even be used to draw directly on the skin without causing burns, according to the company.

The new pen, known as the 3Doodler Start, is designed for kids ages 8 and older. The rechargeable battery and 16 different colors of filaments make the pen ideal for not just recreational use but also classroom use, the inventors said. In particular, the company is hoping that the new pen will significantly enhance STEM education, Bogue added.

The full line of 3Doodler products can be purchased on the company's website. The 3Doodler Start is available for preorder starting at $49.99, and will start shipping in July.

Original article on Live Science.

3D printers aren't just for making small, rigid, plastic models — now, these figurines can have long, flowing, 3D-printed locks.

Researchers have developed software and a new technique for creating 3D-printed hair, or hair-like structures, which can be used in a wide array of forms and functions. Beyond the aesthetic appeal of individual hairs, the 3D-printed version could be designed for connecting, moving or even sensing other objects.

"Although it is the same material, you can vary its stiffness from something like a toothbrush bristle to synthetic hair or fur," said study lead author Jifei Ou, a graduate student in the Tangible Media Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The project, dubbed Cilllia, was presented in May at the Association for Computing Machinery’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. [The 10 Weirdest Things Created by 3D Printing]

"The goal of Cilllia is not to replicate hair, but to look at the functionality of hair," Ou told Live Science. In nature, hair has many structures and serves many purposes, such as for warmth, physical protection, sensation or movement.

After developing the new printing technique, Ou and his colleagues began experimenting with different applications of their own. They found that by controlling the orientation of hair they could give a pair of surfaces adhesive qualities, like Velcro. And by vibrating the hairs, the same qualities of tilt and direction could induce and control motion in objects placed on a printed surface.

Ou said designers could pattern a patch of fur to direct the movement of objects on the surface, and by varying the frequency from a vibration source, move only objects up to a certain weight. As a result, 3D-printed fur could be part of a system for automatically sorting small objects by weight, he added.

The researchers also created a model, in the form of a toy rabbit, for how the artificial hairs could be used as a sensory tool. When petted front to back, a microphone embedded in the rabbit picks up a signal and the rabbit lights up green. But when rubbed the "wrong" way, the fur sounds different, and the rabbit will flash red.

The hair is made in stereolithography printers, which expose parts of a liquid volume of resin to ultraviolet (UV) light, hardening it into a finished product.

The MIT team had a second motivation; one shared by other researchers.

"We were mostly concerned with how to expand the types of objects you can print," said Gierad Laput, a graduate student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who was not involved with the MIT study. Laput led a team of researchers that developed a different technique for making 3D-printed hair using cheaper, more common machines that he compares to a glue gun. Laput and his colleagues presented their process in November 2015 at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology 

"Both [techniques] have advantages and disadvantages," Laput told Live Science. For example, he said their technique of using so-called fused deposition modeling can print more hair-like, longer strands that can be manipulated in different ways, like braiding. MIT's stereolithography, on the other hand, can print in much finer detail, enabling many of the researchers' proposed applications. "There's lots of good things to say about both projects, and I'm glad that research is moving forward on these fronts," Laput said.

But despite the differences between the techniques and the finished products, both Ou and Laput can agree on one thing:

"The major purpose of this process is not to print a wig," Ou said, "because if you want a wig, you can buy a wig."

"It's really impractical to print wigs with both techniques," Laput said. "They're not optimized for this. The wig-making industry is optimized for making wigs."

Original article on Live Science.

The seabed holds some fascinating historical secrets, but unlike monuments on land, they’re largely hidden from view. Now, archaeologists in the United Kingdom are using 3D printing to bring two historical shipwrecks to life for history enthusiasts and experts alike.

Using data from photogrammetry (measuring the distance between objects from photographs) and sonar imaging, the researchers have produced scale models of a 17th-century shipwreck near Drumbeg, in Scotland, and the remains of the HMHS Anglia, a steamship that was used as a floating hospital during World War I. The steamship was sunk by a mine off the south coast of England.

"It was a proof of concept for us, trying to establish what could be done using sound and light, but there are so many different applications you could use this for," said maritime archaeologist John McCarthy, a project manager at Wessex Archaeology who carried out dives at the Scottish site and was in charge of producing the 3D models. [Photos: Shipwrecks of the Deep Sea]

"People can engage much more easily with a physical object in front of them. You can bring it to schools and conferences, and we are hoping to donate both models to local museums, once we've finished with them," McCarthy told Live Science.

It was not particularly difficult to create 3D-printed representations of the shipwrecks, McCarthy said. The magic, he said, was in creating the virtual models that were fed into the 3D printer.

McCarthy carried out initial experimental surveys of the Drumbeg wreck in 2012 with his colleague Jonathan Benjamin, who is now a lecturer at Flinders University in Australia. McCarthy recently joined him there to begin Ph.D. studies under Benjamin's supervision.

At the Drumbeg wreck site, the pair found three heavily encrusted cannons with evidence of a preserved wooden hull underneath. The ship's identity is still unknown, but one theory holds that it is a Dutch trading vessel called the Crowned Raven, which is known to have been lost in the bay in the late 1600s.

After realizing the techniques they were using could provide enough data for a 3D model, the archaeologists went back to do a more detailed survey in 2014 and used the lessons they had learned from their first attempt.

The archaeologists used a technique called photogrammetry, which involves taking hundreds of overlapping photographs of a site and then feeding them into a computer program that can stitch them together. The application is able to establish the spatial relationships between photos, which allows it to create a so-called 3D point cloud that maps each image in 3D space.

"Once you have a point cloud, you can turn it into a solid surface," McCarthy said. "Then you have a 3D model of the site that's not subjective or an artist's impression, but entirely objective."

The benefits of photogrammetry are that it produces very high-resolution images and it can capture the true color of the site, McCarthy said. The method is easily thwarted, however, by excess marine growth or poor visibility, and it is not well-suited to covering large areas.

Sonar, on the other hand, can see through the murk and can cover much larger areas, McCarthy said. For the 329-foot-long (100 meters) HMHS Anglia, another team from Wessex Archaeology used multibeam sonar — which operates in a similar way to a laser scanner — to do a much larger survey of the shipwreck site.

While multibeam sonar can't match the subcentimeter resolution of photogrammetry, using higher-end equipment and doing many passes can boost accuracy, McCarthy said. The Anglia survey was a particularly high-resolution one, he added, which was part of the reason it was selected for the 3D printing project.

McCarthy pointed out that the Wessex Archaeology team is not the first to create 3D-printed models from underwater imaging data. He said that the field has been booming in recent years, with big advances in both sonar and photographic techniques, and even some novel laser-scanning approaches are beginning to come through.

"All maritime archaeologists are engaging heavily with these techniques now," McCarthy said. "Advances in hardware and software in the last five years has allowed us to do very rapid and cheap surveys, and it has added to the tools we use underwater."

Original article on Live Science.

A few decades from now, asteroids may be flying themselves to mining outposts in space, nobly sacrificing their abundant resources to help open the final frontier to humanity.

That's the vision of California-based company Made In Space, which was recently awarded NASA funding to investigate how to turn asteroids into giant, autonomous spacecraft.

The project, known as RAMA (Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automata), is part of Made In Space's long-term plan to enable space colonization by helping make off-Earth manufacturing efficient and economically viable. [How Asteroid Mining Could Work (Infographic)]

"Today, we have the ability to bring resources from Earth," Made In Space co-founder and chief technology officer Jason Dunn told Space.com. "But when we get to a tipping point where we need the resources in space, then the question becomes, 'Where do they come from and how do we get them, and how do we deliver them to the location that we need?' This is a way to do it."

The plan

Made In Space's idea involves sending an advanced, robotic "Seed Craft" out to rendezvous with a succession of near-Earth asteroids in space.

The Seed Craft would harvest material from the space rocks, then use this feedstock to construct propulsion, navigation, energy-storage and other key systems onsite with the aid of 3D printing and other technologies. (Made In Space has considerable 3D-printing expertise; the company built the two 3D printers that were installed aboard the International Space Station in the past year and a half.) 

Thus transformed into autonomous spacecraft, the asteroids could be programmed to fly to a mining station in Earth-moon space, or anywhere else they were needed. This approach would be much more efficient than launching a new capture probe (or probes) to every single space rock targeted for resource exploitation, Made In Space representatives said.

The converted asteroids wouldn't resemble the traditional idea of spacecraft, with rocket engines and complex electronic circuitry. Rather, everything would be mechanical and relatively primitive.

For example, the computer would be analog, akin, perhaps, to the Antikythera mechanism invented by the ancient Greeks to chart the motion of heavenly bodies, Dunn said. And the propulsion system might be some sort of catapult that launches boulders or other material off the asteroid in a controlled way, thereby pushing the space rock in the opposite direction (as described by Newton's Third Law of Motion), he added.

"At the end of the day, the thing that we want the asteroid to be is technology that has existed for a long time. The question is, 'Can we convert an asteroid into that technology at some point in the future?'" Dunn said. "We think the answer is yes."

Project RAMA is not starting from scratch. Autonomous 3D printers that use mechanically driven systems already exist, Dunn noted, as do mechanical computers made of 3D-printed parts.

Still, making it happen will require significant advances in a number of areas, including in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) — the art of living off the land. Made In Space is counting on NASA to push ISRU technology forward, Dunn said. (Advanced ISRU tech will be vital for supporting astronauts on Mars and other off-Earth outposts, NASA officials have said.) [What Technology Will Humans Need to Explore Mars? (Video)]

Asteroids are fascinating for lots of reasons. They contain a variety of valuable resources and slam into our planet on a regular basis, occasionally snuffing out most of Earth's lifeforms. How much do you know about space rocks?

Asteroid Basics: A Space Rock Quiz

Early days yet

Made In Space's larger vision won't be realized for a while, because RAMA is still in the very early stages.

In April, the project received a Phase 1 grant from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, which aims to encourage the development of potentially revolutionary space-exploration technologies.

Phase 1 NIAC awardees get $100,000 for nine months' worth of initial feasibility studies. (Recipients can then apply for a Phase 2 NIAC award, which is worth about $500,000 and funds two years of further concept development.)

Any discussion of Project RAMA timelines is therefore incredibly speculative, Dunn stressed. Still, he estimated that the effort might require 20 years or so of technology development and other work. If that's the case, the first Seed Craft may get off the ground in the late 2030s — perhaps just as asteroid-mining and off-Earth manufacturing are coming into their own.

"The anticipation is that the RAMA architecture is a long time line, and when it becomes capable is about the same time that people really need the resources," Dunn said. 

Project RAMA could also have applications here on Earth, he added, saying that machines similar to Seed Craft could do a variety of jobs around the planet.

"You could build infrastructure in remote locations somewhat autonomously, and convert resources into useful devices and mechanical machines," Dunn said. "This actually could solve some pretty big problems on Earth, from housing to construction of things that make people's lives better."

You can read more about Project RAMA at Made In Space's NIAC page and in a piece that Dunn wrote for Medium.com.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Hikers who have conquered some of the most challenging trails and want to show off these accomplishments can now memorialize their impressive feats in stunning 3D-printed sculptures made from their GPS tracks.

Nice Trails, a project started by Oscar Ardaiz, a computer science Ph.D. candidate based in Barcelona, Spain, creates models, or "trophies," that visualize GPS-tracked hiking trails, cycling trails or other mountainous routes in three dimensions.

A user can simply upload and save a GPS track to the project's website, and Nice Trails will create a 3D-printed replica of the path and the surrounding terrain. The company said it takes about two weeks to produce each customized trophy, and the models can include such details as lakes, forested areas, grasslands and snow cover — with the GPS path traced in red. [11 Outdoor Gifts for Exploring Our Amazing Planet]

Ardaiz said the inspiration for Nice Trails came from his own longing for a special keepsake to commemorate climbing Washington's Mount Rainier.

"One day, back from climbing Mount Rainier, I was revisiting the trail with my phone, and while I was so proud and happy of the hike, I felt that that line on a flat map didn't quite represent the awesomeness of the day spent conquering the top," Ardaiz wrote in a description of the project on the Nice Trails website. "So I really wanted to view my track in 3D, to see the crests and valleys that I crossed."

The hollow models are made with a gypsum-based powder bound with an adhesive, according to Nice Trails.

The trophies are available in three sizes: The smallest size, measuring 1.97 inches (5 centimeters) long, retails for $55; the medium size (and most popular, according to Nice Trails) measures 3.94 inches (10 cm) long and retails for $111; the largest measures 5.91 inches (15 cm) long and retails for $167.

More information, including how to upload your GPS tracks and purchase a model, can be found on the Nice Trails website.

Follow Denise Chow on Twitter @denisechow. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

More than 30 people across the world have received face transplants since the first procedure was successfully carried out in France in 2005. The discussion has long since moved on from initial apprehensions to the practicalities involved in improving the technique. As a treatment for facial disfigurement which enhances quality of life, the clinical need is established and results to date have been encouraging.

There is of course room for improvement, as the practice is still in its early days and rarely performed. Tissue rejection is a major issue for instance, meaning that the patient may need high doses of immunosuppressive drugs for life. Difficulties matching blood type, age, skin tone and hair colour are also preventing face transplants from becoming more routine.

These problems come down to the fact that the patient is receiving a face which previously belonged to somebody else. But what if a new face could be constructed from a patient"s own cells? Not a graft from elsewhere on the body, but a brand new piece of tissue which could be grown in the lab to the patient's specifications. How long until we can bypass face transplants and step into this other realm of possibility?

This is where stem cells enter the picture — specifically the variety that we call "pluripotent," which can renew themselves indefinitely and generate nearly every kind of cell in the body. Human pluripotent cells were first derived from donated surplus IVF embryos, but we can now create them by reprogramming mature cells such as those found in the skin. This means that you could take a skin biopsy, reprogram the cells into a pluripotent state, then use them as the starting point for producing many types of living tissue — including that of a person's face.

A layer of complexity

Creating skin is far more complicated than just producing one type of cell, but researchers across the field have already made some notable progress. Pluripotent cells have been used to produce many of the different cell types found in the skin, including the keratinocytes and melanocytes which are found in the outer layer (the epidermis), as well as the fibroblasts, adipocytes and macrophages which are found in the second layer (the dermis). In terms of generating complete tissue, US researchers have already combined fibroblasts and keratinocytes derived from stem cells to produce full-thickness artificial skin models. The inclusion of more cell types and complex functional elements such as hair follicles and sweat glands is a challenge for the future.

Much of the recent progress with cell production is the result of hands-on, small-scale laboratory work to produce tiny amounts of tissue. There is a long hop from here to producing sufficient numbers of cells to grow a face for transplantation. Yet technology is always advancing, and it is becoming easier to grow cells in larger numbers thanks to robotics and stirred-tank bioreactors. Techniques such as cell printing also now mean that complex tissue can be created by arranging cells into 3D structures. Such technology is again in its early stages, but could eventually be used for combining cells and structural proteins (sometimes referred to as bio-inks) to print an entire face from a template generated in software.

While technical barriers are being eroded, the main shortcoming of using pluripotent cells to produce other cells at the moment is arguably function. Compared to the cells in the body, lab-produced cells often perform at low levels (for example, expressing fewer key proteins), though 3D tissue culture systems designed to mimic the environment in the body may go some way to addressing this.

Production techniques are also rarely fully standardised. Cells for transplantation need to be of the highest quality, and unless we can grow them to an adequate standard, transplantation could bring problems such as immune rejection or tumour formation.

Face value

If that all sounds like a long road ahead, the good news is that the journey will bring more immediate benefits in the fields of disease modelling and drug development. Human skin is already used to model conditions such as diabetic wound healing and skin cancer. As pluripotent cell technology matures, it will allow the large-scale generation of human tissue for examining a wide range of conditions, potentially providing better predictive capability than animal models.

In short, it is still hugely ambitious to think about deriving cells from a biopsy, generating and expanding a stem cell line, differentiating this into the various skin cell types, and engineering them into a piece of transplantable tissue. Even when we have solved the conundrums around cell function and scale of production, any technique for growing a face from one's own cells would require extensive safety testing. Recent progress with implanting retinal tissue derived from pluripotent cells into the eye of a Japanese woman is very encouraging, but we may still be looking at decades of development before we will be able to create skin for facial transplantation in a clinically workable timeframe. In terms of what could be achieved, we have barely scratched the surface.

Sebastian Greenhough, Research Technician, Glasgow Caledonian University

A new 3D printer can print living tissue structures that could one day be used to replace injured or diseased tissue in patients. 

"With further development, this technology could potentially be used to print living tissue and organ structures for surgical implantation," Dr. Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, who co-authored a study describing the new printer, said in a statement. [Read full story: 3D 'Bioprinter' Makes Replacement Bones, Ears]

3D-printed ear structure

This photo shows an ear structure printed with the new bioprinter. In experiments, the researchers implanted such ear structures under the skin of mice to see if the structure tissue would survive. They found that the structures did survive, and had even developed blood vessels by two months after implantation, thanks to special microchannels printed throughout the structures. (Credit: Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine)

3D-printed jaw bone structure

This image shows a jaw bone fragment printed with the new bioprinter. The size and shape of the fragment corresponds to the size and shape of fragments that could be used for jaw reconstruction in human patients. (Credit: Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine)

Tailor-made tissue

This photo shows 3D-printed ear and jaw bone structures. The new printing system can use data from CT and MRI scans to tailor-make tissue for patients. For instance, if a patient is missing an ear, the printer could print a new matching ear structure based on a scan of their intact ear. (Credit: Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine)

Printer at work

This photo shows the printing system at work, printing a jaw bone structure. The new printer deposits plastic-like materials to form the shape of the tissue and water-based gels that contain cells. This process allows the printed tissue to retain its shape and ensures the printing process does not damage the cells. (Credit: Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine)

Larger, stronger tissues

This image shows a close-up view of the jaw bone structure during the printing process. The new printer allows researchers to print tissue and organ structures that are larger and stronger than the relatively simple and fragile tissues that researchers have engineered before. (Credit: Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine)

More research needed

This photo shows another bioprinted jaw bone structure. So far, the researchers have been able to implant only some of the tissue and bone structures they have made into rodents. Much more research is needed before these structures can be implanted in human patients, the researchers said. (Credit: Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine)

Scientists can now "print" human-size bones, cartilage and muscle, using a new device called a 3D bioprinter, according to a new study.

The tissue and organ structures produced by the printer could one day be used to replace injured or diseased tissues in human patients, the researchers said.

"This novel tissue and organ printer is an important advance in our quest to make replacement tissue for patients," senior study author Dr. Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, said in a statement. "It can fabricate stable, human-scale tissue of any shape."

The demand for engineered tissues and organs has been on the rise because of the limited availability of donated tissue and organs for transplants in people who need them, the researchers said. One promising way to make these tissues and organs is through the use of precise 3D bioprinters, which can lay cells down onto a scaffold in layers, in specific patterns.

Although scientists had previously engineered relatively simple tissues in the lab, those tissues were not strong enough to be implanted in the body, or they did not re-create enough of the complexity of real human tissues to be useful, the researchers said. [See Photos: Muscles and Bones Made with New 'Bioprinter']

Another limitation was these tissues' lack of blood vessels. This constrained the tissues' size, because the nutrients and oxygen that are necessary for maintaining cells cannot not reach far enough into tissues for the cells to survive unless vessels are present, the scientists said. 

Now, with a new 3D printing system, the researchers were able to overcome these challenges, they reported today (Feb. 15) in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

The device prints cells together with polymer materials that help to form and mimic the shape of the original tissues. To overcome the issue of the size limit, the researchers printed a lattice of micro channels throughout the tissues so that nutrients and oxygen could be delivered to cells deep within the tissues. These channels allow "nutrients to get to the cells and keep feeding them so they don't die," Atala told Live Science.

In experiments, the researchers were able to print rabbit cells into human-size ear structures, and then implant these structures under the skin of mice. Two months later, the ear structures maintained their shapes; they had not broken down at all within the body. Moreover, cartilage tissue and blood vessels had formed around the structures, to support them.

The researchers also used mouse and rat cells to print muscle tissue and fragments of skull bones, and implant them into rats. The muscle tissue maintained its structure for at least week, and also developed blood vessels and induced the formation of nerves. The skull fragments had formed bone tissue with blood vessels by five months after being implanted.

The researchers even printed human-size jawbone fragments using human stem cells. The fragments were the size and shape of fragments that would potentially be used for facial reconstruction in people.

However, more research is needed before such 3D printed tissues could be tested in human patients, Atala said.

For example, making tissues that could be transplanted to humans would need to involve clinical-grade human cells, and these would ideally be derived from the patient who would receive the transplanted tissue, the researchers said.

 Follow Agata Blaszczak-Boxe on Twitter. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Originally published on Live Science.

By mimicking the way orchids, calla lilies and other plants bend and twist, scientists have created shape-shifting "4D-printed" structures that they say could one day help heal wounds and be used in robotic surgical tools.

Nowadays, 3D printing allows items to be created from a wide variety of materials — plastic, ceramic, glass, metal and even stranger ingredients such as chocolate and living cells. The machines work by depositing layers of material, just as ordinary printers lay down ink — except 3D printers can also print flat layers on top of each other to build 3D objects.

Now, scientists say they recently developed innovative 4D-printing methods that involve 3D-printing items that are designed to change shape after they are printed. [See video of how these shape-shifting, "4D-printed" structures work]

"Other active research teams exploring 4D printing require multiple materials printed together, with one material that stays rigid while another changes shape and acts like a hinge," said study co-senior author Jennifer Lewis, a materials scientist at Harvard University.

The researchers wanted to create 4D-printed structures that were created more simply, from one kind of material instead of several. They sought inspiration from nature, looking at plants, whose tendrils, leaves and flowers can respond to environmental factors such as light and touch. For instance, "pinecones can open and close depending on their degree of hydration — how wet they are," Lewis told Live Science.

Similarly, "tendrils coil up as part of their structure becomes woody and shrinks, leading to stresses that cause the wiry structure to bend and twist," study co-senior author L. Mahadevan, an applied mathematician and physicist at Harvard University, told Live Science.

Plant structures largely consist of fibers of a material known as cellulose. Lewis and her colleagues devised 3D-printed structures made of stiff cellulose fibers embedded in a soft hydrogel, the same kind of material from which soft contact lenses are made. This hydrogel swells up when immersed in water.

The researchers can control the directions in which these fibers are oriented within the printed structures. In turn, the orientations of these fibers control the way in which these structures swell when they are immersed in water, much like how cellulose fibers control the way plants flex because of pressure exerted by fluids inside them, the researchers said. In essence, the scientists can use the orientation of cellulose fibers in the structures to program how the objects change shape.

The scientists found that they could make the structures they created shift into cone, saddle, ruffle and spiral shapes minutes after they were soaked in water. They had flat sheets bend and twist into complex 3D structures resembling orchids and calla lilies.

"I was most surprised by the complex shape changes we could encode in the printed architectures, given that we printed a single material in a one-step process," Lewis said.

The researchers noted that they can make their 4D-printed structures behave in more complex ways by using hydrogels that react to other factors — such as light, heat and acidity — and replacing the cellulose fibers with other rigid rods, such as electrically conductive bars.

In the future, plant-inspired 4D-printed structures could be seeded with living cells to help heal wounds, or find use in "soft micro-grippers for robotic surgical tools," Lewis said. "Another application of interest is smart textiles, which change shape or permeability in response to humidity, temperature and so on. We are pursuing some of these applications in my lab now."

Lewis, Mahadevan and their colleagues, materials engineer Sydney Gladman and physicist Elisabetta Matsumoto, both at Harvard University, and chemist Ralph Nuzzo at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, detailed their findings online today (Jan. 25) in the journal Nature Materials.

Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

An asteroid-mining company is giving the world a glimpse at its vision of the future.

Planetary Resources, which aims to extract water and other useful materials from asteroids, has 3D-printed an object using metal powder gleaned from a space rock.

"It is the first part ever 3D-printed with material from outer space and is reminiscent of a design that could originate from a 3D printer in the zero-gravity environment of space," Planetary Resources representatives wrote in a blog post Thursday (Jan. 7) about the object, which is about 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) tall by 3.4 inches (8.7 cm) wide and weighs 8.8 ounces (250 grams). [10 Ways 3D-Printing May Transform Space Travel]

"The asteroid (or meteorite) used for the print materials was sourced from the Campo Del Cielo impact near Argentina, and is composed of iron, nickel and cobalt — similar materials to refinery-grade steel," they added.

Planetary Resources worked with the company 3D Systems to build the complex geometric object, which was unveiled Thursday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Planetary Resources, which is based in Washington State, isn't the only entity that views 3D printing as a key technology in the spaceflight arena going forward. For example, NASA officials have said 3D printing could help open up the solar system to human exploration, by making voyaging spaceships and off-Earth outposts less dependent on their home planet for supplies and spare parts.

Indeed, the space agency recently teamed up with the California-based startup Made In Space to launch a 3D printer to the International Space Station, to see how well the technology works in microgravity. (The results to date are very encouraging, NASA officials and Made In Space representatives have said.)

Planetary Resources' asteroid-mining ambitions begin with water, which the company plans to split into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen — the chief components of rocket fuel. If all goes according to plan, this propellant will be sold from in-space "gas stations," allowing spacecraft to top up their tanks on the go within the next 10 years. The company aims to eventually mine platinum and other valuable metals from space rocks. (Another company, Deep Space Industries, has similar ambitions.)

Planetary Resources already has a spacecraft in Earth orbit, a tiny cubesat called Arkyd-3R that deployed from the International Space Station last July to test avionics, software and other key technology that future asteroid-mining probes will need.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

LAS VEGAS — What do 3D printers, drones, driverless cars and fitness trackers have in common? For one thing, all of these technologies are front and center here at this year's CES. But perhaps more important, these cool tech gadgets are finally growing up, said Shawn DuBravac, chief economist for the Consumer Technology Association.

In a talk here today (Jan. 5), DuBravac told a packed house about what he sees as the defining trends of CES 2016. Among them is something that he called the "maturing of nascent ecosystems." In other words, all of the cutting-edge gadgetry from past shows — like the 3D printers that churned out plastic bobble heads in 2014 and the fitness wearables that ceaselessly measured heart rate or body temperature at last year's show — these devices are growing up, or finding their place in the real world.

"I see a change in the dialogue around CES in just the last 12 to 18 months," DuBravac said. "We're talking increasingly about what's technologically meaningful compared to what's technologically possible." [9 Totally Cool Uses for Drones]

This shift away from "technology for technology's sake" toward technology that serves some greater, utilitarian purpose is playing out across the show floor at CES. For example, Whirlpool is showing off a line of smart appliances that connect to the Nest smart thermostat system. Nest tells your appliances when you're away from home, so the dishwasher will automatically run when you're at the office instead of when you're trying to enjoy a quiet evening in your kitchen. Another example of this shift is Aipoly — an app that uses a smartphone's cameras and internal sensors to help visually impaired people identify common objects.

Whirlpool and Aipoly have developed dramatically different technologies, but, as DuBravac pointed out, both are examples of intrinsically useful and meaningful technology, rather than just new and trendy. And meaningful tech tools are even cropping up in places where you might least expect them, such as the virtual reality section of the show floor.

While VR was an essential part of last year's show, the technology has only started to really hit its stride in the past year, according to DuBravac. VR-gaming headsets from companies like Oculus Rift and Sony caught everyone's attention in 2015, but this year brings 360-degree cameras and audio systems to the forefront — a move that signals VR's expansion out of the gaming world and into different categories, DuBravac said.

"In 10 years, we'll start to book cruises [with VR]. Before we book a cruise or go on a vacation, we'll walk into the restaurants, walk the pool deck or look at different cabins to get a feel for the different sizes," DuBravac said. And in the not-too-distant future, you can expect to watch YouTube videos in 3D on a VR headset, or use one of these devices in a science classroom, he added. [Check out CES 2016 coverage on our sister site, Tom's Guide]

Other technologies that are coming of age perhaps at this year's CES include 3D printing (goodbye, plastic doodads; hello, printed metal bike parts) and drones. (There's a drone here that can be programmed to follow you around and film everything you do.)

Of course, the CES show floor doesn't officially open until tomorrow (Jan. 6), so stay tuned right here on Live Science for more news on how your favorite technology is evolving, or follow our sister site, Tom's Guide, for insight into this year's top tech trends.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

LAS VEGAS — Tech geeks and early adopters everywhere will descend on Las Vegas this week for a chance to view the latest in technology and innovation at CES, the world's largest trade show for consumer electronics.

The annual show attracts about 150,000 people each year, from business leaders and celebrities to those who just can't wait to get their hands on the newest gadgets.

Amid this tech frenzy, Live Science is here on the ground to bring you show highlights, especially about science- and health-related innovations, ranging from 3D printing to drones to wearables.

Expect to see our coverage of health trackers that go beyond counting steps or heartbeats to track your hydration levels, body temperature and even your hemoglobin levels. And we'll give you the lowdown on the devices aimed at helping you get more sleep, including one that claims to help people beat jet lag by shining blue-enriched bright light through a pair of earbuds.

There's also plenty of tech for athletes, including smart clothing and a device that measures muscle activity during strength training.

Also, did we mention there will be drones? There will be more than 100 of the flying crafts, including one that doesn't require a controller at all but can follow you after it's thrown in the air.

Stay tuned for updates on the cool and crazy science at CES.

Follow Rachael Rettner @RachaelRettner. FollowLive Science @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Strong, flawless ceramics in various shapes, including spirals and honeycombs, can now can be created using 3D printing, researchers say.

These new materials could find use in hypersonic aircraft and microscopic devices, scientists added.

Ceramics possess many useful qualities, such as high strength, high hardness and resistance to corrosion, abrasion and extreme heat. However, one shortcoming limits certain uses of ceramics — they aren't easily morphed into complex shapes. Unlike metals and plastics, ceramics cannot easily be poured into molds or pared down to a desired form.

One potential strategy for making ceramics that have complex shapes is 3D printing. A 3D printer usually works by depositing layers of material, just as ordinary printers lay down ink, except 3D printers can also lay down flat layers on top of each other to build 3D objects. The device can then solidify the printed object using, say, ultraviolet light. [The 10 Weirdest Things Created by 3D Printing]

However, the extremely high temperature at which ceramics melt makes it difficult for 3D printers to fuse ceramic particles together. The few 3D-printing techniques that researchers have developed for ceramics work slowly, and involve ceramic particles that cannot fuse together without resulting in some porosity that increases the tendency of the ceramics to crack.

"3D printing is a very important new capability, but so far, most materials that can be printed are not high-performance engineering materials," said study co-author Tobias Schaedler, a materials scientist at HRL Laboratories in Malibu, California. "We wanted to figure out 3D printing of a high-temperature, high-strength ceramic."

Now Schaedler and his colleagues have devised a method to quickly 3D-print ceramics using a special resin instead of powders. The result: strong, flawless ceramics with complex shapes.

The researchers began with a vat of resin containing silicon, carbon and oxygen. They shone a pattern of ultraviolet light beams onto this resin, causing it to harden where the light shone through it.

In 30 to 60 seconds, an item 0.5 to 1 inches (1.27 to 2.54 centimeters) thick can form, with a lattice or honeycomb shape, Schaedler said. The researchers then heat these objects to convert the material into silicon oxycarbide ceramic.

This new method is 100 to 1,000 times faster than previous 3D-ceramic-printing techniques, the researchers said. Furthermore, electron microscopy of the end products detected none of the porosity or surface cracks that normally weaken ceramics; indeed, these silicon carbide materials were 10 times stronger than commercially available ceramic foams of similar density, the scientists noted.

The researchers suggest that the strong, heat-resistant ceramics this new technique can make could find use "in a wide range of applications, from large components in jet engines and hypersonic vehicles to intricate parts in microelectromechanical systems," such as microsensors, Schaedler told Live Science.

Since ceramics are notoriously brittle, Schaedler said, "We are working to reinforce our ceramics with fibers."

However, it will take some time before these ceramics reach the market, he said.

"We are at the discovery phase. It will take at least five years for an application to be commercialized," Schaedler said.

The scientists detailed their findings in the Jan. 1 issue of the journal Science.

Follow Charles Q. Choi on Twitter @cqchoi. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Imagine walking into a store, running on a treadmill for a few minutes and then purchasing a pair of shoes tailored precisely to the contours of your feet. That's the future of sneaker buying, according to Adidas.

The shoe and clothing company recently unveiled its Futurecraft 3D sneaker — a running shoe with a 3D-printed midsole (the part between the inner sole that touches your foot and the outer sole that touches the ground). Adidas said the midsole can be tailored to fit the "cushioning needs" of your feet, whatever those may be.

To get the measurements needed to 3D print a custom shoe part, sneaker lovers will first have to run on a specially equipped treadmill. Embedded with foot-scanning technologies, the treadmill track will relay information to a computer that creates a design for the personalized midsole. The design file can then be sent to a 3D printer and, voilà — you get a custom-made pair of running shoes that matches the "exact contours and pressure points" of your feet, according to Adidas. [The 10 Weirdest Things Created by 3D Printing]

Adidas showed off its new product in a recent YouTube video, which gives an up-close view of selective laser sintering, or SLS, the 3D printing process used to create the shoe. In SLS, a laser fuses together powdered materials — in this case, thermoplastic polyurethane, or TPU — to form a solid object. The fused-together midsole rises like a phoenix from the bed of powder. Then, it's dusted off and enclosed in a sneaker. Adidas worked with the 3D-printing company Materialise to refine the process.

Though the 3D-printed sneakers in Adidas' video are made for runners, the new manufacturing technique can "meet the needs of any athlete," Eric Liedtke, executive board member at Adidas, said in a statement.

And it's a good thing Adidas is looking to expand upon this technology, because one of its toughest competitors is already making 3D-printed shoes for nonrunners: Nike unveiled its Vapor Ultimate football cleat last year, which is made using both 3D printing and another digital manufacturing process — 3D knitting. In 3D knitting, a machine turns a computer file into a seamless article of clothing or, in Nike's case, a seamless shoe that fits the wearer like a sock.

Other shoe brands are also using 3D printing to create custom kicks for everyday wear. United Nude, a British design company, makes some pretty futuristic-looking high heels using 3D printing. And then there's Feetz, the "digital cobbler" that creates custom 3D-printed shoes that look like something out of a sci-fi flick.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

A software engineer in Canada recently created a 3D-printed replica of the adorable BB-8 robot from the new "Star Wars" movie. The force is strong with this one.

J.R. Bedárd was inspired to build his own version of the roly-poly robot after the real BB-8 droid (the one used in the film "Star Wars: The Force Awakens") took to the stage at Star Wars Celebration, a fan convention held in April in Anaheim, California. Fans like Bedárd were amazed that the bot — which has a half dome for a head and a spherical body that rolls over the ground — actually appeared in the film and that the robot was not the product of computer-generated imagery (CGI).

Once he saw that such an unusual-looking bot could be built, Bedárd said he couldn't resist making a (slightly modified) one for himself. ['Star Wars' Tech: 8 Sci-Fi Inventions and Their Real-Life Counterparts]

"I've completed a couple of 3D-printing projects before and wanted to create my own [remote-controlled] version of this droid, on wheels," Bedárd told Live Science in an email. "Being on wheels meant that I could add more 3D details and elements on the shell of the robot, as it doesn't need to be flat for rolling."

The BB-8 bot that inspired Bedárd is reminiscent of R2-D2, the oh-so-cute "astromech droid" with the beeping binary vocabulary that accompanies protagonists like Padmé Amidala, Luke Skywalker, Obie-Wan Kenobi and Princess Leia throughout the "Star Wars" universe. (Don't worry: R2 also appears in the new film.) But unlike R2-D2, this new droid doesn't roll around on wheels in the film; it has a ball-shaped body that spins around, and up top it has a half sphere for a head. Attached to the body by magnets, the head wobbles adorably as the bot rolls over the ground. (See a GIF of the bot in action.)

Recreating the round bot took a "3D printer and lots of patience," according to Bedárd, who said he spent about 50 hours building his BB-8 droid. The replica Bedárd created is only half the size of the real BB-8, but he used 656 feet (200 meters) of white plastic filament to 3D-printthe eight parts that make up this smaller version.

After printing BB-8's body and head, Bedárd brought the bot to life using self-balancing wheels and an Arduino microcontroller (a component that allows the bot to be controlled remotely). At some point, Bedárd said he'd like to make a BB-8 droid that rolls without wheels and has a magnetic, wobbly head like the film version of the robot. But for now, he has settled for adding other cool features to his creation — such as a slew of light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, that can be programmed to project different colors and visual effects.

To finish the bot, Bedárd gave it a fancy paint job using an assortment of orange and metallic nail polishes. That might sound like an odd design choice, but the engineer said the fingernail paint is "cheap and renders that thick, reflective look that acrylic [paints] can't." He also used an unconventional (but seasonally appropriate) material to build the droid's "eye" — the black, bulbous component on its head that lets the bot "see" the world. The mini BB-8's eye is made from half of a Christmas tree ornament, Bedárd said.

Right now, the industrious software engineer is "cleaning up" the BB-8 computer model so that he can share it online. Soon, he said, other "Star Wars" fans will be able to 3D-print the adorable droid at home.

Editor's Note: The instructions for how to build this 3D-printed BB-8 are not yet available online, but if this is the robot you're looking for, the popular Sphero BB-8 App-Enabled Remote Control Droid is available in the Live Science store.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.