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3D printing will be used to rebuild injured face

dr. dolittle — Thu, 14 Nov 2013 14:24:10 +0000

3D printing will be used to rebuild injured face

Surgeons at Morriston Hospital in Swansea are using 3D printing technology to create titanium implants for a patient whose face was crushed in an accident. This was reported to be the first use of 3D printing to recreate a face after an injury.

Using CT scans, they created a mirror image of the side of the patient's face that was not damaged by the motorbike accident. They hope to begin the reconstruction process very soon.

This reconstruction project is actually the feature exhibit in "3D: Printing The Future" at the Science Museum in London until July 2014.

Source:
BBC News

For more information on 3D printing technologies to create body parts, see this video:

dr. dolittle Thu, 11/14/2013 - 09:24

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Life Science

face

reconstruct

surgery

Wow! Its amazing that scientists are able to reconstruct faces using 3D printers. It is also amazing that 3D organ printing may help end waiting list for organ transplant recipients: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/25/3d-printed-organs_n_3983971.ht….

3D printing has a lot of potential to do good things in this world, whether it is helping veterans through making prosthetic limbs or even helping citizens who recently got into an accident like you described in this blog post. But this does not mean that 3D printing can be only used for good. In fact, this past Tuesday a 3D printer was used to make the first metal gun. I am not saying guns are bad, but where do we draw the line. There are many possibilities, both good and bad, that can come from 3D printing.
Source: http://nocera.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/11/weekend-gun-report-november-…

This is extremely interesting! And apparently it is becoming a widespread process to use the 3D printer for usable body parts. The process itself is known as "bioprinting," and actually has the potential to create not only solid masses that the body can use, but tissue as well. In fact, one of the many goals of bioprinting is to be able to replace damaged tissue from a heart attack with usable tissue-replacement from the printer. Maybe the most similar to your article, though, is the reconstruction of the skull of King Richard III at the University of Leicester. The recreation of the skull is similar to the recreation of the undamaged portion of the man's face you mentioned here. If you want to read more about it you can go to this article: http://scienceblogs.com/channel/life-science/?utm_source=globalChannel&…

So I guess there will have to be a waiting period and background check to buy a 3D printer, since you can make a gun with it?

The Best Science Writing Online 2012

cevans — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 21:31:45 +0000

The Best Science Writing Online 2012

I've been practicing little idiosyncratic rituals on this corner of the web for years: learn something new, obsessively research, get lost in the idea, scribble, converse endlessly, then write. This blog, Universe, has never been about garnering hits or materializing an audience because, for me, thinking and writing about science is a personal tic. I can't help but yell into the void; I understand science as a poetic language for explaining reality, and when I see changes in that language all I want to do is unfasten myself into them.

I definitely don't seek any form of recognition for what I do here. In my estimation, it's niche--probably even archaic--to maintain and expect long-form discourse about peripheral science weirdness on a blog in 2012. I've made friends, gotten some work, told stories, and cross-pollinated, but it feels dorky, sometimes, to even have a blog. Mostly this is a quiet space, one where I can habitually articulate my own starry-eyed fascination with all those ideas bigger than my living room. If the Internet is a storm of ideas, then Universe is a little lean-to, a place to hunker and watch hurricane winds suck mallard ducks of out the city pond and howl, "is anyone else getting this"?

However, as it turns out, someone else is getting it.

I present to you The Best Science Writing Online 2012, an anthology of essays compiled by Bora Zivkovic and Jennifer Ouelette of Cocktail Party Physics. My essay, Moon Arts: Fallen Astronaut, originally posted here last May and part of my larger series about art on the Moon, is included.

I haven't much else to say other than it's an honor to have been nominated, chosen, and included in this formidable anthology. The book is like a fantastic cocktail party full of strange fungi, quantum clones, extinct creatures and Aspies all giving toasts, telling fascinating stories, and generally carrying on. Honestly, it's a great read, and I'm all the more inspired to carry forward, having read it. The Best Science Writing Online 2012 is out now on Scientific American Books, a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. You can buy it on Amazon here, or wherever you want to throw your money.

Oh, and it's not too late to submit any of my articles for the 2013 Anthology, either. ;)

cevans Thu, 09/20/2012 - 17:31

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The Best Science Writing Online 2012

I gifted this to Mikey for his library, but haven't had a chance to read it yet. Exciting!

Science Poem Manifesto

cevans — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:21:50 +0000

Science Poem Manifesto

Earlier this year, I received a charming email from a pair of Helsinki-based artists and designers who work under the name of OK DO. OK DO is a socially-minded design think tank and online publication; they dug Universe and wanted to know if I'd contribute to a new publication and exhibition project they were working on. The project, Science Poems, was perfectly up my alley: a variety of articles and work loosely structured around the "poetry and multi-sensorial aesthetics of natural sciences rather than their functionality and logic."

For the occasion, I wrote a short piece about the aesthetics of Science Fiction: The Science Poem Manifesto. Banged out in a lucid forty-five minutes, it was my most effortless piece of writing in recent memory, presumably because the themes had been banging around in my head, unexpressed, for a decade.

As Stanislaw Lem wrote, science fiction "comes from a whorehouse but...wants to break into the palace where the most sublime thoughts of human history are stored." Within the shadowy, grimacing frame of its own poetics, it does. Because the sublime thoughts of human history have always been projected outwards, to the vastness outside of our minds. Science fiction is a movement outwards, not inwards: "up, up, and away."

Science fiction knows, like the science poets do, that the sky begins at our feet.

The science poets look at our sky and they see three moons, or a ringed planet in sultry sunset; they hear a voice whispering across the void, hear the malice in its tone, but still find how to forgive it. Science poets see a tentacle and know its embrace. Science fiction is the grief of tomorrow and the horror of today. Science poetry makes no illusions.

The finished Science Poems book is an honest-to-goodness marvel, marrying interviews with chemists, astronomers, curators, and fashion designers with short fiction, photography, and aesthetic references to everything from John Cage to electromagnetism. It features discussions with Marc-Olivier Wahler, curator of Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Cosmic Wonder, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, and Paola Antonelli, senior curator of Art and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. I am proud to have been involved.

Read the entire Science Poem Manifesto here.

As far as I know, the Science Poems book itself is only available for sale online via Napa Books in Helsinki. If you live in Europe, a list of available booksellers can be found here. Also, a lot of the content -- all exceptional -- is available for free online. Lastly, as note to our continental readership: OK DO will be having a book party for Science Poems next Thursday, August 5th at Berlin's Do You Read Me?! bookshop.

[Reposted from SPACE CANON]

cevans Thu, 07/29/2010 - 14:21

Tags

Science Poem Manifesto

Science Poems

Two Cultures

design

Hi Claire,
I just came across your Science Poem Manifesto at OK DO and loved it!
It captures so much of science fiction that is often ignored (and all of science fiction as it should be). Beautifully written, too. Thanks.

Thanks, Kerstin!

awesome!

ENTROPIC HOPE
-- James Ph. Kotsybar

Dr. Smart, with sweeping dioramics,
summarized theory accepted today:
âThe first few laws of thermodynamics:
You canât win, break even or get away.

âNo matter speed of acceleration,
the universe runs down since the Big Bang.
The fate of order is dissipation.
The spring, once sprung, canât be re-sprung. It sprang.

âA system needs energy to survive
or itâs unable to do work, of course.
On galactic scales or like us, alive,
complexity is the result of force.

âAnd though the second law says we canât win,
itâs only âlawâ to a statistician.â

SUPERLUMINELLE
-- James Ph. Kotsybar

The Universe is expanding,
Faster than the limit of light,
Beyond common understanding.

Cosmology is demanding.
Its study is by no means slight.
The Universe is expanding.

Physicsâ heroes, quite outstanding,
Have applied their full mental might
Beyond common understanding.

Thereâs no point in reprimanding,
As we gaze out into the night,
The Universe is expanding.

The truth of fact is commanding.
Whatever is has to be right,
Beyond common understanding.

Einsteinâs physics notwithstanding,
Much quicker than what we call bright,
The Universe is expanding
Beyond common understanding.

VISIONARY
-- James Ph. Kotsybar

He looked into the lens-system and saw
an unimaginably small world grow.
Now does this image in history draw
from van Leeuwenhoek or Galileo?
Through lenses both passed to another realm
of being, since their broadened reference frame
allowed them visions that could overwhelm.
Then for everyone nothing stayed the same.
The vaster oneâs view the clearer things get,
of cosmic, subatomic, even time,
and, while the masses may first be upset,
brought to some summit that they didnât climb,
itâs crucial so all the ingenious might
be informed of the remarkable sight.

OBSERVING OBSERVERS
-- James Ph. Kotsybar

Per perceiving predilections effect,
researchers search precautions to assure
that their constructed theories wonât be wrecked
by accredited critics who abjure
results from lax experimentation
which funnels too few affecting factors.
Scientistâs psyches lack isolation --
all audiences are also actors.
Objectivity varies with the minds
involved whose realities rarely budge;
what one expects to see is what one finds.
One must watch âblindâ to impartially judge --
so dataâs distinct from observations
which bind to beliefâs anticipations.

Dear Claire,
I've got enough to manifest a book myself, but I'll leave you this one more to fill you with the Holiday Spirit.
-- Jim

QUANTUM MELODY
-- James Ph. Kotsybar

Below subatomic, the particles
slip through Heisenbergâs uncertainty nets.
They cannot even be called articles;
theyâre just mathematical epithets.
Though we may say they have up or down spins
(we may even find them charming or strange),
like angels that dance on the heads of pins,
it takes metaphysics to find their range.
They have no shape we can define, except
as bleary fields of energy. Until
we measure them, thereâs no place where theyâre kept;
their locus is totally vibratile.
They pluck at space like an instrument string,
at this scale. Quark! The hadron angels sing!

Levitations

bioephemera — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 08:00:00 +0000

Levitations

Levitations
Johanna Mueller, 2004

Artists I'm looking forward to seeing at the 10th annual Artomatic, #1: printmaker Johanna Mueller, whose woodcuts resemble the illustrations from a dark and hallucinogenic children's book. No wonder her blog is called "Feverish Art."

bioephemera Thu, 04/23/2009 - 04:00

Tags

I LOVE dark and hallucinogenic children's books!

This bunny has some serious Donny Darko action going on.

You know it's funny, one would think that books illustrated like that just wouldn't be attractive to kids or might even scare them. But my eldest (seven) and I just read one that was, if anything, a little darker than this and he loved it. I was a little reticent to read it just before bed, but it didn't seem to cause problems...

This piece reminded me of the movie, "Watership Down" which absolutely terrified me as a kid. I still loved the movie and watched it whenever I could.

That's a curious yet exquisite piece by the way.