3D printed skeleton
The 3D printing business promises everything from low-cost home construction to reasonably priced durable arm our, but one of the most intriguing applications of the technology is the creation of 3D printed bones.
The company Aciform, a specialist in medical 3D printing, uses tricalcium phosphate, a material with properties similar to those of human bones, to create patient-specific replacements of different bones.
It’s very simple to utilize these 3D-printed bones. An MRI may be performed at a hospital and uploaded to Aciform, which then develops a 3D model of the required patient-specific implant. Once the design has been approved by the surgeon, it may be printed and utilised during surgery.
The company Ossiform, a specialist in medical 3D printing, uses tricalcium phosphate, a material with properties similar to those of human bones, to create patient-specific replacements of different bones.
The best cuisine ever 3D-printed
What is on the menu tonight? It could soon be a slice of laser-cooked, 3D-printed cake. A system developed by engineers at Columbia University School of Engineering can build a cheesecake with seven ingredients using food inks and then use a laser to cook it to perfection.
They used banana, jam, peanut butter, and Nutella to make their invention. Tasty. One day, the technology may be used to generate customised meals for everyone, from elite athletes to people with dietary disorders, or it might be helpful for others who are pressed for time.
Automatic language recognition
The latest online innovation that is sweeping the nation is natural language processing. Although you have probably seen it in action in Google’s autocomplete feature or when your smartphone provides a forecast of what you are attempting to enter, it is actually capable of far more intelligent things.
With its picture generator Dall-E 2, OpenAI, a firm at the vanguard of artificial intelligence, first took the internet by storm. Now it’s back, developing ChatGPT, a chatbot that can write poetry from scratch, easily explain complicated ideas, and carry on lengthy discussions as if it were a real person.
The GPT-3 programme, which powers ChatGPT, was trained on billions of text instances before being taught how to construct sentences that make sense.
A potential application of AI is ChatGPT. It has demonstrated its capacity to create entirely original websites, write lengthy books, and even make jokes, but it obviously hasn’t yet grasped humour.
a supersonic flight without boom
Later this year, the ‘silent’ supersonic X-59 aircraft from ASA will fly for the first time at the Armstrong Flight Research Centre. In a hangar at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, California, the plane is now being put together.
To prevent a powerful sonic boom from upsetting people on the ground below when it breaches the sound barrier, the plane’s fuselage, wings, and tail have been precisely built to manage the airflow around it as it flies. If the first test proceeds as planned, the space agency hopes to conduct several test flights over populated regions in 2024 to determine how the general population would react to planes.
Electronic “twins” that monitor your health
People may stroll into the medbay and have their complete body digitally scanned for indicators of disease and damage in Star Trek, where many of our concepts for future technology first appeared. The creators of Q Bio claim that by doing that in real life, health outcomes would be improved and the workload of doctors would be reduced.
The US business has developed a scanner that can detect hundreds of indicators in only one hour, including hormone levels, fat deposits in the liver, signs of inflammation, and various malignancies. It plans to utilise this information to create a 3D digital twin of the patient’s body that can be followed over time and updated with new information.
Jeff Kaditz, CEO of Q Bio, expects it will usher in a new era of preventative, tailored medicine in which the enormous volumes of data gathered aid physicians in developing more complex methods of sickness diagnosis in addition to prioritising which patients most urgent care.
Direct air capture
Trees continue to be one of the most effective ways to lower atmospheric CO2 levels because of the process of photosynthesis. Though taking up less space and absorbing carbon dioxide at higher rates than trees, new technologies could serve the same purpose.
The name of this technique is Direct Air Capture (DAC). It entails collecting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and either storing it in underground geological caves or combining it with hydrogen to create synthetic fuels.
Although this technology has a lot of potential, there are currently several difficulties with it. Direct air capture facilities are presently operational, however the running costs of the existing models are very high. If future energy levels can be reduced, DAC may be one of the best technological advancements for the environment.
Green funerals
As people face the reality of the climate problem, sustainable living is becoming more and more important. But what about environmentally friendly death? Death is typically a carbon-intensive process, leaving one final mark on the environment. For instance, a cremation is said to emit 400 kg of carbon dioxide into the environment. So what is a greener course of action?
You could be composted in the US state of Washington. The natural decomposition of the bodies is aided by the presence of bark, dirt, straw, and other materials in the burial chambers. Your corpse decomposes into soil that may be used in a garden or forest after 30 days. The procedure, according to Recompose, consumes only an eighth of the carbon dioxide produced by cremations.
Fungi are used in alternative technologies. The late actor Luke Perry was interred in 2019 wearing a custom “mushroom suit” created by the start-up Coeio. The manufacturer asserts that its product, which is created with mushrooms and other microbes, helps with decomposition and neutralises poisons that are often released when a person decays.
The majority of alternate methods for disposing of human corpses after death are not based on cutting-edge technology; rather, they are just awaiting widespread adoption. Alkaline hydrolysis is another illustration, which entails the breakdown of the body into its chemical components over the course of a six-hour procedure in a pressurised chamber. It is permitted in a number of US jurisdictions and emits fewer pollutants than more conventional techniques.
Energy storing bricks
Thanks to technical developments, the red bricks used to build homes may now store electricity.
Washington University in St. Louis researchers have found a procedure that. Louis, Missouri, US, that can transform the inexpensive and easily accessible construction material into “smart bricks” that can store energy like batteries.
The scientists assert that walls formed of these bricks “could store a substantial amount of energy” and can “be recharged hundreds of thousands of times within an hour” despite the fact that the study is still in the proof-of-concept stage.
The scientists created a process to turn red bricks into a specific kind of energy storage device known as a supercapacitor.
In order to achieve this, conducting coatings known as Pedot were applied to samples of burnt bricks. These coatings subsequently turned the fired bricks into “energy storing electrodes” by allowing them to permeate through their porous structure.
Self-healing ‘living concrete
By combining sand, gel, and bacteria, scientists have created what they term living concrete.
According to researchers, this construction material is more ecologically friendly than concrete, which is the second most used substance on Earth after water, and has structural load-bearing capabilities as well as the ability to self-heal.
The University of Colorado Boulder team thinks their study lays the door for the development of future buildings that may “heal their own cracks, suck up dangerous toxins from the air, or even glow on command.”
Fuel from thin air
The École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland has developed a working prototype of a system that can generate hydrogen fuel from atmospheric water.
The gadget, which was designed to resemble leaves, is constructed of semiconducting materials that capture solar energy and use it to create hydrogen gas from atmospheric water molecules. The gas might then possibly be transformed into liquid fuels for usage.
Internet for everyone
How else would you read sciencefocus.com? Despite the fact that we seem to be unable to function without the internet, only around half of humanity is currently online. There are various causes for this, including societal and economic ones, but for some people, a lack of a connection makes the internet inaccessible.
While Facebook abandoned plans to accomplish the same using drones, Google is steadily working to find a solution by utilising helium balloons to beam the internet to inaccessible locations, which means startups like Hiber are stealing a march. They have adopted a different strategy by launching their own network of shoebox-sized microsatellites into low Earth orbit, which activates a modem hooked into a computer or other device as it passes over and transmits your data.
Organisations like The British Antarctic Survey already utilise its satellites, which orbit the Earth 16 times a day, to give internet connection to the most remote parts of the world.
Reference:
https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology
https://fivtech.com/how-to-stop-hair-from-ageing-too-quickly/
