Lifeboat Foundation

Welcome to #24 Avatar Technology Digest! We provide you with the latest news on Technology, Medical Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence the best way we can. Here are the top stories of the last week!

1) Did you know that Disney does more than shoot box office hits and sell toys to your kids? They also have a very active Research Department that specializes in a variety of applications that can be used throughout the Disney empire. And now another interesting innovation has come out of the Research Department, as they have developed a method for generating those 3D printable robots without the need for time and energy-consuming work at all.

2) Being able to identify problems with a person’s body without subjecting them to invasive procedures is the fantasy of all Star Trek doctors. There’s even a prize offering a fortune to anyone who can effectively recreate the tricorder technology out in the real world. Now, Stanford scientists think that they’ve developed a system that, in time, could be used to spot cancerous tumors from a foot away.

Continue reading “#24 AVATAR TECHNOLOGY DIGEST / Get a Virtual-Reality Punch” »

Futurist Vivek Wadhwa predicts change “at a scale which is unimaginable before,” thanks to advances in technologies like robotics and 3D printing. “New trillion dollar industries will wipe out out existing trillion dollar industries,” he says. “This is the future we’re headed into, for better or for worse.”

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Digital designs for robotic creatures are shown on the left and the physical prototypes produced via 3-D printing are on the right (credit: Disney Research, Carnegie Melon University)

Now you can design and build your own customized walking robot using a 3-D printer and off-the-shelf servo motors, with the help of a new DYI design tool developed by Disney Research and Carnegie Mellon University.

Continue reading “Disney Research-CMU design tool helps novices design 3D-printable robotic creatures” »

Photo Credit: Printgreen Tiskajzeleno/Facebook

This 3D printer is the dream of every garden lover. Created at the University of Maribor in Slovenia by students Maja Petek, Tina Zidanšek, Urška Skaza, Danica Rženičnik and Simon Tržan, the printer unites art, technology and nature into one.

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Pluripotent cells are great, but they can be difficult to steer into growing the way you want. Now scientists have found a new way to create 3D-printed ‘building blocks’ of embryonic stem cells (ESCs), which could be used for growing micro-organs, performing tissue regeneration experiments, testing medication and other biology research purposes.

While bioprinting with ESCs is not entirely new, until recently researchers have only managed to produce two-dimensional sheets of cells. Now a team of scientists from Tsingua University in China and Drexel University in Philadelphia have published a study in Biofabrication, introducing a novel technique for printing a grid-like 3D structure laden with stem cells.

In normal biological conditions ESCs naturally tend to cluster together into spherical ‘embryoid bodies’ – clumps of pluripotent cells which can go on to develop into any type of cell or tissue in the human body.

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According to the Mayo Clinic, the Nerve regeneration is a complex process, because of its complexity, regrowth of nerves after injury or disease is extremely rare. Nerve damages more often than not are incurable and cause permanent disability, but now the scientist has proved that Advanced 3D printing methods could hold a possible cure for such patients.

To prove the proof of concept, a physically disabled rat was chosen as a test subject. The scientist used a specially designed 3D scanners and 3D Printers to create a custom silicone guide, 3D-printed chemical cues were added to the guide to promote both motor and sensory nerve regeneration. This was then implanted into the rat with surgically grafting it to the cut ends of the nerve. The operation was a extremely successful and the rat showed tremendous improvement in the way it walked within 10 to 12 weeks.

Continue reading “3D Printed Guide for Nerve Regeneration successfully tested on Animals, Clinical testing on humans to begins soon” »

Big news! This 3D printer is our first step towards manufactured human organs. For perspective, the device can print a 100-cm blood vessel in two minutes.

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Researchers from Beijing and Philadelphia develop a method to 3D print embryonic stem cells in highly uniform blocks.

Researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China and Drexel University in the US have developed an extrusion-based 3D printing method to produce highly uniform “blocks” of embryonic stem cells. These blocks are a grid-like 3D structure that was able to demonstrate cell viability and rapid self-renewal while maintaining high pluripotency. Lead author Wei Sun says, “It was really exciting to see that we could grow embryoid body in such a controlled manner. The grown embryoid body is uniform and homogenous, and serves as much better starting point for further tissue growth.”

Other common methods of printing stem cells are either done in 2D or with the “suspension” method, but these methods do not produce cells with the same cell uniformity and homogenous proliferation as that of the 3D method. This new method would enable researchers to perform experiments on tissue regeneration. Another author on the paper, Rui Yao, adds, “Our next step is to find out more about how we can vary the size of the embryoid body by changing the printing and structural parameters, and how the varying the embryoid body size leads to “manufacture” of different cell types.”

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The human brain is a fragile and powerful tool, and is also fully dependent on a sturdy skull to keep it secure and intact. Unfortunately for some, there is a need for cranial reconstruction on people who were either born with a skull-related deficiency or critically injured in the head area. 3D printing has shown itself to be a potential game-changer in this regard; we have already witnessed successful titanium mesh skull replacements for one Chinese farmer and even a three-year-old girl born with congenital hydrocephalus. Now, researchers out of Western Australia are developing a new advanced 3D printing method that involves reconstructing the human skull from stem cell cultures.

The project, which is taking place within the Royal Perth Hospital and is being funded by the State Government, will provide their patients with damaged or surgically removed skull fragments with a high-quality cranial reconstruction surgery. The 3D printed stem cell-based skull replacement can potentially increase the success rate and the post-surgical quality of life of patients who require this intensive surgery.

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