At the beginning of March of this year, a radical surgery was performed on an American patient: 75 percent of his skull was replaced with a 3D printed implant. The company that produced the implant, Oxford Performance Materials, made [...]]]> Singularity Hub reports on the pioneering surgery that used 3D printing to replace 75 percent of a patient’s skull:

At the beginning of March of this year, a radical surgery was performed on an American patient: 75 percent of his skull was replaced with a 3D printed implant. The company that produced the implant, Oxford Performance Materials, made the announcement though offered little detail about the patient or the procedure. The surgery was given the green light by the Food and Drug Administration in February.

The implant is called the OsteoFab Patient Specific Cranial Device (OPSCD) or OsteoFab for short and is made from polyetherketoneketone (PEKK) thermoplastic through an additive manufacturing process. This material is not only biocompatible but is bone-like and will not interfere with x-ray scanning. After the patient’s skull was 3D scanned, the custom-made implant was printed using an EOS P800 laser sintering 3D printer. By generating the implant layer by layer, details can be added that promote the attachment of bone and surrounding cell growth.

Turnaround time for receiving an implant after submission of scans is two weeks or less.

A medical poster about pulmonary disease. I can’t read all the writing under it (other than “yi” ((one)) and “ren” ((person))), but after the cold I’ve had this week, I think I know just a little about how this guy feels.

“I’m sorry, son. You’ve got tuberculosis.”

OK, maybe not. But I can sympathize.

From the Images from the History [...]]]>

From the Images from the History of Medicine collection of the NIH.

“On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium,” said Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we’ve ever seen before.”

The [...]]]> A couple months ago, NASA witnessed the largest impact on the Moon in 8 years:

“On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium,” said Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we’ve ever seen before.”

The meteoroid, which weighed an estimated 40 kilograms and was just over a third of a meter wide, hit the Moon at a speed of 90,000 kilometers per hour. NASA said it packed the explosive equivalent of five tons of TNT.

…

The blast on the moon was so bright that anyone looking at Earth’s closest neighbor at the time of impact could have seen the explosion without a telescope.

“The results were remarkably strong and consistent across individuals and cultures and clearly pointed to the powerful role that emotions play in how the human brain maps from [...]]]> Berkeley researchers have mapped out connections between the music we hear and the colors we see. That is, blues music really is blue, and Mozart’s Flute Concerto #1 is bright orange:

“The results were remarkably strong and consistent across individuals and cultures and clearly pointed to the powerful role that emotions play in how the human brain maps from hearing music to seeing colors,” said UC Berkeley vision scientist Stephen Palmer, lead author of a paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Using a 37-color palette, the UC Berkeley study found that people tend to pair faster-paced music in a major key with lighter, more vivid, yellow colors, whereas slower-paced music in a minor key is more likely to be teamed up with darker, grayer, bluer colors.

Scientists from the Group of Philip Walther from the Faculty of Physics, University of Vienna succeeded in prototyping a new and highly resource efficient model of a quantum computer — the boson sampling computer.

…

The huge [...]]]> Science Daily isn’t talking about fiberoptics. They’re looking at the latest breakthroughs that take the “electrons” out of “electronics” by using photons to process information:

Scientists from the Group of Philip Walther from the Faculty of Physics, University of Vienna succeeded in prototyping a new and highly resource efficient model of a quantum computer — the boson sampling computer.

…

The huge advantage of photons — a particular type of bosons — lies in their high mobility.

…

“According to the laws of quantum physics, the photons seem to take all possible paths at the same time. This is known as superposition. Amazingly, one can record the outcome of the computation rather trivially: one measures how many photons exit in which output of the network,” explains Philip Walther from the Faculty of Physics.

Photon computers can go way, way faster than electronic computers because they can literally be in more places at once. Superposition. Instead of yes-no circuits, yes-no-yes and no-neither yes nor no all become potential bits of information.

If you’re going to say goodbye to the International Space Station….

A popular genre of gastropods. Also the name of a boat (a dory, I reckon) and a mythological personage (daughter of Ocean and Tethys, wife of Neree, have no idea what she’s really known for).

Happy Mother’s Day, little nudibranch.

We’ve had The Larousse For You in these [...]]]>
“Genre de mollusques gastropodes, renfermant des animaux nus, de touts les mers.”

A popular genre of gastropods. Also the name of a boat (a dory, I reckon) and a mythological personage (daughter of Ocean and Tethys, wife of Neree, have no idea what she’s really known for).

Happy Mother’s Day, little nudibranch.

We’ve had The Larousse For You in these pages before. I’m sure we will again. Because it’s beautiful.

But below ground, most land plants are connected by fungi called mycorrhizae.

The new study, published in Ecology Letters, is the first to demonstrate these fungi also aid in communication.

Researchers from the University of Aberdeen, the James Hutton Institute and Rothamsted [...]]]> BBC opens the weird world of vegetable communication, revealing the fungal networks plants use to signal one another:

But below ground, most land plants are connected by fungi called mycorrhizae.

The new study, published in Ecology Letters, is the first to demonstrate these fungi also aid in communication.

Researchers from the University of Aberdeen, the James Hutton Institute and Rothamsted Research, all in the UK, devised a clever experiment to isolate the effects of these thread-like networks of mycorrhizae.

The team concerned themselves with aphids, tiny insects that feed on and damage plants.

…

As the researchers allowed single plants in the sets to be infested with aphids, they found that if the infested plant was connected to another by the mycorrhizae, the un-infested plant began to mount its chemical defence.

Researchers at Harvard and MIT teamed up to produce a 3D-printed inchworm robot that is able to aseemble itself. Using shape memory polymers that automatically fold into desired shapes, the remarkable bot transforms itself [...]]]> Inhabitat heralds the end of human dominance on Earth with news of a 3D-printed worm that can build itself out of its own parts:

Researchers at Harvard and MIT teamed up to produce a 3D-printed inchworm robot that is able to aseemble itself. Using shape memory polymers that automatically fold into desired shapes, the remarkable bot transforms itself from a completely flat, two-dimensional object into a walking inchworm-shaped robot with almost no help from human hands.

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The inchworm robot uses shape memory polymers to fold along specific hinges; the only human input needed is to attach the battery and motor.

The final step needed to make the robots entirely self-replicating would be to design them so that they can add the battery and motor themselves. Felton says that the next generation of robots will have come with pre-assembled batteries and motors, enabling the robot to assemble itself and walk without any human intervention.

Next step: a robot that assembles its own children. And after that, we’re all doooooomed.

Across cultures, the research would suggest, male musicians are viewed as promising mating material.

The more recent study, in France, was conducted by a team of researchers led by Nicolas Guéguen of the Universite de Bretagne-Sud, and published in the journal Psychology [...]]]> Science says so. Pacific Standard reports on two studies that find guys with guitars really are more attractive:

Across cultures, the research would suggest, male musicians are viewed as promising mating material.

The more recent study, in France, was conducted by a team of researchers led by Nicolas Guéguen of the Universite de Bretagne-Sud, and published in the journal Psychology of Music. It featured a 20-year-old man “previously evaluated as having a high level of physical attractiveness.”

One sunny Saturday afternoon, in the shopping district of a medium-sized French city, this good-looking guy approached 300 young women (aged approximately 18 to 22). He introduced himself, declared “I think you’re really pretty,” and asked for her phone number so they could arrange to have a drink. For one-third of these brief encounters, he was carrying what was clearly a guitar case. For another third, he was holding a sports bag; for the final third, he was empty-handed.

Of course, he got more waaay numbers with the guitar case. But does science report what he did with those numbers at the conclusion of the experiment?

For the Israeli study, published in the journal Letters on Evolutionary Behavioral Science, 100 single female students at Tel Aviv University and Ben Gurion University received a Facebook profile of a single man. It was accompanied by a friendship request, and the message “Hey, what’s up? I like your photo.” For half the women, the profile was accompanied by a photo of the man in question strumming a guitar. The others saw a similar image of the potential “friend,” except there was no musical instrument in sight.

“While only five of the 50 women responded positively to the friendship request that was sent by the profile without a guitar, 14 of the 50 women (28 percent) responded positively to the friendship request that was sent by the profile with the guitar,” noted the research team led by Sigal Tifferet of the Ruppin Academic Center.

Together, these results provide evidence supporting the sexual selection theory of music—the notion that music grew out of early courtship rituals, and is thus strongly related to mating.

Does that seem far-fetched?

Perhaps the most intriguing explanation was given by researchers Vanessa Sluming and John Manning in a much-discussed paper published in 2000. They provided preliminary evidence of a link between musical prowess and prenatal exposure to testosterone.

[via Dr. Levitin]

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