Creating Real Bones Using 3D Printing and Other Future Tech

It’s Friday the 13^th (#FunFriday)! And we’re back with the latest science and technology news for the day. Enjoy today’s digest.

Creating Real Bones Using 3D Printing

Bone and joint implant surgeries, although one of the most successful in the world in terms of patient recovery, is not a permanent solution. Normal implants have a life of 10-20 years at the most. Plus, we didn’t include the physical pain and post-surgery trauma experienced by a patient because the impact is not tailored to fit the patient’s body type.

A team from the University of Toronto has created a 3D printer that prints bone-like structures using the same mineral found in real bones (70% of it!) - Calcium polyphosphate. The surface of the implant will allow tissues & muscles to grow into it, eventually, being replace by real tissue from the patient’s body.

“It’s a little short of Star Trek where you zap a person, and they’re fixed, but it’s along the same lines. It is nice to think of replacing joints and getting rid of all these metals. But in the short term, we are looking at substituting small regions of bone. If we’re successful, you can imagine trying to re-generate a larger region of a joint,” says Robert Pillar, Professor Emeritus at Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering at the University, who is an expert in the field of additive manufacturing.

Manipulating and Deleting Memories Using Science

Everyone has painful memories we’d rather erase – the time your crush turns down a date or the embarrassing facebook post that should have never happened. Wouldn’t it be awesome to erase them out of our memories for good?

Well, researchers from the Stony Brook University in New York have found a way to manipulate and even erase memories by making changes in cholinergic neurons in the brain.

“We essentially created fearless mice by manipulating acetylcholine circuits in the brain. The findings provide the basis for research examining novel approaches to reverse post-traumatic stress disorder,” says Dr. Lorna Role, Professor & Chairman of the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, “The long-term goal of our research is that we would like to find ways – potentially independent of drug administration – to enhance or diminish the strength of specific memories, the good ones, and diminish the bad ones.”

Germany Actually Paid People to Use Electricity

We recently reported that Germany ran on 95% renewable energy for a day. Now, it is learnt that the country paid to sell power to the country’s power grid for a few hours.

“The system is still too rigid for power suppliers and consumers to respond quickly to price signals. Though gas power plants were taken offline, nuclear and coal plants can’t be quickly shut down, so they went on running and had to pay to sell power into the grid for several hours, while industrial customers such as refineries and foundries earned money by consuming electricity.”

Read more at www.bit.ly/q3newsblog. Q3 Technologies is a large diversified technology company which develops custom software products for the healthcare industry including cloud applications, enterprise applications across all platforms and Rich Internet Applications (RIA).