A 3-D inkjet printer can generate 3-dimensional solids from a wide variety of materials very quickly by applying the material in layers of defined shape and then bonding these layers are with UV radiation. It can create microstructures but 3-D printing technology is still too imprecise for the fine structures of capillary vessels.
Perhaps not for long.
Researchers at Fraunhofer are applying new techniques and materials to come up with artificial blood vessels in their BioRap project. In the future that may mean artificial tissue and maybe even complex organs in future.
I enjoyed a lot reading
a "discussion" prepared by Maury Goodman on the value of "confidence level", discovery thresholds, and what physicists believe or not. If you are a HEP physicist and you want to widen your horizons on the value of statistical claims in experimental results, you are bound to read it. But you might find it thought-provoking and enlightening even if you are a layman, provided you can use three neurons in a row.
A few random excerpts should convince you to read the whole piece:
Manjib: No reasonable high energy physics will believe a two sigma effect.
Does playing music lead to less age-related hearing problems or do people without hearing problems continue to play music?
Hearing studies have shown that trained musicians have highly developed auditory abilities compared to non-musicians but a new study concludes hearing abilities in musicians and non-musicians differs, across the age spectrum from 18 to 91 years of age, and that musicians retain a keener ability to
detect and discriminate acoustic information from the environment.
Sex determination is obviously an important developmental event with great ecological and evolutionary consequences. A large variety of sex determination mechanisms exists, and the evolution of many of these is still relatively poorly understood. Previous work suggests that compensatory adaptations to mutations in involved genes might be relevant in the evolution of these pathways.
The highest paid player in baseball has the last name "Rodriguez" and 3 of the top 10 highest paid players in major league baseball are black - but major league umpires are racist, argues Johan Sulaeman, a financial economist at Southern Methodist University.
They looked at 3.5 million pitches from 2004 to 2008 and found that minority pitchers are so convinced white MLB umpires call strikes more often for white pitchers than for minority pitchers that they throw 'safe' pitches and therefore hurt their own performance.
The Maxwell equations govern light, electricity and magnetism as a trinity. The Big Goal for the next five weeks is to understand my variations on those equations. I want readers to see both the forest and the trees, the planet and the subatomic particles, the math behind the curtain.
Many may fear they don't have the math chops to follow this five week march. The names of the players and their jobs will be explained. There is repetition in this process which may make the steps start to sound familiar. After three weeks, the diligent reader will be rewarded with a deeper understanding of the mathematical intricacies of light, unknowable to poets or priests. My variations are nothing more than that, variations.
Deep Web Interferometry compares curves in trendlines from synchronized multiple data sources. Interferometric analysis of Web metrics data increases the clarity of meaningful data points by isolating events. For example, given two Websites that track a popular sport, one Website may experience a weekly peak in traffic on Monday and the other site may have two smaller peaks on Wednesday and Saturday. However, during a major tournament both sites experience sharp peaks during the games. These game-driven data spikes appear in both sites' trendlines.
One long-standing myth is that any law claiming to be good for the environment is actually good for the environment. Anyone living along levees in the South who watched environmental lawsuits block improvements in the 1990s and then heard the Army Corps of Engineers criticized after Hurricane Katrina for not previously making improvements had to wonder why the media didn't cover one obvious source of blame for the entire region not being more resistant to floods.
No, instead we got treated to Sean Penn carrying a shotgun, apparently to mow down the zombies the media claimed were floating in New Orleans and everyone blamed Pres. George Bush because the tropical storm turned into a hurricane.
A Brief History of Arctic Warming
We all know a high-fat diet is going to be bad for most people, but why?
A study in mice showed that those lacking the gene-expression-controlling enzyme HDAC3 that were fed a high-fat diet experienced rapid thickening of the heart muscle and heart failure. A molecular link between fat intake and an enzyme tasked with regulating gene expression, at least in mice, may be a target for combating heart disease.
The team found that the engineered mice without the enzyme HDAC3 tended to under-express genes important in fat metabolism and energy production. Essentially, when fed a high-fat diet, these animals' hearts cannot generate enough energy and thus cannot pump blood efficiently.
