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Thursday, April 04, 2013

Scientists Use 3D Printer To Make Tissue-Like Material

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/scientists-use-3d-printer-to-make-tissue-like-material-2013-4

3d printer

British scientists have used a custom-made 3D printer to make living tissue-like material that could one day serve medical purposes, according to findings released Thursday.

The material is made up of thousands of connected water droplets, encapsulated within lipid films, that can carry out some of the functions of human cells.

These "droplet networks" could be the building blocks of a new technology used to pass on drugs and, down the road, could even replace damaged tissue, said a statement from Oxford University, where the scientists are based. Their findings were published in Friday's issue of the US journal Science.

Since the so-called droplet networks are completely synthetic, don't have a genome and and don't replicate, they lack the problems linked with other methods of creating artificial tissues — such as those using stem cells.

"We aren't trying to make materials that faithfully resemble tissues but rather structures that can carry out the functions of tissues," Hagan Bayley, a professor at Oxford's Chemistry Department who headed the research, said in a statement.

"The droplets can be printed with protein pores to form pathways through the network that mimic nerves and are able to transmit electrical signals from one side of a network to the other."

According to fellow Oxford scientist Gabriel Villar, "the printed structures could in principle employ much of the biological machinery that enables the sophisticated behavior of living cells and tissues."

Each droplet measures about 50 microns in diameter (0.05 millimeters), or about five times the size of living cells. However, the researchers believe "there is no reason why they could not be made smaller."

This synthetic material can be designed to take on different shapes once printed.

In t his way, a flat shape can be programmed to fold itself into a "hollow ball," the statement said.

As for the 3D printer used, it was custom built at Oxford.

In February, researchers said they had engineered artificial human ears that look and act like the real thing thanks to 3D printing.

Cornell biomedical engineers and Weill Cornell Medical College physicians said the flexible ears grew cartilage over three months to replace the collagen used to mold them.

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Fwd: Phones

ComScore: Apple up to 39 percent US smartphone share in February, Android on top at 52 percent

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/04/comscore-february-2013/

While there's no question that Android is thriving on the global scale, the situation is a little more complicated in the US when looking at ComScore's market share data for February. The platform is still comfortably ahead in the American smartphone sphere at 51.7 percent, but the figure represents the second consecutive dip in recent months, and roughly matches share that we saw back in June. Apple is headed in the opposite direction and appears to be the main beneficiary of Google's drop, albeit at a less-than-breakneck pace: the iPhone continued a gradual climb in February that put it at 38.9 percent. We're not surprised that BlackBerry declined once more in its last month before the Z10 reached the US, although Microsoft will be happy to hear that Windows Phone inched forward again to 3.2 percent.

Among individual smartphone makers, it's more of a familiar story. Apple's platform control gave it the lead at 38.9 percent, while Samsung at 21.3 percent was hovering roughly around the same share it had in January. As for everyone else? It's a bit ugly, to be honest. HTC, Motorola and LG all lost share in February, leaving the US ! firmly i n a two-horse race. That said, we wouldn't be surprised if the market plays a different tune around April and May: with 2013 Android flagships like the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S 4 just around the corner, there's room for a potential upset.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, HTC, Google, LG, Blackberry

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Source: ComScore

The Major Mobile Announcement Facebook Just Made Explained In A Single Graphic

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-major-mobile-announcement-facebook-just-made-explained-in-a-single-graphic-2013-4

Mark Zuckerberg swore his team wasn't making a Facebook phone. But today, he greeted a room full of press in Menlo Park with a different message.

"Today we're finally going to talk about that Facebook phone," the social network's CEO said.

But by "Facebook phone," Zuckerberg doesn't mean actual hardware. Instead his team created Home, a concept that changes the "soul of the phone," the home screen.

"What would it feel like if our phones were designed around people, not apps?" Zuckerberg asked the audience.

"We're not building a phone. We're not building a new MP3 player. And we're not building a new internet communication device," Zuckerberg said.

Instead, Facebook Home appears the moment you turn on your phone or wake it up from stand-by mode (Zuckerberg says people turn on their phones an average of 100 times per day).

Facebook Home doesn't display the typical static background photo. It shows story after story posted by friends to Facebook or Instagram in real-time. It displays status updates, photos, and other open graph stories with large images.

Below is a graphic that simply explains what Facebook Home is. It's an integration on top of Android's Operating System but beneath the app icon layer we're all used to seeing on our smart phones.

Facebook has built the first home screen that comes to life, and updates in real time.

Facebook Android Layer