It may seem like a stretch to envision a 3D printer in every home. However, a Michigan Technological University researcher is predicting that personal manufacturing, like personal computing before it, is about to enter the mainstream in a big way.

“For the average American consumer, 3D printing is ready for showtime,” said Associate Professor Joshua Pearce.

3D printers deposit multiple layers of plastic or other materials to make almost anything, from toys to tools to kitchen gadgets. Free designs that direct the printers are available by the tens of thousands on Web sites like Thingiverse. Visitors can download designs to make their own products using open-source 3D printers, like the RepRap, which someone can build from printed parts, or those that come in a box ready to print, from companies like Type-A Machines.

3D printers have been the purview of a relative few aficionados, but that is changing fast, Pearce said. The reason is financial: the typical family can already save a great deal of money by making things with a 3D printer instead of buying them off the shelf.

Pearce drew that conclusion after conducting a lifecycle economic analysis on 3D printing in an average American household.

In the study, Pearce and his team chose 20 common household items listed on Thingiverse. Then they used Google Shopping to determine the maximum and minimum cost of buying those 20 items online, shipping charges not included.

Next, they calculated the cost of making them with 3D printers. The conclusion: it would cost the typical consumer from $312 to $1,944 to buy those 20 things compared to $18 to make them in a weekend.

Open-source 3D printers for home use have price tags ranging from about $350 to $2,000. Making the very conservative assumption a family would only make 20 items a year, Pearce’s group calculated that the printers would pay for themselves quickly, in a few months to a few years.

The group chose relatively inexpensive items for their study: cellphone accessories, a garlic press, a showerhead, a spoon holder, and the like. 3D printers can save consumers even more money on high-end items like customized orthotics and photographic equipment.

3D printing isn’t quite as simple as 2D printing a document from a home computer—yet. “But you don’t need to be an engineer or a professional technician to set up a 3D printer,” Pearce said. “Some can be set up in under half an hour, and even the RepRap can be built in a weekend by a reasonably handy do-it-yourselfer.”

It’s not just about the money. 3D printing may herald a new world that offers consumers many more choices as everything can be customized. “With the exponential growth of free designs and expansion of 3D printing, we are creating enormous potential wealth for everyone.” said Pearce.

Before 3D printers become as ubiquitous as cellphones, they could form the basis of small-scale manufacturing concerns and have huge potential both here and for developing countries, where access to many products is limited.

“Say you are in the camping supply business and you don’t want to keep glow-in-the-dark tent stakes in stock,” Pearce said. “Just keep glow-in-the-dark plastic on hand, and if somebody needs those tent stakes, you can print them.”

“It would be a different kind of capitalism, where you don’t need a lot of money to create wealth for yourself or even start a business,” Pearce said.

The study is described in the article “Life-Cycle Economic Analysis of Distributed Manufacturing with Open-Source 3D Printers,” to be published in the journal Mechatronics


Heart surgeons obtain
3D models before operating


3D printers are slowly entering everyday life and they are increasingly being used in medicine. Doctors at Washington's Children's National Medical Center say the life-size tri-dimensional prints of their patients' hearts helps them in planning and executing surgeries.

Magnetic resonance imaging, computer tomography and ultrasound already give pretty good images of patients' internal organs, but doctors at the Children's National Medical Center say nothing beats holding a life-size model of a heart in your hand prior to the surgery. They can study it, plan the procedure and even practice the access to the damaged area.

Pediatric cardiologist Laura Olivieri says many of their young patients were born with hearts that did not form as they should have, but surgeons can correct that.

"Seeing the heart defect in three dimensions can really help the interventionist or the surgeon plan the best procedure," she said.

The hospital acquired the $250,000 printer about 18 months ago, and the team is still expanding and finding new areas to print.

The procedure always starts with taking a set of three-dimensional images with magnetic resonance imager, computer tomography scanner and ultrasound machine. Highly trained pediatric cardiologists manipulate those images and separate the organ from the noise in the picture. In order to save time in printing, they sometimes also cut away parts of the image irrelevant to the planned procedure.

"It takes us now about an average I would say about two hours of manual work on the computer to manipulate the data in to generate the 3D model and the printer takes about, for a full size heart like this, it takes about 12 hours," said mechanical engineer Alex Krieger, the principal investigator for pediatric surgical innovation at the Children's National Medical Center. "A smaller heart maybe five, six hours."

Krieger says in one instance his team printed a model of the heart of a patient with stenosis, or narrowing of the passage between two heart chambers. The interventional cardiologist wanted to see exactly what kind of stent he should use, the size and length of it, and also the access path.

"So this model allowed him to really look at that in depth and plan, and prepare for the procedure better," he said.

The machine prints by spraying layers of plastic, one on top of the other, while the ultraviolet light immediately cures it before the next layer is sprayed. Krieger says the printer can be loaded with two different materials. Precise control of their ratio allows the printed model to feel very natural, with both hard and soft tissues.

Cardiologist Olivieri says doctors still have to learn a lot about the new procedure.

"It's a brand new field. These have only been possible for a very little amount of time and I don't think we even know the full capability of what we're going to be . . . what they're going to be used for," she said. "We're kind of talking about a technology that went going from feasible to kind of usable and we're right in that middle ground right now."

There is also hope that someday hospitals will be able to print even replacement parts for damaged organs.

"There's eventually some organ printing, you know, that's the ultimate goal, but I think there are a few steps between that we will reach in the next few years, on the way to full organ printing that I'm very excited about," said Krieger.


Cell phones create sign
of possible cancer precursor


Scientists have long been worried about the possible harmful effects of regular cellular phone use, but so far no study has managed to produce clear results. Currently, cell phones are classified as carcinogenic category 2b — potentially carcinogenic to humans — by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. A new Tel Aviv University study, though, may bring bad news.

To further explore the relationship between cancer rates and cell phone use, Yaniv Hamzany of Tel Aviv University looked for clues in the saliva of cell phone users. Since the cell phone is placed close to the salivary gland when in use, he and his fellow researchers, including departmental colleagues hypothesized that salivary content could reveal whether there was a connection to developing cancer.

Comparing heavy mobile phone users to non-users, they found that the saliva of heavy users showed indications of higher oxidative stress — a process that damages all aspects of a human cell, including DNA — through the development of toxic peroxide and free radicals. More importantly, it is considered a major risk factor for cancer.

The findings have been reported in the journal Antioxidants and Redox Signaling.

For the study, the researchers examined the saliva content of 20 heavy-user patients, defined as speaking on their phones for a minimum of eight hours a month. Most participants speak much more, Hamzany says, as much as 30 to 40 hours a month. Their salivary content was compared to that of a control group, which consisted of deaf patients who either do not use a cell phone, or use the device exclusively for sending text messages and other non-verbal functions.

Compared to the control group, the heavy cell phone users had a significant increase in all salivary oxidative stress measurements studied.

"This suggests that there is considerable oxidative stress on the tissue and glands which are close to the cell phone when in use," he says. The damage caused by oxidative stress is linked to cellular and genetic mutations which cause the development of tumors.

This field of research reflects longstanding concerns about the impact of cell phone use, specifically the effects of radiofrequency non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation on human tissue located close to the ear, say the researchers. And although these results don't uncover a conclusive cause and effect relationship between cellular phone use and cancer, they add to the building evidence that cell phone use may be harmful in the long term, and point to a new direction for further research.

One potential avenue of future research would be to analyze a person's saliva prior to exposure to a cell phone, and then again after several intense minutes of exposure. This will allow researchers to see if there is an immediate response, such as a rise in molecules that indicate oxidative stress, Hamzany said.


Manning guilty of espionage
but not of aiding the enemy


A military judge in Maryland has found Army Pvt. Bradley Manning guilty of espionage but not aiding the enemy by leaking hundreds of thousands of documents to the anti-secrecy Web site WikiLeaks. Manning could now get a life sentence, and the case sets a precedent on how the U.S. government is willing to deal with intelligence leaks in the Internet era. 

Some of the leaked files were found in the hideout of Osama bin Laden.

Manning earlier pleaded guilty to what is being called the largest leak of secret U.S. documents in history:  700,000 files sent to WikiLeaks while he was deployed in Iraq.  They included this video of a U.S. helicopter crew attacking civilians in Baghdad.

Those disclosures led civil libertarians to rally behind the 25-year-old intelligence analyst. On the morning of the verdict, as they did throughout the case, his supporters demonstrated outside Fort Meade.

“He represents the American desire for freedom of information, for democracy, where we hold our leaders accountable, for direct governance by the people," said Manning supporter Emma Cape.

But to the U.S. government, he's a traitor who put the lives of U.S. troops and U.S. national interests in danger. 

Jeffrey Gordon is a former spokesman for the U.S. Department of Defense.

“We're in a 21st century conflict and a big part of that conflict is a battle of ideas.  So if you can embarrass the United States, if you can make them look bad in the eyes of the world, that's actually part of war.  It's asymmetric war.  I think Bradley was a frontline warrior against his own country," he said.

The defense sought to portray Manning as a young, naive, and well-meaning humanist.  Since his arrest three years ago, details have emerged of emotional problems and resentment against his own government that observers say raise questions about why the military put him in a sensitive position.  Larry Korb is a former U.S. assistant secretary of defense.

“Before he deployed to Iraq, his commanding officer said, 'I don't know if we should deploy this guy. He's got all kinds of mental problems, but we're desperate,' so they put him over there.  So basically, what happens if you take someone who doesn't belong there, you put them into a situation, you're asking for trouble," he said.

Korb and Manning's supporters believe the government went too far in charging Manning with aiding the enemy and in the end, the judge ruled the evidence did not support it.  But the verdict also shows the government will convict those who leak information to expose alleged wrongdoing.

The Manning case was tried at Fort Meade, in the shadow of the National Security Agency where Edward Snowden was a contractor.  He recently leaked secret documents on government surveillance of private citizens.

Manning's sentencing phase could take weeks, and the judge will decide if he'll spend the rest of his life in prison.


Obama promotes new plan
for middle class employment


U.S. President Barack Obama is proposing a compromise to help break a deadlock with opposition Republicans over his economic plans.

Tuesday the president went to a giant product distribution center for retailer Amazon.com in the southern city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, to announce his latest proposed grand bargain on the U.S. economy.

"So today, I came here to offer a framework that might help break through some of the political logjam in Washington, try to get Congress to start moving on some of these proven ideas," he said.

Obama offered to cut corporate tax rates in exchange for more spending on programs designed to create jobs for the middle class.

"If folks in Washington really want a grand bargain, how about a grand bargain for middle class jobs?" he asked. "How about a grand bargain for middle class jobs?"

White House officials have said the president’s proposal will be the first of a series of new economic ideas he will advance in the next few months. He said serious people in both parties should accept this deal.

"I am willing to work with Republicans on reforming our corporate tax code, as long as we use the money from transitioning to a simpler tax system for a significant investment in creating middle class jobs," he said. "That's the deal."

Republican lawmakers were quick to dismiss the ideas. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Obama’s initiative is nothing new and makes no concessions to Republican demands.

"It is just a further-left version of a widely-panned plan he already proposed two years ago, this time with extra goodies for tax-and-spend liberals."

Both the president and Republicans have supported simplifying corporate tax rates. But Republicans disagree with the Obama plan to reform corporate tax policy separately from individual tax rates.

The president wants the revenue generated by the tax changes to be spent on enhancing infrastructure, manufacturing and education.

Tuesday’s appearance in Tennessee was Obama’s fifth trip in seven days to promote his economic plans. With Washington facing budget deadlines in the coming months, the president is trying to build public support for his economic initiatives.

In Washington, policy makers at the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve, are meeting. They are considering when they might begin to trim their $85-billion-a-month purchase of securities they have used to pump more money into the U.S. economy, the world's largest. They plan to announce any policy changes today.


Project creates parallel text
of many vanishing languages


There are about 7,000 languages in the world, and half of them could disappear by the end of the century. An effort called the Rosetta Project, however, is preserving a key to understanding them for future generations.

A dozen summer interns are working with the Rosetta Project and professional linguists to expand a digital record of endangered languages. It's inspired by the Rosetta Stone, which contained an ancient inscription in Greek and two different Egyptian writing systems providing scholars with the first key to understand Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Started by a nonprofit group called the Long Now Foundation, the project is creating an online archive and is also preserving parallel texts on an optical disc, a kind of Rosetta Stone for linguists in the future. The small hand-held disc is etched with tiny print and plated with nickel. There are 13,000 pages, sampling 1,500 languages in microscopic text, according to the foundation's Alexander Rose.

“A single parallel text, a description, a map of where it's from, these types of things that just give you enough that you can compare to another language that you know or have studied or scholars have figured out, you can start pulling parallels between the two and reconstruct the basics of a language,” said Rose.

A recent demonstration of endangered languages sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington featured the Hawaiian language and other vanishing tongues, including Tuvan, which can still be heard in southern Siberia.

Many languages like this are spoken by small groups, said Rosetta project director Laura Welcher.

“They're spoken by thousands of people or even smaller-sized groups, and a lot of those languages are in remote parts of the world. They haven't been well documented," she said.

Linguists at universities and research institutes are in a race against time to record these languages before they die out.

Ms. Welcher said that linguists and students at the Rosetta Project are doing their part.

“The idea is to purposely create a massively parallel linguistic collection that is broadly representative of all of our human languages, that can be that kind of secret decoder ring for human languages and what we leave for the future,” she said.


Chinese convert urine
into way to grow teeth


Chinese scientists claim they have been able to generate new teeth from a strange source: human urine.

In a study published in the Cell Regeneration Journal, researchers from the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health say they were able to create induced pluripotent stem cells from cells in human urine and coax them into becoming different cell types that mimic tooth components such as enamel, dentin, cementum and pulp.

Stem cells have shown great promise because of their ability to be made into many types of cells including heart cells and even neurons.

After culturing the cells, they were mixed with mouse cells and transplanted into the mice’s jawbones. In three weeks tooth-like structures were recovered, but with only a 30 percent success rate.

While the experiment may offer hope for those who have lost teeth due to decay or injury, the teeth generated in the process were only about one-third as hard as human teeth.

Harvesting stem cells from urine avoids the controversy of using human embryonic stem cells, but Chris Mason, a stem cell scientist at University College London, said that urine does not make for a good source of stem cells and that it is prone to infection.

"You just wouldn't do it in this way,” he said.


Rising seas and damage
present puzzle of priorities


The devastation caused by Superstorm Sandy last year along the northeastern coastline of the United States has convinced many skeptics that global warming and rising sea levels are now a real and present danger. The state of New Jersey is spending millions of dollars to build up sea walls and sand dunes to protect popular beaches but, in some poor coastal communities people are being urged to flee their homes and move inland.

William Bowen is the oldest living resident of Money Island in New Jersey. He remembers a time when there was a wide beach in front of his home.

Now workers are helping him replace the small sand embankment that was washed away by Hurricane Sandy last year.  He says neither the storm damage nor the encroaching sea will make him leave his home.  

 “I am here to stay, okay?  I love it here. This is my roots," he said. "I have some problems with being here at my age. I’m 85. And where am I going to go?”

Money Island is not an island. It's a small village of modest homes and trailers in the wetlands of southern New Jersey where the Delaware River meets the Atlantic Ocean. 

Mayor Robert Campbell says ever since Hurricane Sandy there seems to be a concerted effort by regulatory agencies to force residents to move away from the coastline. Houses located in flood zones must be elevated. He says the county is imposing stricter sewage and septic standards, forcing residents to spend thousands of dollars to upgrade their systems.

“I don’t know what their agenda is, but they are using all the regulatory powers that they have to scare and intimidate people along the bay and make them want to sell out to programs like Blue Acres,” he said.

Blue Acres is state program to buy houses in floods zones.  Renee Brecht, who is with the environmental organization The American Littoral Society, has been urging many in Money Island to move.  She's against governments spending millions of dollars to protect a small number of houses from rising sea levels. 

“I mean you can put up big sea walls and so forth but those things a lot of times will not only cost an enormous amount of money for taxpayers but they also will only be a short term solution," she said. "So 20, 30 years down the road you’re back in the same position.”

Ms. Brecht says she would like to make much of the bay area a natural preserve like the Nature Conservancy’s restoration project in nearby South Cape May.

That project received some government funding and turned 86 hectares of abandoned homes into a wildlife habitat that protects the community from storms like Sandy.

“The dune actually held which was wonderful and protected the local town from the storm water coming in, the storm surge,” said Adrianna Zito Livingston, a project coordinator with the Nature Conservancy.

She says it will cost $35 million to maintain the Cape May preserve over the next 50 years.


Nasal spray can deliver
snakebite anti-venom


Venomous snakes kill as many as 125,000 people each year.  Snakebite is a leading cause of accidental death in the developing world, especially among otherwise healthy young people.  Most die before they can reach a hospital, largely because there is no easy way to treat a snakebite in the field.  Even if the snake is identified and an anti-venom exists, the medicine is expensive, and requires refrigeration and significant expertise to administer.

Matt Lewin, director of the Center for Exploration and Travel Health at the California Academy of Sciences, led an effort to find an easier way to treat snakebites where they occur.  His team focused on common drugs that can reverse the deadly paralysis caused by a snake's neurotoxins.  Those drugs are typically given intravenously, an approach that is difficult outside of a hospital.  So Lewin put them into a nasal spray.

In an experiment in California and an actual treatment in India earlier this year, the nasal spray reversed paralysis within a half hour.

Lewin is now conducting studies to determine the best methods and drug combinations to address this neglected tropical menace.