Shields Up! Lay In A Course For Mars

No one can deny that Gene Roddenberry was a futurist, even if that 

wasn’t his profession. Futurists like Michio Kaku emulate

 the ideas that Roddenberry put forth in an entertainment venue but 
gave people so much to think about and shoot for.

Gene Roddenberry wasn’t a scientist. He took only a few college courses, and most of those were writing classes. He was an accomplished pilot, so he knew about lift and some basic physics, but his only civilian job outside of writing was as a Los Angeles police officer.

His first TV scripts in LA reflected this line of work; he wrote for TV shows called The Lieutenant, Have Gun - Will Travel, and Highway Patrol. So where did all that sciencey technology come from?

Roddenberry was definitely a futurist. This series of posts has shown, if nothing else, just how savvy he was in creating fictional technologies that had an uncanny ability to become science realities. But, for the life of me, where did he come up with gravitons – subatomic particles that assign gravity to matter? He was walking a beat in LA in the 1960's. That sounds like a lot more than just a convenient story-telling convention.

Gravitons played a role in several of the Star Trek technologies, including today’s topic - deflector shields, or just “shields.” There are a couple of different explanations as to how the shields on the USS Enterprise worked, but the earlier and more accepted explanation in the Star Trek cannon is that the ship had emitters that sent out graviton fields.

Star Trek proposed two kinds of shields, one was large and ellipsoid. It 
protected a large area besides just the ship. The second was contoured 
and was held just meters outside the hull. The shields also had

problems – you could fire through them unless you matched their 
frequency and you couldn’t transport through them.

The gravity field generated around the ship by the emitters protected the it by warping space-time and deflecting matter/energy away from the hull. The force field wasn’t based solely on electromagnetic energy, but it must have played a role, since Geordi, Mr. Scott, and Spock were constantly suggesting to alter the shield frequencies.

The idea of an electromagnetic shield is much closer to our reality at present, since we haven’t yet identified a graviton particle. Electromagnetism was a great choice for Roddenberry, since we all have experience with magnetic fields (two similar poles on magnets will repel each other). Electrical fields likewise repel similar charges. This sounds like a force field we could believe in for the defense of a ship.

Humans on Earth in 2015 don’t have a real need for shields geared to interstellar battle – we haven’t blundered into space wars yet. But we do have a very pressing need for deflector shields in space. And we’re coming close to achieving them.

NASA, the ESA, and many other space programs are taking aim at Mars. We have sent probes, rovers, and satellites; now it’s time for humans to make the trip. But this brings big problems along with the big promise. Space is full of cosmic rays, high-energy electrons, high-speed protons and even heavier atoms. They can all kill you over time or fry your equipment.

Radiation in space will make you sick at the least, and don’t underestimate the problem of being sick in space – think about vomiting in a space suit. But it can also damage DNA and most certainly lead to infertility, given enough time and exposure.

All this damage could occur inside the space ship on a long journey to Mars or beyond, not just on space walks. Most high-energy radiation will pass through the hull of a spacecraft and do damage to the occupants. We need protective shields to keep out the bad particles and waves.

Six months on ISS doesn’t give an astronaut anywhere near the 
radiation exposure that six months on Mars, or going to and from

Mars, would. The reason is that the ISS is still within the Earth’s 
magnetosphere, so it’s protected from most of the dangerous

radiation. To go to Mars, we’ll have to take

our own shield along.

Star Trek: Insurrection showed us an example of using a force field to protect the crew. When Picard and mates were observing Ba’ku from a cloaked duckblind, they used a “chromodynamic shield” to deflect or block the metaphasic radiation that inundated the planet. A force field protected the crew, although it was protecting them from rays that would stop their aging and did in fact restore Geordi’s eyesight for a while.

We don’t have a chromodynamic shield, so we've been looking to more conventional mechanisms of shielding. We could always make the walls of a long distance spacecraft thicker. Concrete would work pretty well, if it was dense and about 2 ft thick. A foot or so of aluminum might do just as well. But these are very heavy. Heavy things don’t make for good space gear.

Interestingly, water is a great absorber of radiation. We could put it between the walls of a spacecraft and it could do a pretty good job of protecting the crew and the electronics.  Hydrogen gas might work as well; notice how water is just hydrogen and oxygen. The sleeping quarters on the ISS are lined with impregnated polyethylene as an additional radiation shield.

But what might work best? – human waste. A privately funded mission to Mars led by Dennis Tito plans to use the astronaut's own excrement as a radiation shield by packing it between the walls of the spacecraft. Organic molecules and water block radiation very nicely, and they’ll be producing more shielding every day. It’s a strange thought that a Mars mission might be jeopardized by constipation.

Dennis Tito is a billionaire investment manager, but first he 

was an engineer. He was the first person to purchase a ride 

into space (Russian rocket) and now he wants to fly 

people around Mars – not to Mars - just a flyby in 2018 

or so. The planets will be aligned to give a 501 day round 

trip then. He wants to use their waste as radiation shielding.

Thank goodness science has kept looking for radiation shields. It's quite the boon that we have natural examples to learn from. The ionosphere of Earth is a great deflector. It’s the reason short wave radio operators can send weak signals very, very far. They bounce off the bottom layers of the ionosphere and back down to Earth, called skywave or skipping. The lower the angle on the way up, the far they will be over the horizon when they bounce back down.

The ionsophere (80-1000 km altitude) is part of the atmosphere of Earth that protects us from cosmic radiation. It consists of ionized air molecules; the ionization comes from the Sun’s energy. What's an ionized gas called?  – plasma.

So we have a plasma shield around Earth – remember this as it will come up again. The magnetosphere (a 40,000 nanoTesla field goes out hundreds of thousands of km) is produced by the spinning of the Earth’s metallic outer core. It participates in the protection because the ions of plasma in the ionsophere are charged, and electrical charges in a magnetic field produce an electric field.

The magnetosphere, in coordination with the

plasmasphere, shunts most of the electrons of

the solar wind and the high energy protons

around the Earth. Where the magnetic lines

come out of the Earth at the poles, you have the

polar cusps. Some radiation can get in there –

we see them as the auroras.

A new study shows that the plasma interacts with the magnetic field and it becomes more important when there are solar storms that greatly increase the energy of the radiation coming at earth. The plasmasphere, a portion outside the ionosphere, reacts to greater energies coming from the Sun and will plume out to be more protective. 

All this protection comes from the fact that ions in plasma are charged, and the magnetic field is charged – and like charges repel. So the high speed electrons of the solar wind and the protons and heavy ions of cosmic radiation that come close to Earth are repelled by the magnetosphere, the plasma sphere, and most importantly by the electric field produced by the interaction between the plasma and the magnetic field. The vast majority of charged particles and waves are swept around Earth and merge again safely behind us. Now that’s a force field.

Several research groups have begun to think about how this could be mimicked on a small scale to protect astronauts in space. A 2005 project from NASA contemplated using vectran balloons covered in gold that could be charged to positive or negative values. Placed above a moon base and electrified, the balloons might create a magnetic bubble that would shunt radiation away and produce a protected cavity underneath.

No one has thought more about producing a plasma shield than Dr. Ruth Bamford of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in England. Since 2008 she has been working on producing mini-magnetospheres that would buffer the small amount of plasma in space; using a magnetic field to hold it in place and build up its density. Together, they would produce an electric field just like the Earth does, and this would shunt radiation and particles away from the protected object.

On the left is the Reiner Gamma lunar swirl. On the right is the 

Reiner crater – no, not for Carl Reiner. We used to think 

the swirls (three on the moon) were dead areas, no magnetic 

field, no water, no nothing. Now we see they are the protected 

areas and are the most interesting places on the Moon.

NASA has also thought about this, using a plasma cloud (probably made from hydrogen gas) on the Sun side of a spacecraft, held in place by a superconducting wire mesh. Unfortunately, superconductors only work to produce a magnetic or electric field if below their transition temperature. And even for the best of materials (YBCO and BSCCO) this is somewhere in the range of -265˚F. If the mesh was exposed to the Sun in space, it would be several hundred degrees at least. Better keep thinking.

A discovery in 2013-2014 brought the thinkers back to Dr. Bamford's mini-magnetospheres. It was discovered that small parts of the moon’s surface are protected from radiation. It turns out that these areas produce weak magnetic fields (few hundred nanaoTesla), and those fields are holding the thin plasma of space in place above them. The field concentrates the plasma, and together they produce a protective electric field to deflect particles and keep the surface of the moon at those spots from being irradiated. Irradiation turns the surface dark, while these “lunar swirls” remain light colored.

This is not a cartoon. The pinkish gas is plasma

and on top of the middle cylinder is a magnet. The

magnetic field deflects the plasma and some builds

up in density on the leading edge. This leading edge

and the magnetic field form an electric field that

would shunt more particles. The dark area around

the magnet is a protected cavity, no cosmic radiation

gets to that point. It’s a real-life deflector shield.

Bamford’s discovery of the mechanisms behind the swirls made her idea of a mini-magnetosphere plasma shield more attractive, since the protective magnetic forces on the moon are much weaker than previously estimates had thought necessary. Therefore, a smaller (lighter, less energy consuming) superconducting coil could be used to create a magnetic field and hold a thin layer of plasma in a bubble around a spacecraft. Bamford’s group has built such a force field in their lab and predicts that a 1.5 ton apparatus could do the job in space!

But wait, there’s more. A plasma shield could also protect a ship from high energy weapons. Plasma has the capability to absorb photons of energy like from lasers or phasers!!! And since plasma has to be at a very high temperature to keep the electrons from re-associating with the nuclei, being in space would help since there would be no air to carry the heat away from the plasma. It would stay hot and maintain itself. In fact, incoming weapons fire would reinforce the plasma state by adding energy.

Next week – we need to talk more about shields. We’re building some pretty cool ones on Earth right now. And some using plasma are already here.

Contributed by Mark E. Lasbury, MS, MSEd, PhD

As Many Exceptions As Rules

Bamford, R., Kellett, B., Bradford, J., Todd, T., Benton, M., Stafford-Allen, R., Alves, E., Silva, L., Collingwood, C., Crawford, I., & Bingham, R. (2014). An exploration of the effectiveness of artificial mini-magnetospheres as a potential solar storm shelter for long term human space missions Acta Astronautica, 105 (2), 385-394 DOI: 10.1016/j.actaastro.2014.10.012

Bamford, R., Gibson, K., Thornton, A., Bradford, J., Bingham, R., Gargate, L., Silva, L., Fonseca, R., Hapgood, M., Norberg, C., Todd, T., & Stamper, R. (2008). The interaction of a flowing plasma with a dipole magnetic field: measurements and modelling of a diamagnetic cavity relevant to spacecraft protection Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, 50 (12) DOI: 10.1088/0741-3335/50/12/124025

Walsh, B., Foster, J., Erickson, P., & Sibeck, D. (2014). Simultaneous Ground- and Space-Based Observations of the Plasmaspheric Plume and Reconnection Science, 343 (6175), 1122-1125 DOI: 10.1126/science.1247212

I’ll Beam Right Over

The latest iteration of Star Trek movies have a

pretty cool transporter signature. The original

was kind of goofy with speckles and blue light.

But the question remains, what about

teletransporting requires the sounds effects?

One of the most iconic pieces of technology from Star Trek was actually a compromise. It was also the reason why the third episode made was shown first. Originally, Gene Roddenberry wanted the Enterprise, or a shuttle craft, to land on a planet’s surface each time there was the need for an away team.

But that was a budget buster (sets, models, etc.). They had to think of a cheaper way of getting crew members down to a planet and back the ship. Voila – the transporter. How did it change the order of the first season? The third episode (The Man Trap) began with Kirk and cohorts transporting down to the planet surface. By showing this first, they didn’t have to go to the time and effort of explaining the transporter – you just saw just what it was for and how it worked.

Star Trek’s transporter moved stuff, animate or inanimate, from one place to another, without them every being located anywhere between the two points. The matter was converted to energy and this was moved at the speed of light (or similar) to the destination. Once there, the matter was reassembled into the object again.

Well…. That’s one way it might have worked. It might also be that the information about the object was transmitted from one place to the destination, and the object was built from atoms at that location. This second possibility is kind of like faxing –

Faxing has been around for years, it got its start with the work of Captain Richard Howland Ranger (from Indianapolis, by the way) transmitting pictures via telegraph in 1924. The picture was one place, and then it was reproduced in another place. If you destroyed the first, then that would be like a Star Trek transporter. But there are problems to solve before we get to the destruction issue.

Triangulation works in many systems. On the left

is how the police can locate a cell phone by the

cell towers that bounce the signal. With just two,

the overlap is two places, , but the third eliminates

one of the two possibilities. It’s the same with GPS.

Three satellites are need to locate a person or thing

on the face of the Earth.

The first question in transporting a person to a specific location is honing in on that location. You need a way to define a single point in space. Here we have made great strides. It’s called the global positioning satellite (GPS) system.

GPS uses a system of 30 satellites in geosynchronous orbit around the Earth. Any one point on the planet can be located using a GPS locator at that point. It will triangulate the distance to each of three of the satellites and this will define the point where the locator is. A signal is sent from the locator to the satellites and the time is measured for the signal to return. Time and speed are used to calculate distance.

In space, defining a certain point would take more than 30 satellites - try millions. Untenable at best, impossible more likely - a different method is needed. Each solar system could have a different coordinate system, using the central star as the 0,0,0 point. Then any point at a given time could be defined by directions x, and y, and a distance z from the 0,0,0 point.

Going from solar system to solar system will be even harder, so the science of astrometry has developed things like the International Celestial Reference System (ICRS). It's not easy to explain, but suffice it to say our Star Trek transporter officer will have to be pretty darn good at math.

In the first two movies about flies and transporters,

the result was a switching of parts. In the 1986 film

with Jeff Goldblum, the fly and the scientist were

merged into one being. In Star Trek, they overcame

this problem with pattern separators to keep

peoples’ information separate and biofilters to

destroy infections agents and such.

Now that you have a way to beam someone to infinity and beyond, how do you bring them back? Star Trek used a pattern lock – they tracked those they transported so that they would have their position at all time. This way, they could beam them back from wherever they were; they didn’t have to go back to the same spot at which they arrived.

Now we come to the crux of the transporting problem. Can you send an object from one place to another without it ever being anywhere in between? It’s not like sending something by microwave pulse, by optical cable and light pulse, or even by radio wave. You can follow those pulses of information from one place to another or even intercept them at some point along the way.

For teletransporting, the object needs to be here…. and then be there. Can we do that? Yes and not yet. Yes for information and energy, not yet for matter. What we have been able to send is information about certain electrons, photons of light, or atoms. The information is their quantum states (like in relativity and quantum mechanics). Quantum states define the unique characteristics of a particle in terms of its energy.

Quantum entanglement is indeed spooky. When

two particles come near one another, they become

linked. Because two particles CANNOT have the

same quantum numbers, one will always have the

opposite values of the other for each characteristic.

Then, no matter how far apart, when one switches,

so will the other.

Sending the information to another place allows the scientists to then create that same quantum state for a photon, etc. at a different point in space. In reality, you just sent that particle (and all its information) to a different place. What makes this possible? Quantum entanglement – what Einstein called spooky action at a distance.

If one particle ever has a relationship (trades energy or even bumps into) another particle, their quantum states are linked (entangled) forever. Change the states of one, and the states of the other will automatically changes as well. This occurs even if they are very far from one another at a later time. This is how information and energy of the particles can be sent from one place to another, but never exist in between.

Many recent papers have shown the progress we have made in sending quantum information and energy from place to place. A recent distance record was set for sending a photon of light – 143 km. This is important because that's about the distance from Earth to low flying satellites, so beaming quantum information could help in communications. Also, improvements have been made in amplifying the signal without losing entanglement.

The principal reason for all this research is to develop quantum computing not a transporter. Regular computing uses 1’s and 0’s; using quantum information would allow for a bit being a 1 and 0 at the same time! With quantum computing you could solve huge mathematical problems where variables could be in multiple states, or do millions of problems all at once, using a small number of qubits (quantum bits). In fact, a computer of just thirty qubits would have the same processing power of a 10 teraflop (trillions of operations per second) classical computer. Your laptop runs about 10,000-100,000 times slower than that.

Scientists recently made a 10,000 qubit “circuit board” in a demonstration, and another group showed how single photons could be used as routers on a circuit board to send information different ways. Maybe quantum computers aren’t so far off.

Mike Teavee was the first person sent by television

in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He was sent from

one place to the other with a receiver needed to stop

the signal and interpret it. The biggest problem for

Star Trek teleportation is that there is no receiver to

stop the signal and reassemble the person. Ever try to

get a light beam to stop at a certain place on its own?

You see the problem.

So, can quantum teleportation and quantum computing be used for transporting people or macroscopic objects? Maybe. Matter is just energy in a different form (E=mc2, there's Einstein again). Each atom in your body can be defined in terms of its position and its quantum states, so maybe we could harness all that information into a pattern (like on Star Trek).

Every person is made up of about 10²⁹ particles, each with multiple elements of quantum information. That's a whole bunch of information to transport. It might be necessary to invent quantum computing in order to transfer the massive amount of information needed to transport a human being to another place. Of course, this means that we are accepting our second description of transporting from above - sending just the information and building a new person at the destination point based on the defined quantum states of their every atom. Only quantum computing could manage that trick.

But what do you do with the first version of the person being transported? Would they be destroyed while obtaining their pattern? The first one would have to be destroyed or there would be two of them. Nobody wants two Dr. McCoy's around to complain twice as much about their atoms being scattered all over the galaxy. But wouldn't it be murder to get rid of the original? I like the idea of transporting both the information and the atoms; no crime committed there.

Next week, how close are we coming to making a cloaking device, and would we know it if we did? We couldn't see it.

Contributed by Mark E. Lasbury, MS, MSEd, PhD

As Many Exceptions As Rules

Filippov, S., & Ziman, M. (2014). Entanglement sensitivity to signal attenuation and amplification Physical Review A, 90 (1) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.90.010301

Ma, X., Herbst, T., Scheidl, T., Wang, D., Kropatschek, S., Naylor, W., Wittmann, B., Mech, A., Kofler, J., Anisimova, E., Makarov, V., Jennewein, T., Ursin, R., & Zeilinger, A. (2012). Quantum teleportation over 143 kilometres using active feed-forward Nature, 489 (7415), 269-273 DOI: 10.1038/nature11472

Shomroni, I., Rosenblum, S., Lovsky, Y., Bechler, O., Guendelman, G., & Dayan, B. (2014). All-optical routing of single photons by a one-atom switch controlled by a single photon Science, 345 (6199), 903-906 DOI: 10.1126/science.1254699

Yokoyama, S., Ukai, R., Armstrong, S., Sornphiphatphong, C., Kaji, T., Suzuki, S., Yoshikawa, J., Yonezawa, H., Menicucci, N., & Furusawa, A. (2013). Ultra-large-scale continuous-variable cluster states multiplexed in the time domain Nature Photonics, 7 (12), 982-986 DOI: 10.1038/nphoton.2013.287

Star Date: Pretty Darn Soon

The 50^th anniversary of Star Trek is a reason to celebrate.

I guess Kirk is too cool to dance and Spock thinks

dancing is illogical.

2016 will mark the 50^th anniversary of the first season of the first series of Star Trek. In that first episode we meet James T. Kirk, Dr. McCoy, Spock, Uhuru, and some guy in a red shirt who meets a horrible fate almost immediately.

In the fifty-one years since Gene Roddenberry pitched the series as, “Wagon Train in space meets Gulliver’s Travels,” many of its technological gadgets have come closer to being real. The original series was set in the 2260’s, so we’re way ahead of schedule on producing workable versions of some of those props. For instance, the tricorder sensor was a repurposed salt shaker.

I figure the only decent way to prepare for next year’s 365-day celebration is to describe where we stand in making all those toys a reality. The purpose of this Star Trek refresher is to rekindle, or just plain kindle, a fire in you to finish the research. That, and about three billion dollars of funding should do the trick.

Let’s start with the replicator. Introduced in the original series, the replicator started out as a way to make food and recycle just about anything. In later series, spare parts and just about everything else was made by replicator, including air. The only rules; no weapons and nothing living. Well… we may be able to go Star Trek one better.

The replicator produced the food and the dishware.

Then you could recycle the dirty dishes into your

next martini.

The theory behind the replicator was that it rearranged subatomic particles to produce atoms of different elements. Then these atoms were assembled into whatever material and form were requested. To recycle dirty dishes or that dead Romulan, the replicator would reduce the object to its subatomic particles. Your late night cheeseburger might have been part of a old sock just minutes before.

While we can’t yet manipulate subatomic particles, we have developed ways to make things on demand. It’s called additive manufacturing; you know it better as 3-D printing.

In basic terms, 3-D printing produces a solid object from liquid or solid material in a build up process, as opposed to cutting extraneous material away from a block. In more technical terms, there are several ways to do additive manufacturing.

Stereolithography is the oldest technique for 3-D printing.

Liquid build material is cured using a UV or laser light.

In stereolithography, a vat of liquid plastic is the build material. A thin layer is spread across the build tray and a laser is used to cure the precise areas that correspond to the first layer of the object. The tray is lowered and another thin layer is spread and cured. This is repeated until the object is completed. This is the oldest of the 3-D printing technologies, first described in 1986, and is still the fastest way to print an object.

On the other hand, in inkjet based printing or powder bed printing, the movable head dispenses a bit of liquid binder onto a bed of powder build material. With light, the binder locks the build powder at that point to the layer below it. The table is then lowered, a new layer of powder material is laid down, and the computer design guides the head to dispense binder at the correct points.

Inkjet 3-D printing is similar to sterolithography, but the

build material is not liquid and the binding comes from the

print head, not from a laser or UV light.

In fused deposition modeling, liquefied build material is laid down and fused together by UV radiation or laser. What is interesting about this (and some other) methods is that you can use several different materials (metal plastic, different colors) in one build.

With fused deposition, you can easily include support material to build up columns for parts of the object that would otherwise be unsupported in the manufacturing process. Now the cool part – the build material can be metal or plastic or glass, while the support material can be something water soluble.

When your build is finished, you can throw it in some water and the supports will disappear, leaving only your desired product. In sterolithography, the support columns are made of the same material as the product, so they have to be cut away.

Fused deposition printing can use different materials for

supports and products. The material is liquefied in the

head before it is deposited.

Finally, there is selective laser sintering. This technique uses powdered metal or plastic. As in stereolithography, a thin layer is spread over the build surface and a laser is used. However, in this case the laser sinters the pieces together, compressing them with heat and pressure into a solid – but not to the point of melting them.

NASA did its first additive manufacturing in space in November of 2014. The International Space Station just got its first 3-D printer. In a small bit of irony, the part they manufactured was a replacement part of the printer itself. The ISS has a fused deposition modeling printer, so our replicator in space may descend from this technology.

Also ironic, the first printed part couldn’t be separated from the build tray. The binder apparently works better in microgravity, so it fused too well with the platform on which the part was built. There’s always a learning curve.

Sintering is just another way to bind the material

particle together.

The original replicator was for making food, and NASA is working on to this as well. There are 3-D printers on the market today that will print food for you. NASA has funded a small business grant to look into the possibility of printing food for long space trips.

Printing food is in some ways very similar – chocolate bunnies or pasta shapes are easy, but it can get more elaborate. Nature Machines has a product called the Foodini that can print burgers, pizza, etc. The technology is similar to other printers, except that the temperatures and textures are different for each ingredient and they have trouble getting many things to hold a 3-D shape against gravity.

The food binder technology is a bit behind – strong enough to hold but edible, and something that will match the flavor, texture, and consistency that one would expect from a certain food. We are actually doing better with medical uses than we are with food.

The software used to design printed objects can be fused to MRI, CT scan or X-ray information to help design very accurate stents, casts, valves, and other plastic or biocompatible material parts to be used in or on the human body. Heart valves are especially useful. A 2015 paper explains printing of metal/glass scaffolds to repair skull defects. Another use described in a 2015 study is for on demand printing of surgical gear needed in war zones.

One possible method to bioprint a vessel. Lay down cells specifically

within an agarose mold. Let them solidify for a time, then put

them in a bioreactor containing growth factors and mild

electrical stimulation so the muscle cells in the walls of

the vessel can mature.

Here's we can go Star Trek one better, 3-D printers are also being used to print living tissues and pretty soon, organs.  3-D bioprinting uses biochemicals and different cell types to build 3-D tissues of various types. A 2014 review explains in common terms the promise and problems with 3-D printing tissues and organs.

One of the problems that must be overcome before organ bioprinting can be realized is the vasculature. For a tissue or organ to survive, it must have a blood supply. This is harder to print because it means having a tubular structure within a solid organ. See the TED video below about printing kidneys.

A new study might have the answer. Using a two print process, the tubular structure is printed using endothelium, muscle in hydrogel tube supports, and then the tissue is printed around it. This must be accomplished before we can take the next step, in vivo bioprinting. In this technique, bioprinting will occur right in or on the human body. That smells a lot like the digital regenerator in The Next Generation. Yes, NASA is funding studies to produce a “bioreplicator” as well.

Next week, let’s tackle a primarily medical device, the tricorder. Think hard about it this week, a workable version might be worth 10 million dollars to you.

Contributed by Mark E. Lasbury, MS, MSEd, PhD

As Many Exceptions As Rules

click here if link on video doesn't work

Yu, A., & Khan, M. (2015). On-demand three-dimensional printing of surgical supplies in conflict zones Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, 78 (1), 201-203 DOI: 10.1097/TA.0000000000000481

Murphy, S., & Atala, A. (2014). 3D bioprinting of tissues and organs Nature Biotechnology, 32 (8), 773-785 DOI: 10.1038/nbt.2958

Kolesky, D., Truby, R., Gladman, A., Busbee, T., Homan, K., & Lewis, J. (2014). Bioprinting: 3D Bioprinting of Vascularized, Heterogeneous Cell-Laden Tissue Constructs (Adv. Mater. 19/2014) Advanced Materials, 26 (19), 2966-2966 DOI: 10.1002/adma.201470124