When most people hear the phrases “additive manufacturing” or “3D printing”, they usually picture the technology being put to use in large factories, creating prototypes, or in someone’s garage who’s making little plastic trinkets. However, as of late, 3D printing has been gaining ground within the medical field, as doctors and surgeons are really beginning to understand the potential that it has in creating prostheses.

For one 27-year-old Chinese woman, named Li Jieyang, 3D printing literally saved her left arm. It all started one day last year when Li began suffering from pain in her shoulder. She brushed it off as a simple sprain, even though the swelling and inflamation just continued to worsen.

The 2011 MasterChef champion Tim Anderson has a new apprentice--a robo-chef.

“It’s the ultimate sous-chef,” Anderson told BBC News. “You tell it to do something--whether it’s a bit of prep or completing a whole dish from start to finish--and it will do it.”

We’re already giving robots weapons, so why not let them take over our homes too? The London-based company Moley Robotics is demonstrating their new robot chef prototype at Hannover Messe, an annual trade fair for the industrial technology. The robot’s first dish will be crab bisque.

According to the company, the mechanical chef, which incorporates 20 motors, 24 joints and 129 sensors, learns how to cook by watching a plain old human chef, whose movements are turned into commands that drive the robot hands. Moley hopes to eventually create a product that can do everything from preparing the ingredients to cleaning up the kitchen, and include a built-in refrigerator and dishwasher.

When I watched the trailer for Ex Machina, I was excited. It wasn’t just the uncanny and attractive robot Ava, either. There were androids, AI, Turing tests! This looked like the scifi movie of my dreams. But when I saw Ex Machina recently, I was terrified. Because it told the truth about what AI might become.

From this point forward, this post is chockfull of spoilers. You have been warned!

I should’ve expected as much. After all, the trailer hardly hides the fact that something goes very wrong in Ex Machina’s isolated artificial intelligence lab. It’s also the kind of plot twist we’re primed for in a world where some of the smartest people on the planet are warning us that computer scientists’ grand ambition to build a true AI is just plain dangerous. Of course the robot was going to turn into a psycho killer, leaving broken mirrors smeared with blood and bodies on the floor. (Sorry, I told you there would be spoilers.)

This is the radio-frequency anechoic chamber used for the experiment. Credit: ITMO University

Physicists from ITMO University, Ioffe Institute and Australian National University managed to make homogenous cylindrical objects completely invisible in the microwave range. Contrary to the now prevailing notion of invisibility that relies on metamaterial coatings, the scientists achieved the result using a homogenous object without any additional coating layers. The method is based on a new understanding of electromagnetic wave scattering. The results of the study were published in Scientific Reports.

The scientists studied light scattering from a glass cylinder filled with water. In essence, such an experiment represents a two-dimensional analog of a classical problem of scattering from a homogeneous sphere (Mie scattering), the solution to which is known for almost a century. However, this classical problem contains unusual physics that manifests itself when materials with high values of refractive index are involved. In the study, the scientists used ordinary water whose refractive index can be regulated by changing temperature.

An artificial muscle developed by Lenore Rasmussen (pictured) will be tested aboard the ISS (Photo: Elle Starkman/PPPL Office of Communications)

When the Dragon spacecraft is propelled into space atop a Falcon 9 rocket this week on a resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS), it will be carrying an artificial muscle material developed by Lenore Rasmussen and her company RasLabs. In addition to better prosthetic devices, it is hoped the material could find applications in robots on deep space missions.

The Synthetic Muscle is a gel-like material known as an electroactive polymer (EAP), which means it changes size or shape in response to an electric field. Its ability to contract or expand at low voltages gives it the potential to mimic human muscle movement and find applications in prosthetics and robotics.

If you could find out your baby’s future health problems right after he or she was born, would you want to know? Some new parents will get to make that decision soon. This month, doctors in Boston will begin the BabySeq project, in which they will sequence the genomes of newborns to look for signs of diseases that begin in childhood.

“We’ve been at an impasse for the last few years--we’ve had the technology to deliver information about future health, but we’ve not been able to use it because of all the issues around it,” says Robert Green, a Harvard Medical School professor who is working on the BabySeq project.

It’s routine for doctors to test newborns for up to 30 treatable diseases, and pregnant women can have blood tests to asses their risk of passing on diseases. But for this project, the team will look at 1,700 protein-coding genes that are strongly tied to diseases that begin during early childhood. Doctors will offer to sequence the genomes of 240 babies in intensive care at Boston Children’s Hospital, as well as 240 healthy babies born at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Organovo has been working on printing functional human tissue since being incorporated in 2007, and first printed a cellular blood vessel in 2010. Since January 2014, it has offeredbioprintedliver tissue (marketed as exVive3D™ liver tissue) for companies to use in drug trials and disease modeling, and it looks as though its bioprinted human kidney tissue will be used for the same tasks, starting sometime in the latter half of 2016.

"Kidney represents an ideal extension of capabilities to 3D bioprint organ tissues that can be tremendously useful in pharmaceutical research," Keith Murphy, Organovo's chairman and CEO, said via press release. “The product that we intend to build from these initial results can be an excellent expansion for our core customers in toxicology, who regularly express to us an interest in having better solutions for the assessment of human kidney toxicity."

Organovo's website has a video that sort of explains how they take human cells and put them into, in this case, a matrix to grow into human tissue. An email with follow-up questions has yet to be answered, but as the Wall Street Journalexplained in February, Organovo prints organs in much the same way, putting cells in as “bio-ink” and then printing them in layers, initially held together by hydrogel until the cells grow together.

White matter tracts within a human brain

Credit: Was a bee via Wikimedia Commons,CC by 2.5

Our brains are complex organs, separated into many parts and units for different functions and computations. According to new research published today in PLOS Computational Biology, this compartmental complexity is what helps us learn new information and retain it for longer. The researchers say these findings may help improve the neural networks involved in artificial intelligence, helping robots learn new skills and remember old ones longer.

Lots of robots have artificial neural pathways, used for things like facial recognition and complex disease diagnosis. When one of these robots learns a new skill, the pathways create new connections to accommodate the new information. Here's what it looks like to learn a skill in typical artificial brain:

Learning Skill A non modular

Credit: Evolving AI Lab via Youtube

But because of how the neurons are organized, learning a second new skill means that the pathways shift, obliterating the connections from the first skill.

Learning Skill B non modular

Credit: Evolving AI Lab via Youtube

The result is what artificial intelligence experts call a “catastrophic forgetting,” where robots can’t learn more than one skill at a time without un-learning another.

Human and animal brains don’t work that way, however, because of how our brains are structured. Having lots of “modules”--or clumps of highly connected neurons separated by areas with sparse connections--means that the brain doesn’t have to overwrite one set of connections to make another. They exist independently.

Creating truly flexible electronics requires applying super-thin layers of conducting materials to already bendable materials—but doing so accurately is difficult. Now, a new form of inkjet printing can allow scientists to deposit thin layers of liquid metal into neat, stretchable circuits.

The researchers, from Purdue University, had the bright idea that liquid metal could be applied via an inkjet print head—but sadly liquid metal doesn’t quite naturally lend itself to being spurted out of a nozzle in that way. So the team created a new liquid metal ink especially, reports PhysOrg.

Professor Rama Khokha and Dr. Hartland Jackson (Courtesy of University Health Network).

The Fountain of Youth has been discovered and it’s not in Florida as Ponce de Leon claimed. Instead, it was found in the mammary glands of genetically modified mice.

A research team led by Professor Rama Khokha has found that when two factors that control tissue development are removed, you can avoid the impact of aging.

Think of tissue as a building that is constantly under renovation. The contractors would be “metalloproteinases,” which are constantly working to demolish and reconstruct the tissue. The architects in this case, who are trying to reign in and direct the contractors, are known as “tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinases” — or TIMPs. When the architect and the contractors don’t communicate well, a building can fall down. In the case of tissue, the result can be cancer.