3D printing is proving to be a potential game changer for a wide variety of fields. One group in particular that could benefit is the medical community, thanks to a recent development by scientists that could make it easier to print organs from living tissue. How? By printing structures inside of special gel that provides support during the build process.
New Scientist reports that researchers from the University of Florida in Gainesville came to the breakthrough method while searching for a way to enable the printing of items that cannot support their own weight. The technique prints objects inside a acrylic acid polymer gel, a material with roughly the same consistency as hand sanitizer.
In the test runs, the researchers used used living cells including human blood-vessel and canine kidney cells—as well as materials like silicone, hydrogel and other polymers—which were injected into the material using tiny needles.
From there, the printed objects can be stitched together into a variety of shapes that have more structural integrity, so that they don’t collapse. The researchers were able to shape the material into a small-scale model of human brain using the hydrogel as a show of how intricate and detailed the printing can get.
There is a catch with the gel, however. It’s not organic, so it currently cannot be used to keep tissues alive during the printing process. It also can’t be used for structures printed under a certain size because the small particles can slip out of the gel.
If the scientists behind the process can overcome those shortcomings, the technique could potentially be used to print real, usable organs. That development is a long way off from being a reality, but the possibility presents a considerable amount of promise going forward, and the researchers from the project are optimistic about the future of 3D printing real human tissue.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.