WSU Researchers Use a 3D Printer to Make Bone-like Material - YouTube

It looks like bone. It feels like bone. For the most part, it acts like bone and it came off an inkjet printer.

A ceramic powder and 3D printer have been paired to create a bone-like material that could be used in surgery within the next decade.

The material, which has already been tested in vivo tests on rats and rabbits, could be created to order for dental and orthopedic procedures.

Once inserted in the body, it acts as a scaffold for new human bone cells to grow upon after just a week.

The manmade scaffold will eventually dissolve "with no apparent ill effects".

The material was created following a four-year effort by chemistry, materials science, biology and manufacturing researchers at Washington State University.

The main "ingredient" is calcium phosphate but silicon and zinc were added, which "more than doubled the strength of the main material," the team explained.

Inside the printer, an inkjet nozzle sprays a plastic binder liquid over a bed of the powder in layers of 20 microns.

Susmita Bose, co-author of the paper revealing the results of the project and professor in WSU's School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering says that custom-ordered replacement bone tissue could be in common use in the next ten years.

"If a doctor has a CT scan of a defect, we can convert it to a CAD file and make the scaffold according to the defect," she said.

Lair of the Giant Kraken Discovered

Long before whales, the oceans of Earth were roamed by a very different kind of air-breathing leviathan.

Snaggle-toothed ichthyosaurs larger than school buses swam at the top of the Triassic Period ocean food chain, or so it seemed before Mount Holyoke College paleontologist Mark McMenamin took a look at some of their remains in Nevada.

Now he thinks there was an even larger and more cunning sea monster that preyed on ichthyosaurs: a kraken of such mythological proportions it would have sent Captain Nemo running for dry land.

McMenamin will be presenting the results of his work on Monday, 10 October at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Minneapolis.

The evidence is at Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada, where McMenamin and his daughter spent a few days this summer.

It’s a site where the remains of nine 45-foot (14-meter) ichthyosaurs, of the species Shonisaurus popularis can be found.

These were the Triassic’s counterpart to today’s predatory giant squid-eating sperm whales. But the fossils at the Nevada site have a long history of perplexing researchers, including the world’s expert on the site: the late Charles Lewis Camp of U.C. Berkeley.

“Charles Camp puzzled over these fossils in the 1950s,” said McMenamin. “In his papers he keeps referring to how peculiar this site is. We agree, it is peculiar.”

Camp’s interpretation was that the fossils probably represented death by an accidental stranding or from a toxic plankton bloom.

But no one had ever been able to prove that the beasts died in shallow water. In fact more recent work on the rocks around the fossils suggest it was a deep water environment, which makes neatly arranged carcasses even more mysterious.

This question — shallow or deep ocean death — is what attracted McMenamin to the site.

“I was aware that anytime there is controversy about depth, there is probably something interesting going on,” McMenamin said. And when they arrived at the remote state park and started looking at the fossils, McMenamin was struck by their strangeness.

“It became very clear that something very odd was going on there,” said McMenamin. “It was a very odd configuration of bones.”

First of all, the different degrees of etching on the bones suggested that the shonisaurs were not all killed and buried at the same time. It also looked like the bones had been purposefully rearranged.

That got him thinking about a particular modern predator that is known for just this sort of intelligent manipulation of bones.

“Modern day octopus will do this,” McMenamin said. What if there was an ancient, very large sort of octopus, like the kraken of mythology. “I think that these things were captured by the kraken and taken to the midden and the cephalopod would take them apart.”

In the fossil bed, some of the shonisaur vertebral disks are arranged in curious linear patterns with almost geometric regularity, McMenamin explained.

The proposed Triassic kraken, which could have been the most intelligent invertebrate ever, arranged the vertebral discs in double line patterns, with individual pieces nesting in a fitted fashion as if they were part of a puzzle.

Even more creepy: The arranged vertebrae resemble the pattern of sucker discs on a cephalopod tentacle, with each vertebra strongly resembling a coleoid sucker. In other words, the vertebral disc “pavement” seen at the state park may represent the earliest known self portrait, by a cephalopod.

Lair of the Giant Kraken Discovered

Consuming Tequila (plants) helps Build Stronger Bones

The plant that gave the world tequila contains a substance that seems ideal for use in a new genre of processed foods -- so-called "functional foods" -- with health benefits over and above serving as a source of nutrients, scientists reported at the 239th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in San Francisco on March 23. Foods spiked with "fructans" from the agave plant may help protect against osteoporosis by boosting the body's absorption of calcium and could have other health benefits, they said.

"Fructans are considered functional food ingredients because they affect body processes in ways that result in better health and reduction in the risk of many diseases," said Mercedes López, Ph.D., who delivered the report. She is with the National Polytechnic Institute, Guanajuato, Mexico. "Experimental studies suggest that fructans may be beneficial in diabetes, obesity, stimulating the immune system of the body, decreasing levels of disease-causing bacteria in the intestine, relieving constipation, and reducing the risk of colon cancer."

Fructans are non-digestible carbohydrates. They consist of molecules of fructose -- the sugar found in honey, grapes, and ripe fruits -- linked together into chains. Rich natural sources include artichokes, Jerusalem artichokes, garlic and onions, and chicory. Fructans do not occur in tequila, however, because they change into alcohol when agave is used to make tequila, López said.

So-called "inulin-type" fructans from chicory find wide use in the United States and other countries in ice cream, breakfast cereals, baked goods, sauces, beverages, and other foods. Small fructans have a sweet taste, while those formed from longer chains of fructose have a neutral taste and give foods a smooth, pleasant texture. Scientific studies have suggested that fructans stimulate the growth of healthful bacteria in the large intestine in a way that increases the body's absorption of minerals, including the calcium and magnesium important for bone growth.

In the new study, López and colleagues set out to determine what effects agave fructans actually have on bone growth. They tested the effects of agave fructans on laboratory mice, used as stand-ins for humans in such research. Mice fed agave fructans absorbed more calcium from food, excreted less calcium in their feces, and showed a 50 percent increase in levels of a protein associated with the build-up of new bone tissue.

"These results suggest that the supplementation of the standard diet with agave fructans prevented bone loss and improved bone formation, indicating the important role of agave fructans on the maintenance of healthy bone," López said. "They can be used in many products for children and infants to help prevent various diseases, and can even be used in ice cream as a sugar substitute."