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Medicine

83-Year-Old Woman Gets New 3D-Printed Titanium Jaw 121

Posted by Soulskill from the will-be-next-bond-villain dept.
arnodf writes "The University of Hasselt (in Belgium) announced today (Google translation of Dutch original) that Belgian and Dutch scientists have successfully replaced an 83-year-old woman's lower jaw with a 3D-printed model. According to the researchers, 'It is the first custom-made implant in the world to replace an entire lower jaw. ... The 3D printer prints titanium powder layer by layer, while a computer controlled laser ensures that the correct particles are fused together. Using 3D printing technology, less materials are needed and the production time is much shorter than traditional manufacturing. The artificial jaw is slightly heavier than a natural jaw, but the patient can easily get used to it."

Comment Re:It should be illegal..... (Score 2, Informative) 291

by A. B3ttik (#38364220) Attached to: 24-Year-Old Asks Facebook For His Data, Gets 1,200 PDFs
I find this attitude so ignorant. How does a company instantly delete backups on redundant servers? How do they delete redundant hard copies kept in closets separated by meatspace? Furthermore, if you upload something to Facebook, and someone ELSE downloads it and saves it to a CD, and you delete it off facebook, should THEY be forced to magically know you deleted it, and delete their copy as well? Does Google have to delete their caches of your facebook page? Or maybe you are saying that Facebook, Google, etc should never make backups?

The truth is that once you upload something to a site like Facebook, it becomes publicly viewable and accessible and ANYONE can download it. The unfortunate truth is that you can never really UNDO that action, and no matter what arbitrary laws or draconian regulations you force companies to abide by, you can never truly take it back, even if you hit the delete key.

The paradigm shift needs to be in how people view sites like Facebook, Photobucket, etc: Don't upload anything you want to keep private. If you want to keep it private, upload it to a company that guarantees your privacy... NOT Facebook.

Comment Why So Implausible? (Score 0) 302

by A. B3ttik (#38271794) Attached to: New Theory Challenges Need For Dark Matter
I don't understand why this theory is "implausible" and why the article is so dismissive of it. Dark Matter was created for the sole purpose of explaining the orbital momentum of stars. There is NO other evidence for it. So an entire new classification of matter that no one has ever (or can ever) seen, felt, or observed was created to satisfy this one anomaly. And yet, this is the industry standard, that 90% of all matter must be Dark Matter just because someone screwed up when calculating orbital momentum.

What's more implausible, that 90% of matter is something that we'll never observe except, conveniently, through the orbital momentum of stars, or that galaxies have a noticeable gravitational pull on objects in nearby galaxies over billions of years?
Technology

Making a Privacy Monitor From an Old LCD 185

Posted by samzenpus from the wandering-eyes dept.
ryzvonusef writes "Instructables Member 'Dimovi' utilized a spare LCD monitor and converted it into a 'privacy' monitor. He took apart the monitor's plastic frame, cutting out the polarized film with a utility knife and removed the film adhesive from the glass panel before reassembling the monitor, which now shines a bright white regardless of what is actually being displayed on the screen. He then removed the lenses from a pair of theater 3D glasses, and replaced it with the polarized film he had just removed from the monitor. Now, he is the only one who can see what he is doing on his computer."
Medicine

Recycled Medical Records Used As Scrap Paper At Elementary School 119

Posted by samzenpus from the it's-a-purple-duck-with-shot-records dept.
Parents with students at Hale Elementary School in Minneapolis have found something interesting on the back of their children's pictures hanging on the fridge, detailed medical information. From the article: "Jennifer Kane was tidying her dining room when she found the drawing by her daughter, Keely, who goes to Hale Elementary School. On the back of the paper was the name, birth date and detailed medical information for a 24-year-old St. Paul woman named Paula White. 'The more I read it, the more alarmed I became about the amount of information I had about this person,' said Kane." The security lapse has been blamed on a paralegal donating the paper to the school.
Science

EU Scientists Working On Laser To Rip a Hole In Spacetime 575

Posted by samzenpus from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong? dept.
astroengine writes "Those pesky physicists are at it again; they want to build a laser so powerful that it will literally rip spacetime apart. Why? To prove the existence of virtual particles in the quantum vacuum, potentially unravel extra dimensions and possibly find the root of dark matter. The $1.6 billion Extreme Light Infrastructure Ultra-High Field Facility (known as ELI) will be built somewhere in Europe by the end of the decade and physicists are hoping the ten high-powered lasers — delivering 200 petawatts of power at a target for less than a trillionth of a second — will turn up some surprises about the very fabric of the Universe."
Science

Intelligent Absorbent Removes Radioactive Material 107

Posted by samzenpus from the in-with-the-bad-out-with-the-good dept.
Zothecula writes "Nuclear power plants are located close to sources of water, which is used as a coolant to handle the waste heat discharged by the plants. This means that water contaminated with radioactive material is often one of the problems to arise after a nuclear disaster. Researchers at Australia's Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have now developed what they say is a world-first intelligent absorbent that is capable of removing radioactive material from large amounts of contaminated water, resulting in clean water and concentrated waste that can be stored more efficiently."

Comment Re:they could agree to send by non-CD (Score 1) 214

by A. B3ttik (#37544394) Attached to: European Users Overwhelm Facebook With Data Requests
Perhaps, but that STILL wouldn't stop this bunch of 4chaners from abusing this retarded law and requesting physical copies of all the crap they _haven't_ deleted. I mean, seriously, how much stuff have you _really_ deleted on Facebook? I know I haven't deleted very much, and sometimes I do like to go back and look at my comments from years ago. If you think Facebook should perma-delete everything that you delete, that's fine, but that's also a different issue than this one.

There is also the argument that Facebook definitely keeps multiple redundant copies of their data across many servers in different areas... in fact, they likely even keep backup drives in closets somewhere just in case ALL the servers fail and they actually need to use them... should Facebook not be allowed to keep backups of their data in closets? Every time you hit delete, should they be forced to walk through manspace and delete stuff off of their backup-backup drives?

And what if make a crawler that accesses all of my friends' pages constantly and saves their data to my hard drive? Google does this already. Should I not be allowed to do this? Should Google not be allowed to do this? If someone deletes something on Facebook, do I have to delete it on my local box? Does Google?

Personally, I think not. You post something on Facebook, you understand that Facebook now knows that information and they're going to have it forever. You can't untell a secret to a friend or unshow someone an embarrassing photo. If you have something you want to hide, don't put it up to begin with. If you make a mistake, you can "delete" it and hope for security through anonymity that Facebook will do the best they can to keep that Photo from showing up anywhere, but you can never be sure that one of your friends didn't save the image or that there isn't some backup somewhere.
Power

Could the US Phase Out Nuclear Power? 657

Posted by samzenpus from the won't-somebody-please-think-of-the-mutants dept.
mdsolar writes "In the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, [German Chancellor] Merkel announced that her country would close all of its 17 existing reactors by 2022. Other nations, including Japan, Italy, and Switzerland, have announced plans to pare back nuclear power, but none have gone as far as Germany, the world's fourth-largest economy. Merkel vows to replace nuclear power with alternatives that do not increase greenhouse gases or shackle the economic growth. Could the US do the same? An increasing number of reports suggest it is not beyond the realm of possibility, and Germany could provide a road map."
Image

Face-Mounted Nose Stylus Created For Phones Screenshot-sm 208

Posted by samzenpus from the because-he-can dept.
Lanxon writes "Designer Dominic Wilcox has come up with a Pinocchio-style 'finger-nose stylus' that lets you use your phone hands free, reports Wired. He came up with the design after he found that he wanted to use his touchphone in the bath. A wet hand is not a good touchscreen navigation device, so he found himself using his nose to scroll, but found it hard to see precisely where his nose was touching the screen. The solution was to create a nose extension 'finger' that would allow for navigation while holding the phone firmly in his one dry hand."

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