Don't over think this one.

What good is a Doomsday device if nobody knows about?

There is limited evidence of combustion. You can have an explosion from rapidly expanding gases without any sort of ignition. Some reindeer herders supposedly saw 'flashes' but it is certainly unclear if these were due to a methane ignition, the aurora borealis or just too much fermented lichen.

But it's pretty amusing to the rest of us.

So, it's a Hamster Habitrail with magnets?

Why aren't you feeding the poor instead of posting on Slashdot? Isn't that the most important thing? You could have given some well deserved, undernourished child one of your twinkies. Oh wait, the child lives in some stinking desert without a functioning water well in five miles.

Or maybe we could use some of the earth sensing satellites (created by those self same hair-brains) to map out artesian flows and show people on the ground where an inexpensive well could be dug. Or we could give the kid a vaccine (developed by that same complex and expensive infrastructure created by those hair-brains) to keep him healthy so he can go to school and break out of the cycle of fear, anger and misuse that characterizes his world.

Or perhaps not - the world is a complex and often ugly place. Quite a bit more complex than your apparent world view, I won't comment on whether or not your view is particularly unattractive but I'm damned sure glad I don't feel that way.

Sure it is. That's how you concentrate things. Probably wasn't the first thing life did - replication has to happen first, but it was an early (and energetically favorable) change.

Sticks and stones may break my bones,
but whips and chains excite me.

(I suppose fiber would be a pretty kinky whip, at least to AT&T, Time-Warner and the rest of those perverts.)

The limitations of the existing manufacturing technologies really aren't in the realm of designing new parts or putting them together. It's keeping them together after the thing has been spinning for a couple thousand hours. Computerized CNC is a well advanced, constantly improving technology that works pretty well. You just don't slap a new turbine spindle in an engine and blast down the runway - you have to test it for hundreds of hours before you even put it under the wing.

So 3D 'printing' (which isn't really what this technique is) won't get you out of design and test any faster. It probably won't even help you create a one off part for an older engine - if you have drawings detailed enough to print it, you have drawings detailed enough to mill it.

Next thing you know, we're going to be printing jet engines on the Internet.....

If this guy had the technology to repair severed spinal cords, he'd already be a Nobel candidate. It is one of the Holy Grails of neurology / neurosurgery. Think of all the paraplegics and quadriplegics you could rescue using those techniques.

Millions of rats have died trying to get us that information.

Sort of depends. They could make the cut high in the brainstem, above where most of the autonomic functions are located. That would technically be *much* harder than the plain ol spinal cord - which, of course, is the hard part as it is. Just connecting the major blood vessels and bones is pretty easy all things considered.

It's just a scam to keep somebody happily screwing around in the lab, mostly torturing rodents.

And we've already discussed how dangerous that can be.

See that bright green "SUBMIT" on the title bar. It's not a request.

It's a command.

See, progress as promised!

Slashdot programmers would be my vote. That way if they screw it up, nothing of any value would be lost.

Maybe the Slashdot programmers could borrow some of this special protein and get some cortical folding going on.

Either that or just read a book on CSS.