A cyclist who received severe third-degree burns to his head after being struck by a drunk driver has been fitted with a printed 3D face. The Guardian: Dave Richards, 75, was given a 3D prosthetic by the NHS that fits the space on his face and mimics his hair colour, eye colour and skin. [...] While recovering, he was referred to reconstructive prosthetics, which has opened the Bristol 3D medical centre, the first of its kind in the UK to have 3D scanning, design and printing in a single NHS location. Richards, from Devon, said surgeons tried to save his eye but "they were worried any infection could spread from my eye down the optic nerve to the brain so the eye was removed."

[...] He called the process of getting a 3D-printed face "not the most pleasant." He added: "In the early days of my recovery, I felt very vulnerable, and would not expose myself to social situations. It took me a long time to feel comfortable about my image, how I thought people looked at me and what they thought of me -- but I have come a long way in that respect."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Robots can now be covered in living skin grown from real human cells to make them look more like us. As robots increasingly take on roles as nurses, care workers, teachers and other jobs that involve close personal contact, it is important to make them look more human so we feel comfortable interacting with them, says Shoji Takeuchi at the University of Tokyo in Japan. At the moment, robots are sometimes coated in silicone rubber to give them a fleshy appearance, but the rubber lacks the texture of human skin, he says.

To make more realistic-looking skin, Takeuchi and his colleagues bathed a plastic robot finger in a soup of collagen and human skin cells called fibroblasts for three days. The collagen and fibroblasts adhered to the finger and formed a layer similar to the dermis, which is the second-from-top layer of human skin. Next, they gently poured other human skin cells called keratinocytes onto the finger to recreate the upper layer of human skin, called the epidermis. The resulting 1.5-millimeter-thick skin was able to stretch and contract as the finger bent backwards and forwards. As it did this, it wrinkled like normal skin, says Takeuchi. "It is much more realistic than silicone."

The robot skin could also be healed when it was cut by grafting a collagen sheet onto the wound. However, the skin began to dry out after a while since it didn't have blood vessels to replenish it with moisture. In the future, it may be possible to incorporate artificial blood vessels into the skin to keep it hydrated, as well as sweat glands and hair follicles to make it more realistic, says Takeuchi. It should also be possible to make different skin colors by adding melanocytes, he says. The researchers now plan to try coating a whole robot in the living skin. The research has been published in the journal Matter.

The C programming language has many problems. But now the Registers notes that "Aria Beingessner, a member of the teams that implemented both Rust and Swift, has an interesting take... That C isn't a programming language anymore...."

"And it hasn't been for a long time," Beingessner writes in an online essay: This isn't about the fact that C is actually horribly ill-defined due to a billion implementations or its completely failed integer hierarchy. That stuff sucks, but on its own that wouldn't be my problem.

My problem is that C was elevated to a role of prestige and power, its reign so absolute and eternal that it has completely distorted the way we speak to each other. Rust and Swift cannot simply speak their native and comfortable tongues — they must instead wrap themselves in a grotesque simulacra of C's skin and make their flesh undulate in the same ways it does....

Everyone had to learn to speak C to talk to the major operating systems, and then when it came time to talk to eachother we suddenly all already spoke C so... why not talk to eachother in terms of C too?

Oops! Now C is the lingua franca of programming.

Oops! Now C isn't just a programming language, it's a protocol.
The Register picks up the argument: it's fair (if wildly controversial) to say, as this 2018 Association for Computing Machinery paper puts it, that C is not a low-level programming language. As its subtitle says: "Your computer is not a fast PDP-11."

This is not a relative assessment: that is, it's not saying that there are other programming languages that are lower-level than C. It's an absolute one: C is often praised for being "close to the metal," for being a "portable assembly language." It was, once, but it hasn't been since the 1970s; the underlying computational models of modern computers are nothing like the one that C represents, which was designed for a 1970s 16-bit minicomputer.
The Register summarizes what happens when a language has to interface with an operating system — and thus, that operating system's C code. [I]t has to call C APIs. This is done via Foreign Function Interfaces (FFIs).... In other words, even if you never write any code in C, you have to handle C variables, match C data structures and layouts, link to C functions by name with their symbols....

The real problem is that C was never designed or intended to be an Interface Definition Language, and it isn't very good at it.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In a private school where tuition is high, students can bicker about clothes, shoe brands, cellphones, or video games. At Paul Towler's middle school, where he teaches English to seventh and eighth graders, some kids "have enough money to be comfortable and others' parents are owners of giant nationwide restaurant chains," he says. Towler is used to seeing such disparities play out in the real world through objects that you can physically hold. But after battle royale sensation Fortnite exploded, the fights between students took an unexpected turn. Fortnite's virtual clothes became a status symbol, and some of Towler's pupils started policing what their classmates wore in-game.

The confrontations could get ugly. One student in Towler's class "begged his parents for [money] to buy a skin because no one would play with him" because he wore basic virtual clothes. While the bullying wasn't always Fortnite-specific, Towler recalls that it seemed "vicious for [the student] to have another avenue for the meaner kids to attack him." Things got better for that kid, but when your social scene begins and ends with Fortnite, having nobody to play with is like a mark of death.

"Researchers at Universite Laval's Faculty of Science and Engineering and its Center for Optics, Photonics, and Lasers have created a smart T-shirt that monitors the wearer's respiratory rate in real time," reports Science Daily. The details have been published in the latest edition of Sensors. From the report: Unlike other methods of measuring respiratory rate, the smart T shirt works without any wires, electrodes, or sensors attached to the user's body, explains Younes Messaddeq, the professor who led the team that developed the technology. "The T shirt is really comfortable and doesn't inhibit the subject's natural movements. Our tests show that the data captured by the shirt is reliable, whether the user is lying down, sitting, standing, or moving around." The key to the smart T shirt is an antenna sewn in at chest level that's made of a hollow optical fiber coated with a thin layer of silver on its inner surface. The fiber's exterior surface is covered in a polymer that protects it against the environment. "The antenna does double duty, sensing and transmitting the signals created by respiratory movements," adds Professor Messaddeq, who also holds the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Photonic Innovations. "The data can be sent to the user's smartphone or a nearby computer." As the wearer breathes in, the smart fiber senses the increase in both thorax circumference and the volume of air in the lungs, explains Messaddeq. "These changes modify some of the resonant frequency of the antenna. That's why the T shirt doesn't need to be tight or in direct contact with the wearer's skin. The oscillations that occur with each breath are enough for the fiber to sense the user's respiratory rate."

An anonymous reader writes a report from CBS News: MIT researchers have developed a "second skin" that could be used to smooth wrinkles, protect skin from damage, or administer medications to treat skin conditions, such as eczema. "It's an invisible layer that can provide a barrier, provide cosmetic improvement, and potentially deliver a drug locally to the area that's being treated," Daniel Anderson said in a university news release. "We started thinking about how we might be able to control the properties of skin by coating it with polymers that would impart beneficial effects," said Anderson. "We also wanted it to be invisible and comfortable." The scientists created a library of more than 100 potential polymers, and they tested each material in order to determine which one would most closely match the appearance and characteristics of healthy skin. The "second skin" is applied in two steps. Both layers are applied as creams or ointments. Once on the skin, XPL is nearly invisible. It can remain on the skin for up to 24 hours, the study authors said. Researchers found the polymer was able to reshape "eye bags" beneath the lower eyelids, and the effect lasted about 24 hours. It also treated dry skin and improved hydration.

Recently the founder of the Mars Settlement Research Organization and author of The International Mars Research Station Shaun Moss agreed to sit down and answer any questions you had about space exploration and colonizing Mars. Below you will find his answers to your questions.

Last week you had a chance to ask Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC) creator and monocle enthusiast Zach Weiner about his comics, reading classy, and his other projects. Below you'll find his answers to your questions.

rtoz writes "Heating or cooling certain parts of your body — such as applying a warm towel to your forehead if you feel chilly — can help maintain your perceived thermal comfort. Using that concept, four MIT engineering students developed a thermoelectric bracelet that monitors air and skin temperature, and sends tailored pulses of hot or cold waveforms to the wrist to help maintain thermal comfort. The product is now a working prototype. And although people would use the device for personal comfort, the team says the ultimate aim is to reduce the energy consumption of buildings, by cooling and heating the individual — not the building. The team estimates that if the device stops one building from adjusting its temperature by even just 1 degree Celsius, it will save roughly 100 kilowatt-hours per month."

tygerstripes writes "The BBC reports that a breakthrough in prosthetic technology will allow titanium to be grafted directly to the bone and then protrude from the skin without risking infection. Research by the Centre for Bio-Medical Engineering, UCL and Stanmore Implants looks into the way that the structure and porosity of deers' antlers prevents infection from entering the break in the skin. Early trials and a fairly gruesome picture show that by mimicking this they can successfully provide amputees with more comfortable, permanent prosthetics. Combined with bionic muscle and other recent developments, we may be very close to fully-integrated prosthetics."

Graeme Williams writes "In the past, I've written the sort of poorly-structured non-compliant web pages that can only be produced by a combination of laziness and confusion, so I'm an ideal test subject for Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML, an introduction to building web pages which focuses on compliance with the most recent HTML 4.01 standard and XHTML 1.0 standard. The book starts with the simplest of web pages, and builds from there to a solid foundation for writing simple well-structured web sites. It's clear and thorough, and will be effective both for the complete beginner and in bringing stale skills up to date." Read on for the rest of Graeme's review.

Here are 10+ plus answers to Slashdot questions from motion picture digital effects expert Thad Beier. He chose the additional questions himself. (Yes, he's on Slashdot almost every day; we asked him to do the interview after reading many intelligent comments he's posted.) Anyway, there's some fine insight into the intersection of moviemaking, graphic arts, and computer science here, brought to you by an award-winning member of the film industry who just happens to be a fellow Slashdot reader.

Almost all Slashdot interview guests are suggested by readers. One week we might invite a physicist; the next week a tech-interested politician or lawyer; the week after that an outstanding programmer. And once in a while we choose someone off-the-wall -- like Alex Chiu -- to keep things from getting too serious around here. Please realize that not every Slashdot interview is going to be your particular cup of tea, but it is someone's. (And, of course, you can send your interview guest suggestion to roblimo@slashdot.org. I read every one.) But enough of that. Let's turn the floor over to Alex Chiu, purveyor of Eternal Life Rings and decidedly non-mainstream opinions on religion, science, and politics.

Once a year, would-be cyborgs and their creators congregate for a few days of catching up with each other and the state of the art at the International Symposium on Wearable Computers's conference, sponsored by the IEEE and corporate sponsors like Microsoft and Compaq. Ever-lighter and more colorful head-mounted displays, innovative input devices and boundary-stretching ideas on human/machine interaction conspire to attract strange looks from startled pedestrians or frank admiration from fellow participants. When ISWC2000 began Monday in Atlanta. it marked the fourth such gathering -- the event has been held in San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and Cambridge, Mass. ISWC is about equal parts trade show, academic conference, and family reunion for a visibly different kind of family. Since ALS had ended just one day before, I stayed in the Peachtree state an extra few days to check it out. Read on to see what I found.

On April 5th you asked Ian Clarke of FreeNet many questions about this new project, which is designed to permit almost totally anonymous Internet posting of almost any kind of material. Here are his answers.

Monday we got a whole bunch of questions for Nitrozac, the shadowy, boot-wearing creator of the After Y2k! online comic strip. We tossed out all the "Are you really a woman?" questions; I've talked to her more than once and assure you that she is indubitably female and, as she puts it, "slightly over 25." A little inside note for y'all: Nitrozac has lots of female fans who think Taco and Hemos are "hot." This should give hope to all male, female-lacking geeks out there! But let's have Nitrozac speak in her own (laughworthy) words. The complete Q&A sesion is below. Enjoy!