The WOW Science Thread

[PeteC]

A stunning slide show. Pete

http://news.yahoo.com/photos/satellite- ... 93153.html

[sandman67]

Yes, I've seen this sort of thing before and it's something to do with the fact that you don't read the letters in short common words like of,the, and, it etc., your brain recognises it from the shape of the word and the context of the sentence without having to actually look at the letters and skims over it to the next word.

Interestingly (or not) a mate of mine from my uni days who works in neuroscience was running a study on this, and he found that there is also a marked difference in the ability of the human eye/brain to discern spelling errors dependent upon the media being read - we are better at spotting typos on a printed page of text than we are on a computer screen or TV

Odd eh?

[pharvey]

Yes, I've seen this sort of thing before and it's something to do with the fact that you don't read the letters in short common words like of,the, and, it etc., your brain recognises it from the shape of the word and the context of the sentence without having to actually look at the letters and skims over it to the next word.

Interestingly (or not) a mate of mine from my uni days who works in neuroscience was running a study on this, and he found that there is also a marked difference in the ability of the human eye/brain to discern spelling errors dependent upon the media being read - we are better at spotting typos on a printed page of text than we are on a computer screen or TV

Odd eh?

Had not heard of that one before SM - certainly a tad on the strange side. On the subject of spelling, another strange one (IMHO anyway)...... As long as all correct letters are included, and as long as the first and last letters are correct - it doesn't matter how the word is spelled..... your brain will recognise it and you will be able to read - try the following: -

I cnduo't bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg. Unisg the icndeblire pweor of the hmuan mnid, aocdcrnig to rseecrah at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mttaer in waht oderr the lterets in a wrod are, the olny irpoamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rhgit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whoutit a pboerlm. Tihs is bucseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey ltteer by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Aaznmig, huh? Yaeh and I awlyas tghhuot slelinpg was ipmorantt! See if yuor fdreins can raed tihs too.

[sandman67]

Out of curiosity I emailed Alex, my mate who ran the studies, and was surprised to find he still used the same old email address from way back in the day. He explained what the purpose of the study had been and how it measured what it measured, but to tell you the truth it all flew well over my addled old head.

One of the words he said was least spotted was stunning - he explained that substitution of the first n for u seemed to frazzle the ability to spot the typos, potentially because the fact is that a lower case u and lower case n are the same character just the different way up. The less similar a character is to its typographic substitute the more easily the eye/brain spots the error. It seems to be our brains actually read patterns rather than the individual words and letters that make them up. So "stuuning" is harder to spot than "stenning" or "stanning".

Alex also said that he remembered the basics of the results, and remembers that we were 3 times more likely to spot physical print typos than ones on a screen. He did point out though that this was run when personal computers were still pretty rare, and wondered idly if their proliferation now means that the study results would be different.

Interesting eh?

Hes a lecturer now at the old alma mater, so maybe some new crop of students will be getting tested on typo spotting

[PeteC]

I cnduo't bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg. Unisg the icndeblire pweor of the hmuan mnid, aocdcrnig to rseecrah at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mttaer in waht oderr the lterets in a wrod are, the olny irpoamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rhgit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whoutit a pboerlm. Tihs is bucseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey ltteer by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Aaznmig, huh? Yaeh and I awlyas tghhuot slelinpg was ipmorantt! See if yuor fdreins can raed tihs too.

It doesn't work with a 7 year old! She thought she had been beamed up to some alien planet. I wonder when the system kicks in....probably around 10-12 I guess. For now she's still depending upon sounding where letters in proper order are very important. Pete

[PeteC]

Apophis asteroid: Large space rock flies past Earth
By Rebecca Morelle Science reporter, BBC World Service

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20961003

A 300m-wide asteroid is making a close pass to the Earth.

Apophis - named after the Egyptian demon of destruction and darkness - has been put on a watch list by scientists.

They have calculated that in 2036 there is a very small chance it could collide with our planet.

However, its current fly-by is at a safe distance of about 14 million km - but this is close enough for astronomers to study the space rock and assess its future risk.

Apophis will not be visible with the naked eye, but space enthusiasts can watch it online via the Slooh space camera's website.

Collision course?

The large rocky mass was first discovered in 2004. At the time, it raised alarm when scientists calculated that it had a one-in-45 chance of smashing into the Earth in 2029.
Continue reading the main story

Later revisions, lifted this threat; instead on the Friday 13 April 2029, it will make a close pass at a distance of about 30,000km.

However, astronomers say there is still a one-in-200,000 chance that it could strike Earth in 2036.

Professor Alan Fitzsimmons, an astronomer at Queen's University Belfast, UK, said: "In 2029, it will pass so close to us that Earth's gravity will change its orbit.

"Most of the potential orbits it will end up on will mean we are safe for the next 100 years. But there is a small region of space - something we call a keyhole - and if it passes through that keyhole in 2029, it will come back and hit us on 13 April in 2036."

If this happened, it would strike the Earth with 100 times the energy in our largest nuclear bombs, said Prof Fitzsimmons.

Future hazards

Astronomers are using the current close encounter as an opportunity to study the asteroid, so they can improve their calculations to predict its future path.

Prof Fitzsimmons said: "While [the asteroid] is relatively close to the Earth, astronomers can ping it with radar. Radar measurements are incredibly accurate: we get the distance to the asteroid very, very precisely, and we can also get its velocity relative to us. And these two things let us pin its orbit down very precisely. "

Researchers are becoming increasingly interested in potentially hazardous asteroids.

So far they have counted more than 9,000 near-Earth asteroids, and they spot another 800 new space rocks on average each year.

Prof Fitzsimmons said learning more about them was vital.

"At some point, we are going to find an asteroid big enough that it could cause damage at ground level if we let it hit," he explained.

"So we should find these objects, we should track them, work out where they are going - and if they stand a chance of hitting us, do something about it."

[Nereus]

Maybe this should be in the Global Warming thread!
............................................................................................
Storm delivers Onslow a red-dust sunset

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/br ... st-sunset/

Mother Nature put on a spectacular display off the coast of Onslow yesterday, where a menacing-looking storm was captured on camera by a tug boat worker.

Jurien Bay man Brett Martin and his colleagues were working west of False Island when the thunderstorm, which had gathered dust and sand as it developed, passed over Onslow and out to the Indian Ocean.

Mr Martin said the storm built up in a matter of minutes.

“We were steaming along in the boat just before sunset and the storm was casually building in the distance, then it got faster and faster and it went from glass to about 40 knots in two minutes,” he said.

“It was like a big dust storm under a thunderhead, there was a lot of lightning but not a lot of rain.”

Bureau of Meteorology duty forecaster Austen Watkins said the stunning view was created as wind and rain caused the storm to dump the sand and dust it had ingested while passing Onslow.

He said gusts of up to 102km/h were recorded from the thunderstorm at about 7.30pm on Wednesday, and such storms were normal for the region at this time of year.

The storm was unrelated to the looming Tropical Cyclone Narelle, he said.

[PeteC]

Photos, maps and video at link. Pete

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21784141

'Black Death pit' unearthed by Crossrail project

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Excavations for London's Crossrail project have unearthed bodies believed to date from the time of the Black Death.

A burial ground was known to be in an area outside the City of London, but its exact location remained a mystery.

Thirteen bodies have been found so far in the 5.5m-wide shaft at the edge of Charterhouse Square, alongside pottery dated to the mid-14th Century.

Analysis will shed light on the plague and the Londoners of the day.

DNA taken from the skeletons may also help chart the development and spread of the bacterium that caused the plague that became known as the Black Death.

Charterhouse Square lies in an area that was once outside the walls of London, referred to at the time as "No-man's Land".
1658 map of London By 1658, the area around Charterhouse Square (centre) had escaped its status as "no-man's land"

The skeletons' arrangement in two neat rows suggests they date from the earliest era of the Black Death, before it fully developed into the pandemic that in later years saw bodies dumped haphazardly into mass graves.

Archaeologists working for Crossrail and the Museum of London will continue to dig in a bid to discover further remains, or any finds from earlier eras.

The £14.8bn Crossrail project aims to establish a 118km-long (73-mile) high-speed rail link with 37 stations across London, and is due to open in 2018.

Because of the project's underground scope, significant research was undertaken into the archaeology likely to be found during the course of the construction.

Footage shows osteologists lowered into the pit, and some of its finds

Taken together, the project's 40 sites comprise one of the UK's largest archaeological ventures.

Teams have already discovered skeletons near Liverpool Street, a Bronze-Age transport route, and an array of other finds, including the largest piece of amber ever found in the UK.

"We've found archaeology from pretty much all periods - from the very ancient prehistoric right up to a 20th-Century industrial site, but this site is probably the most important medieval site we've got," said Jay Carver, project archaeologist for Crossrail.

"This is one of the most significant discoveries - quite small in extent but highly significant because of its data and what is represented in the shaft," he told BBC News.

The find is providing more than just a precise location for the long-lost burial ground, said Nick Elsden, project manager from the Museum of London Archaeology, which is working with Crossrail on its sites.

"We've got a snapshot of the population from the 14th Century - we'll look for signs that they'd done a lot of heavy, hard work, which will show on the bones, and general things about their health and their physique," he added.
Body found in Charterhouse St excavations DNA can be extracted from the teeth, which tend to better preserve it

"That tells us something about the population at the time - about them as individual people, as well as being victims of the Black Death."

In addition, the bodies may contain DNA from the bacteria responsible for the plague - from an early stage in the pandemic - helping modern epidemiologists track the development and spread of differing strains of a pathogen that still exists today.

"It's fantastic. Personally, as an archaeologist, finding good-quality archaeological data which is intact that hasn't been messed around by previous construction is always a great opportunity for new research information - that's why we do the job," said Mr Carver.

"Every hole we're digging is contributing info to London archaeologists, who are constantly piecing together and synthesising the information we've got for London as a whole - it's providing information to slot into that study of London and its history."

[Bristolian]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 39743.html

The graphene story: how playing with sticky tape changed the world
Thin as an atom, with amazing strength and electrical properties, graphene is the scientific find of the century. But it all came about from mucking about in a lab in Manchester, one of men behind its invention tells Steve Connor

The creation of graphene, a wonder material that promises to transform the future, is already the stuff of scientific legend. As a piece of brilliant serendipity it stands alongside the accidental discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming – and it might prove just as valuable.

Two Russian-émigré scientists at the University of Manchester, Andrei Geim and Kostya Novoselov, were playing about with flakes of carbon graphite in an attempt to investigate its electrical properties when they decided to see if they could make thinner flakes with the help of sticky Scotch tape.

They used the tape to peel off a layer of graphite from its block and then repeatedly peeled off further layers from the original cleaved flake until they managed to get down to flakes that were only a few atoms thick. They soon realised that by repeatedly sticking and peeling back the Scotch tape they could get down to the thinnest of all possible layers, one atom thick – a material with unique and immensely interesting properties.

When the two scientists won their joint Nobel prize in physics in 2010 for their ground-breaking experiments, the Nobel committee made a point of citing the “playfulness” that was one of the hallmarks of the way they have worked together.

Playing about with Scotch tape on a Friday afternoon sounds a jokey thing to do, but it soon turned into a deadly serious game of scientific discovery which would have been impossible if not for the well-prepared minds of Geim and Novoselov.

“A playful idea is perfect to start things but then you need a really good scientific intuition that your playful experiment will lead to something, or it will stay as a joke for ever,” Novoselov says. “Joking for a week or two is the right way to go, but you don’t want to make your whole research into a joke.”

Geim, who is 15 years older than Novoselov and was once his PhD supervisor, has a reputation for playful experiments. He levitated a frog in 1997 to showcase his work in magnetism and invented a new kind of sticky tape based on the adhesive feet of Gecko lizards, which can walk up walls and hang upside down on ceilings.

The original idea of working with graphite was to see if it could be used as a transistor – the fundamental switching device at the heart of computing. In fact, Novoselov says, they had almost given up with graphite when they heard about how microscopy researchers working along the university corridor used Scotch tape to clean the mineral before putting it under the lens.

“It was not a new technique, and I’d heard of it before, but when you see it in front of you it makes it obvious what it can be used for,” Novoselov recalls.

Graphene, a two-dimensional crystal of pure carbon, is a superlative material. It is the thinnest and strongest substance known to science – about 100 times stronger than steel by weight. A square metre of graphene, a thousand times thinner than paper, made into a hammock would be strong enough to cradle a 4kg cat, but weigh no more than one of its whiskers. It is a good conductor of electricity, is stretchable and yet is almost transparent. It conducts heat better than any other known substance. It acts as a barrier to the smallest atom of gas – helium – and yet allows water vapour to pass through.

This particular property has allowed the two Russians to perform another playful experiment, this time in passive vodka distillation – water evaporates through a graphene membrane placed over a mug of watered-down vodka, leaving the concentrated alcohol behind.

The inventive step that made Geim and Novoselov into Nobel laureates was to find a way of transferring the ultra-thin flakes of graphene from Scotch tape to a silicon wafer, the material of microprocessors. Once they did this the extraordinary electrical properties of graphene could be witnessed and explored, including its “ghostly” quantum state when electrons start to behave weirdly as if these particles have no mass. “The excitement would exist even without these unusual properties because graphene is the first two-dimensional material. It seems obvious now because we can suspend it in the air and do almost anything with it, but at the beginning it was by no means obvious that it would be stable,” Novoselov says.

“And then on top of that there are other excitements such as the very unusual electronic properties that we’ve never come across before. Then there are the unusual optical properties, chemical properties and many more.

“We have a really unique opportunity here in that quite a few unusual properties are combined in one material; the strongest, the most flexible, the most stretchable, the most conductive, optically transparent and something which is a good gas barrier. So you can invent quite a few new applications that were not possible before,” he adds.

The potential uses for graphene appear almost limitless. They range from new types of flexible electronics that could be worn on clothes or folded up into a pocket, to a new generation of very small computers, hyper-efficient solar panels and super-fast mobile phones. Yet at the heart of graphene is a honeycomb structure of carbon atoms – described as “atomic chickenwire”. Carbon is the basic element of life, which means that graphene could be the focus of a new industrial revolution based on electronic components that are biodegradable and sustainable. If there was ever a building material for a new, green economy, graphene could be it. As a result, the Government has actively supported a new National Graphene Institute (NGI) in Manchester, which will be completed by 2015 at the cost of £61m, of which £38m is coming from government research councils.

The NGI, which will be built on the site of a Victorian gentleman’s club where Friedrich Engels once sipped aperitifs (presumably after working on the Communist Manifesto), is poised to reap the commercial spin-offs that are likely to tumble out of graphene research.

“The model is that we allow our scientists to work on the projects that they want to work on, and we put engineers from companies to work in the same labs,” Novoselov says. “If there is something interesting that the company believes should be pushed forward then there will be collaboration with the scientists to bring it to the next level,” he says.

Geim, who declined to be interviewed, is working closely with Novoselov on all aspects of the institute’s architecture as well as the way it will work to encourage both scientific discovery and its commercial exploitation. They both hope to foster an industrial revival to rival the one that began in this part of north-west England 200 years ago – but with carbon in the form of graphene rather than coal.

Wonder stuff: uses for graphene

Drinking water
Graphene could be used to desalinate seawater to make it drinkable. Scientists believe that passing seawater through graphene’s tiny pores, the crystal lattice could let water molecules through, while blocking out the atoms that make salt. Using a graphene filter, Lockheed hopes to transform salt water into drinking water by the end of the year.

Smartphones
Being both transparent and conductive, graphene could be perfect for the new generation of smartphones. Samsung are among the consumer electronics companies that are developing touchscreen interfaces.

Computers
It is hoped that graphene can replace silicon chips. Electronics firms are testing graphene in numerous electrical devices. IBM has already piloted computers that use the material to achieve the record-setting speed of 100GHz.

Satellites, planes and cars
Graphene has properties that provide light but super-strong composite materials for next-generation satellites, planes and cars. The new form of carbon could further reduce aircraft weight, subsequently cutting the burning of fuel and dumping of carbon in the atmosphere.

Building materials
Scientists believe that graphene’s flexible nature may prove the ideal building material, with the trick being to incorporate it into a matrix like a polymer or a metal, where the load is borne by the graphene layer.

Rust-free cars
Graphene repels water and is highly conductive. This combination keeps steel from coming into contact with water and delays the electrochemical reactions that oxidize iron. New York scientists designed a polymer coating containing this form of carbon and found that it protected steel from rusting for up to a month.

Military equipment
Graphene foam can pick up small concentrations of the nitrates and ammonia found in explosives. A postage-size sensor developed in the US could soon be mandatory for bomb squads. Australian researchers found adding an equal amount of graphene and carbon nanotubes to a polymer produced a super-strong fibre that could be spun into fabric used to make bulletproof vests.

Nuclear clean-up
Graphene oxide can absorb radioactive waste. Researchers at Rice University and Lomonosov Moscow State University found that tiny bits of graphene oxide bind to radioactive contaminants, transforming them into large extractable clumps. This could help after nuclear accidents like the Fukushima disaster.

[Dannie Boy]

Amazing!!

[pharvey]

Interesting..... though you'd have to a tad nervous of "hackers" in this day and age!!!

Taken from: - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... l-ill.html

The medical lab implanted under the skin that can automatically phone a doctor BEFORE you fall ill

* 14mm long chip comprises five sensors, a coil for wireless power as well a miniaturized electronics for radio communication
* Links to a user's mobile phone to send live data to doctors
* Can warn of a heart attack hours in advance, and help monitor patients undergoing chemotherapy

A blood laboratory small enough to be implanted under the skin could revolutionise healthcare, researchers claimed today.

Measuring just 14mm long, it uses a mobile phone to send medical staff updates on a patient's health.

The team at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne say the gadget could be invaluable for patients undergoing chemotherapy, and could even warn of an impending heart attack by monitoring key chemicals in the bloodstream.

The implant is only a few cubic millimeters in volume but includes five sensors, a radio transmitter and a power delivery system.

Outside the body, a battery patch provides 1/10 watt of power, through the patient's skin – so there is no need to operate every time the battery needs changing.

The researchers behind the device say it will allow doctors to monitor high risk patients from anywhere.

'It will allow direct and continuous monitoring based on a patient's individual tolerance, and not on age and weight charts or weekly blood tests,' said EPFL scientists Giovanni de Micheli, who led the research.

Capture1.JPG (45.79 KiB) Viewed 1081 times

[pharvey]

A truly remarkable piece of history continues - great article very much well worth a read.....

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... began.html

Nasa confirms Voyager 1 probe has LEFT the solar system 35 year after its mission to explore space began

* Drastic changes in radiation levels measured by the probe confirm it has finally travelled beyond the influence of the Sun
* Researchers still unsure whether Voyager 1 has reached interstellar space or entered a separate, undefined region beyond the solar system
* Voyager 1 and its sister probe Voyager 2 launched 35 years ago on a tour of the outer planets

[PeteC]

Photo gallery at link. Pete

http://news.yahoo.com/apollo-moon-rocke ... 56909.html

Apollo Moon Rocket Engines Raised from Seafloor by Amazon CEO
By Robert Z. Pearlman | SPACE.com – 5 hrs ago

Long thought to be lost forever on the ocean floor, massive engines that launched astronauts to the moon more than 40 years ago have been recovered by a private expedition led by the founder of Amazon.com.

"We found so much," said Jeff Bezos, the online retailer's CEO, in an update posted Wednesday (March 20) on the Bezos Expeditions website. "We have seen an underwater wonderland – an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 enginesthat tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program."

When NASA's mighty Saturn V rockets were launched on missions to Earth orbit and the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the five F-1 engines that powered each of the boosters' first stages dropped into the Atlantic Ocean and sank to the seafloor. There they were expected to remain, discarded forever.

Then, almost exactly one year ago, Bezos announced his private — and until then, secret — expedition had located what they believed to be theengines from the 1969 Apollo 11 mission that began the journey to land the first humans on the moon. [Apollo Rocket Engines Recovered by Jeff Bezos (Photos)]

"Nearly one year ago, Jeff Bezos shared with us his plans to recover F-1 engines," said NASA administrator Charles Bolden in a statement that was released Wednesday. "We share the excitement expressed by Jeff and his team in announcing the recovery of two of the powerful Saturn V first-stage engines from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean."

Poetic echoes of lunar missions

When Bezos first revealed that his team had discovered the engines using state-of-the-art deep-sea sonar, he said he wasn't sure what condition they were in.

"They hit the ocean at high velocity and have been in salt water for more than 40 years. On the other hand, they are made of tough stuff, so we'll see," Bezos wrote in 2012.

What they saw, using Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROV), was a tangled pile of F-1 engine parts strewn across the ocean floor at a depth of more than 14,000 feet (4,270 meters).

"We photographed many beautiful objects in situ and have now recovered many prime pieces," Bezos wrote in the update Wednesday. "Each piece we bring on deck conjures for me the thousands of engineers who worked together back then to do what for all time had been thought surely impossible."

The scene also evoked the Apollo moon missions themselves.

"We on the team were often struck by poetic echoes of the lunar missions," Bezos wrote. "The buoyancy of the ROVs looks every bit like microgravity. The blackness of the horizon. The gray and colorless ocean floor. Only the occasional deep sea fish broke the illusion."

Bezos and his team are now heading back to port in Cape Canaveral, Fla., after working for three weeks at sea on the Seabed Worker, a multi-purpose support vessel.

Recovery, restoration and display

The Bezos expedition returned enough major components to rebuild two Saturn V F-1 engines — out of the 65 that were launched between 1967 and 1973 — for display. Despite claims last year that the engines were specifically from Apollo 11, Bezos now says the history of the engine parts he recovered may not be known.

Inspecting the raised pieces, Bezos reported that many of the parts' original serial numbers are missing or partially missing, which may make mission identification difficult.

"We might see more during restoration," Bezos wrote.

Once the engine parts are back on land, they will undergo a restoration to stabilize the hardware and prevent further corrosion from their decades-long exposure to the ocean's salt water. But Bezos hinted the restoration may not return the engines to like-new condition.

"We want the hardware to tell its true story, including its 5,000 mile per hour re-entry and subsequent impact with the ocean surface," Bezos stated. "We're excited to get this hardware on display where just maybe it will inspire something amazing."

Where the recovered F-1 engines will go on exhibit is still to be decided. Last year, Bezos expressed a desire that if two or more of the engines were successfully raised, one would go on display at The Museum of Flight in Seattle, near where Amazon and Bezos' commercial spaceflight company, Blue Origin, are headquarted.

NASA, which retains ownership of the engines and all of its parts, said it would likely offer one to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.

"We look forward to the restoration of these engines by the Bezos team and applaud Jeff's desire to make these historic artifacts available for public display," Bolden said.

Click through to collectSPACE.com for more photos and video from Bezos Expeditions’ recovery of two Apollo Saturn V rocket F-1 engines.

[Frank Hovis]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/spac ... lapse.html
Stunning (if not a little boring) time lapse of the sun.

[pharvey]

There's nothing like a little fiber in your diet......


Hungry? Print a pepperoni pizza

Nasa is funding the development of printed food with an eye on the long-haul, long-stay space missions of the future.



It isn’t the most offensive entry into our occasional round-up of crimes against pizza (a Pizza Hut burger-ringed dish being the worst) but it may yet incite protests on the streets of Naples.

Printed pizzas are the future, according to Nasa. The agency is funding the development of a machine capable of cooking a Mars-gherita at the push of a button. In space, hit Ctrl+P for pizza.

The project, conceived with an eye on the long-haul, long-stay space missions of the future, is just the latest 3D interpretation of the box in the corner of the office.

Only yesterday we reported on the printing in the US of a plastic airway for a baby with a lung condition; 3D printers are also producing spare parts, toys and even guns. David Rowan, editor of Wired UK, said the growing technology was “an industrial revolution in the digital age”. But are we ready for printed food? And how is it even possible?

Kjeld van Bommel is a scientist at TNO, a Dutch research organisation. He has eaten a printed biscuit, after working on food printing techniques for the past two years. The simplest involves automated syringes, of the sort deployed at the University of Exeter last year to create a chocolate printer. It works like an inkjet that builds layers. More complex laser techniques allow him to turn powders laid over the printing bed into solid objects. These can be plastic or metal powders or, in the case of his biscuits, a mix of flour, fat and sugar.

Away from space, printing techniques will allow bakers, say, to design cakes with impossible shapes. Natural materials such as meat or vegetables pose a greater challenge. But, Van Bommel says, “If we can print a kidney [this has happened, he says] then why not a steak?” The scientist says he is working with several food producers.

Printers may also personalise products, adding fewer carbs, say, to a child’s dinner than an athlete’s. Van Bommel says his biscuits are just the beginning. But how do they taste? “OK, but I think the recipe needs work.”