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US Military Working On 3D Printing Exact Replicas of Bones & Limbs
ErnieKey writes The U.S. military is working with technology that will allow them to create exact virtual replicas of their soldiers. In case of an injury, these replicas could be used to 3D print exact medical models for rebuilding the injured patient's body and even exact replica implants. Could we all one day soon have virtual backups of ourselves that we can access and have new body parts 3D printed on demand?
It will look so much like the real McCoy, they will be able to use it in the next Star Trek film
Bones and hard tissues = easy. Vessels, nerves, supporting tissue = nigh impossible. If technology ever got to the point where we could do this, we wouldn't be using soldiers to do our fighting.
Indeed. Convergence towards a stupidity-singularity seems to be in progress...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Have seen a few cranial reconstruction implants made from MRI/CT to replace cranial defects from trauma and cancer etc. Amazing technology for sure. Beats the alternative by a huge margin. Doing a MRI of a soldiers body at induction might be a good resource when bad things happen? We need to stand behind our soldiers that go into harms way, in the many ways ...
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
You could use it to distract zombies, agreed.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The Island
Someone keeps swiping all the Scarlett Johansson spare parts to build their own copy.
Have gnu, will travel.
...cause that technology is about as magical as this silly notion:
>> Could we all one day soon have virtual backups of ourselves that we can access and have new body parts 3D printed on demand?
What makes it retarded as opposed to an interesting direction given the present and improving ability to print replacement body parts?
Yep. This is not a 3d printing application, at least based on current 3d printing technology. This is an application for machining a negative mold on a mill, then hydroforming a hollow shape in that mold similar to how modern light truck frames are hydroformed, and filling the hollow core of that part with the correct material. Bones need to be both extremely strong and fairly light weight, and they need to be completely medically sanitary and built in such a way that the body will accept them.
I'm mildly curious if the military would like to put repaired service personnel back into action if such six-million-dollar-man repairs prove practical in the long term.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
...or maybe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboCop
The entire premise is ridiculous. The *bone* part isn't important. You can make a perfectly cromulent 'bone' with titanium pieces parts. The BIG issue is attaching the muscles and getting them to work, reattaching the nerves and blood vessels that presumably went missing when the IED popped off. Just filling up an arm or leg with a static printed / milled / molded whatever is going to be OK only if you are laying out a corpse for viewing.
You are much better off spending the time and money to figure out how to regenerate everything. Of course, that's orders or magnitude harder than 3D printing something that low end factories in India have been churning out for centuries (anatomically correct skeletons, no not THAT anatomically correct).
This is getting silly.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Is this the same military which decided that armor was too expensive for humvee's, and that body armor was too expensive for soldiers?
(It's a great idea, I just wonder how they'd ever pull it off.. an ounce of Kevlar is apparently NOT cheaper than a pound of 3d printed skeleton.)
On one hand, it is dumb.
Why is it dumb? Recruits are already given a physical exam, and doing a body scan and saving the result would cost little.
On the other hand, it would be convenient to have scans of the skeletal structure ahead of time.
So then, it is not dumb?
The only problem I see, is that many recruits are not done growing. When I enlisted at 18, I was 5'9" and weighed 130 lbs. When I was discharged four years later, I was 6'0" and weighed 165 lbs.
or just 3d print the bombs just before dropping them.
Musculature shapes bone development. While very similar, the radius and ulna are not identical between two arms because people are not typically ambidextrious, and will naturally favor one over the other. Having a mirror is obviously a good place to start with, but not a great answer as the musculature will be slightly different lengths, strengths, and attachment ridges upon which they hang. Inferring what those differences should be and computing them is a non-trivial task. Having a known good sample that all are expected to participate in is a trivial task, comparitively as it can be completed during regularly scheduled physicals prior to deployment.
Thirty four characters live here.
Yeah, it's dumb. Whole body MRIs take a long time and are expensive, even if you factor out the tendency to overcharge everything by a factor of ten in American Medicine. If you use CT as a medium, you are needlessly exposing people to radiation. Data storage isn't cheap. The infrastructure to get the data to the field (or even a different hospital) isn't cheap. It won't do anything useful. As has been noted several times already, bones aren't the big issue - it's the stuff that the bones are attached to.
It's just a fantasy created by some idiot journalist and some other techno fetishists.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Why would the US want to build a skeleton army?
I expect nothing of substance when I see "3D printing". You should adjust your expectations likewise.
When I see 3D printing, I expect plenty of substance, just sadly in a globby mess splodged over the printer bed...
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
What makes it retarded as opposed to an interesting direction given the present and improving ability to print replacement body parts?
The fact that a bone is a living organ, not a lump of cheese.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
And thus WWIII was lost due to a Hewlett Packard printer cartridge that reported itself empty when it was still half full....
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Yes. It really is scary seeing a soldier run towards you waving bones in the air. Obviously, he's finished with that person and looking for his next meal.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
So that's why she kept saying MultiPASS.
and the HP ceo will be in gitmo
I was thinking about what could be done with 3D printed stem cells, soft tissue "printed" around the bone.
Gently reply
Bones are not living. They are host to lots of living stuff but they are dead. There is lots of research and practice into building 3D frameworks for your body to grow back into. Not all three D printing is little plastic doodahs.
The fact that a bone is a living organ, not a lump of cheese.
Wow, that does sound pretty stupid. But weren't they planning to replace bone with things like titanium rather than things like cheese?
The overview of the movie has a typo in it. It should read "Politicians scheme to clone themselves, assuring immoral life."
http://thedriftwars.com/
I have found this humerus!
If bones are not living, why do they become stronger if you do weight lifting?
Why is bone loss a problem in long term space missions.
How do bones grow back together if they break?
All that nice magic ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yeah, it's dumb. Whole body MRIs take a long time and are expensive, even if you factor out the tendency to overcharge everything by a factor of ten in American Medicine. If you use CT as a medium, you are needlessly exposing people to radiation. Data storage isn't cheap. The infrastructure to get the data to the field (or even a different hospital) isn't cheap. It won't do anything useful. As has been noted several times already, bones aren't the big issue - it's the stuff that the bones are attached to.
Ok, what makes it dumb? Whole body MRIs aren't that significant an issue either in time or cost. The argument that CTs expose people "needlessly" to radiation is incorrect simply because there is an obvious need. US soldiers get injured all the time and sometimes those injuries destroy bone and other parts of the body.
Data storage might not be cheap, but it's not expensive either. Same goes for data delivery infrastructure.
As to the claim that it won't do anything useful, that's already been dealt with since we're rebuilding human bodies which is already known to be an activity with considerable value.
As has been noted several times already, bones aren't the big issue - it's the stuff that the bones are attached to.
And once that is solved, there will no doubt be further obstacles which we will solve in a similar fashion to our past problems.
To summarize, I don't see at all why this idea is supposed to be dumb.
Oblique calcium reference for anyone familiar with anatomy and physiology.
The problem, I suppose, was the headline, not the article. If there is no bone left to regrow from (bones are incredibly good at healing themselves, unlike many other parts of the body), you can be damn sure there won't be any soft-tissue worth talking about either, so there's no need for "a bone". Replacing joints, which is what the article seems to be pointing more towards, is a different matter entirely.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
If you reconstruct a soldier, replacing every body part one by one until all body parts have been replaced, is it still the original soldier?