The big news this week comes from the world of medicine, where a woman has received a 3D-printed ear transplant. The 20-year-old woman suffered from microtia, a rare congenital deformity that left her without a pinna, the external structure of the ear. Using scans of the normal ear, doctors were able to make a 3D model of what the missing pinna should look like. Raw material for the print was taken from the vestigial ear of the patient in the form of cartilage cells, or chondrocytes. The ear was printed using a bioprinter, which is a bit like an inkjet printer. The newly printed ear was placed into a protective structure and transplanted. The operation was done in March, and the results are pretty dramatic. With a little squinting, it does look a bit like there are some printing artifacts in the ear, but we’d imagine that’s more from the protective cage that was over the ear as it healed.
Interesting news from Jezero crater on Mars this week as NASA revealed that Perseverance is now autonomously blasting rocks with its laser. During its recent drive in the ancient river delta, the rover spotted two rocks that seemed interesting to its Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science, or AEGIS, system. Rather than sending the images back to controllers on Earth and waiting for instructions, AEGIS used the IR laser in the rover’s SuperCam to blast away at the surface or each rock, while monitoring the spectrum of the resulting plasma plume. This marks the first time AEGIS has been used by Perseverance, and the thought is that i ..
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