US Military Working On 3D Printing Exact Replicas of Bones & Limbs 80
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?
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...or maybe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboCop [wikipedia.org]
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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.
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Leeloo Dallas Canon MultiPASS (Score:2)
So that's why she kept saying MultiPASS [canon.com].
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The overview of the movie has a typo in it. It should read "Politicians scheme to clone themselves, assuring immoral life."
Exact replicas of Bones (Score:5, Funny)
It will look so much like the real McCoy, they will be able to use it in the next Star Trek film
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It will look so much like the real McCoy, they will be able to use it in the next Star Trek film
I'm thinking that they are researching another type of "Bone", that some males experience in dreams or in the morning in Mom's basement.
I was always suspicious over that children's song, where they sang "Give a dog a bone!"
"I'm a doctor, Jim, not a bestiality fetishist!"
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Indeed. Convergence towards a stupidity-singularity seems to be in progress...
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I'm mil
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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...
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On one hand, it is dumb. On the other hand, it would be convenient to have scans of the skeletal structure ahead of time. On the gripping hand, if you're making a new part anyway, why not do better than the original? That is, base it on the one on the other side, then make it the ideal shape and size to balance the body? If it's a little different from the original, the patient will cope. Unless, of course, the other side is defective or damaged...
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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
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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.
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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
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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 wit
Re: Holy shit! (Score:2)
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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.
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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.
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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 ...
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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?
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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.
Replica? (Score:2)
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Exactly. And you cannot just rip out a bone and put in another one either. All the other stuff needs to be attached and put into it.
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So we just outsource surgeon jobs to the 5th dimension? Problem solved, and we can probably make a pretty penny in the process.
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and you still have to pay off that student loan
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Sure other stuff needs to be attached. But this isn't an issue. Bone replacement is a routine everyday operation.
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Not on the scale that these people are envisioning. What is being replaced now are joints - with great care to avoid damaging muscles, tendons and nerves. There are limited bone grafts done, you typically make a metal scaffold and stuff bits of hip bone in there and there are some more advanced scaffolding technologies being worked on. None of these require detailed anatomical models of the patient.
There are replacements for skull parts being made by 3D printing but that can be done using a generic head
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Bones provide much more than structure. They are awesome! :D
My dog would definitely agree with you on that.
However, although the technique is still in its infancy, it does seem very promising; there is already work being done on using 3D printing to produce functioning organs like kidneys and lungs, using living cells instead of plastics. It does not seem unreasonable at all to extrapolate this to include an ever widening range of organs over time - the hardest part will be nerve cells, I expect, not least because the cells can be so incredibly long. I think we may
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You could use it to distract zombies, agreed.
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Cranium reconstruction is not uncommon (Score:3, Interesting)
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Also think of reducing the health care costs of older or retired soldiers. Hip/knee/shoulder replacements. They do not have to have been blown up of shot or anything violent.
Movie (Score:3)
The Island [imdb.com]
Someone keeps swiping all the Scarlett Johansson spare parts to build their own copy.
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The Island [imdb.com]
Someone keeps swiping all the Scarlett Johansson spare parts to build their own copy.
Or a sadder, non-action-movie version, Never Let Me Go [wikipedia.org] - based on the book [wikipedia.org] by Kazuo Ishiguro [wikipedia.org].
Would rather see research: respawning health packs (Score:2)
...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?
Huh. Priorities? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.)
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You do know that those things happened during a time when congress was proposing cutting their budget right?
1. Funding is threatened by congress
2. Don't give troops what they need, blame expense
3. Constituents get mad at congress
4. Budget is not just maintained, but increased
profit addendum
3a. Brass invests in military contractors
4a. Profit goes to mil-industry complex
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"Is this the same military which decided that armor was too expensive for humvee's, and that body armor was too expensive for soldiers?"
This method will print the kevlar right onto the body parts.
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I was in the Army back in the 80's when the first Humvees were being rolled out and they offer way better protection than the hold Jeep's and CUCV M1009s (essentially a tricked out Chevy K5 Blazer) that they replaced. They were designed for different a battlefield than the one we fought on in Iraq and Afghanistan, a battlefield were the threats were much more potent and a few pounds of Kevlar underbody armor was not going to make a bit of difference.
The Army _should_ have acted more quickly to upgrade or r
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Armor for Humvees means they use a certain deal more fuel, all the time. Regardless where they are, what they do. So yes, that might be really expensive.
Body armor is nice in movies (and nice in case it safes your life), otherwise it is overrated. No body armor makes you survive a direct hit of an modern infantry weapon, a grenade or a mojour explosion by anything.
It only helps you butchering third world peons in places where you had no business anyway.
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or just 3d print the bombs just before dropping them.
Re:In the year 2525 (Score:5, Funny)
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and the HP ceo will be in gitmo
Skeleton army (Score:2)
Why would the US want to build a skeleton army?
Just like sci-fi... (Score:2)
http://thedriftwars.com/
Is it still a person? (Score:1)