To this end, 3D By Flow claims to have teamed up with a company they won't name but describe as the "world's largest chocolate maker." "We are working together to create the first industrial-scale chocolate printer, and this will be complete later this year," the team wrote in an email.
But competing with the industrial automatons that prepare foods today will require a significant leap in speed. 3D printers have a reputation for being slow. Barilla's prototype, for instance, takes 45 seconds to craft a single piece of uncooked pasta. Meals for the German nursing home can be assembled by a single machine at a rate of only 10 to 20 per hour.
"Speed is all important," wrote Jan Andrzejewski, who created a device called the Rotruder that uses 3D-printed plastic molds to form desserts quickly instead of 3D printing the food itself. "If the response to the chef asking how long till the 3D-printed item made from freshly mixed ingredients will be is 'about another 20 minutes, chef,' all hell would break loose."
New machines in the works give reason to be hopeful that 3D printing will speed up. One project called Gizmo 3D aims to print objects in mere minutes instead of the hours it can take with today's printers. So does another project still under development, Carbon3D, which has the stated goal of constructing plastic items 25 to 100 times faster than is possible with current techniques.
In the meantime, Bordeaux's vineyards, bottlers, barrel makers and wine merchants are getting ready to raise a glass to their increasing fortunes. Following the less than spectacular vintages of late, said Sykes, there's a feeling of relief more than anything that this year's fruit is full of promise.
In the late 1960s, Lindahl found that DNA is subject to many millions of damaging assaults every day. His research sought to uncover how DNA can be so unstable while human life remains more or less stable.
The answer: DNA has several ways of repairing itself. "This is a great prize," said physicist Michael Turner, director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. He added that this is the latest of four neutrino-related Nobel Prizes, from 1988 to 2015.
Today’s announcement was "doubly wonderful," said Gene Beier, a professor of physics at the University of Pennsylvania who was a U.S. co-spokesperson for the SNO experiment. Beier had also worked in the Kamiokande II experiment, a predecessor to Super-Kamiokande. Both advances were done by looking at natural, local substances. In the case of Tu’s work, ancient Chinese remedies and herbs proved the key to finding new treatments. In Ōmura’s case, his search took him to the woods near his favorite golf course.
“I humbly accept it,” he said of the prize in an interview. “I am surprised.”
Ōmura looked at a type of bacteria found in soil called the Streptomyces, the group of organisms from which late biologist Selman Waksman extracted streptomycin, one of the earliest antibiotics. Ōmura took his samples and using large-scale culturing, he isolated thousands of new strains from the soil. He then took the 53 most promising with the intent they be studied further for their antibiotic strengths.
Campbell used Ōmura’s cultures to test for efficacy and produced Ivermectin, which kills the parasites, first for use in domestic and farm animals, and then in a more purified form, for use in humans.
Tu looked at the literature of ancient Chinese medicine for her breakthrough, which started with the plant Artemisia annua. Her first attempt produced inconsistent results, so she went back to the literature to find cause to extract the active ingredient, and named it Artemisinin.
Her work led to a whole new class of anti-malarial drugs, usually used in combination with other drugs.
While parasitic diseases are a minor and often ignored public health problem in the developed world, they are a major plague elsewhere. Parasitic worms, such as the roundworm, affect one third of the world’s population, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America.
The larvae live in the soil and get into the body by traveling from the hands to the mouth, or in some cases through the skin. Symptoms don't appear until about a year after infection. When the adult worm growing in the body is ready to lay eggs, it breaks through the skin as an open wound, usually when that part of the body is submerged in water, and crawls out. The worms can be a foot and a half long.
For onchocerciasis, this roundworm infection is caused when an infected blackfly introduces worm larvae into the skin of the human host, where they penetrate into the bite wound. These larvae can develop into adult worms underneath the skin and cause skin nodules to form. Treatment with ivermectin every 6-12 months kills the larvae and microfilariae but not the adult worms. Adult worms can also be removed surgically.
The diseases they cause are serious and include river blindness (onchocerciasis) and lymphatic filariasis, the latter leading to ghastly swelling disfigurements, including elephantiasis and scrotal hydrocele. The infection can last nine years.
Ascariasis, an intestinal infection, is the most common human worm infection, affecting a billion people. Ivermectin kills the parasite.
Malaria is a historic problem and one of the oldest human diseases, perhaps 50,000-100,000 years old. The team's new noninvasive technique uses a laser to measure the speed of blood flowing in the skin beneath suspicious-looking moles. Analysis of 144,000 data points connected with each individual mole revealed fluctuations in the flow, or perfusion, of blood through the tiny vessels known as capillaries. The fluctuations, revealed through the Doppler effect, helped to reveal whether or not individual patients had melanoma, the most aggressive form of skin cancer.
In an experimental trial on 54 patients, the approach identified every case of melanoma. It also ruled out the cancer in 90.9 percent of patients not suffering from it, the team related in the online journal Nature Scientific Reports.
"The method is optical, noninvasive, and easy to apply," said Aneta Stefanovska, the physicist at Lancaster University in England who conceived of the study and designed it. If they had wanted to, the Italians could have designed the buildings with a mind for sound -- even theaters in ancient Greece had great acoustics and are still in use. But Prodi said that going to the opera was a social event, and initially that was more important than hearing the show. Most patrons couldn't care less about the music.
Italian opera houses were horseshoe-shaped structures with boxes in tiers on top of each other. The boxes were private property, Prodi said, and owners could rent them out. A bicoastal team of marine biologists has developed and tested a new noninvasive method of diagnosing the health of endangered whales that relies on a small, unmanned drone.
The drone, called a hexacopter because it has six whirling rotors, collects data from two different altitudes.
An onboard camera first takes high-resolution photographs of the entire body of a target whale while hovering between