Domenic Eggbeer, a PhD student at the National Center for Product Design & Development Research in UK, hopes to apply the technology of rapid prototyping to improve the quality of prosthetics and to slash production times.

Mass production techniques have transformed the world and made advanced technology cheaply available in all kinds of areas. Rapid prototyping (aka 3D printing) could make these techniques available areas mass production won’t reach.
That’s important because economies of scale mean that some areas of life haven’t benefited from technology as much as they could. If demand is small, it’s simply too expensive, and just not worth it to mass produce. Assistive technologies that can improve the quality of life of disabled people, for example, are not a big enough market for mass production. But rapid prototyping could change all that.
“Today’s techniques have pretty much remained unchanged for forty years,” he told me. Skilled artists work with wax to sculpt a prosthesis, which is then used as a mould to make a finished piece of silicone. Skin texture is one of the most important features needed to make a prosthesis look realistic – it’s added to the wax using toothbrushes, orange peel or gauze. But the whole process takes 2-3 days with the patient having to be present for much of it.
Eggbeer has been testing a rapid prototyping machine for printing realistic skin instead. A close-up photo of their skin, or an imprint of it, can be used to instruct a 3D printer to produce the same texture in wax over a large area. The photo above shows some of the results.
Eggbeer’s goal is to use a few photos and perhaps 3D scans of the patient to quickly make a near-complete wax model of a prosthetic. “Instead of them sitting there for a whole day, they would only need come in for a final fitting, and adjustments,” he says.

Full article at the New Scientist Blog . . .

The history of medicine is a rich and fascinating topic which has very little relevance to non-geeks… until now! Researchers from the Mayo Clinic have published a paper in the BMJ, which used an ancient herbal text as a guide to finding novel drugs. Apparently they stumbled onto an antibiotic that can wipe out some of the more stubborn strains of super bacterias. Here’s more from the press release:

A unique Mayo Clinic collaboration has revived the healing wisdom of Pacific Island cultures by testing a therapeutic plant extract described in a 17th century Dutch herbal text for its anti-bacterial properties. Early results show that extracts from the Atun tree effectively control bacteria that can cause diarrhea, as claimed by naturalist Georg Eberhard Rumpf, circa 1650. He documented his traditional healing methods in the book Ambonese Herbal.
The Mayo Clinic-led team’s report appears in the Dec. 23 edition of The British Medical Journal… In their report, Mayo Clinic researchers demonstrate the feasibility of using sophisticated data mining techniques on historical texts to identify new drugs.
The study provides a creative new model for drug discovery. It integrates nontraditional, ancient medical information with advanced technologies to identify promising natural products to investigate as drugs for new and better therapies.
“Natural products are invaluable sources of healing agents — consider, for example, that aspirin derived originally from willow bark, and the molecular basis of the anti-cancer chemotherapeutic agent Taxol™ was derived from the bark of the Pacific yew tree. So it’s not so far-fetched to think that the contributions of an ancient text and insights from traditional medicine really may impact modern public health,” explains Brent Bauer, M.D., director of the Mayo Clinic Complementary and Integrative Medicine Program.
For thousands of years, people around the world have lived intimately with botanical healing agents and evolved effective healing traditions. “Our work shows just how much we can learn from them. But to make the most of what is fast becoming lost knowledge, we have to respect, preserve and work with traditional healing cultures,” adds Eric Buenz, Ph.D., researcher for Minnesota-based BioSciential, LLC.
Rumpf referred to himself as Rumphius, in the Latinized scientific manner of the day. Rumphius was a German-born naturalist who worked for the Dutch East Indies Company. His book is an account of the herbal healing traditions on the Indonesian island of Ambon. Rumphius’ description of Atun kernels’ therapeutic properties is what modern medicine calls “antimotility agents,” they stop diarrhea. Writes Rumphius: “… these same kernels … will halt all kinds of diarrhea, but very suddenly, forcefully and powerfully, so that one should use them with care in dysentery cases, because that illness or affliction should not be halted too quickly; and some considered this medicament a great secret, and relied on it completely.”

Press release…
Searching historical herbal texts for potential new drugs. BMJ 2006;333:1314-1315.
More from the New York Times…