“Earl Gray, hot…and extra pepperoni on the pizza.”

NASA has enlisted the help of mechanical engineer Anjan Contractor at Austin, Texas-based Systems and Materials Research in the form of $125,000 to build a 3D printer that makes pizzas. Contractor has already made a proof-of-concept printer able to print the chocolate chips onto a cookie. To print the pizza, he plans on first printing out the dough and letting it cook while printing out sauce and toppings.

“The way we are working on it is,” Contractor explained to Quartz, “all the carbs, proteins and macro and micro nutrients are in powder form. We take moisture out, and in that form it will last maybe 30 years.”

That’ll definitely come in handy for a trip to Mars, until we can terraform the planet, of course, when fresh vegetables will be aplenty. But astronauts aren’t the only ones who stand to benefit from printing food.

A pizza is an ideal food for a 3D printer to tackle. It has a variety of ingredients arranged in layers. Contractor hopes to use the money from NASA to build the food-printing device by the end of the year. The following is a video of his prototype that can print chocolate on a cookie.

The idea of printing food has been around for a while now. In 2011, a group at Cornell created a printer that prints chocolate, cheese, scallops, celery, even turkey. But rather than use the layer-by-layer fabrication method that has come to define 3D printers, their food is made by layering ingredients squeezed out of tubes. And just last month a scientist in the Netherlands printed an entire burger, although with its $325,000 price tag it’ll be some time before our corner burger shops adopt the technology.

One can envision a day when 3D food printers will enable the long distance transmission of digital recipes, so Mom can “cook” you your spaghetti just the way you like it even if you’re miles – or planets – away. Ray Kurzweil predicts that, in the future, information will become a major commodity to be bought and sold. Recipes, furniture designs, unique toys – the blueprints for anything that can be 3D printed, instead of the finished products themselves – will compete on the open market. But the printers have to be built first. And who better than NASA to push even the culinary envelope? Hopefully their can-do attitude results in a delicious pizza with the workings, and eventually we can all eat like Captain Picard.

Kaiba is a young boy who suffers from a condition called tracheaobronchomalacia in which the cartilage in the trachea is soft, causing it to collapse and make it difficult or impossible to breath. The rare condition – affecting only about 1 in 2,200 babies – showed itself one evening when Kaiba was just six weeks old. He stopped breathing while his parents were dining at a restaurant. The terrified parents saw their son turn blue and rushed him to the hospital.

University of Michigan professor of biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering, Scott Hollister, and physician Glenn Green 3D printed an implant that kept Kaiba’s airway open, and allowed the boy to breath again.

Their design was guided by a high-resolution CT scan of Kaiba’s trachea and bronchus. With computer-aided design they were able to make a splint that was tailored specifically to Kaiba’s collapsed airways. The splint was made of a polyester called polycaprolactone that, according to the team, has never been used before in this manner. Normally such an invasive procedure would have to go through the normal regulatory FDA avenues. But given the urgency of Kaiba’s situation, the FDA fast-tracked the splint’s approval.

“For Scott and I, Kaiba’s case is definitely the highlight of our careers so far,” Green wrote in a piece about the operation. “To actually build something that can save a person’s life? It’s a tremendous feeling.”

Green goes on to mention that he and Hollister are already adapting their 3D printing procedure to print other types of tissue including an ear and a nose. Like Green and Hollister, physicians are increasingly teaming up with engineers and computer experts to create their own solutions to meet transplant demand. 3D printers have already been used to create bone models to plan operations, and just a few months ago one group printed an ear and then attached to the patient. Dentists benefit too, making custom-made crowns for patients in a few hours.

Most children with tracheaobronchomalacia outgrow it by age 2 or 3, but Kaiba’s case was severe. His survival attests to the power of using new technology to solve old problems, and the impact 3D printing will have in the future.

Two major limitations keep electric cars from going mainstream, and both center on the battery. For one, charge storage is limited. The cars produced by Better Place had a range of about 100 to 160 miles per charge, leaving many to worry about getting stranded. Another problem is the cost, as the battery is the most expensive part of an electric car.

When he founded Better Place in 2007, Shai Agassi sought to solve both of these problems by retaining ownership of the batteries in the cars, that way they could be leased to customers at prices comparable to conventional cars, and by setting up ‘swap stations’ where a spent battery could be swapped out for a fully charged one. Dozens of stations were set up around Israel initially, then in Denmark and the Netherlands to extend the car’s European range. And, thinking globally, the company had even set up stations in China, Hawaii and Japan.

Israel, Agassi’s home country, was considered an ideal place to establish the feasibility of the system because of its relatively small size, dense population centers, and high gas prices. Backed by Israeli President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Israel had formed a partnership with Better Place and Renault-Nissan with the explicit goal of replacing gas-run cars with electric ones. The company attracted private support too, raising as much as $850 million in funding from companies including General Electric, Morgan Stanley and HSBC. It all looked so promising a year ago when the company launched its first network.

As it turned out, Agassi’s solution, so elegant on paper, didn’t translate quite as well to the real world. First, it drove overhead costs extraordinarily high. Each switch station cost about $500,000 to build and, to make a network large enough for even Israel required building dozens of stations. And – the fatal drawback – even when the stations had been built, customers remained unconvinced. The company could only attract 750 drivers throughout all of Israel. On May 26th, citing losses totaling almost a billion dollars, Better Place filed to liquidate.

Apparently they couldn’t wait that long.

“This is a very sad day for all of us,” Better Place’s Board of Directors said in a statement. “We stand by the original vision as formulated by Shai Agassi of creating a green alternative that would lessen our dependence on highly polluting transportation technologies. The technical challenges we overcame successfully, but the other obstacles we were not able to overcome.”

But while Better Place screeches to a halt, the world’s leading electric car maker, Tesla continues to pick up speed. The company’s shares are up 180 percent this year and there’s plans in the works to add to the successful Model S ($62,000 to $87,000) with another sedan and a compact SUV, both priced around $35,000 and with ranges of around 200 miles. Unlike Better Place that required a vast network of swap stations to make owning the cars feasible, scaling the Model S has tracked consumer demand. The Model S can drive 208 to 265 miles on a single Supercharge. Supercharging stations provide reliable 150 mile boosts for long distance travelers, but right now there are only 12 of them. The company says they plan on installing hundreds more by 2015. In an effort to spread publicity about the feasibility of electric cars, Tesla’s charismatic founder Elon Musk plans to take the Model S on a road trip across America, recharging all the way from New York to Los Angeles.

As with gasoline-powered vehicles, some electric cars will be successful, some won’t. While Better Place’s solution to low battery power was technologically elegant, it wasn’t socially effective. As other electric cars like Tesla’s growing fleet, Mitsubishi’s i-MiEV, Chevrolet Volt or Nissan’s Leaf compete in the electric car market, the feasibility will grow with as visibility – and the number of charger stations – spread. Hard lessons will be learned and more companies will fold. But the biggest winner may still be Agassi’s original vision, to one day rid vehicles their dependency on oil.

The genome of the carnivorous bladderwort plant (Utricularia gibba) is minuscule compared to the human genome – 82,000 bases versus our near 3 billion. But while it’s small, the genome is extremely efficient. About 97 percent of its genome codes for an estimated 28,500 genes and the short sequences that control those genes. The authors of a study mapping the bladderwort genome surmise that, through many generations, the non-coding portion of the carnivorous bladderwort’s genome has been systematically removed, resulting in just 3 percent of non-coding DNA.

Non-coding DNA is DNA that does not code for proteins, the structural building blocks of the body. Their stretches of non-protein coding DNA contains the all important regulatory sequences that control when and where genes are turned on and off, areas that produce non-coding RNA, the function of which largely remains a mystery, and introns, those good-for-nothing wastes of space. But while it’s not clear what purpose the non-protein coding regions of the genome serve, they’ve generally been assumed to have some useful function – evolution is driven by the selection for survival, how could it make junk?

The current study, conducted by the Laboratorio Nacional de Genómica para la Biodiversidad (LANGEBIO) in Mexico and the University of Buffalo, however, reaches a different conclusion.

Which is why we shouldn’t automatically assume our genome works the same way.

Human physiology is much more intricate than that of the bladderwort. With all its different organs and cell types and the unique functions they serve, it would be shortsighted to conclude that the trimming which resulted in the bladderwort’s genome is a general evolutionary rule. That is, if the human genome were to trip the non-coding fat, it would still give us the diverse physiology our bodies require.

Counter to this idea are recent studies put forth by the ENCODE, a National Human Genome Research Institute project that seeks to identify all the functional elements of the human genome recently published a series of studies that send a clear message: it ain’t junk. The studies reach the collective conclusion that 80 percent of the genome actually does have important function – they don’t code for genes, but rather, affect the different biochemical processes that occur in cells.

The bladderwort is interesting, not only for its highly efficient genome, but all carnivorous plants are, by definition, awesome. The aquatic plant is found on all continents except Antarctica. Its water-filled bladders act as traps, sucking in small insects unlucky enough to contact the bladder and trigger it. And while the meat-eating green has done away with its non-coding DNA, one species’ junk could be another’s treasure. Projects like ENCODE that explore the genomes’ dark matter will bring its function – or lack thereof – to light. Genomic divergence of the two species could be a true mark of different evolutionary paths such that an almost entirely coding genome might reveal something about, not only our very non-coding genome, but the fundamentals that underly the evolution of all life.

While the exact cause of type 1 diabetes is unknown it is thought to be an autoimmune disorder in which the body attacks cells in the pancreas that produce insulin, a hormone that causes blood sugar to be taken up by cells and used for energy. In type 1 diabetes the pancreas makes little or no insulin, leading to high levels of sugar in the blood which can lead to blindness, limb amputation and kidney failure. Untreated, the disease is fatal.

Right now type 1 diabetes patients have to receive insulin shots, several times a day, for the rest of their lives to keep blood sugar levels under control. And there’s added risk if the patient’s dose isn’t correct – too much insulin is harmful too. The new device would relieve patients of the need to monitor and control their own blood sugar levels by controlling them automatically.

“This technology effectively creates a ‘closed-loop’ system that mimics the activity of the pancreas in a healthy person, releasing insulin in response to glucose level changes,” Zhen Gu, lead author of the study and an assistant professor in the joint biomedical engineering program at North Carolina State and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, said in a press release.

The study was published recently in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. The next step, the researchers say, is to test the technology in humans.

The current technique works in principle similarly to the ‘Silicon Pancreas,’ a microchip that regulates blood sugar levels by mimicking both the insulin-producing beta cells and glucagon-producing alpha cells in the pancreas. The current technique is more elegant in its simplicity, however, as the Silicon Pancreas requires a separate blood sugar level monitor embedded in the skin.

Diabetes affects 366 million people worldwide. It’s the seventh leading cause of death in the United States where 25.8 million children and adults, or 8.3 percent of the population, have the disease. And as people continue to grow in size, so will diabetes as an epidemic, and devices such as the one developed by Dr. Zhen and colleagues will be needed more than ever.

Drones are expected to benefit farms both big and small – small farms can save money and resources through greater precision, big farms can map and characterize crop health and yield, for example, of large areas more easily. Such land monitoring was once performed on foot, with farmers seeing for themselves which areas need more water or fertilizer. With the advent of precision agriculture, remote sensing has already become vital to many large farm operations. Satellites and aircraft take pictures in infrared to determine water distribution and movement, as well as weed coverage. Thermal infrared sensors that measure heat can determine crop health from afar. Tractor booms are also being fitted with the multi-spectral cameras so that they can take measurements simultaneous with doing their jobs.

But now drones can offer on demand images much more inexpensively. High performance GPS allows these aerial farmers to be controlled with precision and remain stable. The CropCam is an RC glider plane equipped with a Pentax digital camera. It’s operated manually or preprogrammed on the ground to collect aerial photos to provide imagery for agriculture, forestry, environmental and other uses. Another is Airrobot’s ARB100-B used in France for agricultural surveying. And far ahead of their American counterparts, over 2,400 Yamaha RMAX Unmanned Helicopters are already tending to farmland across Japan, South Korea and Australia (these top-of-the-line machines cost $125,000 each).

And the RMAX can do more than just monitor, it can actually help with the farming. It’s equipped with a sprayer that can disperse granules, coated grains and fertilizers. The drone is smart enough to tell operators when airspeed is too high for optimal spread of material. And offering the farmer a rare opportunity to scale, up to six RMAXs can be operated simultaneously – tractors will need another gear just to keep up.

Ever improving drones continue to offer their services to warfare, surveillance, simple entertainment, and now to help farmers farm better. There’s no way to know right now if UAVs will fulfill AUVSI’s high economic expectations. But no doubt companies eager to find out will be locked in a dogfight to master the skies over US farms.

The X-51A was lifted from Edwards Air Force Base in California by a B-52H Stratofortress and was released at about 50,000 feet (15,000 meters). A solid rocket booster then kicked in to bring the X-51A to Mach 4.8 in 26 seconds. The solid rocket booster then separated and the X-51A’s air-breathing supersonic combustion ramjet – or scramjet – engine pushed it up the rest of the way to Mach 5.1 and up to an altitude of 60,000 feet (18,300 meters). Four minutes later its fuel supply had been used up and it nosed down, finally crashing (as planned) into the Pacific Ocean. In just over six minutes it had traveled over 230 nautical miles, making it the longest air-breathing hypersonic flight ever.

What makes the X-51A special is its scramjet engine which has no moving parts. Scramjets of the past have used hydrogen fuel, which is injected into a combustion chamber where it is mixed with incoming air and ignited. The X-51A differs in that it uses a hydrocarbon fuel instead for “lighting a match in a hurricane.” The Air Force says that logistical advantages that come with using hydrocarbon make it a much better choice for a sustainable scramjet program.

A vehicle is defined as hypersonic if it travels past Mach 5.0. The current air speed record for manned flight is just under Mach 3. We’ve certainly come a long way since Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947. Just last year Yeager went supersonic again to commemorate the 65th anniversary of his landmark flight. People like Yeager have the need for speed too, and it’s only a matter of time before someone gets behind the stick of a X-51A type and becomes the first to go hypersonic.

Check out the amazing flight in the following video.

[Source: VideoFromSpace via YouTube]

The culinary breakthrough is the creation of Mark Post, a Vascular Physiology professor at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. To make the burger, he and his team of researchers began with a kind of stem cell called a myosatellite cell that is taken from a cow’s neck. The myosatellite cells are placed in growth medium that the researchers have formulated to allow them to grow and divide. The cells are grown into 20,000 strips of muscle tissue which are finally assembled into a burger. In all, the in vitro burger is comprised of tens of billions of cells.

Burger lovers know that fat provides much of a burger’s juicy goodness. But Post, who has sampled his lab-grown recipe, says although it has zero fat, his burger “tastes reasonably good.” In the coming weeks Post plans on cooking his burger at an event in London where participants will try the in vitro meat – adding salt and pepper to taste.

The burger isn’t completely devoid of a reliance on cows. The muscle cells were grown in fetal calf serum. It’s hoped that in the future the burger can be produced without any material of animal origin.

While Post maintains faith that technological advances will bring costs down, it still remains to be seen whether or not producing burgers in the lab will be at least as safe as normal burgers and, if it’s going to be a sustainable enterprise, if it will taste as good. At least at this early stage, thick, juicy stakes is something people shouldn’t expect.

At least one person – aside from Post and the members of his lab – believes that the project will eventually serve up results. Who exactly, we can’t say, as the $325,000 burger was funded by an anonymous investor.

While cultured meat is better for the environment might seem obvious, a 2011 study summarized just how much better it is. Compared to conventional meat production in Europe, cultured meat required up to 45 percent less energy and up to 96 percent less water to produce, generated up to 96 percent less greenhouse gases and, without animal herds of flocks to tend to, requires 99 percent less land.

The world’s population continues to grow at a fierce rate and is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. Countries with burgeoning economies like China are expected to increase their demand for meat to feed growing middle class populations. In vitro burgers have long been sought as a solution to minimize environmental costs of beef farms and as an alternative to slaughtering millions of cattle every year. If and when they make it to grocery market shelves, they’ll be a savory addition to our sustainable future.

The hypothalamus controls a number of hormones that influence development, growth, metabolism and reproduction. Previous research has also shown that an unhealthy hypothalamus can lead to disorders associated with aging such as glucose intolerance and hypertension. Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University then asked if the hypothalamus might have some greater control over aging in general.

To answer this question they focused on a protein produced by the hypothalamus called NF-kB that regulates a wide variety of physiological processes including cell growth and death, and inflammation and has been connected to diseases such as cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and heart disease. The researchers hypothesized that preventing NF-kB from being produced in the hypothalamus would slow the process of aging.

The lifespan of untreated, normal mice ranged between 600 and 1000 days. The mice who had their NF-kB blocked lived up to 1100 days, a median lifespan increase of 20 percent. In an assessment at six months of age they showed more muscle and bone, thicker skin, and performed better on learning tests than the normal mice.

Another substance important for whole-body aging is gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH), which is important for our reproductive systems. Like NF-kB, GnRH is synthesized and released from the hypothalamus. It is also regulated by NF-kB – production of NF-kB leads to a decrease in GnRH. The authors therefore hypothesized that the anti-aging effects of NFkB may have been mediated through their effects on GnRH. If that’s true, then boosting the amount of GnRH should have similar anti-aging effects.

The study was published recently in the journal Nature.

“It’s clear from our study that many aspects of aging are controlled by the hypothalamus,” Dongsheng Cai, lead author of the study, said in a news release. “What’s exciting is that it’s possible – at least in mice – to alter signaling within the hypothalamus to slow down the aging process and increase longevity.”

In addition to increasing longevity, knocking down NF-kB levels might also one day be a strategy to combat neurodegenerative diseases associated with aging. Inflammation in the hypothalamus is associated with cognitive decline and age-related brain disorders. The team saw that inflammation was higher in old mice. But treating the mice with GnRH decreased the inflammation. So not only could life be extended through the new neurons produced when the amount of NF-kB is decreased, but through reduced inflammation as well.

We all know that, through the brain, we control our movements, sense our environment, and feel emotion. But it’s easy to forget that the brain also regulates the “behind the scenes” basics of our physiology. As it turns out, through controlling our body’s hormones the hypothalamus has control of systemic aging and our lifespans. Just the size of an almond, it’s a small area with enormous therapeutic potential.

I’ll give you a moment to dump all your triclosan-containing antibacterial liquid soaps and body washes that you’ve been using for years into the trash.

Triclosan, which kills both bacteria and fungus, is found in about 75 percent of antibacterial products. In addition to soaps, it’s found in deodorants and toothpaste and mouthwashes where it helps prevent gingivitis, and it’s infused in various household products such as garbage bags, kitchen utensils, furniture, clothing, toys, and some cosmetics.

Need another moment?

In short, triclosan is all around us. Which is why it’s a good thing that the FDA has decided to take a look at the compound to see first of all if it actually works, and secondly if it’s harmful. The move has been prompted by recent animal studies showing triclosan affects hormone regulation in animals. If the same holds for humans, it could increase risk of hormone-related problems such as infertility and early puberty.

“To me it looks like the risks outweigh any benefit associated with these products right now,” Allison Aiello, professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health told the associated press. “At this point, it’s just looking like a superfluous chemical.”

And a possibly dangerous one.

But how could a chemical that has been in everyday household products since 1972 only now face scrutiny by the FDA? The truth is, many chemicals used in household products have never received an FDA stamp of approval because they were developed decades ago before laws required a scientific review of cleaning ingredients.

The antibacterial did score a victory in 1997 with its approval for use in Colgate’s Total toothpaste after the Colgate-Palmolive Co. demonstrated it helped prevent gingivitis. For the rest of the products, however, the FDA had set a 2012 deadline for itself to complete its review.

At about the time that deadline had come and gone, animal studies emerged showing triclosan to alter hormone regulation and other studies with bacteria indicated that triclosan may increase antibiotics resistance. The hormone study corroborated the results of a 2009 study performed by the Environmental Protection Agency that showed the compound decreased testosterone levels and sperm production in rats and a 2010 study by the University of Florida showing that it interfered with movement of estrogen into fetuses in pregnant sheep. In response to public concern, the FDA issued a consumer update saying they’d finish the review by the end of the year.

They didn’t, but they’re still at it: “We are engaged in a comprehensive scientific and regulatory review of all the available safety and effectiveness data. This includes data relevant to the emerging safety issues of bacterial resistance and endocrine disruption due to triclosan in FDA-regulated products.”

Some aren’t waiting for the results. The data has prompted some hospitals and companies to stop using products with triclosan. In 2010, Kaiser Permanente replaced triclosan-containing soaps from 37 of its hospitals and replaced them with alcohol-based hand sanitizers. And beginning in 2015, Johnson & Johnson is planning to make all of its adult product triclosan-free.

The slow moving FDA certainly isn’t garnering confidence with their unexplained delays. Probably to head off further criticism they haven’t issued another timeframe for the review. When they finally do announce their decision, whatever it is will likely raise the ire of the companies that have to retool entire production lines or consumers won’t believe triclosan is safe no matter what the FDA says. It might get ugly, ugly enough to have to wash people’s mouths out with soap.