Move over microwave, here comes the 3D food printer

It may sound like science fiction, but exhibitors at the first ever 3D Food Printing Conference in The Netherlands believe it is the future.

They were showing off all the latest and most innovative in the field, including a 3D food printer by company ByFlow, able to create perfect caviar made of fruit gelatin.

It may not be mainstream today, but, just like the micro-wave oven back in the 80s, some believe the 3D food printer will soon be a part of every modern kitchen.

“We are going back to the time when microwaves arrived in the kitchen and people said ‘I am not going to heat my food in a microwave because I just don’t understand it.’ It’s a different technology but it’s the same concept. Once your mind allows it to be a part of your kitchen, you will be able to print your food,” said Marcio Barrades, head of sales at ByFlow.

German start-up Print2Taste presented its latest plug and play concept. The user draws a simple shape on a tablet computer which is then printed using a sweet gelatin substance. The result, say developers, is more than just appealing and can be adapted to a person’s specific needs.

“That’s always depending on the person, that’s why it’s personalized,” says Melanie Senger, concept developer at Print2Taste. “So if someone has deficiency in vitamin D you can add some vitamin D, if someone has another deficiency, maybe they don’t eat enough, you can add some energy in form of proteins or fat, or people who are obese or overweight, you can increase the fibre so that they feel full faster and do not take up so much energy.”

While 3D food printing is still in its infancy, testing and tasting are taken very seriously by these ambitious innovators convinced that this is the solution to feeding the planet’s growing population.

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Do you know: what's a robotic walker?

Don´t get confused; we are not talking about an ordinary walking robot.

Just listen to what this Italian computer engineer has to say about a low-cost state-of-the-art technology that could soon significantly improve the quality of living of elderly people.

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A satellite revolution in oceanography

"It does 14 orbits a day, you have global coverage in practically one day. You'd need almost one year to do that in a boat."

Plymouth is one of England’s historic port cities, a place from which sailors, soldiers and scientists have set off to sea for centuries. Today there’s a new twist to the tale though, as oceanographers now have a huge fleet of satellites in space to add to their list of high quality data sources in order to study and understand our seas.

Among those on board the Plymouth Quest research vessel as we head out into the English Channel is Spanish scientist Victor Martinez Vicente from Plymouth Marine Laboratory, a specialist in combining data from satellites with data from the sea surface. He takes water samples from a device called a rosette, which plunges off the back of their ship into the Channel waters to take samples at different depths.

His colleague, James Fishwick, a bio-optical oceanographer at PML, explains: “It’s a joined up approach, so we use the in situ sampling to get a true idea of what’s going on in the environment, to measure the interactions between all the different parameters – chemical, physical and biological – we then bring them and we can relate them to what the satellites has seen.”

Today’s samples will be studied for colour, because colour tells the researchers about phytoplankton, microscopic algae that are the base of the ocean food chain, and produce half the oxygen on planet Earth. Victor’s results will then be used to improve the accuracy of satellite data.

“So in this little vial you get in the order of thousands of small cells – phytoplankton, which do photosynthesis, as well as bacteria, and other particles as well. You can detect this using laboratory measurements that count each of the current cells in it. One of the reasons why we’re doing this is to match what the satellite sees with what there is in the water,” says Victor.

The field of satellite ocean observation is due to get a boost later this year as ESA’s Sentinel-3 will join the fleet of Earth observers already in orbit. It’s part of Europe’s Copernicus programme, and heralds a new era in ocean observation by offering an uninterrupted flow of data from its speedy polar orbit, now and well into the future.

Jérôme Benveniste, Senior Advisor in Altimetry at ESA, explains how the satellite age has revolutionised oceanography: “When you go across an ocean from north pole to south pole with a satellite it takes 50 minutes, and 50 minutes to complete the circle. Given that it does 14 orbits a day, you have global coverage in practically one day. You’d need almost one year to do that in a boat.”

We have long known that oceans dominate life on our planet and govern our weather and climate. But now, with the eyes of satellites, we can really get a planet-scale view of what’s happening:

“From space we measure physical parameters, like temperature, salinity, we know how to measure mass by the variation in the gravity field, and we measure the height of the ocean, which includes several phenomena, and we also study colour in visible light,” says Benveniste.

A lot can be learnt from space, but there’s always a need to keep checking the data with readings from the open sea. Among the instruments on board the Plymouth Quest is a new device to automatically control for glinting sunlight, developed at PML by Victor and colleagues: “It’s an above water radiometer – it looks at the ocean colour, directly as a satellite would, but in this case the measure is taken right above the surface of the water. We measure that so that we are able to give a better validation of what the satellite is actually looking at.”

That one single parameter, ocean colour, can reveal so much about our planet. In particular it shows how the living ocean adapts to change.

Senior Scientist at PML, Shubha Sathyendranath, Senior Scientist, explains: “Phytoplankton are microscopic, they are dynamic, they are very active, so you can think of them as the ocean analogue to the canary in the coal mine. They will respond very, very rapidly to any change.”

The satellite revolution in oceanography means each parameter can be monitored, mapped, and modeled on a global scale. So researchers can begin to look for trends and signs of interaction between ocean colour, sea level surface height, and temperature.

Sathyendranath highlights some of the changes they’ve seen via satellite: “Sea level has been increasing, not everywhere, and not uniformly, but overall the trend is an increasing trend. Ocean temperatures have been increasing, surface temperatures, but not so much in the last couple of years, and the scientists are again interested in why that is so”

With so much more data now available, from many different sources in the sea and in space, we’re slowly but surely starting to get the measure of our oceans, according to James Fishwick:
“We’re in a period now where the information that we’re getting back from the oceans is so significant – we have the satellite remote sensing, we have observatories and in situ monitoring, we have large autonomous systems out in the ocean all the time. We know far more than we ever have done because of technology. Once we understand that we can then start looking into the future to see how things might change, how the environment might adapt to a changing environment.”

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'Heart-on-a-chip' could replace animals in drug development

Observing human heart muscle cells normally means opening someone’s chest, but no longer. Now they can be observed and studied outside the heart with a microscope, and scientists at the University of California Berkeley working with bio-engineers have for the first time developed a system that allows human heart cells to function outside the body.

“It is the first demonstration of an actual human heart which is based in a system that is mimicking the physiology as close as possible,” says post-doctoral fellow and researcher Anurag Mathur.

Californian scientists call the device a heart-on-a-chip. The system is comprised of cell layers derived from human adult stem cells, which can be converted into many different types of tissue. These cells are housed on a small slab of silicon. To keep the cells beating, micro-fluidic channels thinner than a human hair nurture the cells and also provide a way to deliver drugs to them for testing.

“These are mock blood vessels, similar to blood vessels. The fluid that we are interested in comes across this tissue and then it bathes it with the drug. We give it caffeine, the heart-on-a-chip beats and accelerates its heart rate. We give it adrenaline and it accelerates its heart rate,” says Professor of Bioengineering and Material Science Kevin Healy.

Scientists believe that by mimicking human physiology, the device could provide a new and powerful tool for drug development. Currently, pharmaceutical companies spend billions testing new drugs on animal models that more often than not fail in predicting if new drugs are toxic to humans. The heart chip could revolutionize drug screening by providing a tool that can be modified to model human diseases using human cells to test new drugs. The research is still in its infancy, but Healy says its potential is enormous.

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The walking robot set to help elderly people live an autonomous life

How can we help elderly people find their way around places which are new and completely unknown to them? At the Science Museum in Trento, northern Italy, Vittoria Basso, 91 years old, is involved in an unusual scientific experience. She is testing a robotic walker.

“It is like a GPS, similar to the GPS that my son has in his car. This guides me easily; it helps me not to be lost. It let’s me know the right path. And I can walk without fear,” she explained.

The walker obtains information about the environment around it through the wireless connections and that guides the user’s decision-making.

The device is stuffed with sensors, cameras, obstacle recognition systems and software components aimed at extending elderly people’s autonomous life beyond the home.

“Inside algorithms receive the information from all the sensors embedded in the walker. The algorithms then analyse all this data and suggest to Vittoria and other users a path that minimizes the chances of stumbling on problems. The system for instance will try to avoid obstacles that may be present in the environment, or people who may be walking and did not notice the presence of the walker and its user,” explained Alessio Colombo Computer scientist, University of Trento.

“Or a dog,” added Vittoria Basso.

The technology was partially developed and assembled at the University of Trento. Engineers worked to equip the walker with both sensing and cognitive technologies, and friendly human-machine interfaces. Solutions were then tested by volunteers.

“With this machine you can be safer on the pavement or when you cross the street, etc… I think it is good when things like that are developed and when older people can buy or rent it for a certain price. That is really great,” pointed out Herbert Schuster, one of the volunteers.

Scientists aim at a robotic walker worth less than 2,000 euros per unit in the market.

Given the state-of-the-art technology embedded in the device, that is far from easy, researchers say. So they used some tricks.

“We tried to design it to be financially competitive. The embedded intelligent systems have powerful low-cost calculus platforms. The walker has also the possibility to connect to wireless signals sent by other sensors, cameras in the environment around. And this contributes to expand the capacity of our own system at a low cost.

‘We don’t need to think of this robotic walker as a substitute for caregivers. It is just something complementary. We can for instance think that these walkers could work in a retirement home. That same carer could follow and take care of dozens of users of this technology,” explained Luigi Palopoli, Computer engineer, University of Trento/DALI project coordinator.

Researchers say the technology is ready to be on the market in two or three years.

Find out more.

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Augmented reality: the future of advertisement?

Passengers at a bus stop in London recently got more than they had bargained for when they were plunged into a world of science fiction thanks to augmented reality advertising. After one woman was scared out of her seat by a crashing meteor, it was another passenger’s turn to be terrified by a tentacled monster trying to grab passers-by.

“We are immersed in advertisement from morning to evening. We interact with about 10,000 brands each day… 10,000 – that’s a huge number!,” says advertising and marketing professor Julien Intartaglia. “Which means that to stand out from this flood of brands in people’s everyday life, we have to be creative, resourceful in order to attract consumers’ interest and make them relate to the product.”

The question is: does this kind of advertising sell more?

The answer is: it’s still too early to tell. But the strength of augmented reality advertising is that it creates an experience consumers can share with others, turning them into ambassadors for the brand.

“If I am immersed in an unprecedented kind of consumer experience, I will share it with other people, and by doing this, I will raise other people’s interest, and that’s what’s interesting because it’s a new kind of advertising model which allows brands to play with the client’s involvement,” says Professor Intartagli.

It’s certainly an attractive advertising model, which has drawn interest from a wide range of brands, hoping to create a buzz and raise consumer attention.

One of them is major Swiss telecom company Swisscom.

“We have launched operations for several clients, for example advertising campaigns in magazines where we increase the content by adding videos, games, which may be of interest to the consumer and will extend their consumer experience. For a publisher, it’s also a chance to enrich the print edition of a magazine because, as we all know, unfortunately, sales in print editions are declining,” says Swisscom consultant Thierry Kunstmann.

While it’s still in its infancy, augmented reality advertising has a promising future, with consumers of every generation drawn to its unexpected blurring of the line between the real and virtual worlds.

A blurring that allows advertisers to transcend the public sphere and enter potential customers’ own, private world, allowing them to take part in and become the stars of this new form of reality show.

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