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Though it's been around for three decades, 3-D printing has finally started to take off for manufacturing and even for regular consumers. It's being used for making airplane parts on demand and letting kids make their own toys. One designer is pushing the limits of 3-D printing by using it to make an acoustic guitar. As a teenager, Scott Summit had a dream: He wanted to be a rock star. And, like his rock heroes, he wanted to design his own guitar — "one that had a sound that was designed by me," Summit says. "I just didn't like the idea of off-the-shelf guitar. I wanted my own guitar." Summit's dream to be a rock star? That's over. But he finally made his own guitar. It's gray and smooth like painted ceramic. It's got leafy engraving on the front. But what makes it really different is that it isn't wood. Summit printed it out of "very fine nylon powder." He says that when you do that, "you can create any shape...

"Written in blood" is usually hyperbole. Not so in the case of the latest issue of a Lebanese music and culture magazine. Audio Kultur used real blood to publish the magazine commemorating the 100th anniversary of the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians. The magazine's editor-in-chief, Tres Colacion, said the intent was not to call for the event to be called "genocide." (A growing number of historians, and more recently, Pope Francis, now say the Armenian killings by the Ottoman Turks, was a "genocide" — a term that Turkey rejects.) "Obviously when you do something like this it becomes a statement, and the reader will take away from it whatever they want to take away from it," Colacion told the Daily Star. "But what we want to do is just kind of celebrate this rich culture, which impacts all of us every day, especially in the arts." Lebanon became home to large numbers of Armenians fleeing the Turks during World War I. Whi...

While this year's annual State of Black America report from the National Urban League focuses as usual on areas of progress (education, healthcare and economic well-being) and regress (criminal justice) over the past year, the report took the unusual step of warning that the organization now has a new priority: protecting areas of progress from retrenchment during the Trump years. "During the Obama era, the economy added 15 million new jobs, the black unemployment rate dropped and the high school graduation rate for African Americans soared," Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, said in the report. "Now that progress, and much more, is threatened...The National Urban League is resolute; we will protect our progress." In the report, called "Protect Our Progress," the Urban League suggested that the nation should invest in a "Main Street Marshall Plan" that would ensure that the gains made by black Americans during the Ob...

A team at Wake Forest University has used a combination of living cells and a special gel to print out living human body parts — including ears, muscles and jawbones. It’s an advance on previous attempts, which either involved making a plastic scaffold and then trying to get cells to grow in and on it, or that printed out organ shapes that ended up being too floppy and dying. The new approach mixes live cells with a gel that starts out as a liquid but quickly hardens to the consistency of living tissue, and layers them in with tiny tunnels that serve as passages for nutrients to feed the cells until blood vessels can grow in and do the job naturally. “We are actually printing the scaffolds and the cells together,” said Dr. Anthony Atala of the Wake Forest University Institute for Regenerative Medicine, who led the study team. “We show that we can grow muscle. We make ears the size of baby ears. We make jawbones the size of human jawbones. We are printing all kinds of things...

Almost every day it seems there's a new use for 3-D printing. In medicine, the printers are already making prosthetic hands, hearing aid cases and parts of human ears. But the materials used in some 3-D printing processes could be toxic to humans, particularly if the products get inside the body. So researchers have been looking for ways found a way to replace some of the bad stuff with naturally occurring riboflavin, or vitamin B2. Riboflavin is found in lots of food, including green veggies, nuts and fish. Our cells aren't programmed to reject it, which could make it handy for use in 3-D printed medical implants, microneedles or scaffolding to build custom body parts in the lab. The researchers focused on a 3-D printing technique called two-photon polymerization, which can produce finely detailed, microscopic structures. The 3-D printer uses lasers to transform a potion of light-sensitive chemicals into a solid structure. But some of the chemicals in that potio...

He may not handle a gun as artfully as that other Bond, but University of Leicester scientist John Bond has made a real contribution to crime fighting. He has figured out a way for forensics experts to take a fingerprint off a bullet, even if the shooter has wiped the casing clean. The technique has already helped reopen three cold cases. JACKI LYDEN, host: And whose name gets 6.1 million hits on Google? Bond. John Bond, that is. This guy may not handle a gun so artfully and we're guessing he's not so debonair. He's a physicist after all, but John Bond has made a real contribution to crime fighting. He's figured out a way for forensic experts to take a fingerprint off a bullet even if a shooter has wiped the casing clean. You've seen this movie. An advance that even Q might not believe. But it's been reported in the Journal of Forensic Sciences and the Journal of Applied Physics. The old way of fingerprinting developed 100 years ago relies on a chemica...

NEW YORK — Museums are always looking for ways to make their exhibitions more exciting. Now, new technologies are making that easier. From 3D scanning and 3D printing, to virtual reality and special apps, these technologies are being applied in a multitude of ways. Still other technologies are being tested and developed as museums seek to ever broaden public access. “Where we used to have one way of visiting and experiencing a museum, people now expect a variety of ways,” said Catherine Devine, chief digital officer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. “It’s about exploring technologies.” A look at some of the ways museums are integrating and developing technologies to engage their audiences: Navigating a big collection You can get lost in the giant American Museum of Natural History. Explorer, a new app, uses hundreds of Bluetooth hotspots to navigate visitors around its halls to artifacts that may interest them the most. “Instead of saying ‘tu...