2013: The year in science

The close of 2013 gives us an excellent opportunity, though satiated with holiday feasts, to look back on a year that has been filled with scientific accomplishment. So it's time to get comfortable on your Binary Chair, sip your hot cocoa from a phase-change mug while your Foodini prints out a batch of cookies and reflect on science stories of note from the past year.

If 2012 was the year of 3D printing, 2013 marked the first real progress in printing bits of lifeforms.

We have seen the printing of retinal cells in a major step toward growing replacement retinas, as well as the 3D printing of functional liver tissue.

New methods for printing tissues included the direct printing of hydrogel blood vessel scaffolding by dynamic optical projection stereolithography, 3D printing of human embryonic stem cells, and the micro 3D printing of lipid cell-like assemblies as tissue substitutes. On the nanoscale, we have seen the creation of artificial ribosomes, which carry out biological protein synthesis in the body.

Also of note is the development of the BioPen, which allows a surgeon to directly draw stem cells, scaffolding, and growth factors on the damaged surfaces of bones, thereby assisting their rapid healing.

We confidently expect printing bits and pieces of ourselves for replacement and medical research will continue as a hot topic throughout the decade, with substantial new treatments hitting the medical mainstream as we approach 2020. The maximum human longevity probably wont be radically changed, but somewhat longer and much healthier lives are likely to be the fallout from the medical use of replacement organs.

A topic closely related to 3D printing of people parts is enabling a flexible source of the cells and tissues needed for such procedures. 2013 was a year of great progress in this area, with developments ranging from creation of mini-brains to a potential cure for baldness.

The real question remaining after this year: Is there any type of cell or tissue we cant figure out how to produce? We suspect that until medicine is able to substantially duplicate the contents of a brain, or some smoothly operating cerebral rejuvenation treatment comes along, 120 years will continue to be roughly the maximum human lifespan. However, we can still have hair at age 120! Many of these new methods are awaiting FDA approval for human testing, so in the short term you might still want to go ahead and get yourself a good toupe!

2013 has seen major strides in practical, experimental, and theoretical terms, toward stronger materials and slipperier surfaces.

Not surprisingly, graphene retains its crown as the strongest material that has actually been made in significant amounts. A new technique for making large areas of polycrystalline graphene has succeeded in reproducing the record strength of single crystal graphene. Graphene aerogel has also retaken the position of worlds lightest solid with a density of 0.16 mg/cc, or about one-eighth of the density of air.

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2013: The year in science