One month into a simulated space mission, a team of "gastronauts" in Hawaii is already figuring out what to have for dinner on Mars. It's thumbs up for wraps and vegetables, even when the vegetables are dehydrated or freeze-dried. It's thumbs down for pre-prepared meat dishes and most sugary drinks. But Tang is a hit, just as it was for astronauts 50 years ago.

That's the early word from the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS, a NASA-funded experiment that is forcing six non-astronauts to live on a Mars-style diet for four months. The findings could help the space agency determine what real astronauts eat and drink when they're sent to Mars in the 2030s or later.

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HI-SEAS is about more than food: In addition to the taste tests, the crew members are playing with robo-pets, coping with the disconnects that a Mars expedition would encounter, and even trying out odor-resistant underwear. "Two crew members have been wearing the same exercise shirt for five weeks now without any problem, so we suspect they might have been treated,” Angelo Vermeulen, the crew commander for the simulation, told NBC News in an email co-written with other crew members.

Simulating Mars
The HI-SEAS mission is part of a three-year, $947,000 NASA grant that also covers a bed-rest study in Texas. For most of the time, the gastronauts are confined to a domed habitat placed at the 8,000-foot level on Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano. If crew members go outside, they have to wear mock spacesuits. And as the mission continues, communications between the habitat and the outside world will be delayed 20 minutes each way to simulate the light-travel time between Mars and Earth.

All this is in line with a host of other Mars simulations — ranging from a 520-day mock mission in Russia to the Mars Society's crew rotations at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah.

Not everyone likes the concept. In March, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., made fun of HI-SEAS as an example of government waste. "For any of you college students looking for jobs, Uncle Sam's got a job for you," he said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. "The pay's $5,000, all expenses paid. The study is in Hawaii. But the requirements are onerous. Only a few can qualify. You have to like food."

In fact, not one of the crew members is a college student: Vermeulen is a space researcher and artist. The other participants are materials scientist Yajaira Sierra-Sastre, roboticist Simon Engler, geologist Sian Proctor, biologist Oleg Abramov and journalist Kate Greene. These six were selected from about 700 applicants.

Food ... in ... space!
The project is one of several initiatives NASA is funding to find out what works best as a long-duration diet. Just last week, the space agency firmed up a $125,000 contract with a Texas company to work on a 3-D printer for space food. Johnson Space Center has its own lab that works on orbital menus, and astronauts on the International Space Station have tried growing their own lettuce. Experts say astronauts on Mars will probably grow their own food as well.

Astronauts sometimes complain about the bland, boring menus they face in space — and that's the main focus for the HI-SEAS experiment: The crew is trying out the typical just-add-water meals served on the space station, and comparing them with meals that are created from a pantry of bulk ingredients, plus canned, dehydrated and freeze-dried foodstuffs.

Q&A: The good, the bad and the ugly on a Hawaiian Mars

"The advantages of using pre-prepared meals is that they’re less time-consuming and less stressful. Hardly any thinking needed." Vermeulen wrote. "But of course, they’re also less culinarily satisfying."

He and his crewmates use the dehydrated and freeze-dried vegetables whenever they can. "Wraps work really well: We combine tortillas, different vegetables, Velveeta cheese and sausage or canned fish. ... This is actually in line with the success of tortillas at the ISS," Vermeulen wrote.

The freeze-dried meat is a different story. A pre-prepared dish called "Kung Fu Chicken" is particularly awful: "The texture of the meal could be best described as 'slimy,'" Vermeulen wrote. No wonder the astronauts complain.

The HI-SEAS crew quickly went through their supply of Tang, but the other sugared drinks have hardly been touched. Now they're mostly drinking water, tea and coffee.

Not by bread alone
The crew's other research projects focus on different aspects of long-duration missions: A test of odor-resistant exercise wear serves as a practice run for an experiment that NASA is planning on the space station. Some of the togs are treated with antimicrobial agents, while others are left untreated. The crew members' mission is to wear the clothing for their workouts until they can't stand it any longer.

The test subjects aren't supposed to know which clothes are which, but they think they can tell the difference. "One of the crew members told us he was very impressed and that it was by far the best exercise shirt that he has used," Vermeulen wrote. The crew is also testing antimicrobial underwear, socks, gloves, towels and bed linens for Cupron, the company that makes them. 

Meanwhile, Engler is experimenting with robotic pets to see whether a needy, an assertive or a passive robo-personality is a better fit for space companionship. "It has been well-established that domestic pets can provide a great deal of stress relief and create emotional bonds with their owners. At this time it is not practical for domestic animals to accompany long-term space missions, so it is of interest to examine the potential of providing robotic companions," Vermeulen's email explained.

The HI-SEAS simulation also provides an opportunity to study group dynamics for long-duration space missions, including a phenomenon called crew-ground disconnect. "It's the perception by the crew that the mission support team doesn't understand what they're going through, are overscheduling them and aren't as supportive as they want them to be," said Kim Binsted, a HI-SEAS project leader at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. "That certainly has reared its head a couple of times."

So far, there have been no signs of friction between the crew members, but what about signs of affection? Vermeulen's answer to the inevitable question about sex provided no grist for gossip: "We’re actually getting along fine and keep professional relationships," he wrote. 

Binsted said the Hawaiian habitat isn't that conducive to romantic flings, due to the lack of privacy as well as the fact that the Internet lets crew members stay in touch with their loved ones in the outside world. The dynamics may be different for an actual Mars crew during a years-long mission, however. That's a question hanging over NASA's vision for Red Planet exploration.

To answer such questions, researchers plan to push the envelope for long-duration missions. Binsted said NASA recently approved another $1.2 million in funding for HI-SEAS over the next three years, with the goal of building up to a yearlong simulation. "The 12-month mission, we think, is going to line up time-wise with the 12-month mission on the International Space Station in 2015," Binsted said.

That means a future HI-SEAS crew could play a part in a real-life orbital experiment. "It's looking as if our mission will be a control experiment of a sort for the space station," Binsted said.

More about missions to Mars:

• Why sign up for a one-way trip to Mars?
• Applicants clamor to go on Mars flyby
• Cosmic Log archive on Mars

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HI-SEAS crew member Kate Greene is writing dispatches about the simulated Mars mission for Discover Magazine's website.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

This story was originally published on Fri May 24, 2013 7:23 PM EDT

NASA won't be printing out pizzas on Mars anytime soon, but the space agency is paying out $125,000 to study the use of 3-D printing technology for food preparation in space.

"We will be building the components for a prototype" over the grant's six-month period, David Irwin, principal investigator for the project at Texas-based Systems and Materials Research Consultancy, told NBC News.

The ideas is to use a 3-D printer to turn generic mixes of starch, protein and fat into textured foodie-type elements, and then add flavorings with an inkjet device. The result? Theoretically, you could have a warm slice of crusty-type starch material topped with fake cheese, sauce and pepperoni.

SMRC's Irwin was reluctant to discuss the project in detail, in part because the contract with NASA for a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research grant had not yet been signed. But he was optimistic about the long-term prospect: "We're going to do great things," he said.

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NASA spokesman David Steitz said the contract was finally signed on Wednesday. The project is part of the space agency's effort to widen the menu options for future space travelers when they head out to Mars or a near-Earth asteroid. Right now, astronauts are eating mostly pre-packaged, pre-processed, shelf-stable foods. But that won't work for a trip to the Red Planet.

"The current food system is not adequate in nutrition or acceptability through the five-year shelf life required for a mission to Mars, or other long-duration missions," Steitz said in an email.

Steitz stressed that the Phase I study is just one small step in what's likely to be a years-long effort to build a 3-D space food printer. "There's a lot between this and a pizza," he told NBC News.

Hello, 'Star Trek'
3-D printing technology could open the way toward the kinds of food synthesizers you've seen in 45-year-old episodes of "Star Trek." Basic unflavored ingredients could be kept in long-term storage — up to 30 years, according to a report on the project published by Quartz. The 3-D printer could build up different blends of the basics with different textures. Food-specific flavorings could be sprayed onto the components of synthetic food. Thus, the same device could turn out pizzas on one day, and tacos on the next.

"It has some merit as a way to avoid some of the problems that are currently experienced with the limited shelf life of the pre-prepared foods that are used by the astronauts," said Jean Hunter, a space food researcher at Cornell University who isn't involved with the 3-D-printing project. "One of the keys to having a good food system is to have a lot of variety."

SMRC's proposal to NASA says that "the biggest advantage of 3-D printed food technology will be zero waste, which is essential in long-distance space missions."

One small step: a cookie
As an initial experiment, SMRC researcher Anjan Contractor produced a chocolate-covered cookie using a 3-D printer, and Quartz quotes him as saying a 3-D-printed pizza is his next objective. If the project turns out the way Contractor and his colleagues hope, we may be seeing a cornucopia of food printouts on Earth as well as in outer space. SMRC says the technology could offer an alternative to the current ready-to-eat meals served up by the military, and even a solution to the world's future food woes. 

"With the anticipated world population of 12 billion by the end of the century, the current infrastructure of food production and supply will not be able to meet the demand of such a large population," the company says in its NASA proposal. "The conventional technologies can only provide marginal efficiency, which is not enough in keeping food prices at affordable level for the population growth. By exploring and implementing technologies such as 3-D printing, this may avoid food shortage, inflation, starvation, famine and even food wars."

What do you think? Is 3-D printing the technology that will feed us on Mars, and on Earth? Will it become a future fast-food fad? Or will the novelty eventually go stale? Feel free to register your opinion using the informal survey above, or add your comments below.

More about the food frontier:

• Burritobot is a precision tortilla-filling machine
• The wild possibilities of printing food
• NASA builds menu for Mars mission

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Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Researchers have selected six "gastronauts" who will put outer-space menus to the test next year during a four-month simulated Mars mission, conducted on a barren lava field in Hawaii.

The mission, jointly sponsored by Cornell University and the University of Hawaii at Manoa, is known as HI-SEAS — which stands for Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation. It's part of a NASA study aimed at determining the best way to keep astronauts fed and in good spirits during a long-duration mission to a deep-space destination.

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"We tend to say it's Mars, but as long as it's long-term space exploration, this research should apply," Kim Binsted, an associate professor at the University of Hawaii's information and computer sciences department, told me today.

The final six were chosen from nine finalists who spent several days in training last month at Cornell's test kitchens, where researchers develop all sorts of recipes for freeze-dried, canned, powdered or fresh-made foods suitable for spaceflight. Cornell has been doing these sorts of simulations for more than a decade — but the HI-SEAS mission is the most ambitious exercise yet.

The six crew members are:

• Oleg Abramov, a research space scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey's astrogeology branch in Flagstaff, Ariz.
• Simon Engler, a programmer specializing in robotics who's currently on an internship at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
• Kate Greene, a science and technology journalist, amateur filmmaker and open-water swimmer who is a native of Kansas and currently resides in San Francisco.
• Sian Proctor, a geology professor at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix.
• Yajaira Sierra-Sastre, a materials scientist and educator who is a resident in Ithaca, N.Y., and is currently working with disadvantaged school districts and communities in Puerto Rico.
• Angelo Vermeulen, a biologist, space researcher and visual artist from Belgium.

The three other finalists will be reserve crew members, ready to step in if one of the prime crew members has to leave the mission:

• Yvonne Cagle, a NASA astronaut and family physician who is currently on faculty and serves as the NASA liaison for exploration and space development with Singularity University in California.
• Crystal Spring Haney, a small-business owner, personal trainer and at-home mother of two from Kapolei in Hawaii.
• Chris Lowe, a space systems engineer from southeast England who currently resides in Glasgow, Scotland.

Binsted told me it was hard to narrow down the prime crew to just six. "If we could stick nine people in the habitat, we would have," she said.

In making the selection, the researchers wanted to strike a balance among the various skills that the crew members had to offer, and also come up with a team of "people you'd be happy to spend four months in a can with," Binsted said. The crew's cooking skills vary, she said: "There are a couple who cook quite a lot ... and a couple of people who don't cook at all."

"We wanted to have people who were willing to eat anything they'd be asked to try," Binsted said. "Of course, if you try something and you don't like it, that's fine."

The crew members will go through two weeks of additional training later this year, in preparation for the four-month exercise that begins next year in mid-March. They'll be paid $5,500 plus expenses for their time. In addition to trying out menus, the gastronauts will be pursuing their own projects in analog research or mission outreach. Binsted said the public will eventually be able to suggest recipes for the crew, or check out video updates on the mission blog.

All communication with the team in their habitat will be delayed to simulate the light-speed travel time for signals between Earth and Mars. The crew will also be required to wear simulation spacesuits anytime they venture outside the habitat, as if they were really living on Mars instead of in Hawaii.

The point of all this is to see how the crew's diet affects their health and morale during the kind of isolation and day-to-day routine that a space crew experiences. One of the big challenges for a long-duration space mission is the potential for menu fatigue. Having the same thing over and over again is bad enough on Earth. When you're confined in a tin can for a space journey, it's even more of a drag. Past studies have shown that astronauts eventually get tired of eating the foods they normally enjoy, and tend to eat less. That could lead to nutritional deficiencies — thus adding to the health risks associated with life in low gravity.

Binsted said the HI-SEAS crew will have a variety of menu items to try out: "A lot of freeze-dried fruits, vegetables and meats, textured vegetable protein, powdered eggs ... We'll have an international mix of ingredients, miso powder, dried tofu." During last month's session at Cornell, the finalists came up with their own menu items, including paella made with dried shrimp, coffee granita and a fruit smoothie using yogurt prepared from dried milk.

The researchers want to measure the time, power and water requirements for instant foods vs. crew-cooked foods. They'll also test their hypothesis that the rituals associated with food can be a morale-booster during an interplanetary journey. After all, that's why they call it "comfort food."

"It's hard to put a price tag on that," Jean Hunter, an associate professor of biological and environmental engineering at Cornell, said during last month's training session.

More about space food and simulations:

• Would-be gastronauts practice Mars cooking at Cornell
• Pale-faced crew emerges from 520-day mock Mars mission
• Space spice gets five stars from space station crew
• First Mars astronauts may grow their own food

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The HI-SEAS mission is part of a three-year, $947,000 NASA study that also includes a head-down, bed-rest study at the NASA Flight Analogs Research Center in Galveston, Texas. In addition to Binsted and Hunter, the HI-SEAS research team includes Cornell's Bruce Halpern and Bryan Caldwell. Rupert Spies, chef and senior lecturer at Cornell's School of Hotel Administration, will assist in the development of the study's menu. You can follow @HI-SEAS on Twitter or on Facebook.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or following the Cosmic Log Google+ page. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Want to get paid $5,500, plus expenses, for tasting different kinds of space food on Hawaii's Big Island for four months? Join the crowd: About 100 people have applied for the job so far, and there are still six days to go before the deadline.

There are a few catches, though: You'd have to be cooped up in a fake Mars habitat for most of that time, cut off from the rest of the world except for a time-delayed communication link. Forget about packing the bikini. Anytime you leave the habitat, you'd have to wear a bulky spacesuit. And don't expect a luau. The whole point of this exercise is to find out whether it's better to feed you freeze-dried and dehydrated foods, or let you make your own meals from "shelf-stable" ingredients such as flour, beans, rice and cheese. For 120 days, you'll have to write detailed assessments of all those meals ... as well as your own mood.

Such is the life awaiting six prime crew members and two alternates next year during a 120-day simulated Mars mission known as Hawaii Space Exploration Analogue and Simulation, or HI-SEAS.

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University of Hawaii researcher Kim Binsted says the applications have been streaming in as the Feb. 29 deadline approaches. She can tell where HI-SEAS has gotten a shot of publicity by keeping track of where the emails are coming from on any particular day. "Apparently Italy heard about us yesterday," she said. By next week, she expects to have 200 or so applications to choose from.

The selection criteria are relatively stringent: a bachelor's degree in science, math or engineering ... three years of graduate school or professional experience ... ability to pass a flight physical exam ... 24 months of being tobacco-free. Plus, of course, a normal sense of taste and smell. "We're looking for people who would be as astronaut-like as possible," Binsted told me.

The simulation, conducted by researchers at Cornell University and the University of Hawaii at Manoa, is designed to find out which kinds of foods would make the most sense for a months-long mission beyond Earth orbit. Are meals be more satisfying if they're made from bulk ingredients, or will it turn out that the usual pre-packaged, no-muss meals are actually more suited to space missions?

After selection and training, the crew members will travel to Hawaii in early 2013 and get settled inside a simulated habitat that will probably be set up in the Big Island's Saddle Road area. Binsted said "it's very stark, very Marslike," with fresh lava flows from the Mauna Loa volcano. In addition to their food-tasting duties, the crew members should have some spare time to conduct other research studies, as long as they stay in character for the simulation.

Binsted said the entire three-year project is supported by a $947,000 NASA grant, and about a third of that will go toward the 120-day taste test. The project also includes a head-down, bed-rest study that's being conducted at the NASA Flight Analogs Research Center in Galveston, Texas, to simulate the effects of long-term microgravity.

Many astronauts have observed that food seems to lose its flavor in space — which is why hot sauce is such a popular condiment for crews on the International Space Station. Binsted said the bed-rest study could determine whether the hot-sauce effect arises because of a physical effect (for example, swelling of the nasal passages in zero-G) or a psychological effect.

"There's not a lot of 'spice' in their life, so maybe they have to get it from their food," she said.

More about space food and simulations:

• Wanted: Six mock Mars astronauts with the right stuffing
• Pale-faced crew emerges from 520-day mock Mars mission
• Space spice gets five stars from space station crew
• First Mars astronauts may grow their own food

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To learn more about Hi-SEAS and apply to join the crew, check out the project's call for participants. Application deadline is 11:59 p.m. Hawaii time on Feb. 29. You can also follow @HI-SEAS on Twitter.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or following the Cosmic Log Google+ page. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Owners of household robots may soon be able to issue orders such as "make me a sandwich" or "pop me some popcorn" and a robot will do the rest, as demonstrated by Technical University of Munich's robots James and Rosie in this video above.

While we've seen robots do other household chores ranging from making sausage breakfasts to folding laundry, this latest accomplishment is yet one more example of robots that think for themselves — that is, James and Rosie aren't programmed to do each and every step in the food preparation process.

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Rather, they're just given the order and autonomously infer what needs to be done to get the popcorn popped and the sandwich made, such as turning on the stove to pop the popcorn.

To get the job done, the robots take advantage of technical advances such as Kinect sensors to detect objects in their surroundings. 

"Giving robots the ability to take a complex task and autonomously infer all the intermediate tasks that it can then execute one at a time means that you'll be able to say, 'Make me a sandwich' … and the robot will just go and do it, no questions asked," notes IEEE's Automation blog.

More on robots that do chores:

• Robots make sausages for breakfast
• Robot recognizes self in mirror
• This robot scoops poop
• Mmm! Robot makes cookies

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

If, in a few years, you are suddenly overcome with a sense that there's something fishy about the lettuce in your salad, you might be on to something. There's a chance it was grown with fish poop.

"There's no fish taste whatsoever," Michael Amadori, a master's student in ecological engineering at the State University of New York's College of Environmental Science and Forestry, assured me Wednesday.

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For now, Amadori is growing the futuristic lettuce in question as part of a science experiment aimed at closing the loop between the food we throw away and the food we eat.

Americans throw out about 25 percent of their food, he noted, a fact that led him to ask: "Can I take this waste product in our society and turn it into a value-added product?"

To find out, he's set up an experiment where he feeds dried food waste from a student cafeteria to fish in freshwater tanks and uses the fish poop to grow Boston Bibb lettuce.

The concept is called "aquaponics," a combination of fish farming and hydroponics (growing vegetables without soil). Though not new, this is the first time it has been tried with post-consumer food waste to feed fish.

Most aquaponic systems, Amadori said, spend about 50 percent of their operating budget on commercial fish feed, which is typically pellets made from ground up fish, corn, and vitamins.

So, while systems such as the Massachusetts Avenue Project in Buffalo, N.Y., and Growing Power in Milwaukee, Wis., are great socially and environmentally, "they are having trouble making a profit," Amadori said.

His experiment is set up in a greenhouse where tilapia, a hardy freshwater fish that will eat just about anything, is raised in half a dozen 55-gallon barrels holding 20 fish each.

The cafeteria food waste is ground up, dried, and broken up into pellets that are fed to the fish in three of the tanks. The other fish are fed commercial pellets as a control factor.

Temperature-controlled water from the fish tanks is cycled into graveled-filled containers where the lettuce grows.

"The gravel bed has bacteria that convert the fish waste into plant food and then the plants remove that and the water returns (to the fish tank) clean," Amadori explained.

The experiment has been running for about four months. The fish won't be harvested until they weigh around a pound, at about one year of age. The lettuce, however, is abundant.

"I'm making 18 heads a week and it is delicious," Amadori said. "It tastes just like the lettuce you buy at the grocery store."

More on sustainable food:

• Fishing for food solutions, aquaponics offers clues
• Could vertical farming be the future?
• Rooftops take urban farming to the skies
• U.S. OKs large fish farms in Gulf of Mexico

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

 

 

 

Do you need to decorate a child's birthday cake, even though you have the drawing skills of an infant? No problem. Just get your hands on a 3-D printer, and your guests will think you're a five-star pastry chef. Heck, you could even print their (edible) pictures on individualized cupcakes.

That's one potential application for 3-D printers in the kitchen. They also work great for making squiggle-printed masa cakes — as Dave Arnold, a chef at the French Culinary Institute and co-author of the Cooking Issues blog, demonstrates in the video above.

The printer essentially spits out paste, or frosting, or any other malleable product through a moving syringe. The syringe can be programmed to build whatever you want. But instead of just one layer, such as text or a photo printed out on a piece of paper, these printers allow layers to be stacked into three-dimensional shapes.

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Currently, the technology is most useful for things such as decorating cakes and making funky-shaped cookies, according to Jeffrey Lipton, who leads the Fab@Home project at Cornell University. Lipton and his colleagues created the 3-D food printer, and he says the future of culinary 3-D printing lies in creating foods with different textures.

"You could imagine having a meatloaf that is spongy and absorbs the sauces, and that is a completely different experience from just taking meat, putting it into a loaf and baking it," he told me today. "Even though the materials are all the same, how they are arranged really affects how it tastes and how it feels in your mouth."

More than food
The buzz around 3-D printers extends well beyond food. The MakerBot Thing-o-Matic 3-D printer kit, which prints three-dimensional products by building up layers of plastic to match a computerized design, was crowned by Cosmic Log readers as 2010's top Science Geek Gift.

The $1,200 gizmo could be used to print prototypes for commercial products, made-to-order artwork or replacement parts for other devices you have at home ... even custom-made action figures for gamers and collectors.

A group called Made in Space wants to put 3-D printers on the International Space Station. Then, instead of shipping up spare parts or some object left back on earth, astronauts could just download the design and press print.

Other researchers are eying the technology to print three-dimensional structures of cells. A first step would be to use the technique to build layers of cells and study how they communicate. Sometime in the future, the machines could be programmed to print out human organs for transplants.

"The real power of 3-D printing is giving you complete control over geometry, about giving you the ability to innovate, and about allowing you to customize," said Lipton, whose project envisions 3-D printers available to make just about anything.

Press print for dinner
Back in the kitchen, the 3-D printer could be used to spit out dinner for the time-starved set. Just walk in the door, and instead of hitting the freezer for yet another TV dinner, hit the print button instead.

"You'll always have ways of manipulating the food. … Even though it may not be the best quality and the most amazing food in the world, it will still be interesting and edible and rapidly produced," Lipton said.

Arnold, the Cooking Issues blogger, finds the idea of a 3-D printer that spits out a meal with a press of a button horrifying — it removes humans even further from the way our food is made, he says. Tasked to figure out how he would use the printer loaned to him by the Fab@Home project led to the masa cake idea.

"Masa is a homogeneous paste. Masa is delicious. It is the ideal printing medium," he writes. "I had a feeling that the taste and texture of steamed and fried squiggle printed masa would be fantastic. I was right."

Fab@Home is open source technology. Anyone with access to a laser cutter can build one for about $1,600, Lipton said. A kit costs about $2,400. Lipton expects the price to fall further and the quality of the technology to improve as it moves from academics and tinkerers to the realm of professional engineers and corporations.

If you got your hands on a 3-D printer, how would you use it? Feel free to weigh in with a comment below.

More stories on 3-D printing:

• Inkjets print living cells in 3-D
• 3-D home printers could change the economy
• Make your own geeky goodness
• Print your own space station in orbit
• Can business ideas benefit billions?

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

Scientists have developed a technique to coat paper with nanoparticles of silver — a combination that makes the paper lethal to bacteria such as E. coli and potentially suitable as a food packaging material.

Silver is widely used to fight bacteria, and silver nanoparticles are already found in textiles, fibers, plastics and metals for biomedical applications. The technology is used in wound dressings and microbial resistant catheters, as well as consumer products such as odor-resistant socks (and even space underwear).

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Until now, scientists have been unable to deposit the particles of silver — each one-50,000 the width of a human hair — onto paper. The new method involves the use of ultrasound, or high-frequency sound waves, to anchor the particles on paper.

The technique was pioneered by a research team led by Aharon Gedanken at the Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and described last month in the journal Langmuir, published by the American Chemical Society.

In laboratory tests, the so-called "killer paper" showed lethal antibacterial activity against E. coli and S. aureus, two causes of bacterial food poisoning, "suggesting its potential application as a food packaging material for longer shelf life," the researchers write.

In addition to food packaging, the coating method could be extended to other nanomaterials to create properties such as water resistance, various degrees of conductivity, and roughness. That "could lead to interesting applications," the researchers say.

Are you ready for your meat to come wrapped in paper coated with nanoparticles? Feel free to weigh in with a comment below.

More on nanotechnology:

• City of Berkeley to regulate nanotechnology
• Scientists see risks and benefits in nanofoods
• Nanotechnology leaves the lab
• FDA told to watch nanotech products for risks

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).