A customized artificial jawbone built with a 3-D printer has allowed an 83-year-old woman to continue breathing, chewing, and chatting away, a team of European scientists announced.

The first-of-a-kind jaw reconstruction was accomplished with a printing technique called laser melting where layers of a metallic powder are built up and fused together with a laser.

In this case, the powder is titanium. Once built, the entire artificial jawbone was coated with a type of ceramic that made it compatible with body tissue.

University of Hasselt

A researcher holds up a replica of a lower jawbone that was created with 3-D printer that was implanted in an 83-year-old woman.

The design, production and processing of the implant was done digitally in just two hours. Other implant building methods can take up to two days, the University of Hasselt in Belgium noted. 

The rapid construction technique allowed the team to address a rapidly progressing infection in the woman's lower jaw that required complete removal of the bone in order to retain an open airway.

They decided to go with the 3-D printed jawbone for the sake of speed and functionality. Other options would have led to either a non-functional lower jaw or required a lengthy surgery and recovery time.

During surgery, the patient's deteriorating jawbone was removed and replaced with the custom implant. One day after the operation, she had normal function and was able to talk and swallow.

The completed implant weighs about 107 grams, which is around 30 grams heavier than a natural bone, the team reported. The difference, they said, is manageable for the patient.

In a statement, team member Jules Pouken from the University of Hasselt  likened the feat to man's first step on the moon: "A cautious, but firm step."

The team explained the procedure during a press conference in Belgium on Feb. 3. More images and details are available from the University of Hasselt.

Only time will tell whether 3-D printing will revolutionize the medical profession, but this feat marks rapid advancement in a field that seemed futuristic just a few months ago.

More on 3-D printing technology:

• 3-D printers may soon fix broken bones
• Robot spider crawls out of 3-D printer
• The wild possibilities of printing food
• Chocolate printer crafts sculptures from cocoa

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.

Corning, the company known for its innovation in glass, has just put out another mesmerizing video exploring how its interactive display technology could mate with the computers and gadgets of the tomorrow.

The video envisions interactive displays that do everything from help us get dressed in the morning to make life-saving decisions in the operating room and share the wonder of nature with schoolchildren.

The video, "A Day Made of Glass 2," is an extension of a video released last yearthat went viral on YouTube. It's possible the new one too will leave many of us eager for the future it presents. 

For even more about the future of glass, check out our Stronger than Steel video below.

Johns Hopkins University / YouTube

Information on the mechanics of a painted lady butterfly's flight patterns gleaned from high-speed video may be used to construct better designs for military drones.

High-speed video cameras are allowing university researchers to document how butterflies gracefully flutter through the air. The U.S. military funded findings may lead to more agile insect-sized drones sent to spy on enemies.

A key finding is that butterflies appear to use their bodies and wings to twist and turn in the air in a way similar to how ice skaters use their arms to control the speed of their spins, explains Johns Hopkins University undergraduate Tiras Lin, who is working on the high-speed video research.

"Ice skaters who want to spin faster bring their arms in close to their bodies and extend their arms out when they want to slow down," he explains in the video news release below.

"These positions change the spatial distribution of a skater's mass and modify their moment of inertia; this in turn affects the rotation of the skater's body. An insect may be able to do the same thing."

To capture the images of butterflies in flight, Lin used video cameras that record 3,000 one-megapixel images per second. To put that in perspective, a standard video camera shoots 24, 30 or 60 frames per second. "Butterflies flap their wings about 25 times per second," Lin notes.

Most of his analysis zeroed in on 1/5th of a second of flight, or about 600 frames.

Lin recently presented his findings at a meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics. While they haven't yet been adopted by next-generation drones, he said they ought to be. To see how else drones could get buggier in the future, check out the stories below.

More stories on insect-inspired drone technology:

• Biofuel cells may turn cockroaches into cyborgs
• Military developing robot-insect cyborgs
• On wings of technology: Humming bird drones
• Ant-like robots poised to invade the marketplace

Sphero

Sphero is a robotic ball that is controlled with a smartphone. Upcoming games incorporate the ball as a controller.

Fans of Sphero, the robotic ball that you control with your smartphone, will soon be able to use the ball to navigate fields of flying space rocks as they blast them apart with an anti-matter cannon, the makers of the gadget entice on their website.

The "coming soon" gaming app marks the latest evolution for the gadget that debuted at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.  Then, it was a gee-whiz device that users controlled with their smartphone to roll it around a room.

This allowed games such as Sphero Golf, a hybrid between a virtual and real round. The phone serves as the golf club and the robot as the real-world ball. You can make a course anywhere and even play on an actual course should swinging your phone be less frustrating than a driver.

The Sphero-as-controller Space Fighter game, along with Chromo, a Simon Says-like color-matching-memory game, are getting buzz as the company makes media calls in New York. The folks at Business Insider got a preview at their offices on Thursday. 

Folks interested in getting their hands on Sphero can pre-order online.

More on Sphero and other to control with a smartphone:

• Meet Sphero, the robotic ball controlled by iPhone
• Device teaches your old robot new tricks
• Robotic helicopters at work in Afghanistan

Grass clippings could be turned into solar cells using inexpensive chemicals and materials, according to new research.

Within a few years, a special powder sold in little plastic baggies could turn your grass clippings into an electricity-generating solar cell, scientists reported Thursday.

"That's the dream," Andreas Mershin, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of a paper describing the process, told me.

The powder in the bag is an inexpensive chemical cocktail that stabilizes the molecules in green plants that carry out photosynthesis known as photosystem-I so that they can be used to generate electricity.

Instructions on how to build the rest of the so-called biophotovoltaic would be printed on a cartoon included with the baggie.

One step is to extract and concentrate photosystem-I from yard waste, for example, with a membrane such as cheesecloth and spinach. "It is not that hard," Mershin promised. "The green stuff is easy."

In addition, these do-it-yourselfers will need to roughen up a piece of glass or metal, which increases the surface area, to stick the stabilized green goo onto.

Wires connected to this plate would deliver the trickle of electricity to a battery, cell phone or a light.

Mershin and his colleagues explain their process for building one of these biophotovoltaics in the open access journal Scientific Reports. 

The research improves on previous work by Mershin's MIT colleague Shuguang Zhang, who coated photosystem-I on a flat glass surface. 

This produced an electric current, but such a small amount that it was practically useless. In addition, the stabilizing chemicals used were expensive and assembling it all involved expensive lab equipment.

Mershin looked to nature for inspiration and found a potentially better design in forests of pine trees that allow "for more light to be absorbed," he said.

He mimicked this forest effect with zinc oxide nanowires and a sponge-like titanium-dioxide nanostructure. 

When this chip is coated with the light-harvesting material extracted from plants, it creates a solar cell with 0.1 percent efficiency.

"At 0.1 percent, you can only do this as a proof-of-principle," Mershin said. "Nobody is going to be doing this in real life until we get to about 1 or 2 percent efficiency and about 12 months of lifetime."

The hope is that researchers around the world will replicate the results — which can be done with inexpensive materials and equipment — and improve on the design to reach that milestone.

If so, this technology could be a way to bring electricity to the 1.2 billion people in the world who live without it today.

Ideally, he said, not even the plastic baggie with the powder will be required. "We'll just send out fliers that have the information."

More on solar energy technology:

• Tree power could save forests from fires
• Quantum dots: A big boost to solar tech?
• Sunflowers inspire improved solar power plant
• Ant frying tech could make solar cheap

A war-ready electromagnetic railgun took a step closer to reality this week when the U.S. Navy awarded a defense contractor $10 million to develop a piece of the power system needed to hurl projectiles at speeds up to 5,000 miles per hour.

The contract is the latest indication that the military is serious about developing the futuristic technology that would, for example, allow warships to hit targets up to 220 miles away in less than six minutes.

"The new system will dramatically change how our Navy defends itself and engages enemies while at sea," Joe Bondi, vice president of advanced technology for Raytheon's Integrated Defense Systems, said in a news release. 

The Naval Sea Systems Command awarded Raytheon the contract on Monday. 

Unlike traditional guns that use explosives to fire a shot, railguns employ an electromagnetic current to accelerate a projectile between a pair of electrically charged rails and out of a barrel, the Office of Naval Research explains.

Thus in addition to being able to reach targets from far out at sea, use of railguns would reduce the amount of explosives needed aboard ships. 

A Navy prototype made headlines in December 2010 when it fired a projectile packing 33 megajoules of energy — the same kinetic force a 33-ton semi has while traveling at 100 miles per hour. 

According to the Office of Naval Research, this is about half the energy envisioned for deployment at sea to reach distant targets.

In other words, the Navy needs to be able to generate a ton of energy and store it in confined space for railgun technology to work as envisioned.

Raytheon is working on a piece of this puzzle, a so-called pulse forming network, that allows electricity generated by the ship to be stored over several seconds and then sent it to the railgun to generate electromagnetic force.

Other hurdles include development of a gun that can withstand the considerable wear and tear of repeated use as well as the securing the funding required for further development.

If these hurdles are cleared, the Office of Naval Research notes, the railgun will be a "true warfighter game changer."

"Wide area coverage, exceptionally quick response and very deep magazines will extend the reach and lethality of ships armed with this technology."

To learn more about how railguns work, check out this explainer on How Stuff Works.

More on military technology:

• Railgun shot heard around the world
• Flying Humvee moves ahead
• Dream military space telescope could spy anywhere on Earth
• Navy gets fix for speed need
• Navy's twin stealth drone takes flight

Georgia Institute of Technology / DOE

A map generated by Georgia Tech's tidal energy resource database shows mean current speed of tidal streams.

Next-generation technologies that harvest electricity from ocean waves and tides sloshing along the U.S. coasts could provide about 9 percent of the nation's demand by 2030, according to a pair of recent studies.

The findings, which include maps of these ocean energy resources, should help guide companies looking to develop them.

"We have believed for a long time that the resource was significant and these assessments add a tremendous level of confidence to what that potential is," Mike Reed, water power team lead with the U.S. Department of Energy's Wind and Water Program told me Monday. 

Today, about 6 percent of the nation's electricity comes from traditional hydropower projects, such as the Grand Coulee Dam, that direct the flow of the river through turbines to generate power.

Since such dams plug up rivers and make it difficult for migrating fish species such as salmon to reach their spawning grounds, they have lost favor in recent years. 

Looking forward, energy developers see promise in technologies that capture the energy in waves and tides off the coasts. 

Designs to do this range from buoys that harness the up-and-down motion of passing waves to turbines on the ocean floor that are spun by the ebb and flow of the tides.

The studies released earlier this month from the U.S. Department of Energy could help nudge along the development and deployment of these technologies by showing the resource is there to be captured.

Motion of the ocean
The U.S. uses about 4,000 terawatt hours of electricity per year. The maximum theoretical electric generation that could be produced from waves and tides is approximately 1,420 terawatt hours per year, the assessments found.

"We are never suggesting that all of that would be captured," Hoyt Battey, team lead for water power market acceleration and deployment with the DOE Wind and Water Program, told me. 

But based on the resource assessments and current understanding of what it will take to scale up and deploy the technology, wave and tidal power could be upwards of 9 percent by 2030.

The DOE has set a goal that water power, including traditional hydroelectricity, total 15 percent of the nation's supply by 2030.

To measure the wave resource, the DOE worked with the Electric Power Research Institute and Virginia Tech to develop a model that accurately predicted past wave regimes and used it to predict future wave climate.

Those predictions are converted into wave power densities. As surfers know, waves from one day to the next are not the same, but they know what beaches tend to have the best waves when conditions are right, Reed noted.

Like surfers trying to figure out where and when to vacation, utility owners and operators can use the new resource data to figure out where the best reliable waves are to put their converters.

This knowledge, combined with reliable forecasts out several days on wave heights, will allow utilities to balance their loads with other sources such as a natural gas fired power plant.

"Wave energy is predictable and forecastable," he said. "If you are a utility operator or utility owner, that predictability adds value."

Tides are even more predictable, noted Battey. "You know down to the second years ahead of time what the tidal regime will be," he said.

The tidal resource maps were created by researchers at Georgia Tech and are available online.

Realizing the potential
Resource assessments such as these, as well as others mapping potential geothermal, solar and wind resources, can nudge development of green energy technologies.

But a key word in such assessments is "potential." As long as generating electricity from coal, oil, and natural gas remains cheap and politically salable, wave and tidal resources will struggle to compete.

Reed takes the long view. Although wave and tidal energy projects today are expensive, he said, their costs should fall as the technology is improved and scaled up over the next few decades.

"A good comparison would be to go back 15 to 20 years in the wind and solar industry and see how their costs have dramatically come down," he said.

While wind and solar still struggle to compete with traditional sources today, the falling prices of the technologies and abundance of the resources are beginning to make them attractive.

Given the size of the wave and tidal resource identified, Reed said there's plenty of room for wave and tidal energy developers to get their feet wet and begin to drive down costs.

More on wave and tidal energy:

• $28 billion in wave energy projects proposed
• IBM sees energy, money in motion of the ocean
• Here's an idea: Floating webs that capture sun, wave power
• Oregon coast could be wave energy hub
• Maine offers testbed for power from tides

Hiriko

Hiriko is a foldable electric car unveiled Jan. 24 in Europe. It is designed to fit in tight parking spaces and be part of car-sharing programs.

The commercial version of a two-seater foldable electric car that driver and passenger enter through a pop-out windshield was officially unveiled this week in Europe.

The car, called Hiriko, is powered by four in-wheel motors that each turn a full 90 degrees. Its compact — and compactable — design coupled with four-wheel steering should allow parking in the tightest of spaces on crowded city streets.

The concept is based on the electric CityCar created by researchers at the MIT Media Lab, and commercialized by a consortium of automotive companies in the Basque region of Spain.

Hiriko, which is Basque for "urban," made its debut at a ceremony Jan. 24 by José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission in Brussels.

With electric motors in the wheels, there's no need for a gas tank or traditional gasoline engine, transmission and gearbox, allowing the rear of the car to slip under the chassis. 

When folded, three of the cars can fit in one traditional parking space.

MIT Media Lab

MIT Media Lab's CityCar, which is the car Hiriko is based on, is compared to standard-size automobiles and a Smart car.

The MIT Media Lab envisions the cars finding a home in car-share programs where members drive any available ride around the city and parking at widely distributed charging stations.

The cars have a reported range of 100 km (62 miles) per charge, making them well suited for in-city driving in compact European cities already accustomed to small, fuel-efficient vehicles.

While the vehicles should appeal to cities and consumers keen to save money and the environment, the Economist notes that "supercompact cars have not done nearly as well as their proponents had hoped."

One of the hurdles, IHS Global Insight analyst Tim Urquhart told the magazine, is that cars like Hiriko are low value, low price, "and, therefore, they are low margin" — not much of a money maker.

Time will tell if these little electric rides find market acceptance. The first car-sharing trial is slated for Malmo, Sweden's third largest city, the Guardian reports. Other cities around the world have reportedly expressed interest, including Berlin, San Francisco, and Hong Kong.

Commercial production is slated to begin in Spain next year. The cars will cost 12,500 Euros each to build. A video of the unveiling ceremony is below.

More on electric car technology:

• Paris to launch electric car-sharing program
• Electric cars meet the real world
• So far, battery cars coming up short
• Recharge that electric car … wirelessly

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.

Mat Evans / University of Sheffield

A Roomba robot outfitted with whiskers and reprogrammed with monkey smarts determines what type of flooring is beneath it.

The next time you find yourself trapped under a pile of rubble, your savior might be a Roomba — souped-up with whiskers and a monkey brain.

Such a robot was recently shown to outperform other whiskered robots in characterizing its environment, using technology that could wend its way into next-generation search and rescue robots, the University of Sheffiled reports.

Researchers have long known that rats sense their environment with whiskers. But models of how their brains interpret these signals vary. 

One approach, for example, has assumed that rats looked at whisker movement patterns and vibrations over a set period of time and then used that information to make a decision.

But various robots created with this model, Science Now explains, correctly guessed the floor beneath them only 50 to 80 percent of the time, after 0.4 seconds of exposure.

Nathan Lepora at the University of Sheffield in England wondered if outfitting these robots with a model of how the monkey brain makes decisions would be an improvement.

Previous research shows that individual neurons in monkey brains ramp up their firing rates when making decisions about the direction of motion for a group of random dots flashing on a screen.

A decision is made when the firing of these neurons cross a certain threshold. If the neurons responding to the up motion cross the threshold first, for example, the monkey would say the dots are moving up.

Lepora and his team fitted a brain model based on this monkey study into an existing Roomba with rat whiskers and found that it nearly flawlessly correctly identified the type of flooring beneath it.

The findings are reported Jan. 25 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

In addition to improved rescue robots, the result suggests that rat brains may function similar to those of monkeys — in fact, they "suggest the possibility of a common account of decision-making across mammalian species," the team conclude.

[Via: Science Now and University of Sheffield]

More on whiskers, rats, monkeys, and brains:

• Virtual whiskers have the touch
• RatCar takes to the robo-road
• 3-D model of rat brain circuit created
• Cat brain inspires computers of the future
• How whiskers help rats find their way

Lemelson-MIT Program

Steve Jobs ranked behind Thomas Edison in a question to young Americans about who is the greatest innovator of all time.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs ranks behind only Thomas Edison as the world's greatest innovator of all time in a survey released today on young Americans' attitudes about invention and innovation.

Jobs' innovations include the iPhone and iPad, the popular gadgets that are helping to revolutionize how we communicate with each other and sent Apple's stock to a record high Wednesday. 

His second-place finish in the survey of Americans aged 16 to 25 surprised Leigh Estabrooks, the invention education officer with the Lemelson-MIT Program, which conducted the survey.

"Here we have this innovation role model who has changed the way we live and yet young people still go back to Thomas Edison," she told me. "While he did great and wonderful things, most of his work was in the 1880s."

The result highlights the fact that invention and innovation are primarily taught in history class, not the math and science courses that are the foundation for careers in invention and innovation.

"Thomas Edison comes up because all students take history," she said. That's where we learned, for example, about his life-changing electric power distribution system and his money-making stock ticker.

Next-generation innovators
The Lemelson-MIT Program aims to foster an innovative spirit in America's youth. The annual Invention Index helps the program gauge the level of interest among young people in becoming innovators.

This year's results show that young Americans are aware of the role invention and innovation play in their lives and its importance as an economic driver, but 60 percent feel inhibited in pursing inventive careers themselves.

Many — 34 percent — said they simply don’t know enough about these fields. "That's daunting for a teenager to think about going into a field that they don’t know much about," Estabrooks noted.

Other students consider these fields too challenging to pursue and/or feel they were unprepared for such a career track in school.

According to Estabrooks, increasing awareness of career options in these fields is a key step. That means more mentors coming into classrooms to talk, especially to elementary and middle school students.

"The sooner we can share with kids the things they can do with science, technology, engineering and math, the better off we'll be," she said. 

"It is awfully hard to catch up with the math once you're in high school and almost impossible once you're in college."

"And it is hard," she added. "Therefore mentors can help by encouraging students to stick with it."

Hands-on experiences
More than just listening to an engineer or computer programmer talk, hands-on experiences inside and outside the classroom are paramount to fostering a new generation of innovators.

The survey shows American youth hunger for these opportunities, such as invention projects at school and creative field trips. Simply "a place to develop an invention" would be a good start for 52 percent of the respondents.

The opportunity to invent is working its way into classrooms across the country thanks to initiatives such as a framework for next-generation science standards released in July 2011 by the National Academy of Sciences.

The framework outlines a way for science teachers to incorporate engineering into their lessons, Kristina Peterson, head of the middle school science department at the Lakeside School in Seattle, Wash., explained to me.

(Disclosures: I'm a Lakeside alumnus as is Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates, another great innovator who, it turns out, wasn't included in the survey. Msnbc.com is a joint venture between Microsoft and Comcast/NBC Universal.)

The school is in its second year of a revamped science curriculum that includes an engineering thread in all the science courses, grades 5-8, partially based on materials from the Boston Museum of Science.

"A key thing is engaging students in what's called engineering design process," Peterson said. "It has them not only inventing things, but also the big picture of the process of inventing."

Students learn to brainstorm ideas, research them, and communicate their goals, for example. They also learn to evaluate what they create so they can improve it with a redesign.

Other schools around the country are involved with programs such as Lemelson-MIT's own InvenTeams as well as First Robotics and First Lego League that provide the hands-on experience outside of the class.

And outside of the classroom learning has its advantages, according to Estabrooks.

For one, there's a finite amount time within the school day to learn. Students can tinker more outside of class time. As well, grades don't apply after school.

"One thing about inventors is that we encourage them to fail quickly and fail often," she said. "And in our academics, we certainly don't encourage our youth to fail."

Steve Jobs, who died last October, was certainly prone to fail. Products from the Apple III computer (1981) to Apple TV (2007) are considered among his misses. 

He was even fired from Apple in 1985, a humbling experience that led to his most fruitful innovations, he said during a commencement speech at Stanford in 2005:

"The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life." 

More on innovation education:

• How inventive is the next generation?
• Science fair projects with buzz
• 'Humanized mouse' among student science prizes
• Grant turns lab rats into scientific entrepreneurs

University of Bristol

A magnet plunged into test tubes filled with soap under an organic solution. The soap on the right is magnetic. You can see how it is attracted to the magnet.

Scientists have created the world's first soap that can be controlled by magnets. 

That's right: magnetic suds.

The breakthrough may revolutionize industrial cleaning products and the response to environmental disasters such as oil spills, reports the research team from Bristol University in England.

The soap works like ordinary soap — breaking up the oily, grimy particles it touches and clumping it all into a drop. Only these clumps can be controlled simply by turning on a magnet.

The property could, for example, allow environmental cleanup crews to dump soap onto an oil spill, let it do its thing and then turn on a magnet to remove it all from the environment.

The soap was created by dissolving iron in a range of standard soap materials made of chlorine and bromine ions, similar to those found in mouthwash and fabric softener.

Molecular change
"Any fool would know that if you tried to put a magnet next to a soap bottle, nothing happens," Julian Eastoe, a chemist at Bristol University who led the group that developed the soap, told me Tuesday.

"But what we did is we changed ... an important part of the molecule for a known magnetically active group." 

Soap molecules have an oil-loving part and a water-loving part. "It is almost like a schizophrenic molecule," he explained. His team left the oil-loving part alone, but made the water-loving part magnetic.

The addition of iron creates metallic centers within the soap particles that, lab tests show, are big enough be magnetically attractive. 

While ionic liquid soaps infused with iron have been suggested as possible, scientists thought the metallic centers would be too isolated for the long-range interactions necessary for magnetic attraction.

Bristol University

A droplet of liquid soap responds to a magnet.

"A single atom alone is not magnetic," Eastoe said. "It is only when put next to neighbors, brothers, that there is a communication between the brothers in a network and that connective communication gives rise to a macroscopic magnetic effect."

Surprised by their lab results, the Bristol University researchers took a sample to the Institut Laue-Langevin in France where they studied it with a so-called neutron microscope. 

The neutrons revealed the iron particles were clumping together sufficiently to make the suds magnetic.

Potential applications
According to Eastoe, the potential applications are many. 

Simply by turning on or off a magnet, researchers can change the electrical conductivity of the soap, its melting point, and the size and shape of aggregates, for example.

These properties are traditionally controlled with the addition of electrical charge, or changing the pH or temperature of a system. All of these alter the system and can cost money to remediate.

The magnetic property also makes the soap easier to collect and remove from a system once it has done its job. This could prove particularly useful, for example, in cleaning up oil spills.

Research to make the soap commercially viable is ongoing, Eastoe noted. 

"We've uncovered a proof of principle," he said, noting that it should open minds to consider other ways to make magnetic soaps. Other solutions might be more attractive, less expensive, or more appropriate for a given application.

But within one to three years, he surmised, "you might see something appear."

More stories on soapy technology:

• That kitchen grease isn't sliding through sewers
• Space washing machine could microwave laundry
• New coating helps wash grease off with water
• Colored bubbles arise after 15-year quest

Findings are reported January 23 in Angewandte Chemie.  

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.