NASA Studies 3D Printing for the ISS, Future Space Missions (ContributorNetwork)

According to Scientific America, NASA is looking at a technology called 3D printing to allow the crew on the International Space Station to manufacture spare parts and tools at will. The technology has implication for long term space settlement.

What is 3D printing?

According to Computerworld, a 3D printer is capable of creating any object that is programmed into it, often from a Computer Aided Design device. It generally does this by using a polymer, spraying it in layers in the same manner as an ink jet printer until the object is created. The polymer is then hardened by being exposed to an LED light. Another method uses a metallic powder that is bonded together as it is printed out.

Applications to which 3D printing has been used in are almost endless. These include rapid prototyping, create on demand spare parts and tools, and even visual art. 3D printing has been used to make exact copies of dinosaur fossils, rare art objects and bones and other body parts for forensic pathology. A similar technology is being developed to use 3D printing using biological material to create spare body parts.

Why is 3D printing so important for settling space?

Whether one is living on the ISS or on a future colony on the moon or Mars, providing spare parts would be prohibitively expensive. However, 3D printing would give a space settlement the ability to create spare parts or just about anything else at will, just using raw materials. Indeed 3D printing might help such a settlement become self sufficient early if local materials can be found and processed so that it is suitable for use in that technology.

How is NASA developing 3D technology for space applications?

NASA has already tested a number of commercial 3D printers in an aircraft using parabolic flights to create microgravity. A company called Made in Space is creating a 3D printer designed to work in microgravity without massive modifications as well as developing 3D printing for aerospace applications on the ground. Made in Space has flown its prototype 3D printer on NASA sponsored microgravity flights.

What is the bottom line?

The ability to manufacture virtually anything using a 3D printer and raw material would allow the operating life of the International Space Station to be extended almost indefinitely, as well as reducing the cost of keeping it resupplied. Further forward in time, 3D printing technology can be used to facilitate long duration space flight, such as human missions to Mars, and settlements on other worlds or deep space.

Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker. He has written on space subjects for a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today, the L.A. Times and The Weekly Standard.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/science/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ac/20111221/sc_ac/10730491_nasa_studies_3d_printing_for_the_iss_future_space_missions

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Network analysis predicts drug side effects

Technique can foresee adverse events before medications hit the market

Web edition : 5:44 pm

Using a new mathematical approach, scientists have predicted drug side effects that typically aren?t discovered until thousands of people have taken a medication. The technique is especially good at foreseeing side effects that show up after days or months of taking a drug, suggesting that a similar approach could help make drugs safer before they come to market and may even save lives.

Researchers started with a 2005 catalog of existing medications and their known side effects, such as heart attacks or sleeping problems. After linking drugs and their side effects into a network, they instructed a computer to predict likely new connections between drugs and side effects. The program was able to predict 42 percent of the drug?side effect relationships that were later found in patients, the researchers report in the Dec. 21 Science Translational Medicine.

?Adverse drug events are very important and understudied,? says Russ Altman, a biomedical informatics specialist at Stanford University who wasn?t involved with the work. Before a drug ever gets to market it undergoes toxicology testing and clinical trials to establish that it is effective but not dangerous. These trials are often extensive enough to prove that the drug works, but not big enough to say anything meaningful about side effects, says Altman. So, many side effects aren?t discovered until after the drug is on the market.

?You routinely find a whole bunch of annoying ones and every now and then there?s a showstopper,? Altman says. Such interactions lead to 770,000 injuries and deaths each year.

To clear some of the haze surrounding side effects, scientists from Harvard Medical School and Children?s Hospital Boston created a network linking 809 medications to 852 side effects that were known as of 2005. The team also added information to their network on chemical properties, such as the drug?s melting point and molecular weight, and where the drug does its stuff in the body. Using these data and relationships alone, the computer predicted side effects that were reported in later years, such as the seizure drug zonisamide causing suicidal thoughts in some people and the antibiotic norfloxacin?s link to ruptured tendons. It also linked the controversial diabetes drug Avandia (rosiglitazone) to heart attacks, a connection that is supported by some research.

The team tried adding additional information about drugs, such as data describing molecular structure. But the network diagram of the known relationships between drugs and side effects alone had more predictive power and fewer false positives than methods that added the additional information, the team reports.

?We were pleasantly surprised,? says team member Ben Reis, who directs the predictive medicine group at Children?s Hospital Boston.? ?The network encodes a lot of information from other worlds. Perhaps that?s why it did so well.?

There were some side effects for which the model performed less well, such as skin problems, notes mathematician Aurel Cami of Harvard Medical School and Children?s Hospital Boston.

This first round established that network math, typically used for assessing social relationships or how a disease spreads, can uncover important drug reactions. Now Reis and Cami are investigating what kinds of data work best and trying to tackle drug-drug interactions that can also be dangerous and are rarely studied in clinical trials.

?We?re moving from a paradigm of detection ? where it takes sick people to know something is wrong ? to prediction,? says Reis.

Found in: Biomedicine, Body & Brain and Science & Society

Source: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/337088/title/Network_analysis_predicts_drug_side_effects

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