Have you ever seen or used a 3D printer before? Well, when you do get a chance to see it in action, make sure that it is well-ventilated. Otherwise, it poses some dangers to your health.

As with every innovation, 3D printers come with hazards of its own. According to this recent study four years in the making, 3D printers release microparticles in the air that could be toxic and embed themselves into the body permanently.

So what does this mean for the future of 3D printing? Well, the researchers weren't as concerned about it but still, additional precaution needs to be taken.

(Image credit: Neonbrand/Unsplash)

This seems like something out of a movie but it isn't. This is the story of Louis, which isn't his real name for privacy and safety reasons, who in his early 30s had hatched a grand scheme that 30 years later would eventually come to fruition.

Louis was on a secret mission, motivated by a deep anxiety that had built as he drifted through early adulthood. Profound questions of mortality were keeping him awake at night. “I had started to think, ‘Who will remember me when I’m gone? Who will talk about me? Who will be my heir?’” he says. “I think our biggest fear in life is not to die, but to be forgotten.”

If he wasn’t going to have children of his own in the normal way, maybe he could donate sperm in such quantity that – eventually – a child might try to find him. To pull it off, Louis would need to play a biological numbers game. “If I had 10 children this way, there would be a very slim chance of success,” he says. “But what if I had 100… or even more?”

Read the rest of the story written by Simon Usborne on The Guardian.

(Image credit: Judith Jockel/The Guardian)

In today's world, everything is geared toward convenience and ease for consumers, firms, and all other stakeholders. So it would be a lot easier if we could simply do away with unnecessary things. For Sweden, cash seems to be one of those things.

Being able to purchase quickly through apps, debit cards, and credit cards removes the hassle of trying to find the right amount of bills in your wallet. It's just one swipe away and you're out of the store.

Because of this, some of their banks have even stopped doing any cash transactions completely. But a certain portion of the population may not be able to keep up with this trend.

“We have around one million people who aren’t comfortable using the computer, iPads or iPhones for banking,” said Christina Tallberg, 75, the group’s national president. “We aren’t against the digital movement, but we think it’s going a bit too fast.”

They say they're not trying to stop the digital revolution and it would definitely help the economy. However, they would like this to be carefully studied in order to consider all possible implications to the economy.

Read Liz Alderman's whole article on The New York Times.

(Image credit: Loulou d'Aki/The New York Times)

Women have always been uncredited and unappreciated when it comes to the work that they do in various fields, whether it be in literature, arts, science, or technology. Many women who contributed to these fields go unnoticed. But in reality, they are part of how society has developed and progressed throughout the centuries.

And here, let's get to know two women who were responsible for paving the way to producing effects and iconic sounds in such television shows and radio broadcasts as Doctor Who and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Read more about it on Nature.

(Image credit: Dom McIntyre)

Several systems and design innovations in engineering and technology that we have today are actually inspired by things we see in nature and we try to replicate them by artificial means so that we can examine how and why they work. Then those principles can be applied in real life situations.

I couldn't imagine that simply observing how certain aquatic and amphibious animals can jump out of water would inspire Sunghwan Jung and a team of researchers to conduct an experiment that would imitate these entry and exit movements which could then be used for air-water interfaces and even surveillance near water basins.

Check out their video of the animal-inspired robot jumping out of water here. via Popular Mechanics

(Image credit: Sunghwan Jung)

Intermingling between races wasn't something uncommon back in the day, so researchers find out. Having a mixed race heritage of this ancient teenage girl might suggest that in general, racism wasn't really a thing back then, or at least that's how I see it.

After the unearthing of a Neanderthal-Denisovan fossil, UK scientists are using groundbreaking techniques to learn more of the species’ complex bonds with humans.

Katerina Douka and Tom Higham, researchers of the project Finder, used the new technology called Zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry in order to identify whether there were human bones from 1,500 bone samples. With the help of Samantha Brown, an Australian master's student, they were able to identify one.

However, their technique only allowed them to determine whether a bone sample was human or not, but not the species it belonged to so the sample was taken to Svante Pääbo. The results were intriguing to say the least.

Exactly half the sample consisted of Neanderthal DNA. The other half was made up of Denisovan DNA. At first, the researchers assumed that the sample was contaminated. “I thought they must have screwed up something,” says Pääbo.

But re-testing confirmed the finding: the Oxford team had discovered the 90,000-year-old remains of a hybrid daughter of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father. She was nicknamed Denny.

Read more of the article by Robin McKie on The Guardian.

(Image credit: John Bavaro/early-man.com)

First, there were bacteria in space. Now, we have viruses big enough to rival bacteria found in the soil under Massachusetts. And with more complex genomes to boot.

"We were not looking for giant viruses," says biologist Jeff Blanchard from the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass).

"Our goal was to isolate bacteria directly from the environment to understand how microbial communities are changing in response to soil warming."

"Soil is immensely diverse," says one of the UMass researchers, Lauren Alteio, "and we are only beginning to scratch the surface of the organisms and viruses that inhabit it."

Peter Dockrill has more on this at Science Alert.

(Image credit: Jeff Blanchard/UMass Amherst)

This is possibly one of the most wonderful things I have ever seen and it is just a sample of the beauty of our universe. Seeing things from a different perspective can really blow your mind and just fill you with awe. Don't blink, you might miss it. - via AstronautiCAST

Humans share 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees and there is more to it than that. We actually share something else not just with primates but with the rest of the animal kingdom. That is the Rhesus factor.

"What is the Rhesus factor?" you might ask and that was the same thing a curious adult from Arkansas had in their mind. Well, here is the answer.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Creative Commons)

Contracting a dangerous disease on Earth is terrifying enough but at least, if we do, we will have means to address and counteract the threat to our health. In space, that might be a difficult thing, especially if we are dealing with drug-resistant strains of pathogens.

Five strains of the bacterium Enterobacter recovered from areas on board the International Space Station (ISS) have been identified, with researchers urging further careful research to determine whether continuous exposure to microgravity could induce potentially dangerous mutations.

Are astronauts' lives being endangered in space? How did these bacteria even get to space? Find out more on Cosmos.

(Image credit: Ross Marchand)

Ancient mathematicians and engineers used their arms and feet as the standard for measurement but that's quite tricky because we all have different measurements, so it's not much of a standard really. So how did measurement of distances evolve to become precise and universal? - from New Mind

You read that right, alchemist. Though not in the sense that it was used during the Middle Ages.

Dawn Shaughnessy is actually a nuclear chemist who has been working with a team from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in collaboration with a Russian team in order to explore the limits of chemistry.

Shaughnessy leads a team of real-life alchemists. You might be familiar with alchemy as a medieval European practice where mystics attempted to transmute elements into more valuable ones. But rather than turn the element lead into gold, Shaughnessy and her team turned plutonium into flerovium.

“It was like alchemy,” she told me. “Nuclear chemistry for me was really amazing, the whole idea that you could take things, put them together, and make something totally new out of it.”

Read more about Ryan Mandelbaum's interview with Dawn Shaughnessy on Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)

With the growing concerns of climate change and our need for a more sustainable energy source, researchers may have hit on an interesting development in regards to the search for possible alternatives.

Buried below the seabed around Japan, there are beds of methane, trapped in molecular cages of ice. In some places, the sediment covering these deposits of frozen water and methane has been eroded away, leaving whitish mounts of what looks like dirty ice rearing up out of the seafloor.

Take a chunk of this stuff up to the surface and it looks and feels much like ice, except for a give-away fizzing sensation in the palm of your hand, but put a match to it and it doesn’t just melt, it ignites.

Now, it's not a done deal just yet because there are several other factors that need to be taken into consideration but there have already been efforts done to ensure that methane hydrates could become a viable source of energy. - from the BBC

(Image credit: US Department of Energy)

If there is such a thing as poetic justice, what would be the opposite of it? Perhaps, irony comes closest. And it's such a sad and frustrating thing to see this play out in the life of this young girl.

"We are in a state of chaos. In the city in which I live, I hear and see examples of chaos almost every day. Little children are victims of senseless gun violence..."

Two years ago, 11-year-old Milwaukee schoolgirl Sandra Parks wrote these words in an award-winning essay about the murders in her city.

On Monday night, aged 13, she was shot by a stray bullet fired into her home.

Just. tragic. Read more on The BBC.

(Image credit: Ximena Conde/WPR)

Aside from being an economic and military powerhouse, China is now aspiring to become the leader in scientific and technological advancement with this new particle smasher. If they haven't already dwarfed the competition in that respect, this would definitely put them at the top of the pack.

Physicists at Beijing’s Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) are are designing the world's biggest particle smasher. If built, the 100-kilometre-circumference facility would dwarf the 27-kilometre Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland — and would cost around half the price.

It seems that the tides are turning, a shift of power from the West to the East is looming. Elizabeth Habney has more on this development at Nature.

(Image credit: Tim Kramer/Ruhr-Universitat Bochum)