Imagine having a printer hooked up to your computer that could make anything. Tired of your toothbrush? No problem. Print a new one. Want a chocolate treat? Print it. Need a new dress, new shoes or maybe just new cleats for soccer? Just choose a style and size. Then print, print and print some more.

And why stop there? You might print a fake dinosaur bone. You might also print out a life-size copy of your own head. You could print another printer for a friend. And if your printer was big enough, it could print out the body of a car or even a new house.

No one machine can make all of these things, but three-dimensional printers are getting very close. Engineers have printed every single thing listed above — except the house. (And architects plan to knock that one out by the end of 2013.)

Read more at Science News for Kids. 

(Photo: FabCafe. See more here.) 

AT SOME point in their career every mathematician comes up against the question, is mathematics invented or discovered? The query makes some cranky. The answer doesn’t directly affect their work, after all, and the discussion often leads nowhere useful. Spending time debating the ultimate nature of mathematics takes away from actually doing it.

Some scholars take issue with the terms themselves. In his 2008 essayMathematical Platonism and Its Opposites, Harvard University mathematician Barry Mazur called discovery and invention “those two too-brittle words”. One might be tempted to defuse the question altogether with a merger: perhaps maths involves inventing new relationships between things we have discovered.

Bump a glass and any water inside might slop over the side. Splash in the bathtub and waves slosh. Toss a rock into a pond and ripples move outward in expanding rings. In each case, the water moves in waves. Those waves carry energy. And the more energy that gets added to a watery environment, the more powerful the waves may become.

Now imagine an undersea earthquake and the tremendous amount of energy it can transfer to the ocean. That is because the movement of the Earth’s crust can shift huge volumes of water, unleashing a parade of great and powerful waves. The water races away at speeds up to 800 kilometers (500 miles) per hour, or as fast as a jet plane.

Eventually those waves reach shallow water. They slow down and swell, sometimes as high as a 10-story building. When the waves eventually crash onto land, they can swamp hundreds of kilometers (miles) of shoreline. They may snap trees like twigs, collapse office buildings and sweep away cars. Among nature’s most powerful forces of destruction, these waves are called tsunamis (tzu NAAM eez). The Japanese term means “harbor wave.”

Read more at Science News for Kids. 

Only after David Sims had exhausted many other species did he find his ultimate prey: the albatross. Sims, a senior research fellow at the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom, Plymouth, and a marine ecology professor at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom, has tracked many a species during his career, and it’s all to answer a fundamental ecology question: What’s the best way for an animal to search for small and irregularly distributed pockets of food when it has limited information, and the whole ocean is open to it?

Read more at PNAS.

Not every hypothesis in cancer research has the same staying power. Some emerge with fanfare and hype, only to fade when follow-up research fails to support a promising theory—or when an upstart steals the spotlight. But even when a promising idea gets pushed aside, it’s not always gone for good. The perfect object lesson: treating cancer by disabling its metabolism, an idea that flared and faded, and now, like a trick candle on a birthday cake, has reignited.

Read the whole story in the Winter 2013 issue of Cancer Today. 

Gods in Ancient Egypt could do it; so allegedly could Buddha and Jesus. But for the rest of us lowly human beings – at least, those of us without divine parent- age or supernatural abilities – the closest we can get to walking on water is to strap on a pair of pontoon shoes and hope for the best (an idea first envisaged in sketches by Leonardo da Vinci). But in the animal kingdom, the ability is nothing new. The basilisk lizard uses its specially shaped feet to slap the surface hard enough to keep from sinking as it runs across water. Dolphins use the same technique with their tails, as do some birds.

Most insects take a different approach.

Read more about how pond skaters (water striders) walk on water in the November 2012 issue of Physics World. 

To humans, falling rain usually amounts to little more than a minor inconvenience. After all, we are big and raindrops are small – they splatter on our heads and sleeves, and we end up a little wetter. But a mosquito’s mass is only 2–3 μg and the largest rain- drops may weigh up to 100μg.

To those tiny bugs buzzing about in the rain, a gentle spring shower comes on like a downpour of London taxis, cascading from the sky at terminal velocity.

And yet, they live…

Read more in this story from the November 2012 issue of Physics World. 

MONTGOMERY COUNTY, TENN. — The world’s first artificial bat cave is expecting the arrival of its first winged visitors. The nearly 80-foot-long concrete chamber was built to protect bats against white nose syndrome, a disease named for a white fungus that infects the skin of the muzzle, ears and wings of hibernating bats.

In the six years since bats with the syndrome were discovered dead or dying in a cave near Albany, N.Y., more than 5 million infected animals from seven species have died, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Read more in the Washington Post. My first story for the paper! 

A bullet fired into a disk of polyurethane — a type of plastic — may not burst out the other side. In some instances, the bullet will stop in its tracks, frozen by the plastic and sealed inside. How a simple plastic can do this has left researchers scratching their heads. Until now.

Read more at Science News for Kids. 

In the muck beneath the ocean floor, there’s something alive. Lots of somethings. But don’t worry: You’ll never see them. Instead, these tiny, one-celled germs are content to hunker down in very old clay, for a very long time, eating just enough to stay alive.

“These organisms are so different from anything we know,” says Hans Roy, a biologist from Aarhus University in Denmark. He has been studying microbes that live beneath the Pacific Ocean, near the equator. Recently, he and other scientists published a study in the journal Science that contained a surprising observation: These organisms may live for an astonishingly long time — perhaps millions of years.

Read more at Science News for Kids.