Apocalypse Then

We live in the Milky Way Galaxy. Our neighbor is the Andromeda Galaxy. The Milky Way will be consumed by the Andromeda Galaxy in about five billion years (according to the latest studies).

Not to worry, however, because life on Earth will end much sooner than that, when our sun enters the red-giant stage of it's life, it's diameter will reach Earth (having engulfed Mercury and Venus). In all honesty life would probably end before this phase. The sun will become a red giant star in approximately five billion years (about when our galaxy starts getting consumed by Andromeda). However Earth will have gotten too hot for life to continue a bit earlier than five billion years from now.

More heat means more water vapor and less carbon dioxide, so the plants will go first. As plant species go extinct, the animals will decline too pretty much simultaneously. In approximately 2.8 billion years scientists estimate that only the hardiest of microbes will be left behind. Once temperatures reach over 140 degrees Celsius, DNA breaks down, and even those microbes will be lost.

Image courtesy SDO/NASA

Don't fret, however. This is an unimaginably long time away.

Or, perhaps, fret a lot, because current rates of climate change weren't given a lot of consideration, and that's looking bleaker by the second.

Sources.
Milky Way Will Be Consumed

Biosignature Doomsday

The Future Is HERE

So this happened last year, and some of you may have heard of it already, but recently someone was complaining that the Back To The Future Hoverboards haven't been created by scientists yet and would scientists just invent that already?

Well my impatient friend, scientists have something better to do. Like create the first 3D printed titanium human jaw and successfully implant it into a female patient.

BOOM.

So what happened was this woman had osteomyelitis (bone infection) that was so bad her lower jaw couldn't be saved. The awesome folks at Hasselt University Biomed (in Belgium) has a functional morphology research group and decided to help out. Functional morphology is the study of why things are shaped the way they  are shaped, and how that shape affects the function of the thing.

So this research group created a customized 3D printed titanium jaw. They gave her an MRI so that they could customize the jaw, and built it in just two days.

This woman had a complete lower jaw implant, and it restored vital functions (breathing, speech, chewing, and sensation) as well as aesthetics (her jawline still looks like her). It's an incredible step forward with implants and health care. While current technologies limit the amount of personalized prosthetics that can be made, this could be commonplace in the near future, and represents a huge step forward in medical technology. This technique could be used in hip prosthetics, as well as knees and elbows, even spinal inserts.

It's all very exciting.

Sources:
3D Printer World

UHasseltBE