(Column) - You have a printer. What would you normally do with it? Print documents, probably forms and even a few photographs? Did you ever think you could print skin for yourself? How about organs, or even notebook screens?

If you think I’ve lost all of my senses, you are more wrong than Bill Gates was about future memory requirements.

So what exactly am I talking about? Researchers at the University of Manchester have developed an exciting technology where you take cells from the patient’s body and feed them into the computer. The system then analyses and multiplies them to the required level, which then fills up as "ink" in the first cartridge while the second cartridge contains the necessary gel. Once the process has started, multiple print layers ensure that a complex 3D skin is created and the dimensions are exactly as required.

Perhaps Adobe needs to come up with a plug-in for this in Photoshop. What if I want my skin to be a different color? I don’t want to go through the pain of a tattoo, so I just feed in some of my cells, make some funky designs on the skin and slap them on me. It’s fairly simple, unless you want to get to the complexities of how it works.

Similarly, researchers at Cambridge have just used Inkjet technology to create a 14" OLED screen for notebook computers. Again, since we are using printers, I could get my notebook screen in whatever shape I desire. Since they are printing it, it’s obviously pretty thin, and for all we know, I might even be able to fold away my TV whenever I don’t need it, assuming we use specific polymers to make that happen.

Next