I am sure that you have heard the phrase, "thinking out of the box." It represents those hopefully fortunate times when our minds make a leap outside the boundaries of conventional wisdom. Sometimes you can see it coming, such as the catastrophe brewing in physics before Einstein published his Theory of Relativity. Other times, it just happens and one has to marvel at the ingenuity, the new thinking, that led to invention.

I have just come across such a thing. Indeed this so much amazes me that I would like to suggest to the world at large that we should no longer refer to "thinking out of the box," but rather "thinking off the page."

Try this: use ink-jet printers to produce new biological tissue in three dimensions. Just empty the ink and fill with a solution of the right cells. Modify the ink squirting software, which is complex in its own right, to properly handle this new stuff, and print onto a substrate in multiple passes.

My idea? Hardly. But you will find more information by clicking here.