Light Start – Twitter’s expanding heart, fingers, 3D printed thyroid, super-superglue, and breaking Fallout

Twitter seems to be testing different ways for you to get emotional

If you miss your Twitter Favourites star, you’re probably going to hate this. Twitter might be playing with more ways than just that heart-shaped Like to interact with or show your support/distaste/disgust/insert-emotion-here with a particular tweet. Twitter user @_Ninji recently had the option to use multiple emoji from the heart icon, a feature that definitely isn’t wide-spread as yet. Perhaps the best bit of this premature reveal comes by way of Twitter’s official response, which you can find at the source link below.

Source: Twitter via The Verge

Stand aside 3D Touch, there’s a new finger-angle sensing tech in town

3D Touch, the pressure-sensing technology that Apple is currently using (and that others are expected to replicate soon) has competition coming in the ‘most recent finger tech’ stakes. It’s one thing to calculate pressure but what if your touchscreen could tell which angle your finger was at? This software-based update, called FingerAngle, is the creation of Qeexo – an offshoot of Carnegie Mellon University. It doesn’t require any special hardware. Your same old touchscreen will work but there’s potential there for a whole new control method to spring to life, in apps and for general navigation.

Source: Gizmodo

3D bioprinting successfully creates mouse thyroid

Russian company 3D Bioprinting Solutions has, at the 2015 Biofabrication conference (that’s a thing now?) in the Netherlands detailed how they have printed mouse thyroids, teeny little organs which were then transplanted into said wee beasties. The result is that the artificial organs were able to restore thyroid functions in the hypothyroidism-stricken mice – quite the medical feat for 3D printed innards. The artificial bits were created using the FABION printer (above, unless you’re reading the newsletter). The next step would be to create human thyroid, we guess? Preferably not in a hobbyist’s home, thanks.

Source: Digital Trends

Just how sticky can a superglue made from mostly water be, anyway?

What kind of a question is that? If something is 90% water, it’s supposed to be runny, right? Wrong. The human body is around 60% water, on average, and you need to be a six-year-old boy in order to be really runny (most of it from the nose, we believe). So a 90% water superglue, like the one created by technology wizards MIT, is within the realm of possibility. Because science. It’s less a glue than a synthetic hydrogel, able to “…adhere to surfaces with a toughness comparable to the bond between tendon and cartilage on bone.” The result? A tough bond that is nonetheless flexible. So… the complete opposite of a conventional superglue, then.

Source: MIT (YouTube)

Fallout 4 has a game-breaking bug because of course it does

We were wondering how long it would take before something like this surfaced. Fallout 4 has at least one game-breaking bug, one which is tied to a settlement quest. Unusually, this bug is active across all platforms, meaning that you can experience it on the Xbox One, PC and PS4. If you’re on the PC then you can circumvent the bug, which occurs when trying to travel to Mosignor Plaza during the quest in question, using console commands. Just a head’s up. So head to the Bethesda forums for possible fixes and expect a patch soon. And don’t panic, game-breakers existed in both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas as well.

Source: GameSpot