Science Weirdness

Art is weird, sure, and politics is wackier than monkeys on pot, but for my money nothing is stranger than science. Nature makes a glue that's apparently stronger than almost anything else in creation:

The glue one species of water-loving bacteria uses to grip its surroundings may be the strongest natural adhesive known to science. [snip] Researchers... studied how much force they needed to tug the tiny, stalked Caulobacter crescentus off a glass plate... The bacteria grip with a force of 70 newtons per square millimeter--roughly 5 tons per square inch--or equivalent to the downward force exerted by three cars balancing on a spot the size of a quarter. While the researchers do not yet know if the substance is the strongest glue on Earth, it is stronger than cyanoacrylate superglues found on store shelves and may be rivaled only by a few synthetics.

Just don't get it on your hands. If you do, though, you might be able to get some new fingers made down at the "bioprinter":

Sitting in a culture dish, a layer of chicken heart cells beats in synchrony. But this muscle layer was not sliced from an intact heart, nor even grown laboriously in the lab. Instead, it was "printed", using a technology that could be the future of tissue engineering. [snip] Gabor Forgacs and a company called Sciperio have developed a device with printing heads that extrude clumps of cells mechanically so that they emerge one by one from a micropipette. This results in a higher density of cells in the final printed structure, meaning that an authentic tissue structure can be created faster.

A question - will the slovenly Kinkos staffer wear biohazard gloves when he hands over your order of bioprinted kidneys?