Amazing science in the world around us

National Science and Engineering Week is over, but that doesn't mean emerging, exciting science stories are over too. I've been involved in one or two events this week so I'm just managing to catch up on the science news headlines from the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science_and_environment/) and its incredible how advanced modern life has become- from 3D printing of human face parts to bionic 'cyborg' limbs, I find it hard to comprehend this kind of technology (even though my school days weren't that long ago)! To think that we live in an age when faces can be reconstructed by simply being printed off before our very own eyes is unbelievable. But it is true, and it's true because of the efforts of scientists and mathematicians and engineers continually trying to develop our world and make it a better place for us. How cool is it to think we are alive NOW when all this is happening? In the late 1980's DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) fingerprinting was used for the very first time to capture a criminal, the murderer Colin Pitchfork. This all happened around the time I was born, and since then DNA fingerprinting has moved leaps and bounds in it's development, meaning the identification of people nowadays can be made much quicker and by using tiny amounts of DNA of between 100 to 1000 base pairs (DNA building blocks). To put this into context, the gene for ginger hair (MC1R gene) has nearly 90 million base pairs! These developments help to make the world around us a safer place to live, knowing that criminals will be caught, but also offer hope to those who may have lost loved ones in past conflicts. In fact only this weekend it emerged that 10 soldiers who died during World War I had been identified using modern day forensic DNA analyses, allowing families to close the chapter on their relatives last moments. What else will scientists and engineers discover or create in this world (or other worlds?) whilst we are alive? What discoveries will you make?