Just saw this on The Chive, and found it fascinating.
This artist merges science and art. Heather Dewey-Hagborg is her name, and she deserves a “Bravo!”.
She picks up chewing gum, cigarette butts, hair, etc. (some of that etc. could be on the yucky side), and takes samples from them to a DIY biology lab. There she extracts the DNA, and prints out the result.
About 30 parameters are then fed into a 3D printer from a program she customized, and a face is printed out.
This is a WIP, since the printed masks aren’t identical to the folks themselves (I’m guessing she has some known samples and pictures for tweaking, herself among them) but look as if they could be relatives…with a resemblance. I think with time, shell find the proper number of values to feed into the program and weight them appropriately.
photocredit The Chive
This could have valuable applications for the future…
In the meantime, watch where you throw out your cups…and watch your butts.
Source:
http://thechive.com/2013/05/28/3d-faces-printed-from-discarded-materials-whaaa-10-photos/