3D smartphones will soon be a reality–if you live in Japan, that is. Two upcoming Sharp smartphones will offer a 3D-capable display. These two new Android powered phones, known as the Galapagos 003SH and 005SH, won’t just house any regular 3D screen. Instead, they’ll be based around an autostereoscopic 3D display developed by Sharp itself, which means that you’ll be able to view 3D content without the need for pesky 3D glasses. After all, who would want to wear 3D glasses just to use their smartphone?

But what 3D content will these portable devices have? Sharp detailed that a range of 3D movies and games will be made available for the smartphones. The game lineup will include the likes of Resident Evil (BioHazard), Megaman, and Konami Mobile Baseball titles. Oh, and if that wasn’t enough, both devices will be capable of taking 3D pictures.

Beyond the devices 3D capabilities, both of the handsets will come with Android 2.2 (Froyo), and they’ll include a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, a 3.8-inch display, as well as the usual Wi-Fi and GPS capabilities.

3-D printing has already resulted in advances in manufacturing (as well as tiny stop-motion animation), but now taking it one step further is the Urbee hybrid: the world’s first 3-D printed car, developed by Kor Ecologic and Stratasys.

The Urbee was created using Stratasys’ Dimension 3-D printers and Fortus 3-D Production System. The full-scale prototype is not yet complete, but all of the exterior components, including the glass, will be entirely printed by additive manufacturing – printing layer upon layer of material until you end up with a car in front of you.

Canadian scientists have transformed pinches of human skin into petri dishes of human blood — a major medical breakthrough that could yield new sources of blood for transfusions after cancer treatments or surgery.

The discovery, by researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., could one day potentially allow anyone needing blood after multiple rounds of surgery or chemotherapy, or for blood disorders such as anemia, to have a backup supply of blood created from a tiny patch of their own skin — eliminating the risk of their body’s immune system rejecting blood from a donor.

Researchers predict the lab-grown blood could be ready for testing in humans within two years.

The achievement, published Sunday in the journal Nature, raises the possibility of personalizing blood production for patients for the first time.

“This is a very important discovery. I think it represents a seminal contribution” to the rapidly evolving field of stem-cell research, said Michael Rudnicki, scientific director of the Canadian Stem Cell Network and director of the Regenerative Medicine Program at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute.

“That one can play with the fate of a cell and force it sideways into something that it doesn’t at all resemble, and then being able to use it, is tremendously exciting.”

The procedure is also relatively simple. It involves taking a small piece of skin just centimetres in size, which would require only a stitch to close, extracting fibroblasts — abundant cells in the skin that make up the connective tissue and give skin its flexibility — and bathing them in growth factors in a petri dish. Next, by adding a single protein that binds to DNA and acts as an on/off switch, the researchers turned on or off some 2,000 genes and reprogrammed the skin cells to differentiate or morph into millions of blood progenitors — the cells the produce blood.