Project Helix Might Support the Full History of Xbox Games - DTNS 5324

0:00This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Do you have an app idea you keep meaning to build someday? Well, someday just got a deadline. Ship-a-ton is back.

0:36The world's biggest mobile hackathon brought to you by Revenue Cap. It's simple. Launch a brand new app between August 1st and September 30th and compete for over$1 million in prizes. Win and your app could land on a billboard in Times Square, forever enshrined in app development glory. Join the fun at Ship-a-ton.com. Meet Amazon Ads rising star Daryl Spencer, who set out to redefine men's self-care with his brand Crown Skin. Amazon Ads helped him grow.

1:06Dr Niki: I walked away from big tech to build a luxury brand in a category that no one was paying attention to. With the help of Amazon Ads, I'm reaching relevant audiences and competing with the biggest names in men's grooming. We've scaled to over$500 ,000 in monthly revenue. Watch Crown Skin's story at advertising.amazon.com slash rising-stars.

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2:21this is the daily tech news for tuesday august 4th 2026 we tell you what you need to know give you the important context and all of it and help each other understand oh my gosh august uh today

2:32Dr Niki: dr nikki tells us about 3d printing ear bones want to 3d print some ear bones dr nikki's going going to tell you how to do it. And Microsoft's Project Helix console could run the entire back catalog of Xbox console games, including 360. Whoa, that's crazy. I'm Jason Howell. I'm Tom Merritt. Let's start with what you need to know with a big story. Really big story. If you're interested in game preservation, which I definitely am, a leaked memo addressed to publishers obtained by The Verge's Tom Warren reveals or shows that Microsoft is pitching Project Helix, which is the next Xbox console, as a hybrid Xbox and PC console capable of running games designed, yes, for the new hardware, but also running games from four Xbox generations, plus PC games on top of that, of course.

3:28Microsoft's disk-to-digital system would turn Xbox One and Xbox Series X and S discs into digital licenses. Those licenses could transfer across supported Xbox devices, including Helix, including PCs and Xbox handhelds, wherever a game is enabled as Xbox Play anywhere. Now, on the publisher side, publishers can opt into eligible or their titles, their Xbox titles that are actually eligible for this into the new backwards compatibility on PC and Helix program. That would give them control over pricing, over licensing, whether the game hits Game Pass or not. And then Microsoft would actually make the games work on Project Helix, on Windows PCs, on its Xbox branded handhelds by owning the engineering side, the certification, and then support for all that backwards compatibility, basically.

4:28So the expanded Xbox Play Anywhere program, this is the one that allows games to be played on any supported device. It already covers more than 1500 titles, right? Microsoft's expected to extend that model to New Helix and PC backwards compatibility releases over the next few years. That would build on a separate PC backward compatibility program for original Xbox games that Microsoft actually announced last month with plans to launch that in October. So a little confusing, but I think at the end of the day, Project Helix capable of running pretty much the back catalog of Xbox titles. And I think that's pretty significant.

5:09Dr Niki: Yeah, there's a lot of steps along the way that we're talking about here, like you were mentioning. The first step is the one you mentioned last. we're going to get four Xbox games that you can run on PC, but that's apparently just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, the emulator that's going to do that has the emulator to run the 360 games, which is part of the news that we're talking about here is like, well, they've got the emulator to run the 360. And we have Tom Warren saying that, you know, they're out there talking about this pitch to port your games to PC. I think what they're aiming at is eventually, if you have an Xbox game, you can run it on a Microsoft device, whether it's Windows-based and made by somebody else.

6:01Dr Niki: Maybe it's a handheld Windows-based device. Maybe it's a PC or Project Helix, which will be called Xbox Ridiculous Name because the names keep getting more ridiculous with every generation of Xbox. But yeah, you'll be able to buy an Xbox if that's what you want or just play things on the PC and it'll be a long road there. But eventually it won't matter when you bought it and what device you have. The aim is to make everything playable across all of its own platforms. Now, this still requires, though, publishers of these games, whether those publishers still exist or not, right, to basically say, yes, we want to do this.

6:46And then those machinations are happening. This isn't just like automatically Microsoft flips a switch and every single game in the history of Xbox catalog suddenly appears. And there still needs to be some sort of coordination there to actually, I guess, opt into the system. Yeah, for the developers.

7:03Dr Niki: For the first-party titles, I assume Microsoft is just going to be like, great, we'll make those happen. But for the third-party developers, yeah. That's why I was trying to choose my words carefully of like, it will be a long road to get there. And the aim is to be able to play everything. We'll never get to be able to play everything, like you said. But I wonder, too, at what point we start talking about what to do about those games that don't have a publisher anymore. Totally. Or the rights are in question. You know, Abandonware is a big deal in game preservation. This is less about game preservation.

7:37Dr Niki: This is more about Xbox wanting to make it easy for you to make the decision to get a new Windows machine or Project Helix or whatever. Like, don't worry. You won't lose any of your games. Disk to digital is also going to make it possible for them to stop making disks. That's what Sony has done, right, is say, well, we're going to make it so that you can take your Sony disks and make them available for digital because we're not going to make disks anymore. Microsoft hasn't announced that yet, but my guess is they are facing the same economics that Sony is, which is too few people are buying the disks.

8:10Dr Niki: It costs a lot to make the disks. It's not economically sensible to continue to make the disks. and so Sony already made the call. Microsoft's probably going to make that call in the next couple of years. Yeah, I mean, I've mentioned it many times on the show. I think I'm nostalgic, especially about old video games that I loved back in the day. I do see video games as art. I think the video games do deserve to be historically preserved in some way. And I know you're saying that this isn't about preservation, but it kind of achieves something that I've always... It can be, yeah, right. I've always wanted my consoles to work in some sort of way like this.

8:50I realize that technically speaking, it's probably incredibly difficult to say every console that we release will play all the back catalog of every console that we've ever released. That's a pretty tall order. But at the same time, from a preservation standpoint, that would be the best of all worlds. And so this gets us a little closer to that, even if it does mean a more diskless future. And some people have a real problem with that. even if it does mean a little bit more lock-in, let's say, as a result of that, it still gives you the option to have access to these things that may, you know, maybe you don't have that old console around anymore, but you still really love that game.

9:26At least you have the option, and that's what I really want.

9:29Dr Niki: Well, and technologically, it is easier now to do that than it used to be. Emulation, right? Yeah, yeah. Emulation has become easier to pull off, easier to design for. That's why Microsoft is able to do this. So I think it would be smart for Microsoft to lean into the preservation aspect of this a little somehow, just to build the goodwill of like, hey, we're going to try to work to resolve abandonware issues and make those available as well. That's probably three or four steps down the line. Because today, what we're talking about is Tom Warren saw an internal memo, right? Microsoft isn't even announcing anything yet.

10:06Dr Niki: So we're getting ahead of ourselves on the roadmap, I suppose. But yeah, I think that would be a great thing for them to do. I'm with you on that. Is there an old, like I never owned an Xbox console. I've owned plenty of PlayStations in the past, but never an Xbox. Did you? And is there one game that you're like, ooh, I'd love to go back to that one? Not for Xbox. I had an Xbox 360 and an Xbox One. But I can't think of anything I played on them that I have to go back to. Yeah, yeah. Most of the stuff that I feel that way about is from the 90s. I was going to say, yeah, the older things that are just easier to like.

10:46Dr Niki: That's why I have the Commodore 64 return, right? Because that's my era. But if there's something you folks out there are like, I know what I would want them to bring back first. Let us know. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Love it. DTNS is made possible by you, the listeners. We get the majority of our funding from Patreon. and without our patrons and Substack subscribers, we would be half what we are now. So big thanks to folks like David Rowell, Johnny, Hitech Oki, and Chris Zaragoza for supporting the show at patreon.com slash DTNS.

11:28Do you have an app idea you keep meaning to build someday? Well, someday just got a deadline. Ship-a-ton is back. The world's biggest mobile hackathon brought to you by Revenue Cap. It's simple. Launch a brand new app between August 1st and September 30th and compete for over$1 million in prizes. Win and your app could land on a billboard in Times Square, forever enshrined in app development glory. Join the fun at ShipATon.com. This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping.

12:09Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Hey guys, it's Drew Afualo from the comment section. Listen, it's time to stop settling for hair products that just don't work. With all the prestige brands at Sephora, upgrading your routine is easy. If your hair needs repair, they've got the K18 Leave-In Molecular Repair Hair Mask. If you're trying to level up your wash day, the Kerastase Elixir All-Time Hair Oil leaves your hair looking ridiculously shiny without feeling heavy.

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14:25All right, we got a lot of show to get to, so let's get into the briefs.

14:29Dr Niki: Yes, indeed. I know it's all about Microsoft. Feels like 2007 again, where we're just covering a lot of Microsoft stuff and people are complaining. Why are you covering Microsoft all the time? Well, this is not a good news story for Microsoft. Microsoft released details of a hacking campaign against hotel Wi-Fi networks previously disclosed by a security company called ReliaQuest. So Microsoft's just following on and saying, yes, what ReliaQuest said was true. Here's more details about it. Microsoft is calling the campaign Captive Crunch. Little play on Captain Crunch there. As it attacks the captive portal on hotel Wi-Fi networks.

15:08Dr Niki: Captive portal is that little pop-up you get, you know, in a hotel. you're going to enter your name and your room number or at a conference going to ask for your email address and solve a captcha or something. It's that little pop-up, the captive portal that gets you onto the Wi-Fi network. Microsoft has not determined how they are getting into the captive portal, though there are signs of a breach of some kind of shared infrastructure. So it could be some kind of supply chain attack on captive portal software, but they are getting in and the attackers are then able to modify DNS and HTTP traffic on those compromised networks.

15:45Dr Niki: And once you're on the Wi-Fi, the attackers can then redirect you to a page that looks like a Microsoft 365 login portal or a Microsoft Entra ID phishing page. They're going to try to trick you into entering your Microsoft credentials, basically. The attackers also served fake browser and operating system update pages. So if they can't trick you to get your Microsoft stuff in there, they might try to trick you into updating your browser or your operating system. And in any of those cases, once you do, they have your credentials and then they can serve malware for Windows and even Android, they think in some cases through click fix prompts.

16:24Dr Niki: Microsoft described two types of malware that get installed as a result of all this. Cornflake is what they're calling the one that enables remote shell access and key logging and screen capturing and all the monitoring types of malware that watch what you do and record it. And then ChocoShell, the cornflake, somebody was hungry for breakfast when they were naming them at Microsoft. Yeah, no kidding, I didn't eat enough this morning. ChocoShell targets browser cookies, passwords, tokens, and Wi-Fi credentials. So one monitors you, the other tries to take all the authentication stuff they can find.

16:56Dr Niki: Microsoft believes Captive Crunch has been active since early May. The company recommends treating hotel and conference Wi-Fi as untrusted, which you probably already should have, but definitely treat it as untrusted now. You probably are better off connecting through your cell carrier if you can. They recommend avoiding doing any kind of software update or tool use when you are on a captive Wi-Fi connection. Recommend using phishing-resistant authentication, MFA, pass keys, that sort of thing, and disabling intra-device code authentication if you don't need it. Also, don't use your corporate credentials to register on a guest Wi-Fi network because that's just giving them a leg up.

17:39Dr Niki: Some of this I know folks in the audience are like, well, I try not to use those Wi-Fi networks anyway, and I don't do anything important when I'm connected to hotel Wi-Fi or conference Wi-Fi, which is good practice. But it's also good to know that this is out there. So any of us may let our guard down when we're tired from a long day at a conference or a long day at work in the hotel afterwards. And so it's good to be extra aware of this. Yeah. And particularly when you're traveling and you're staying at random hotel and that thing pops up for you to connect, that's not a prompt or a screen that you're accustomed to seeing necessarily, used to seeing.

18:20And so patterns and things that might stand out might be less easy to spot because you just you aren't faced with that a lot. And so, you know what I mean? Versus getting like, like I, if I get a Google login screen, that's been spoofed by some someplace, I've seen a Google login screen a million times. I'm probably going to more easily, I'm guessing, be able to spot like, Oh, wait a minute. There's something off here. I'm not going to go down.

18:46Dr Niki: Well, again, the, the captive portal login is not the part being compromised. You, what it's doing is channel through, you get on the hotel or the conference wifi through the captive portal. And then once you're on, they have infiltrated that network. And there you type in Microsoft.com to log into your 365 account and it redirects you from Microsoft.com to their own Microsoft page. And you don't notice because they're doing DNS. Yeah. Right. And they've probably done a good job from these screenshots, making it look like a Microsoft login page. And then, of course, once you've put in your name and password and even your MFA, they have it and then they can use it.

19:32Dr Niki: Microsoft offers the ability to not use a password and just use passkey. That will be a big help because then if they redirect you to your phishing page, your passkey won't work and it won't log you in. So it's one of the big advantages to passkey here is that it defeats this kind of phishing attack. But then if you're on the hotel Wi-Fi and you get a time to update your browser, be careful. If it's telling you to do control V to update your browser, don't do it. Don't do that at all. Yeah. Be careful out there, ladies and gentlemen. OpenAI posted on its company blog that Apple's trade secrets lawsuit that we've talked about in recent weeks against it is careless.

20:21This is their quote, careless, aggressive, and oddly personal. Lawsuit, of course, just to kind of bring you up to speed, alleges that former Apple employee Chang Liu accessed sensitive hardware files, including a presentation on Apple's complex circuit boards after leaving the company. And then former Apple iPhone product designer Tang Tan sought proprietary details from Apple candidates after becoming OpenAI's chief hardware officer. OpenAI says that Apple's own staff asked Lou to help locate those files and that Tan warned his team never to use other companies' confidential data. OpenAI included a very lengthy amount of screen grabs from conversations and emails that it says support its claims.

21:06This is in its blog post. Apple had initially demanded that OpenAI stop accessing and using any of its confidential information, preserve all related evidence, halt any ongoing use, of course, which OpenAI says it agreed to. But Apple also sought broader forensic analysis of devices and data sources and as well a search of OpenAI systems for additional confidential information. Those demands not accepted by OpenAI while they were kind of talking and walking through this. So as a result, Apple has now filed for a preliminary injunction in the U.S. to bar OpenAI and the two former employees from accessing, using or disclosing potential and alleged trade secrets.

21:50Part of Apple's request, its expedited request for discovery, is driven by what Apple says are another 11 former Apple employees who might have witnessed or have been involved in similar situations to what I'm just talking about here. OpenAI, of course, in this has said, quote, we do not have nor want any of their trade secrets. So interesting for OpenAI to just kind of like air it all out with screenshots and conversations and everything.

22:18Dr Niki: It's like interesting is a word strategy of public opinion is another couple of words you could throw in there. Yeah. OpenAI is taking offense. and I'm not sure why and I'm not sure that it's particularly helpful. My guess is what happened. OpenAI also saying that Apple says they tried to contact OpenAI in February and OpenAI says Apple contacted the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names, which is kind of throwing some shade. Didn't have to say they were Asian last names. You know, they could have just said two last names. There are two sets of lawyers going to battle is what this looks like.

23:07Dr Niki: And somebody on either the comms side, because it's a blog post, or the exec side who pushed it to become a blog post said, you know what? This is silly. Apple doesn't want this to be dragged out into public. Let's drag it out into public and put pressure on them to let up on this. because my guess is Apple found something. They were like, I think they might have this, this circuit diagram and, and we need to make sure they don't. There are also some emotions over Johnny. I've going to work for open AI, maybe. And maybe that's one or two execs. Maybe that's not all of Apple, but it really feels like now it's the lawyers.

23:47Dr Niki: And once the lawyers start going after each other, it all sounds incredibly spiteful and mean. That's how, that's how lawyers do this. that you don't win a case by being nice to the other side. You don't win a case by being gracious to the other side. And so OpenAI decided like, well, Apple won't like it if we show that side of them in public, let's do it. And maybe the public opinion pressure will pressure Apple to come to an agreement on this because I don't think OpenAI thinks there is much going on. Yeah, yeah. I just wonder when you go that next step and like start airing all the laundry in a public sense, do you in any way potentially damage the case down the line?

24:31I don't know what that would look like, but you know, it's a...

24:34Dr Niki: Yeah, I'm sure OpenAI's lawyers have vetted that carefully before that blog post went out there. Yeah, I'm sure they only did it, yeah. I'm guessing there's nothing in that post that isn't also in a filing in the court, right? Yeah, yeah, fair. But you're right. You do have to be careful. You wouldn't want someone to just go half-cocked and just write a blog post because there could be something in there that would impact the case. So from what I can tell, they're just taking a lot of the discovery stuff that is already in the court case and just putting it in public. And maybe trying to get ahead of that, saying like, well, these screenshots are going to leak anyway once they're, well, not leak, but they're going to become public anyway as part of the case.

25:12Dr Niki: So let's just use them to our own advantage here. The World Bank put out an interesting report noting that developing economies might stand to benefit the most from large language models, which is something even the World Bank didn't think it was going to find. It started the report expecting to explain the risks to developing economies from LLMs. But chief economist Endermit Gill wrote, as a rule, developing economies today have more to gain and less to fear from AI than richer ones. Less than a 10th of their jobs are susceptible to AI automation compared with more than a third in high-income economies.

25:52Dr Niki: In fact, 14.2 % of jobs in rich economies can be automated versus 4.5 % of jobs in developing economies. He also wrote, AI can help by enabling less experienced workers to perform more advanced cognitive tasks, allowing some work to be shifted away from scarce specialists and making existing workers more productive. Basically, instead of having to wait for the developing economy's culture to either bring in people or train people, AI can bring them up to speed really fast. The report noted improvements like accurate medical imaging, faster clearance of court cases, better weather forecasts, things that you could just do without having to hire or train a specialist.

26:39Dr Niki: Some of this comes from small models with fewer parameters that can run without needing a large data center or increased electrical power. In fact, the World Bank report recommends that these countries don't sink a lot of money into trying to build up a lot of data centers that are going to just use your electrical power, but focus on the efficient models. And the models will need to be customized. They'll need to be available in local languages. So that is something that would need to be overcome. The bank also advised countries buy model services and tools from several different countries because they want a developing economy to avoid becoming overly dependent on the U.S.

27:19Dr Niki: or China. Yeah. I mean, when you think about like job displacement and this whole argument around AI or this recurring theme around AI displacing jobs and everything, a lot of the jobs that are more difficult, at least right now, at a time when we don't have a whole lot of embodied humanoid robots, you know, roaming the earth with AI intelligence, are those like manual labor jobs, right? agriculture, construction factory roles, those things are largely less touched by generative AI than things like call centers, which is also something that I might imagine exists in some of these developing countries.

27:58You hear about a lot of call centers, entry-level coders and stuff. Those would be very susceptible.

28:02Dr Niki: The World Bank report did touch on that and said that the countries that have, like India, for example, has a large call center are going to be at more of a disadvantage, but not all developing economies have that. And like you're saying, if you have a large, medium-skilled working class, you can probably replace a lot of those roles with LLMs. I say roles because usually what happens is you replace the role and then you find other things for those people to do that you couldn't afford to pay them to do before. And so it doesn't actually destroy jobs. you know, that, that is the way it usually goes.

28:45Dr Niki: We'll see. But, but in these developing economies, you don't even have people doing those roles. That's one of the reasons that the economies are struggling is they don't have the skilled labor. Well, suddenly the LLM shows up and you have a lot of skills available. And instead of going like, well, one paralegal can now do the job of 12. You're like, oh, we can have a paralegal. We didn't have one before. And now we can do more with that. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Well, folks, if you want to join the conversation in our discord, people in there are talking about this sort of thing quite regularly, as you might imagine.

29:20Dr Niki: You can join our discord by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS.

29:30This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Do you have an app idea you keep meaning to build someday? Well, someday just got a deadline. Ship-a-ton is back.

30:07The world's biggest mobile hackathon brought to you by Revenue Cap. It's simple. Launch a brand new app between August 1st and September 30th and compete for over$1 million in prizes. Win and your app could land on a billboard in Times Square, forever enshrined in app development glory. Join the fun at ShipATon.com.

30:32All right, we got a gaggle of quick headlines that are good to know. will make you look smarter the minute we're done reading them.

30:39Dr Niki: Yeah, no, guaranteed. For example, an entry on Apple's interoperability request in the EU shows the company has agreed to develop a solution to let extensions share and import iPhone clipboard items with paired devices, including Windows PCs. That's right, cut and paste between your iPhone and Windows coming to the EU and hopefully to the rest of the world. Apple thinks that it will complete development on this in fall 2027, and then it would show up in the next beta after that. Cross fingers on that worldwide. That sounds very useful. Samsung is going to start deploying the latest version of HDR10 Plus Advanced to 2026 TVs this month.

31:19Prime Video will be the first platform to support it.

31:22Dr Niki: WhatsApp has added the ability to use at all to ping all the members of a group chat. Please use it responsibly. Yes. the feature will only be available to admins if your group is larger than 32 people. Yeah, be careful with that one. Apple said it briefly removed Telegram from the App Store after it found content that violated CSAM rules. However, the app was restored after Telegram removed the content and banned the user who posted it. But your algorithm knows that you're going to get upset when you see that Apple removed Telegram from the App Store. So it's going to keep showing you stories that say Telegram has been removed from the app store.

32:00Dr Niki: So this isn't a very good example of a story that's going to make you look smarter because you're like, no, but they already put it back. Stupid algorithm. Go away. Apple's incoming CEO, John Ternus, has hired retired VP of hardware engineering, Laura Legros, retired back in 2022. Laura Legros will return to Apple to take on the role of VP working cross functionality. A report from Palo Alto Network describes three attacks called Pass to Key that target Google Password Manager in Chrome on Windows. The attacks need malware to be installed on a machine and target a vulnerability in Chrome and Google Cloud Authenticator.

32:40Dr Niki: Yeah. And the big thing to remember here is that there is no compromise of Passkey or Passkeys encryption. It is compromising the way you manage your pass keys. So it gets into the password manager and then tries to use stuff. But pass key itself is safe. So another example of like, actually, pass key is more secure because it takes this much. You have to have the malware running on the machine already, which if malware is running on your machine, it's going to be able to get your passwords as well. And it's harder to get at the pass keys. uh nothing subsidiary cmf released its first clip style earbuds called the clip pro they wrap around your ear like an earring and the charging case which looks a little like a lighter uh includes a dial the smart dial that can adjust volume control playback and answer your calls it's 100 bucks coming august 15th yeah cmf likes to do the little dial on the case thing is that their thing their earbuds one of those dials on the case actually changes the volume which is kind of annoying if you have that case in your pocket.

33:48Oh, yeah. Something's going up and down. Anyways, it's interesting. Different, let's say. Nice. The New York Times reports that in June, an Illinois judge certified the class in a class action lawsuit against Apple, alleging the feature of the Photos app that can collect people by face violates an Illinois law requiring consent before biometric data is used and stored. Apple contends the feature cannot be used to recreate a face and is not linked to a person's name or identity.

34:19Dr Niki: This case has been going for six years. Oh, don't you love those cases? Yeah. It's the case that never ends. Those are the essentials for today, and we've got some time to dive a little deeper. Yes. Do you want titanium ears? Trust me, you might. Maybe not the outer part, but the inside part. You can 3D print them, making some surgeries safer and more effective. Dr. Nikki is going to talk to us about why that is. Dr. Nikki, welcome back. It's good to have you. It's good to hear you, Tom. Ah, yes, because you had me at 3D printed ear bones. I'll be honest, I agreed to this segment before I read the story because of the name, but I have read the story now.

35:03Dr Niki: And it turns out that the world's first middle ear bone transplant using 3D printed components happened in 2020. We'll get to why it's in the news again right now. But back then, they restored the hearing of the 40-year-old patient. It occurred at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. So let's start with how this works. Bring everyone back up to speed on ears so that we know why we need to 3D print something in the first place. It's perfect timing. The semester starts in two weeks. So here's biology 101, ears 101. So as you may or may not remember from school, hearing works through transmission of vibration.

35:41So a vibration will go into your ear and get transmitted to your eardrum through three small ear bones, the malias, stapes, and incus, or the hammer, what is this, hammer, anvil, and stirrup.

35:55Dr Niki: Yes, I remember that now from grade school. Okay, good. And it'll go to what looks like a snail, but it's not a snail. It's the cochlea, which is the spiral sensory hearing organ in your head. Yeah, the snails in our ears are important. Listen to the snail. So these three small bones are called ossicles. They are the smallest bones in the human body. And because they're so small, they're easily damaged. And when that happens, you can have hearing loss. Let's say you hit your head really hard. You might either move or damage those bones, and then you can't hear those vibrations. anymore. Yeah. So that makes sense to me that those bones get damaged or maybe there's a genetic problem or something and replacing them would fix the problem.

36:40Dr Niki: So how does 3D printing work into that? So before we use 3D printing for this, usually this type of hearing loss gets treated by replacing your ossicles with donor tissue. And usually that's from a cadaver's ossicles or other types of surgery can use ceramic or stainless steel prosthesis. However, that surgery has a really high failure rate, not because it's so small and finicky, but actually because it's really hard to get the prosthesis to be the exact right size for you to hear the right way because it's such a microscopic scale. So if you're getting a donor, right, you're going to get whatever size the donors.

37:20Yeah, I mean, even if their head's like the same size as your head, their obstacles may not be the same. May not be.

37:25Dr Niki: And then I guess stainless steel and ceramics are just, at that scale, it's just hard to get it precise. Exactly. And that's where 3D printing comes in and is really helpful, which is you can have a microscopic CT scan of the patient's head and obstacles at an extreme level of precision where you can then 3D print either their same bones and just kind of sculpt the broken one by repairing it or mirror the ones from the other side and you get an exact fix for their ear. And that's what they did in 2020. And they used 3D printed titanium ossicles. And the surgery took less than two hours. And titanium's light and that's good.

38:05Dr Niki: And I guess it doesn't wear down too. It's biocompatible. That's one of the big reasons. And it can transmit vibrations, which is important. Okay. So that's where we were already, which is impressive enough that you can put tiny 3D printed titanium ear bones in your ear. Where are we now? So, right, that happened back in 2020. Now it's 2026. And there has been a recent study that investigates 3D printing an entire middle ear. So that includes the ossicles, but also the tympanic membrane, which we would call eardrum. And basically what this study does is they use a micro CT scan again to scan a cadaver's middle ear.

38:45And what I thought was funny is to edit this scan down and make it workable they use blender so like whatever tools people are using at home

38:52Dr Niki: you use also for this which is great that's amazing yeah and then they printed this replica not only bones but eardrum using silicone and also 3d printed resin ossicles so they did a combination of hard and soft materials um and overall they were able to capture a model that responded to frequencies using a vibrometer similarly to the cadaver's middle ear. So we're not at the place where we're entirely replacing someone's ear with this silicone version, but in the trials, it seems similar. And they are basically trying to improve the prosthesis even further and the types of things that you can replace.

39:35Yeah.

39:36Dr Niki: So we're advancing with the materials, using different kinds of materials, which makes sense, especially when you're talking about the eardrum you're not going to use titanium for the eardrum i wouldn't think that would work and they did include the printer spec so like what kind of filament you're going to use or resin and how you want to put the setting so you could theoretically 3d print this yourself i wouldn't i wouldn't do the surgery even though it takes less than two hours i wouldn't do it but but if you could get a scan of your ear for some reason then you can see your ear bones This is the hard part because I work with micro CT quite a bit.

40:13And the only problem with micro CT is the field of view. So the area, the space in which you have to put an object to scan is really small, depending on how expensive your micro CT machine is. So you could theoretically put a head in there, but you'd have to find the right machine. And that's, I think, why they used a cadaver specimen because they extracted the middle ear.

40:32Dr Niki: Yeah, that makes sense. That's the only hurdle, though. But obviously, if you're in need of the surgery, they will find a way to get the scan, even if it's complicated, without crushing your head. Well, I think there is a device. The only reason I know this, I think there's a scan where you could do this because one of my colleagues scanned a rhino head. And that's bigger than a human head. Yeah, there's got to be a way. Whether it's safe, I don't know. Well, and they've been doing scanning for the titanium ones that they did starting in 2020. So there's some kind of scan. Yeah, well, those were based on cadaver scans as well.

41:05Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So there's options.

41:08Dr Niki: Well, this is very promising and very helpful. Dr. Nikki, thank you for finding the story and bringing it to us. If folks want to find more of what you do, got any new shows you're doing these days? Oh, yeah. Well, you can with your new ears, you can listen to the new show that I'm doing with Huan Tui Dao called Technical Tea. It launched Monday and it's great. we talk about makeup but in a tech way so not really the way you would expect we talk about cyber cyber computer vision and cyber decks and a million other things in between it's a pretty big episode but we're excited for you guys to listen to it so technicaltea.show everywhere fantastic go check it out technical t t e a thank you dr nikki talk to you again soon Thanks for having me.

41:59I love it. It became a show. Yes, yes. Technical T has graduated. Yeah. That's amazing. Congratulations. All about ear health, too. So that's a cool story. We end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives. Today, Sparky64 reminds us, slash me, of what line of sight actually means.

42:21Dr Niki: Uh, well, Sparky 64 wrote line of sight means the drone operator has to be able to see the drone all time with their eyes. Can't use binoculars, telescope monitors, telescope monitors, et cetera. Uh, I knew the monitors thing. I did not realize until Sparky wrote that. Yeah. You can't even use assistive, uh, things if they're zooming in, you can use your spectacles, but you can't use binoculars or telescope. That's not line of sight. So then line of sight is not very far away at all because drones are pretty darn small to begin with, right? Yeah, yeah. So it doesn't take very long for them to be out of your line of sight, out of distance.

43:00Dr Niki: Yeah, usually I think of like tree lines or buildings or something keeping me from seeing them. But you're right, distance could be that too. Yeah, there you go. Well, folks, if you've got something like Sparky has for us, you can send it to us. Any kind of thought, any kind of insight. you got a particular expertise on a story, send it to us feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Yeah, thank you again, Sparky64, for contributing to today's show. Thank you also to Dr. Nikki for contributing. Excellent stuff there. And thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business by becoming a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS.

43:37We'll see you tomorrow.

43:44The DTNS family of podcasts. helping each other understand.

43:50Dr Niki: Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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