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Scientists are still trying to figure out what’s going on in our brains when we listen to music and how it produces such potent effects on the psyche.

“We’re using music to better understand brain function in general,” said Daniel Levitin, a prominent psychologist who studies the neuroscience of music at McGill University in Montreal.

Three studies published this month explore how the brain responds to music. The quest to dissect exactly what chemical processes occur when we put our headphones on is far from over, but scientists have come across some clues.

Health benefits of music

Listening to music feels good, but can that translate into physiological benefit? Levitin and colleagues published a meta-analysis of 400 studies in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, suggesting the answer is yes.

In one study reviewed, researchers studied patients who were about to undergo surgery. Participants were randomly assigned to either listen to music or take anti-anxiety drugs. Scientists tracked patient’s ratings of their own anxiety, as well as the levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

The results: The patients who listened to music had less anxiety and lower cortisol than people who took drugs. Levitin cautioned that this is only one study, and more research needs to be done to confirm the results, but it points toward a powerful medicinal use for music.

“The promise here is that music is arguably less expensive than drugs, and it’s easier on the body and it doesn’t have side effects,” Levitin said.

Levitin and colleagues also highlighted evidence that music is associated with immunoglobin A, an antibody linked to immunity, as well as higher counts of cells that fight germs and bacteria.

More: How music changes the brain

What music we like

So music is good for us, but how do we judge what music is pleasurable? A study published in the journal Science suggests that patterns of brain activity can indicate whether a person likes what he or she is hearing.

Valorie Salimpoor, a researcher at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto and former Levitin student, led a study in which participants listened to 60 excerpts of music they had never heard before while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine.

The 19 participants were asked to indicate how much money they would spend on a given song when listening to the excerpts, while also allowing researchers to analyze patterns of brain activity through the fMRI. Such a small number of participants is common in an fMRI study for reasons of complexity and cost, although it suggests more research should be done.

The study authors highlight in their results a brain area called the nucleus accumbens, which is involved in forming expectations.

“There is actually a network of activity that predicts whether or not you’re going to buy this music as you’re listening to the music,” Salimpoor said.

The more activity in the nucleus accumbens, the more money people said they were willing to spend on any particular song in the “auction” set-up that the researchers designed.

“This was an indicator that some sort of reward-related expectations were met or surpassed,” she said.

Another brain area called the superior temporal gyrus is intimately involved in the experience of music, and its connection to the nucleus accumbens is important, she said. The genres of music that a person listens to over a lifetime impact how the superior temporal gyrus is formed.

The superior temporal gyrus alone doesn’t predict whether a person likes a given piece of music, but it’s involved in storing templates from what you’ve heard before. For instance, a person who has heard a lot of jazz before is more likely to appreciate a given piece of jazz music than someone with a lot less experience.

“The brain kind of works like a music recommendation system,” Salimpoor said.

You can listen to the clips that the researchers used in the study here.

Levitin called the findings “interesting,” but views it as a refinement of what other laboratories have found in the past. He and Vinod Menon at Stanford University were the first to show the role of the nucleus accumbens in music in 2005.

Beholding beauty: How it’s been studied

Are we all hearing the same thing?

It seems intuitive that different people, based on their personalities, preferences and personal histories of listening to particular music, will have different experiences when exposed to a particular piece of music. Their attention to various details will vary and they might like different things about it.

But Levitin and his collaborators showed in a European Journal of Neuroscience study that, from the perspective of the brain, there may be more similarities among music listeners than you think.

“Despite our idiosyncrasies in listening, the brain experiences music in a very consistent fashion across subjects,” said Daniel Abrams, lead author and postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Seventeen participants who had little or no music training took part in this study which, like Salimpoor’s, is small, but typical for an fMRI study. Participants listened to four symphonies by composer William Boyce of the late Baroque period, which the researchers chose because they reflect Western music but were likely to be unfamiliar to subjects.

Among participants, the researchers found synchronization in several key brain areas, and similar brain activity patterns in different people who listen to the same music. This suggests that the participants not only perceive the music the same way, but, despite whatever personal differences they brought to the table, there’s a level on which they share a common experience.

Brain regions involved in movement, attention, planning and memory consistently showed activation when participants listened to music — these are structures that don’t have to do with auditory processing itself. This means that when we experience of music, a lot of other things are going on beyond merely processing sound, Abrams said.

One resulting theory is that these brain areas are involved in holding particular parts of a song, such as the melody, in the mind while the rest of the piece of music plays on, Abrams said.

The results also reflect the power of music to unite people, Levitin said.

“It’s not our natural tendency to thrust ourselves into a crowd of 20,000 people, but for a Muse concert or a Radiohead concert we’ll do it,” Levitin said. “There’s this unifying force that comes from the music, and we don’t get that from other things.”

Further research might compare how individuals with healthy brains differ in their musical listening compared to people with autism or other brain disorders, Abrams said.

“The methods that we’ve used can be applied to understand how the brain tracks auditory information over time,” Abrams said.

What the brain draws from: Art and neuroscience

What’s next

The next frontier in the neuroscience of music is to look more carefully at which chemicals in the brain are involved in music listening and performing, Levitin said, and in which parts of the brain are they active.

Any given neurochemical can have different function depending on its area of the brain, he said. For instance, dopamine helps increase attention in the frontal lobes, but in the limbic system it is associated with pleasure.

By using music as a window into the function of a healthy brain, researchers may gain insights into a slew of neurological and psychiatric problems, he said.

“Knowing better how the brain is organized, how it functions, what chemical messengers are working and how they’re working — that will allow us to formulate treatments for people with brain injury, or to combat diseases or disorders or even psychiatric problems,” Levitin said.

Editor’s note: Brenna Ehrlich and Andrea Bartz are the sarcastic brains behind humor blog and book “Stuff Hipsters Hate.” Got a question about etiquette in the digital world? Contact them at netiquette@cnn.com.

(Yes, we’re enculturating you in Netiquette. We can hear the shouty, complainy e-mails already.)

“The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there tomorrow. … This thought has made me more and more attentive to all encounters, meetings, introductions, which might contain the seed of depth that might be carelessly overlooked.

“This feeling has become a rarity, and rarer every day now that we have reached a hastier and more superficial rhythm, now that we believe we are in touch with a greater amount of people, more people, more countries. This is the illusion which might cheat us of being in touch deeply with the one breathing next to us. The dangerous time when mechanical voices, radios, telephones, take the place of human intimacies, and the concept of being in touch with millions brings a greater and greater poverty in intimacy and human vision.”

Nin wrote those words in 1946, but she might as well have been writing them today. She starts with a YOLO and ends with a contemporary-sounding rumination of just how horrible we’ve all become now that we hold the power to be in touch with millions of people in the palms of our hands.

That’s right, we’re talking about how annoying and rude and antisocial we’ve all become with our smartphones and tablets. As CNN investigates all the ways mobile devices are changing our lives, we’d like to peel our eyes off our glowing screens long enough to recount our top eight egregious handheld errors.

These are things you literally could not do before the www went mobile; now we’re embarrassing ourselves all over the place. Please stop:

1. Drunk -tweeting, -texting, -Instagramming, etc.

Long gone are the days when the only witnesses to your inebriated ramblings were other bar patrons who also saw you stumble from your bar stool to the ground. Whether you’re able to keep it together with spelling and syntax (in which case, you’ve just got the world going, “Wait, she wants to do WHAT to Paul Ryan?!”), or your typing skills erode quickly, alcohol and mobile devices don’t mix.

2. Fooling around on your phone whenever you have a spare moment.

As writer Austin Kleon writes in his alarmingly cute book, “Steal Like an Artist,” we need unstructured time for creativity to foster, down time in which we mess around and let our disconnected thoughts gel into cool ideas.

If you turn every spare moment (a red light, a line at the salad station, a ride in the elevator) into an excuse to check your Cinemagram feed, you just won’t have those artistic a ha! moments. (And no, “Draw Something” doesn’t count.)

3. Passive-aggressively whining for the whole world to see.

Look, we all have our personal stock of First World Problems, frustrated complaints with the minor injustices committed by a cruel, uncaring world. That’s been true since the dawn of time. Now we just have myriad means of expressing them.

Nobody cares about your thinly veiled railings against your ex or roommate or employer, OK? Unless you’ve scribbled it on a notepad, in which case you should share it with the world. So that we can laugh at you.

4. Being really, really scared to actually use the phone.

Phones and tablets have made it oh so easy to communicate without using our voiceboxes. This is bad for relationships for oh so many reasons. Anais Nin would just hate it. Hit “dial” and enjoy the time-honored pas de deux of two humans, you know, talking.

5. Missing your favorite band’s concert because you’re so busy taking crappy photos, letting your phone ring and fiddling with your phone during the set.

Your hard-of-hearing, reformed punk-rock uncle was right: Concerts really WERE better back in the day, not necessarily because music really meant something, man, but because the audience actually paid attention and sang along and danced instead of holding their phones in the air and spending 30-plus seconds trying to find the shutter button on the front of the screen.

Your punkle would be so disappointed if he still made it out to shows today.

6. Texting salacious pictures.

The ritual sharing of NC-17 photos used to be a complicated analog affair involving Polaroids and furtive looks. Nowadays, people just drop trou, snap and send. Analyze THAT, Anais Nin.

7. Turning your friends into enemies with videos of them.

Camcorders have become tiny and discreet and as user-friendly as checking your e-mail. This is potentially bad news for those people you hang out with, as you hold in your hands a recording device that can humiliate them forever.

Set ground rules and roll the camera judiciously, lest you wind up publicly shaming a friend for her foul mouth, caught-on-film fart or unpopular political opinions.

8. Letting your seething anger leach out into the world at large.

Humans have always done stupid things when they’re emotionally riled up. Now, those tantrums and rages and outbursts are shared and cached for the world to see. Take a deep breath and put down the smartphone.

9. Texting while walking.

Rarely does this go well. Whatever’s so urgent can probably wait a few minutes. Or you can, you know, actually call the person (see No. 4).

10. Using your phone in the bathroom.

Don’t. Just don’t.

These are just some of the revelations writer Paul Miller had during a year of self-imposed exile from the Internet.

Miller came back online May 1 after giving up the Internet for a year and documenting his experiences for tech site The Verge. After a nerve-wracking start (including finding 22,000 e-mails in his inbox), Miller is settling comfortably back into the Web’s black hole of information and nonstop chatter.

We talked to Miller about what he learned on the other side, what’s changed online in the past year, and how his dream of being a cyborg won’t involve Google Glass.

What did you imagine going offline was going be like?

I thought it would be a ton of real practical hilarious hijinks. Oh, I couldn’t find this place on Google Maps, or I don’t have Wikipedia, or I have to send a real letter. I really thought that’s what the Internet was to me, mostly those little practical things.

What was the actual experience like?

Existential and introspective. I really learned a lot about myself. I did have a lot of free time, but a lot of it was loneliness and boredom in ways that I hadn’t really experienced before.

Early on that was a real inspiration. There were times I would realize my mind was in really cool places, having thought processes that are hard to have when you’re on the Internet and the same news and information cycle as everybody else. I read some books I would have never read, and wrote some stuff I would have never written.

I was a little bit out of the loop, in a good way, and I really enjoyed that. But it was really easy to sink in on myself and be withdrawn from people because it was just a little harder to get a hold of people, a little harder to make plans, and a little easier for me to just hide from the world and stay in my apartment and play video games.

Did you accomplish most of what you set out to do?

I had these goals for this year what I wanted to do. Read X number of books and write a first draft of my novel. This was my chance. I’m never going to have this much free time in my entire life, and so it was really hard at the end of the year to say I didn’t do all those things.

I’m probably a quarter of the way through the freshman syllabus of St. John’s College, a great books program I was copying. And I’m about halfway through the first draft of my novel. I wanted to do some real serious reporting, as well, but it proved really hard to do journalism without the Internet. Not only was it really hard for me, but it was really hard on my editors because they had to pick up the slack.

Did you ever ask people to Google things for you?

No. I’m sure I implied it at some point and got some information from the Internet. I know that happened sometimes. In my personal life I became very content with not knowing things. I was fine with missing out. There were a couple of things that were a little hard, like Felix Baumgartner’s jump from space. I saw it on CNN but they cut away during the actual jump.

Did your reaction change to people who still had the Internet?

I did become pretty judgmental. I didn’t envy them, but the most frustrating thing was people who couldn’t quite get out of their phone, or get out of their laptop. And in their opinion they’re listening, but I know they’re not really because I’ve experienced what full-on, true interaction is, and it’s different than someone glancing back and forth at their phone, or glancing back and forth at their e-mail. So that became really frustrating.

Now that I’m back on the Internet I really want to be the shining example of what it’s like to actually pay attention to somebody and put away your devices.

What is the first thing you did when you were back online?

I tweeted “jk” as a follow-up to my “GOODBYE INTERNET!!!!!” tweet. And I watched a video by my sister. She just started working as an art director and set designer, so I got to see her first music video project, which was really cool.

I just had so much trouble logging in to my different accounts, and then once I got on Facebook I didn’t know how to use Facebook. I almost had a panic attack that night. The Internet was real overstimulation, and for the first few days I really had a hard time using it. It just seemed like way too much, and it gave me real anxiety.

Someone on Twitter described me as their 80-year-old grandpa learning how to use the Internet. It was difficult, just technically, for me to use it well. But it was also stressful for me to use it because I had, like, three tabs open and I just didn’t know what was going on.

Did the Internet change while you were gone? Did you discover any new tools when you came back?

Vine and SnapChat. Vine is brand new and SnapChat was just sexting when I left the Internet. Now a lot of my friends and people are using it in this new way to communicate that isn’t this public blast of information on your Facebook wall or Twitter. It’s this very private communication with a few friends. I think that’s really cool because it uses that expressive creativity that would go into an Instagram or a tweet, but it’s one-to-one.

For the most part the Internet kind of disappointed me. I thought there’d be some fundamental, cool shift. Everything feels the same to me.

And to be honest, and I don’t know if I’m just being a snob, but I’m not as entranced by funny cat videos anymore. I really like vacuum cat and my buddy has a blog, didntmeantopost.tumblr.com, and I really like his selective picks of GIFs. But for the most part I’m just not that entranced by it at all.

Will old habits come back over time?

To be honest, I already feel like I’m using the Internet a little too much or the wrong way. I’m just a blob existing on the Internet instead of getting into the Internet, using it as a really good tool, and then putting it away so I can focus on writing or something.

I haven’t really been able to listen to music. I haven’t done any actual reading. I’m finding lots of articles that I pin so I can read them later, but I’m not actually reading any of it. I don’t want to be that. I still get my newspaper that got me through this whole year news-wise, and I haven’t had any time to read those or The New Yorker.

It’s very worrisome, and I really hope I can slow it down soon and find a new happy medium.

Do you plan on using the Internet differently now that you’re back?

I want to prioritize family and friends, and productivity and learning, over just generally consuming and being entertained. And that takes work because the Internet is so happy to entertain you. I want to find a way to use the Internet in that way, but unfortunately I’m really out of practice, so I kind of have to learn it from scratch. I don’t think I got better at using the Internet by not using it.

There’s a Wired post that [Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT Media Lab] wrote a long time ago about how surfing the Internet was a fad and after a while we would all get back to work. The Internet would be super utilitarian — we’d get what we need then we could be productive and do actual stuff.

But surfing the Internet was not a fad. That is the primary way we use it, and it’s rarely productive. I spent a couple of hours last night looking for a new e-mail client, looking for a way how to program, looking for an app to teach me Latin. Instead of working on my e-mail, learning how to program or learning Latin.

The Internet wants to be surfed. It takes a proactive approach to actually be a productive person.

Do you have any plans to take periodic breaks in the future?

We need to learn how to give each other a break and not always expect immediate responses, to be OK with this new wave of people who only check their e-mail twice a day.

I hope I get the permission from people — and maybe I have this because I’m that guy who left the Internet — so I can just disconnect for a weekend. It will be hard because I will want to tweet all the time. I’m not going to take some grandiose Internet break again, but I want to be able to do it for a day or two.

How do you see Google Glass impacting how we use the Internet?

I am such a nerd and I want to be a cyborg, and I want a computer on my head and always connected to me in a way. But wearable computing in the ’90s was about augmenting a human and making them more powerful in a way. Helping memory, taking notes on conversations and maybe recognizing faces and helping you navigate.

Google Glass is about taking everything in your world and uploading it to Google. It’s about using the Internet more, and it’s about pulling more parts of your life into the Internet. So instead of using the Internet as a utility to make your life richer and be less interrupted, it’s interrupting your life more to make the Internet richer with all the stuff from you life.

Did you have any surprising reactions?

One of my favorite letters I got was from a guy who’s diagnosed with Aspergers and engaged. He says his fiancée loves him and knows that’s just him. But based on something I wrote — and I don’t know what — he just decided to try a little harder to talk to her and be more open with her and she really appreciated it.

That was a really cool letter to get because I think you just assume this is how you’re going to use the Internet, this is how things are. And just by questioning it a little bit, questioning who you are and how you are and what technology is and fighting back against it, just a little bit, you can change that. I just loved that letter.

The Sun has unleashed its most powerful eruption of 2013 so far.

The solar flare – a sudden release of radiation – peaked at 1705 BST on Monday, and was associated with a huge eruption of matter.

When these eruptions reach Earth, they can interfere with electronic systems in satellites and those on the ground.

Nasa said this solar explosion – known as a coronal mass ejection (CME) – was not directed at Earth, but it could pass several US spacecraft.

The event on Monday was classified as an "X-class" flare – the most intense type – with a designation of X2.8 (higher numbers denote a stronger flare). It surpassed an X1.7-class flare that occurred 14 hours earlier.

They are the first X-class events to occur this year.

When intense enough, a flare can disturb the Earth's atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel.

This disrupts the radio signals for as long as the flare is ongoing – the radio blackout associated with this flare has since subsided.

CMEs can be even more disruptive because they can send billions of tonnes of solar particles into space. In those cases when very strong eruptions do reach Earth, the charged matter can blow out transformers in power grids.

The so-called Carrington Event of 1-2 September 1859 shorted telegraph wires, starting fires in North America and Europe, and caused bright aurorae (northern and southern lights) to be seen in Cuba and Hawaii.

The CME associated with this flare may pass the Stereo-B and Spitzer spacecraft. The operators of those science missions can choose to put their spacecraft into a "safe mode" to protect the electronics in onboard instruments from being tripped.

Increased numbers of flares are expected at the moment because the Sun's normal 11-year activity cycle is approaching a "high" of activity – known as a solar maximum.

Some technology analysts, along with some of the most influential computer makers in the world, say yes. Optical disc drives take up precious space in our ever-shrinking gadgets, and the ability to stream music or movies on demand has made CDs and DVDs less essential.

The disc drive’s spin into obscurity may have started swirling faster last week.

Apple’s new iMac, its flagship desktop computer, was released Friday. For the first time, it has no disc drive. This marks a trend that has already begun on some laptops, like Apple’s MacBook Airs, and of course with mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

“Over time, an optical disc will be as much of an historical curiosity as a floppy disk,” said Michael Gartenberg, a tech-industry analyst with research firm Gartner Inc.

According to Apple, where sleeker, thinner designs are always en vogue, dumping the disc drive was a no-brainer.

“These old technologies are holding us back,” Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of marketing, told CNN sister publication Time. “They’re anchors on where we want to go. We find the things that have outlived their useful purpose — our competitors are afraid to remove them. We try to find better solutions — our customers have given us a lot of trust.”

If the company’s track record on such things holds, the optical drive may be doomed. The original Mac dumped the 5-inch disk for a 3.5-inch floppy, and the first iMac was one of the first desktops without a floppy disk drive.

“It’s clearly a long-term trend, but Apple’s always been aggressive about making moves like this sooner as opposed to later,” Gartenberg said.

The company’s tiny Mac Mini, for the record, has been disc drive-free since last year.

Sony has already announced that it will stop making optical drives itself. And the release of Microsoft’s Windows 8, an operating system that works on disc-free smartphones and tablets as well as laptops and PCs, suggests that computing giant would be well positioned for such a move as well.

For some users, Web habits have already begun trending away from actions that require external media.

CDs? There’s music streaming or digital downloads. DVDs? Netflix, Amazon or a host of other online movie sites. Video games? There’s digital distribution like Steam and, increasingly, downloads from the major console and game makers.

“As personal cloud services become ubiquitous and broadband speeds increase, there’s very little reason for many consumers to use an optical drive on their computer going forward,” Gartenberg said.

There are always USB ports available on the occasion that an external device is needed (Apple, for what it’s worth, offers an external optical disc drive for $79).

Much as Google has with its Google Drive service, Apple has embraced cloud computing with its iCloud offering, which lets users store documents, photos, music and movies on Web-based servers. A move to the cloud could mean internal storage is less of a concern for users going forward.

Combined with advances in “solid state” internal storage and quicker broadband speeds that make downloads and streaming less painful, a post-DVD era could grease the skids for Apple and its competitors to make increasingly thin, light and inexpensive computers.

Witness the new Chromebooks, laptops that run Google’s Chrome system, that rely almost exclusively on the cloud and sell for around $250.

To be sure, the transition may be rough on some users.

“For those who still own DVDs and want to watch them on their computers, the iMac isn’t the ideal solution,” Fortune’s JP Mangalindan wrote in a review of the new iMac. “Sure, there’s a $79 external SuperDrive that connects via USB cable, but that means shelling out extra for — let’s face it — a feature that still comes standard on most PCs. It also means messing with the iMac’s minimal-looking setup.”

But like it or not, folks who still pop in a disc may not have long to keep doing so.

“While it may be too early to say for certain that the optical drive is absolutely dead,” wrote Chris Pirillo, founder of blogging network Lockergnome, “it is certainly showing all the early warning signs of a technology that is past its prime.”

An invasive shrub is disrupting US Mid-West ecosystems and threatening amphibian populations, say researchers.

Buckthorn, listed as an invasive species in the US, is understood to release a chemical into the environment that reduces successful hatching.

Since its introduction in the 19th Century as a hedgerow shrub, the plant has spread widely and is now found across two-thirds of the country.

The results will appear in Natural Areas and the Journal of Herpetology.

"What we are finding is a suppressed hatching success, so there is very low recruitment into the populations (of amphibians)," explained co-author Allison Sacerdote-Velat, a biologist from Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago.

"There are sites that, historically, had a greater diversity of amphibians and temporary breeding pools but now only have two or three species breeding.

"You would have had six or seven species breeding there about 20 years ago. We are finding that the sites are becoming a monoculture and certain species are becoming harder and harder to spot.

Dr Sacerdote-Velat explained that her study into the impact of European buckthorn on amphibian diversity and populations formed the basis of her PhD dissertation.

"When I started doing a background review, I found very little information on amphibians and buckthorn," she told BBC News.

"But what I did find was some medical and veterinary literature that there were abortive effects of buckthorn oil when it was ingested by small mammals.

"I began wondering whether the oils secreted by the plants were actively releasing this into breeding ponds, and whether this is was affecting amphibians as well."

She added that the shrub tended to form thick vegetative cover around breeding ponds, raising the possibility of a chemical – emodin – being released into the pond water.

Where the shrub had been removed, there was evidence of an increase in amphibian diversity and populations, but Dr Sacerdote-Velat explained that it was not clear whether this was a result of the removal of the invasive plant or the wider benefits of hydrological restoration programmes.

She explained: "The removal of the buckthorn would certainly make it easier for the amphibians, which protect themselves under leaf litter, to disperse.

"Currently, where buckthorn becomes established then it shades out all of the native ground cover, and because it has a very accelerated decomposition rate, there is just bare soil underneath the shrubs, making it very difficult for amphibians to move."

Story By: by Scott Horsley

President Obama met with a group of mothers on Friday to talk about selling relevant aspects of Obamacare to a young generation that often takes its healthy condition for granted and avoids the cost of insurance.

The world's first gun made with 3D printer technology has been successfully fired in the US.

The controversial group which created the firearm, Defense Distributed, plans to make the blueprints available online.

The group has spent a year trying to create the firearm, which was successfully tested on Saturday at a firing range south of Austin, Texas.

Anti-gun campaigners have criticised the project.

Europe's law enforcement agency said it was monitoring developments.

Victoria Baines, from Europol's cybercrime centre, said that at present criminals were more likely to pursue traditional routes to obtain firearms.

She added, however: "But as time goes on and as this technology becomes more user friendly and more cost effective, it is possible that some of these risks will emerge."

Defense Distributed is headed by Cody Wilson, a 25-year-old law student at the University of Texas.

Mr Wilson said: "I think a lot of people weren't expecting that this could be done."

3D printing has been hailed as the future of manufacturing.

The technology works by building up layer upon layer of material – typically plastic – to build complex solid objects.

The idea is that as the printers become cheaper, instead of buying goods from shops, consumers will instead be able to download designs and print out the items at home.

But as with all new technologies, there are risks as well as benefits.

The gun was made on a 3D printer that cost $8,000 (£5,140) from the online auction site eBay.

It was assembled from separate printed components made from ABS plastic – only the firing pin was made from metal.

Mr Wilson, who describes himself as a crypto-anarchist, said his plans to make the design available were "about liberty".

He told the BBC: "There is a demand of guns – there just is. There are states all over the world that say you can't own firearms – and that's not true anymore.

"I'm seeing a world where technology says you can pretty much be able to have whatever you want. It's not up to the political players any more."

Asked if he felt any sense of responsibility about whose hands the gun might fall into, he told the BBC: "I recognise the tool might be used to harm other people – that's what the tool is – it's a gun.

"But I don't think that's a reason to not do it – or a reason not to put it out there."

To make the gun, Mr Wilson received a manufacturing and seller's licence from the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

Donna Sellers, from the ATF, told BBC News that the 3D-printed gun, as long as it was not a National Firearms Act weapon (an automatic gun, for example), was legal in the US.

She said: "[In the US] a person can manufacture a firearm for their own use. However, if they engage in the business of manufacture to sell a gun, they need a licence."

Amid America's ongoing gun debate in the wake of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, US congressman Steve Israel recently called for a ban on 3D guns under the Undetectable Firearms Act.

Groups looking to tighten US gun laws have also expressed concern.

Leah Gunn Barrett, from New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, has said: "These guns could fall into the hands of people who should not have guns – criminals, people who are seriously mentally ill, people who are convicted of domestic violence, even children."

3D printing technology has already been used by some criminal organisations to create card readers – "skimmers" – that are inserted into bank machines.

Many law enforcement agencies around the world now have people dedicated to monitoring cybercrime and emerging technologies such as 3D printers.

Ms Baines from Europol said: "What we know is that technology proceeds much more quickly than we expect it to. So by getting one step ahead of the technological developments, we hope and believe we will be able to get one step ahead of the criminals as well."

GENEVA (Reuters) – Physicists are deadly serious people, right? Clad in long white coats, they spend their days smashing particles together in the hunt for exotic creatures like quarks and squarks, leptons and sleptons — and the Higgs Boson.

At night their dreams are all about finding them.

When discoveries show up amid the colorful displays on their monitor screens – as the Higgs Boson did last summer – they may share a glass or two of champagne, but then get down to writing learned papers for the heavy science journals.

True? Well, not quite. They do have a sense of humor too.

At the start of this month, a blog from the Great Temple of the particle hunting profession at CERN, near Geneva, offered a captive boson of the Higgs genus to each of the first 10 readers to e-mail in a request.

Simultaneously, across the Atlantic the U.S. Fermilab announced a months-long search for a new director was over with the appointment of “the obvious candidate,” the Time Lord.

It WAS April Fools’ Day, and no one was misled, right? Wrong, they were, according to both august institutions.

At CERN, scientist-blogger Pauline Gagnon now reports that over 1,500 eager respondents entered her boson lottery.

“Most of them wrote very enthusiastic notes, explaining why they wanted a Higgs,” – so far no more than a ripple on a graph she told Reuters.

“Even some physics students fell for it…. One told me it would help to win his girlfriend’s heart as he was about to propose.”

Nearly half the entries came from Belarus or Russia. Gagnon suspects that a serious report on the “lottery” by a regional news agency may have had something to do with that response.

Other applications for an original of the ephemeral Higgs came from Australia, China, Canada and Finland – which have strong physics communities. One came from Rwanda, which doesn’t.

“Many applicants were not completely fooled but happily played along,” says Gagnon. Ten of them, finally selected at random, will get a cuddly toy boson in reward.

Over at Fermilab, which for years competed with CERN in the Higgs chase but lost its particle collider in a U.S. government economy drive, spokesperson Andre Salles reported a “tremendous response” to their April 1 announcement.

Run in its online daily Bulletin, it said the new director to replace departing Pier Oddone – an Italian-born physicist with his feet firmly on the ground – would be “someone dedicated to exploring the mysteries of space and time”

“On July 1, the Time Lord known as the Doctor will join Fermilab,” said the Bulletin, alongside a portrait of British actor Matt Smith with a scientifically suitable mop of ruffled hair and tweed jacket.

Smith is currently playing the title role in the cult British television science fiction serial, “Dr Who”, now in its 50th year in which the hero battles alien villains seeking the destruction of humankind.

“After facing down Daleks, Cybermen and the Master, I can’t think of anyone more qualified to take on a congressional budget committee,” the Bulletin quoted Oddone as saying.

But Bulletin readers were not so easily misled. A number of emails came in, one from a Nobel physics prize-winner, appreciating the joke.

Just one writer “was fooled for a few seconds,” said Salles. A local reporter, “she initially couldn’t believe we’d picked a new director who was so young.”

(Reported by Robert Evans, editing by Paul Casciato)