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Steel beams are pretty uniformly strong, but they're all run of the mill, literally. If you start 3D-printing custom beams for the exact purpose they're intended to serve though, you've got a regular space-age material on your hands. It's lighter than steel and orders of magnitude stronger. The process, developed byYong Mao of the University of Nottingham, UK and colleagues, isn't just the product of one innovation, but rather a whole bunch of them wrapped up into one bundle. First, you start out withF a hollow beam and you test it with the load it needs to bear. When it inevitably fails, you use some sophisticated software to analyze that sucker and 3D print an internal fractal structure to provide support, kind of like what's inside your bones. Then lather, rinse, and repeat. With each iteration of ever-smaller fractal innards, the beam can gain strength by the order of magnitude, with practically negligible weight gain. Third generation beams, about as far as we can hope to go with current tech, are 10,000 times stronger than steel. There is one big limitation to how strong you can get with this stuff however, and it all depends on printer fidelity. Since these sorts of beams are specifically designed, there's not much extra support to carry your load, so if the mesh isn't perfect, you could be in trouble. As 3D printers get better however, imperfections won't be a problem on the larger scales, and more and more iterations will be possible, making for structures that are both incredibly strong and incredibly light. Now if only they could figure out how to 3D print some new bones for us.
An engineer named Jim Kor is printing, as in building, a car. The Winnipeg, Manitoba, car visionary is responsible for the Urbee 2, being readied for the road, intended eventually as an about-town car, with three wheels, and built for two passengers. It looks like a big, shiny red bug cruising down the road. Interest grows in its means of production and implications for car manufacturing in the future.
If printing cars develop, conventional manufacturing plants might operate aside very small "cottage" plants deploying lights-out manufacturing. Kor's company, Kor Ecologic, is responsible for the Urbee 2, described as strong as steel yet lightweight. (The motto for the company is "Reasonable Design.") By using 3-D printing, there is a special focus on lightness but strength; he is creating large pieces with varied thicknesses. The Urbee's car body will be assembled from about 50 separate parts. The team's practice is to take small part from a big car and make them into single large pieces. The less pieces, the less car weight. The lighter the car, the more miles per gallon. The less spaces between parts and the Urbee becomes the more aerodynamic. The teardrop-shaped car has a curb weight of 1,200 pounds. The bumper, which is made in two pieces, required 300 hours to finish. The entire car takes about 2,500 hours.
The printing process to make the car is called Fused Deposition Modeling. (FDM), where one lays down thin layers (0.04 mm) of melted plastic filament. The FDM approach enables tight control by the designer, who is able to add thickness and rigidity to special sections. Kor likes to compare the fender of a future Urbee with a bird bone. As shown in a cross section of a bird bone, he said there is bone only where the bird needs strength, and the FDM process can replicate a bird bone.
Kor has been printing the body pieces at RedEye, a business unit of Stratasys, which uses 3-D printers to produce on-demand parts and prototypes. Kor Ecologic has drawn up specific design ideals that are applied to the Urbee car project..A few of them are highlighted here. "Use the least amount of energy possible for every kilometer traveled. Cause as little pollution as possible during manufacturing, operation and recycling of the car. Use materials available as close as possible to where the car is built. Use materials that can be recycled again and again….
Be simple to understand, build, and repair. Be as safe as possible to drive. Be affordable." Kor does not have a high-priced toy in mind but rather an economy car. He has received orders for 14 cars. Most of the orders are from those involved in designing the car. Kor is presently planning to make one car and to drive it, when it is ready, with a partner, from San Francisco to New York City. They hope to do it on ten gallons of gas; Kor would prefer to use pure ethanol. They will try to prove without argument that they did the drive with existing traffic.
With a big splash, the first 3D printed fully articulated gown was modeled and presented by the queen of burlesque Dita Von Teese to a crowd of über-cool fashonistas and paparazzi at the Ace Hotel in New York. The gown is based on the Fibonacci sequence and was designed by Michael Schmidt and 3D modeled by architect Francis Bitonti to be 3D printed in Nylon by Shapeways. The gown was assembled from 17 pieces, dyed black, lacquered and adorned with over 13,000 Swarovski crystals to create a sensual flowing form. Thousands of unique components were 3D printed in a flowing mesh designed exactly to fit Dita's body. This represents the possibility to 3D print complex, customized fabric like garments designed exactly to meet a specific person or need. As we see the material properties of 3D printing mature to produce more fine, flexible materials we will see more and more forays into fashion such as this. At first it is at the boundaries of haute couture and art but as we have seen with Nike using 3D printing in footwear, we will see more and more 3D printing creep into the world of clothing and fashion until it becomes ubiquitous.
Cornell bioengineers and physicians have created an artificial ear - using 3-D printing and injectable molds - that looks and acts like a natural ear, giving new hope to thousands of children born with a congenital deformity called microtia. Over a three-month period, these flexible ears grew cartilage to replace the collagen that was used to mold them. "This is such a win-win for both medicine and basic science, demonstrating what we can achieve when we work together," said co-lead author Lawrence Bonassar, associate professor of biomedical engineering. The novel ear may be the solution reconstructive surgeons have long wished for to help children born with ear deformity, said co-lead author Dr. Jason Spector, director of the Laboratory for Bioregenerative Medicine and Surgery and associate professor of plastic surgery at Weill Cornell. "A bioengineered ear replacement like this would also help individuals who have lost part or all of their external ear in an accident or from cancer," Spector said. Replacement ears are usually constructed with materials that have a Styrofoam-like consistency, or sometimes, surgeons build ears from a patient's harvested rib. This option is challenging and painful for children, and the ears rarely look completely natural or perform well, Spector said. To make the ears, Bonassar and colleagues started with a digitized 3-D image of a human subject's ear and converted the image into a digitized "solid" ear using a 3-D printer to assemble a mold. They injected the mold with collagen derived from rat tails, and then added 250 million cartilage cells from the ears of cows. This Cornell-developed, high-density gel is similar to the consistency of Jell-O when the mold is removed. The collagen served as a scaffold upon which cartilage could grow. The process is also fast, Bonassar added: "It takes half a day to design the mold, a day or so to print it, 30 minutes to inject the gel, and we can remove the ear 15 minutes later. We trim the ear and then let it culture for several days in nourishing cell culture media before it is implanted." The incidence of microtia, which is when the external ear is not fully developed, varies from almost 1 to more than 4 per 10,000 births each year. Many children born with microtia have an intact inner ear, but experience hearing loss due to the missing external structure.
With controversy swirling over gun-sale background checks, limiting the size of weapon magazines and retaining Second Amendment rights, the problem of making homemade guns with 3-D printers has become a matter of public concern. Laws mean little if a determined criminal or a hobbyist teen wants to make plastic guns or extra-high capacity magazines, says Hod Lipson, Cornell University professor of engineering and a pioneer in 3-D printing. "With a homemade 3-D printer, you can print a gun using ABS plastic, the same material that LEGOS are made out of. You can even use nylon, and that's pretty tough," he says. "You won't be able to make a sniper rifle with a 3-D printer and it won't shoot 10 rounds a second, but the gun you can make could be dangerous. And a high-capacity magazine is nothing more than a strong plastic box with a spring. It's trivial to print." Lipson and co-author Melba Kurman just published a new book, "Fabricated: The promise and peril of a machine that can make (almost) anything." (Wiley, 2013.) The book includes a chapter on "3-D printing and the law," which addresses the legal and ethical challenges raised by 3-D printed firearms. The book also explores 3-D printing's impact on consumer safety, intellectual property, and ethics. As Lipson and Kurman detail, three-dimensional printers are intended to do the world good. In industry, 3-D printers can make hard-to-find spare parts and complex new devices. Researchers are developing techniques to 3-D print tailored and personalized body parts like he
One day in the future, astronauts on a long-term deep-space mission might have the ability to use 3-D printers to make delicious, nutritious meals. - Several decades from now, an astronaut in a Mars colony might feel a bit hungry. Rather than reach for a vacuum-sealed food packet or cook up some simple greenhouse vegetables in a tiny kitchen, the astronaut would visit a microwave-sized box, punch a few settings, and receive a delicious and nutritious meal tailored to his or her exact tastes. This is the promise of the rapidly maturing field of 3-D food printing, an offshoot of the revolution that uses machines to build bespoke items out of metal, plastic, and even living cells. Sooner than you think, 3-D printed designer meals may be coming to a rocketship, or a restaurant, near you. “Right now, astronauts on the space station are eating the same seven days of food on rotations of two or three weeks,” said astronautical engineer Michelle Terfansky, who studied the potential and challenges of making 3-D printed food in space for a master’s thesis at the University of Southern California. “It gets the job done, but it’s not exactly home cooking.”
Via Wildcat2030
A new 3D printing process using human stem cells could pave the way to custom replacement organs for patients, eliminating the need for organ donation and immune suppression, and solving the problem of transplant rejection. The process, developed at Edinburgh-based Heriot-Watt University, in partnership with Roslin Cellab, could also speed up and improve the process of reliable, animal-free drug testing by growing three-dimensional human tissues and structures for pharmaceuticals to be tested on.
Via Ray and Terry's
Organovo Holdings, Inc., a creator and manufacturer of functional, 3D human tissues for medical research and therapeutic applications, is working together with researchers at Autodesk, Inc., the leader in cloud-based design and engineering software, to create the first 3D design software for bioprinting. The software, which will be used to control Organovo’s NovoGen MMX bioprinter, will represent a major step forward in usability and functionality for designing three-dimensional human tissues, and has the potential to open up bioprinting to a broader group of users, Oraganovo says. “Autodesk is an excellent partner for Organovo in developing new software for 3D bioprinters,” said Keith Murphy, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at Organovo. “This relationship will lead to advances in bioprinting, including both greater flexibility and throughput internally, and the potential long-term ability for customers to design their own 3D tissues for production by Organovo.” “Bioprinting has the potential to change the world,” said Jeff Kowalski, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Autodesk. “It’s a blend of engineering, biology and 3D printing, which makes it a natural for Autodesk. I think working with Organovo to explore and evolve this emerging field will yield some fascinating and radical advances in medical research.” Organovo’s 3D bioprinting technology is used to create living human tissues that are three-dimensional, architecturally correct, and made entirely of living human cells. The resulting structures can function like native human tissues, and represent an opportunity for advancement in medical research, drug discovery and development, and in the future, surgical therapies and transplantation. http://tinyurl.com/bo8as6s
In a bid to test the limits of 3-D printing technology, an audio tinkerer created a technique to convert digital audio files into a record that works on a turntable. The sound quality is scratchy, but should improve with advances in the printing technology. The 3-D printed record was created by Amanda Ghassaei, a tech editor at the project-sharing website Instructables.com. The technique "works by importing raw audio data, performing some calculations to generate the geometry of a record, and eventually exporting this geometry straight to a 3-D printable format," she explained in an article for Instructables.com. She used a resin printer called Object Connex500, which has some of the highest resolution for 3-D printing. Like other 3-D printers, it creates an object layer by layer. You can listen to a few tracks from the record here, including Nirvana’s "Smells like Teen Spirit." Even though the sound quality is an order of magnitude lower than a vinyl record, Ghassaei notes that we’re able to hear the song because evolution has fine-tuned our brains to filter out noise and focus on the important pieces of information.
Borrowing from microfabrication techniques used in the semiconductor industry, MIT and Harvard Medical School (HMS) engineers have developed a simple and inexpensive way to create three-dimensional brain tissues in a lab dish. The new technique yields tissue constructs that closely mimic the cellular composition of those in the living brain, allowing scientists to study how neurons form connections and to predict how cells from individual patients might respond to different drugs. The work also paves the way for developing bioengineered implants to replace damaged tissue for organ systems, according to the researchers. Brain tissue includes many types of neurons, including inhibitory and excitatory neurons, as well as supportive cells such as glial cells. All of these cells occur at specific ratios and in specific locations. To mimic this architectural complexity in their engineered tissues, the researchers embedded a mixture of brain cells taken from the primary cortex of rats into sheets of hydrogel. They also included components of the extracellular matrix, which provides structural support and helps regulate cell behavior. Those sheets were then stacked in layers, which can be sealed together using light to crosslink hydrogels. By covering layers of gels with plastic photomasks of varying shapes, the researchers could control how much of the gel was exposed to light, thus controlling the 3-D shape of the multilayer tissue construct. This type of photolithography is also used to build integrated circuits onto semiconductors — a process that requires a photomask aligner machine, which costs tens of thousands of dollars. However, the team developed a much less expensive way to assemble tissues using masks made from sheets of plastic, similar to overhead transparencies, held in place with alignment pins. The tissue cubes can be made with a precision of 10 microns, comparable to the size of a single cell body. At the other end of the spectrum, the researchers are aiming to create a cubic millimeter of brain tissue with 100,000 cells and 900 million connections. The new system is the first that includes all of the necessary features for building useful 3-D tissues: It is inexpensive, precise, and allows complex patterns to be generated, says Metin Sitti, a professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. “Many people could easily use this method for creating heterogeneous, complex gel structures,” says Sitti, who was not part of the research team.
American scientists have developed a hybrid printer that prints cartilage, which could one day be implanted into injured patients to help re-grow cartilage in areas such as the joints. The 3D tissue printer, featured in a study published in the journal Biofabrication by the Institute of Physics, is a mix of a traditional ink jet printer and an electrospinning machine. In this study, done by scientists at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, the hybrid system produced cartilage with better mechanical stability than those created by an ink jet printer. “This is a proof of concept study and illustrates that a combination of materials and fabrication methods generates durable implantable constructs,” said Dr. James Yoo, a professor at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and an author on the study. Other methods of making cartilage, such as robotic systems, are also being developed to improve implantable tissue. Key to the success of the hybrid printer is the electrospinning machine, which can generate very fine fibres from a polymer solution. The polymers can be easily controlled and made porous, which is important in getting real cartilage cells to integrate into the surrounding tissue. Researchers built cartilage by combining electrospun polymer with cartilage cells from a rabbit’s ear that were deposited using the traditional ink jet printer. The cartilage was tested on mice and after eight weeks it had developed the structures and properties of real cartilage, demonstrating its potential use in humans. In future, researchers say clinicians could develop cartilage specific to the needs of patients. For instance, an MRI scan of the body part, such as the knee, would provide a sort of blueprint and then matching cartilage could be created.
They’re soft, biocompatible, about 7 millimeters long – and, incredibly, able to walk by themselves. Miniature “bio-bots” developed at the University of Illinois are making tracks in synthetic biology. Designing non-electronic biological machines has been a riddle that scientists at the interface of biology and engineering have struggled to solve. The walking bio-bots demonstrate the Illinois team’s ability to forward-engineer functional machines using only hydrogel, heart cells and a 3-D printer. With an altered design, the bio-bots could be customized for specific applications in medicine, energy or the environment.
A design student has created what might be the lightest running shoe ever made. Luc Fusaro, who is also part of the team which designed the London 2012 podium, made the shoes while a student at the Royal College of Art in London. The shoes are custom-made for each athlete, and are produced using a 3D printer. Weighing just 90 grams, they are among the lightest ever made. Fusaro thinks they could be ready for competition by the 2016 games in Rio - and even the current prototypes could shave fractions off a 100m time. "The current mass-manufacturing process only allows to produce shoes with standard mechanical properties and geometries," his website explains. "Using the opportunities offered by additive manufacturing... opens up the possibility of whole new generation of athlete-specific footwear." French-born Fusaro previously studied General Engineering at Ecole Centrale Lyon - but also competed in athletics "at a national level" for a number of years. More fine-tuning is needed - the upper part of the shoe is reportedly too stiff and more comfort needs to be added. But Fusaro said they still showcase the "unlimited potential" of 3D technology. http://www.scoop.it/search?q=3d+printing&type=topic&page=1&limit=24
Via Floris Van Cauwelaert
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Some of these principles already hold true today. Others will come true in the next decade or two (or three). By removing familiar, time-honored manufacturing constraints, 3D printing sets the stage for a cascade of downstream innovation. In the following chapters we explore how 3D printing technologies will change the ways we work, eat, heal, learn, create and play. Let's begin with a visit to the world of manufacturing and design, where 3D printing technologies ease the tyranny of economies of scale. Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman are leading experts on 3D printing, frequently speaking and advising on this technology to industry, academia, and government. Lipson's lab at Cornell University has pioneered interdisciplinary research in 3D printing, product design, artificial intelligence, and smart materials. Kurman is a technology analyst and business strategy consultant who writes about game-changing technologies in lucid, engaging language.
Nanoscribe, a spin-off from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, has developed a tabletop 3D microprinter that can create complicated microstructures 100 times faster than is possible today. "If something took one hour to make, it now takes one minute," says Michael Thiel, chief scientific officer at Nanoscribe. While 3D printing of toys, iPhone covers and jewelry continues to grab headlines, much of 3D printing's impact could be at a much smaller scale. Micrometer-scale printing has shown promise for making medical and electronic devices. Thiel says it should be possible to speed up his company's microprinting technique even more in the future. Nanoscribe plans to start selling its machine in the second half of this year. Printing microstructures with features a few hundred nanometers in size could be useful for making heart stents, microneedles for painless shots, gecko adhesives, parts for microfluidics chips, and scaffolds for growing cells and tissue. Another important application could be in the electronics industry, where patterning nanoscale features on chips currently involves slow, expensive techniques. 3D printing would quickly and cheaply yield polymer templates that could be used to make metallic structures. So far, 3D microprinting has been used only in research laboratories because it's pretty slow. In fact, many research labs around the world use Nanoscribe’s first-generation printer. The new, faster machine will also find commercial use. Thiel says numerous medical, life sciences, and nanotechnology companies are interested in the new machine. "I'm positive that with the faster throughput we get with this new tool, it might have an industrial breakthrough very soon," he says. The technology behind most 3D microprinters is called two-photon polymerization. It involves focusing tiny, ultrashort pulses from a near-infrared laser on a light-sensitive material. The material polymerizes and solidifies at the focused spots. As the laser beam moves in three dimensions, it creates a 3D object. Today's printers, including Nanoscribe's present system, keep the laser beam fixed and move the light-sensitive material along three axes using mechanical stages, which slows down printing. To speed up the process, Nanoscribe's new tool uses a tiny moving mirror to reflect the laser beam at different angles. Thiel says generating multiple light beams with a microlens array could make the process even faster. The smallest features that can be created using the Nanoscribe printer measure about 30 nanometers, says Julia Greer, professor of materials science at the California Institute of Technology.
Via Natalie Stewart
The future of urban runabouts will be ultra lightweight, electrically powered and 3D-printed... if Jim Kor has his way. Picture an assembly line not that isn’t made up of robotic arms spewing sparks to weld heavy steel, but a warehouse of plastic-spraying printers producing light, cheap and highly efficient automobiles. If Jim Kor’s dream is realized, that’s exactly how the next generation of urban runabouts will be produced. His creation is called the Urbee 2 and it could revolutionize parts manufacturing while creating a cottage industry of small-batch automakers intent on challenging the status quo. Urbee’s approach to maximum miles per gallon starts with lightweight construction – something that 3-D printing is particularly well suited for. The designers were able to focus more on the optimal automobile physics, rather than working to install a hyper efficient motor in a heavy steel-body automobile. As the Urbee shows, making a car with this technology has a slew of beneficial side effects. Jim Kor is the engineering brains behind the Urbee. He’s designed tractors, buses, even commercial swimming pools. Between teaching classes, he heads Kor Ecologic, the firm responsible for the 3-D printed creation. “We thought long and hard about doing a second one,” he says of the Urbee. “It’s been the right move.” Kor and his team built the three-wheel, two-passenger vehicle at RedEye, an on-demand 3-D printing facility. The printers he uses create ABS plastic via Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM). The printer sprays molten polymer to build the chassis layer by microscopic layer until it arrives at the complete object. The machines are so automated that the building process they perform is known as “lights out” construction, meaning Kor uploads the design for a bumper, walk away, shut off the lights and leaves. A few hundred hours later, he’s got a bumper. The whole car – which is about 10 feet long – takes about 2,500 hours.
In his State of the Union address Tuesday night, U.S. President Barack Obama noted that “Our first priority is making America a magnet for new jobs and manufacturing. After shedding jobs for more than 10 years, our manufacturers have added about 500,000 jobs over the past three. “Caterpillar is bringing jobs back from Japan. Ford is bringing jobs back from Mexico. After locating plants in other countries like China, Intel is opening its most advanced plant right here at home. And this year, Apple will start making Macs in America again. “There are things we can do, right now, to accelerate this trend. Last year, we created our first manufacturing innovation institute in Youngstown, Ohio. A once-shuttered warehouse is now a state-of-the art lab where new workers are mastering the 3D printing that has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything. There’s no reason this can’t happen in other towns. So tonight, I’m announcing the launch of three more of these manufacturing hubs, where businesses will partner with the Departments of Defense and Energy to turn regions left behind by globalization into global centers of high-tech jobs. And I ask this Congress to help create a network of fifteen of these hubs and guarantee that the next revolution in manufacturing is Made in America.”
The tiny spaceship in the video above was built using a microscale 3-D printer. At 125 micrometers long, the craft is about the length of a dust mite, and it took less than 50 seconds to produce. The super-fast, high-resolution printer that made the spaceship was introduced this week at the Photonics West fair by Nanoscribe GmbH, a company based in Germany that specializes in nanophotonics and 3-D laser lithography. The printer crafted the spaceship using two-photon polymerization, in which ultra-short laser pulses activate photosensitive building materials. Afterward, the ship — based on a Hellcat fighter from the Wing Commander Saga — was inspected using an electron microscope. While the spacecraft can’t fly, thereby limiting its usefulness for space exploration (unlike, say, 3-D printed astrofood), the technology’s other tiny productsinclude biological scaffolds, ultralight metamaterials, and channels that have found homes in biological research, photonics, and microfluidics. Next step? We’d love to watch this thing launch into space, piloted by an army of microbes.
The behavior of cells strongly depends on their environment. If they are to be researched an manipulated, it is crucial to embed them in suitable surroundings. Aleksandr Ovsianikov is developing a laser system, which allows living cells to be incorporated into intricate taylor-made structures, similar to biological tissue, in which cells are surrounded by the extracellular matrix. This technology is particularly important for artificially growing biotissue, for finding new drugs or for stem cell research.
At first, the cells are suspended in a liquid, which mainly consists of water. Cell-friendly molecules are added, which react with light in a very special way: a focused laser beam breaks up double bonds at exactly the right places. A chemical chain reaction then causes the molecules to bond and create a polymer.
This reaction is only triggered when two laser photons are absorbed at the same time. Only within the focal point of the laser beam the density of photons is high enough for that. Material outside the focal point is not affected by the laser. “That is how we can define with unprecedented accuracy, at which points the molecules are supposed to bond and create a solid scaffold”, explains Ovsianikov.
Guiding the focus of the laser beam through the liquid, a solid structure is created, in which living cells are incorporated. The surplus molecules which are not polymerized are simply washed away afterwards. This way, a hydrogel structure can be built, similar to the extracellular matrix which surrounds our own cells in living tissue. Ideas from nature are imitated in the lab and used for technological applications. This approach, called ‘bio-mimetics’ plays an increasingly important role, especially in materials science. Aleksandr Ovsianikov is confident that in many cases, this technology will render animal testing unnecessary and yield much quicker and more significant results.
Stem cell research is a particularly interesting field of application for the new technology. “It is known that stem cells can turn into different kinds of tissue, depending on their environment”, says Aleksandr Ovsianikov. “On top of a hard surface, they tend to develop into bone cells, on a soft substrate they may turn into neurons.” In the laser-generated 3D structure the rigidity of the substrate can be tuned so that different types of tissue can be created.
In a few years, 3D printers will become a consumer electronics commodity. Today you can buy a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic, “the latest in cutting edge personal manufacturing technology,” for $2,500. You can plug it into your computer via USB, load up some freely-available 3D modeling software, and print stuff; it really is that simple. The only real barrier to mass adoption is the initial purchase price, and the printing material itself isn’t cheap either. Both of these costs will tumble in coming years, however. Printing — or additive manufacturing — techniques will improve. 3D printers will speed up, and the choice of colors and finishes will expand. For now these magical printers are just the plaything of prototypers, inventors, and gadgeteers, but sooner rather than later they will find a place in the home. To begin with they will be attached to a family computer, but it’s safe to assume that wireless versions that can sit on the kitchen worktop won’t be far behind.
3D printing is increasingly permitting the direct digital manufacture (DDM) of a wide variety of plastic and metal items. While this in itself may trigger a manufacturing revolution, far more startling is the recent development of bioprinters. These artificially construct living tissue by outputting layer-upon-layer of living cells. Currently all bioprinters are experimental. However, in the future, bioprinters they could revolutionize medical practice as yet another element of the New Industrial Convergence. Bioprinters may be constructed in various configurations. However, all bioprinters output cells from a bioprint head that moves left and right, back and forth, and up and down, in order to place the cells exactly where required. Over a period of several hours, this permits an organic object to be built up in a great many very thin layers. Several experimental bioprinters have already been built. For example, in 2002 Professor Makoto Nakamura realized that the droplets of ink in a standard inkjet printer are about the same size as human cells. He therefore decided to adapt the technology, and by 2008 had created a working bioprinter that can print out biotubing similar to a blood vessel. In time, Professor Nakamura hopes to be able to print entire replacement human organs ready for transplant. You can learn more about this groundbreaking workhere or read this message from Professor Nakamura. The movie below shows in real-time the biofabrication of a section of biotubing using his modified inkjet technology. Another bioprinting pioneer is Organovo. This company was set up by a research group lead by Professor Gabor Forgacs from the University of Missouri, and in March 2008 managed to bioprint functional blood vessels and cardiac tissue using cells obtained from a chicken. Their work relied on a prototype bioprinter with three print heads. The first two of these output cardiac and endothelial cells, while the third dispensed a collagen scaffold -- now termed 'bio-paper' -- to support the cells during printing. Since 2008, Organovo has worked with a company called Invetech to create a commercial bioprinter called the NovoGen MMX. This is loaded with bioink spheroids that each contain an aggregate of tens of thousands of cells. To create its output, the NovoGen first lays down a single layer of a water-based bio-paper made from collagen, gelatin or other hydrogels. Bioink spheroids are then injected into this water-based material. As illustrated below, more layers are subsequently added to build up the final object. Amazingly, Nature then takes over and the bioink spheroids slowly fuse together. As this occurs, the biopaper dissolves away or is otherwise removed, thereby leaving a final bioprinted body part or tissue. In more complex bioprinted materials, intricate capillaries and other internal structures also naturally form after printing has taken place. The process may sound almost magical. However, as Professor Forgacs explains, it is no different to the cells in an embryo knowing how to configure into complicated organs. Nature has been evolving this amazing capability for millions of years. Once in the right places, appropriate cell types somehow just know what to do.
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Mathew Hayes
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Prototypes of what would be the world's first fully 3D-printable plastic weapon could go into testing before the end of the year, the organization behind the controversial project has claimed. "We're ready," said Cody Wilson, a spokesman for Defense Distributed, the company that hopes to manufacture the "Wiki Weapon". "We're sitting on the logistics, time, resources and money. We're just waiting on a little piece of paper." That little piece of paper is a federal firearms license , the permit that is needed to legally make and manufacture firearms in the United States. Barring an unexpected issue, Wilson expects the license will be granted within the next two or three weeks. Initially, the group planned to create prototypes without a license, but after the media discovered the Wiki Weapon, the group has been under increased scrutiny and several problems have threatened to derail the project.
Scientists are developing new materials which could one day allow people to print out custom-designed personal electronics such as games controllers which perfectly fit their hand shape. The University of Warwick researchers have created a simple and inexpensive conductive plastic composite that can be used to produce electronic devices using the latest generation of low-cost 3D printers designed for use by hobbyists and even in the home. The material, nicknamed ‘carbomorph’, enables users to lay down electronic tracks and sensors as part of a 3D printed structure – allowing the printer to create touch-sensitive areas for example, which can then be connected to a simple electronic circuit board. So far the team has used the material to print objects with embedded flex sensors or with touch-sensitive buttons such as computer game controllers or a mug which can tell how full it is. The next step is to work on printing much more complex structures and electronic components including the wires and cables required to connect the devices to computers. The research was led by Dr. Simon Leigh in the School of Engineering at the University of Warwick. Dr. Leigh said: “It’s always great seeing the complex and intricate models of devices such as mobile phones or television remote controls that can be produced with 3D printing, but that’s it, they are invariably models that don’t really function. “We set about trying to find a way in which we could actually print out a functioning electronic device from a 3D printer. “In the long term, this technology could revolutionalise the way we produce the world around us, making products such as personal electronics a lot more individualised and unique and in the process reducing electronic waste. “Designers could also use it to understand better how people tactilely interact with products by monitoring sensors embedded into objects. “However, in the short term I can see this technology having a major impact in the educational sector for example, allowing the next generation of young engineers to get hands-on experience of using advanced manufacturing technology to design fairly high-tech devices and products right there in the classroom.” The printed sensors can be monitored using existing open-source electronics and freely available programming libraries. A major advantage of using 3D printing is that sockets for connection to equipment such as interface electronics can be printed out instead of connected using conductive glues or paints.
3D printers – it’s a word that offers glimpses into the future that seems so far, and yet is so close. The technology, which allows you to replicate 3D objects the same way you make a photo copy, has been around for a couple years now, but, for the most part, has been far too expensive and inaccessible to the public. But now, what’s being called the world’s first 3D printing photo booth is set to open for a limited time at the exhibition space EYE OF GYRE in Harajuku. From November 24 to January 14, 2013, people with reservations can go and have their portraits taken. Except, instead of a photograph, you’ll receive miniature replicas of yourselves.
Saul Schleimer, a mathematician at the University of Warwick, and Henry Segerman, a mathematician at the University of Melbourne, are the co-creators of the Thirty Cell puzzle. They are both theoretical math researchers who also enjoy using 3-D printing—a technique for manufacturing a three-dimensional object from a computer program—to create mathematical art and visualizations. (In August, Scientific American featured some of Segerman’s sculptures in a slide show from the Bridges math-art conference.) This puzzle is a projection of a four-dimensional shape into our three-dimensional world. To explain how the projection was created, Schleimer brings it down a dimension and starts with a three-dimensional cube. Imagine a cube sitting inside a sphere. Now put yourself at the middle, holding a flashlight. The light projects all the edges and vertices out to the surface of the sphere. “We replace the usual cube that we know and love with a roundy cube on the sphere,” says Schleimer. This process is called radial projection. Segerman and Schleimer use the company Shapeways to print their models. They use programs such as Python, Adobe Illustrator and Rhino to create files of an object that they send to Shapeways to translate into very precise 3-D models. Shapeways uses the computer files to program a laser to fuse powders into the shape of a 3-D object. It can even print objects with multiple interlinked components, such as the the fidget above. Another popular type of 3D printer, MakerBot, melts new layers of a material over previously deposited ones, so the models must be supported during the entire process. Shapeways doesn’t have that constraint, but its printers are more expensive. The company lets people upload their models and then ships the printed material out to them, rather than having users own printers themselves.
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