The 3D Printing Archive
The struggle for cancer patients’ lives is still a vital task of contemporary medicine. Ralph Mobbs, a neurosurgeon at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney, has won a first victory over chordoma, a grave form of cancer. He performed the first operation of implanting 3D vertebrae at the hard-to-get-to location where usual methods of surgery weren’t effective.
A scandal broke out around the Thingiverse and Makerbot’s Creative Commons that offer free databases of 3D printing models. The main sense of these sites is to share designs of 3D models for everyone who wants to print them for himself or sent them to a service for printing. While the company Just3DPrint decided to use the disinterestedness of the design makers to make money selling all this free designed printed stuff on eBay. Such behavior contradicts to all the ideas the authors meant by their joining Creative Community.
The Boeing Company has proved that it can provide not only high-quality plains and flights but it also is working out an extremely new method of 3D printing based on levitation! That’s not a joke! An object is really printed in the air supported by magnets or acoustic waves.
The trick is that the main nugget is flying, turning and twisting above another magnet that gives the chance to print the layers from the different points. A multiple 3D printer’s nozzles create material around that nugget simultaneously, that makes the process of printing much faster. It also changes the usual order of printing from the bottom to the head. With levitation, nuzzles can get the printing object even from the bottom that allows doing more complex tasks and features.
Each year possibilities for blind people increase with the help of high technologies. They make such people more adaptable to the changing world and help them to orientate in their everyday life without any assistant.
The German scientists from Hasso Plattner Institute have worked out a Linespace that is a sense making platform for the blind. It looks like a touchable 140x100cm display with a build-in 3D printer that draws tactile lines on the board. There is also the footswitch that the blind people use for typing the text and giving commands to the computer.
A new 3D bioprinter technology developed by scientists from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine opened a great opportunity for organ replacement. Scientists say that now they can print muscles, human bones and even the whole ear by pressing a button on the 3D bioprinter.
The lack of donated tissues and organs is a big problem for many diseased or injured people in the world today. The issue is to produce these tissues and organs using 3D printer, which can lay cells down in specific patterns.
In eighties Chuck Hull, the inventor of 3D printer, predicted to his wife that his new device would enter the people’s houses in 25- 30 years. And was absolutely right! Now 3D printing technology gets more accessible to simple people and costs from $300 in Amazon.com market. Additive manufacturing can be used in many fields from medicine to robotics and its possibilities seem to be endless. But what 3D printing started with?
A new generation of additive manufacturing, 4D printers, copies the nature to create 3D objects that can change their shapes after they are printed. The basis of the method was borrowed from the flowers bending and twisting their petals depending on the light and humidity in the environment.
“Other active research teams exploring 4D printing require multiple materials printed together, with one material that stays rigid while another changes shape and acts like a hinge,” said Jennifer Lewi, a materials scientist, at Harvard University.
In September 2015 Nepalese locals were astonished to find a little plastic device dared to regulate their way of life after terrible earthquake in May 2015. A small 3D printer was brought to the camp in Bahrabise, central Nepal, by Field Ready engineers to print and facilitate some essential equipment for 200 homeless families.
Is it possible to make a 3D printer by yourself? Two businessmen from Maryland Institute College of Art, Evan Roche and Harrison Tyler, say “Yes”. They released a workshop teaching students how to make a simple 3D printer from the ground up.
Buildclass is held for 3 days and involves its participants into fabrication, programming and customization processes of 3D printers. The organizers prepared individual packages for each student with two hundred individual elements for constructing a personal printer.
The recent 2016 Toy Fair in New York City showed its visitors that retro toys like “ThingMaker” by Mattel can still be interesting to up-to-date kids if modernized properly.
A new version of the ThingMaker allows children to design a model of the toy within an app and then print it by themselves. The toy 3D printer is going to be launched this fall.