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--IMAGE HERE-- The lower receiver of the gun pictured at the top of this article was not purchased from a licensed dealer, nor was it purchased from an individual. This lower was ‘printed’ using a 3D printer and it may spell the beginning of the end for the gun control movement. 3D ‘printing’ is an emerging technology that has been commercially available for some time but is only now achieving inroads into the consumer market. 3D ‘printers’ are in fact computer controlled material handling systems that lay down successive layers of polymer or other material based upon a computer model...

Tatiana Guerra, 30, from Brazil, is 20 weeks pregnant. She lost her sight at age 17, so she is unable to see her unborn son during ultrasound exams. But thanks to a 3D printer and a campaign for Huggies diapers, Tatiana was able to “see” her son Murilo for the first time. In a video that’s been viewed nearly 500,000 times, Tatiana is at an ultrasound exam. She asks the doctor what her son looks like. “His nose looks like yours. His two little eyes are closed,” he says. Meanwhile, a 3D printer is transforming ultrasound images of Murilo’s face...

Imagine you need to have an almost exact copy of an object. Now imagine that you can just pull your smartphone out of your pocket, take a snapshot with its integrated 3-D imager, send it to your 3-D printer, and within minutes you have reproduced a replica accurate to within microns of the original object. This feat may soon be possible because of a tiny new, tiny high-resolution 3-D imager developed at Caltech. Any time you want to make an exact copy of an object with a 3-D printer, the first step is to produce a high-resolution scan of the...

Most of us are aware of the KISS principle: Keep it simple, stupid! And while simplicity is certainly a theme in many 3D printers, they are anything but stupid—and created by those who are the polar opposite—with ingenuity in abundance—which they use to share new innovations with the world. One quite simply has to give up with wondering what the collective ‘they’ will come up with next and just roll with the idea that the possibilities in 3D printing are infinite. And as progress in the industry and the community of makers marches on daily and hourly, it’s hard not...

Is this 3D printer worth it? Seems like a good entry level, home hobbiest and tinkering tool. Anyone have one already and can you tell us about your learning curve? G

In what may be one of the biggest stories we have covered this year, a new company, Carbon3D has just emerged out of stealth mode, unveiling an entirely new breakthrough 3D printing process, which is anywhere between 25 and 100 times faster than what’s available on the market today.The privately-held Redwood City, California-based company, Carbon3D, was founded in 2013, and since then has been secretly perfecting a new 3D printing technology which promises to change the industry forever. The technology that the company calls Continuous Liquid Interface Production technology (CLIP) works by harnessing the power of light and oxygen to...

What will 3D printers ultimately evolve into? No one has a functioning crystal ball in front of them I assume, but a good guess would be a machine which can practically build anything its user desire, all on the molecular, and eventually atomic levels. Sure we are likely multiple decades away from widespread molecular manufacturing, but a group of chemists led by medical doctor Martin D. Burke at the University of Illinois may have already taken a major step in that direction. Burke, who joined the Department of Chemistry at the university in 2005, heads up Burke Laboratories where he...

Need an obscure medicinal compound found only in a jungle plant? Just print it.Say you're a medical researcher interested in a rare chemical produced in the roots of a little-known Peruvian flower. It's called ratanhine, and it's valuable because it has some fascinating anti-fungal properties that might make for great medicines. Getting your hands on the rare plant is hard, and no chemical supplier is or has ever sold it. But maybe, thanks to the work of University of Illinois chemist Martin Burke, you could print it right in the lab. In a new study published in the journal Science...

An astronaut aboard the International Space Station needed a socket wrench, so NASA engineers emailed him designs for 3D-printing one.

Image by Michael Crumbling The latest 3D printed hybrid uses an old but useful concept: pre-loaded interchangeable chambers/barrels/cartridges.   The cartridge itself has sufficient strength to contain the pressures necessary for propelling a projectile, and is sufficiently long enough to result in a velocity that is useful. Michael Crumling has created a relatively small round, the .314 Atlas, to demonstrate the concept as used with a 3D printed mechanism.   Here is a video link showing his system being fired: Link to video at Wired The extractor groove is likely included to make priming the cartridges easy. I have thought of...

Dremel has announced the first 3D printer to come from a major tool manufacturer, the $999 Dremel 3D Idea Builder. Dremel called it a desktop machine for the masses. The 3D Idea Builder is a fused deposition modeling (FDM) machine that uses a printer head that melts and extrudes a plastic filament layer upon layer to build an object; the thinner the layers, the better the "resolution" or smoothness of an 3D object's surface. Dremel's machine extrudes the melted filament in layers 100 microns thick - about the same thickness as a standard sheet of paper. The 3D thermoplastic filament,...

Scientists at MIT are using a new technique that could print responsive objects—from water pipes to sneakers—that adapt to their surroundings on their own.These days, 3D printing seems to be at the core of most new new research ventures, whether it's developing ways to print entire meals or recreating facial features to repair a patient's face. But Skylar Tibbits wants to up the ante: He's hoping 4D printing will be the thing of the not-so-far future. The name for his concept, Tibbits admits, was a bit lighthearted at first. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tibbits and researchers from the...

Grace Choi was at Harvard Business School when she decided to disrupt the beauty industry. "They charge a huge premium on something that tech provides for free color."color printers are available to everyone, and the ink they have is the same as the ink that makeup companies use in their products. the ink is FDA-approved. This is the Mink printer. It uses regular printer ink. First, find a color you want to print. Use the color picker to copy the hex code of the color you've chosen. paste the hex code into a new document. Print the color just...

Police found five plastic guns, 3D printer and gun-making blueprints in suspect's home in first such case in Japan Share 194A 27-year-old Japanese man has been arrested for illegally possessing handguns made by a 3D printer, local media has said, marking the first such case in Japan, a country that takes pride in its low crime rate. Police in April found five plastic guns and a 3D printer at the suspect's home in Kawasaki, south of Tokyo. Two of the handguns were later proved capable of killing or wounding people, although no bullets were found at his home, public broadcaster...

Posted in Cardiovascular The Cardiovascular Innovation Institute's executive and scientific director, Stuart K. Williams, PhD, has set his sights on a fully functional, implantable 3-D bioprinted human heart, which could provide a potential cure for heart disease. “We think we can do it in 10 years — that we can build, from a patient’s own cells, a total ‘bioficial’ heart,” Williams, who is also a professor of surgery at the University of Louisville, told the Louisville Courier-Journal's Laura Ungar in an interview published on the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute (CII) website. The CII is a collaboration between the University of Louisville...

Harvard scientists have developed a new bioprinting method that can create intricately patterned 3-D tissue constructs with multiple types of cells and tiny blood vessels. The work is a major step toward creating human tissue constructs realistic enough to test drug safety and effectiveness, researchers said. The method will also help bring closer the building of fully functional replacements for injured or diseased tissue that can be designed from CAT scan data using computer-aided design (CAD), printed in 3D at the push of a button. "This is the foundational step toward creating 3D living tissue," said Jennifer Lewis, senior author...

Technology to bring 3D printing closer to the mass market is accelerating, though most 3D printed items tend to be rather small in size. To help demonstrate the effectiveness of printing larger items, BigRep, a company founded in 2014, opens the door to printing items such as furniture. The device is launching worldwide at large trade shows, and begins shipping in two months, with a $39,000 MSRP.The BigRep One can print full-scale objects in sizes up to 45x39x47 inches, and has the ability to print plastics, nylons, Laywood (wood fibers mixed with polymers), and Laybrick (something similar to sandstone-type of...

Researcher Darryl D'Lima of Scripps Clinic with his "bioprinter" adapted from an HP inkjet printer that can produce cartilage. California’s stem cell agency, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, awarded him $3.1 million to research the use of embryonic stem cells and artificial embryonic stem cells to generate replacement cartilage. Stem cell researcher Jeanne Loring has collaborated with D’Lima on growing cartilage from stem cells. She described him as “unique” in the ability to incorporate many disciples of science and medicine. “He’s the only orthopedic surgeon I know who has the bandwidth to start thinking way outside the box,” said...

Because apparently Americans don't have easy enough access to junk food, soon getting a candy bar could be as easy as hitting "print." 3D Systems (DDD) announced a deal with Hershey's (HSY, Fortune 500) Thursday to collaborate on developing a 3-D printer that makes chocolate and other edible products. In a statement, 3D Systems said making printers that print chocolate is a good way to help the relatively new technology go mainstream. Hershey sees it as a great delivery system for its products. "Whether it's creating a whole new form of candy or developing a new way to produce it,...

2014 is upon us, and what a year it’s shaping up to be. We can now see that 2013 was a transition year, a time of evolution but not revolution. Many of the threads first unspooled last year, though, will run out in 2014, leaving us in the position of predicting their effects. Here are ten specific, falsifiable predictions for 2014 — some safer than others. These are designed to look at a wide swathe of the technology sector, from consumer electronics to government surveillance. Some of these predictions will be wrong, but come 2015 we’ll begin this list’s sequel...