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Category: 3D printing – Page 108

New metamaterial shrinks when the heat is on

It’s one of the basic facts of science: Heat something and it expands. But a team of US scientists has gone counterintuitive and invented a 3D-printed material that shrinks when heated. Developed as part of DARPA’s program to study materials with controlled microstructure architecture, the lightweight metamaterial exhibits what the researchers call “negative thermal expansion.”

Metamaterials are one of those things that come out of the lab with an air of enchantment about them. Basically, they’re made up of composite materials, like metals, plastics, or ceramics, engineered into repeating, microscopic structures. Depending on how these structures are designed, they can give the metamaterial properties that aren’t found in nature and may not even be derived from the source materials themselves.

The study by a team from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL) Additive Manufacturing Initiative in partnership with the University of Southern California, MIT, and the University of California, Los Angeles, used a 3D printing process called projection microstereolithograpy to form a polymer and a polymer/copper composite into a highly complex 3D bi-material microlattice structure. To put it more simply, they printed a material made of two substances to form a pattern by printing out the polymer in a layer, cleaning the surface to avoid contamination, then printing the polymer/copper composite, then repeating.

Give a 3D printer artificial intelligence, and this is what you’ll get

A London-based startup has combined some of today’s most disruptive technologies in a bid to change the way we’ll build the future. By retrofitting industrial robots with 3D printing guns and artificial intelligence algorithms, Ai Build has constructed machines that can see, create, and even learn from their mistakes.

When CEO and founder Daghan Cam was studying architecture, he noticed a disconnect between small-scale manufacturing and large-scale construction. “On one side we have a fully automated production pipeline,” Cam explained at a recent conference in London. “On the other side we’re completely dependent on human labor.” With the emergence of more efficient printing technologies, he thought there must be a better way.

“We wanted to push the boundaries of how intricate we could design things through computation and how we could create them through 3D printing,” Cam said.

NASA Offers Prize Money for 3D-Printed Habitat Ideas

NASA is offering $1.1 million in prize money in Phase 2 of the 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge for new ways to build houses where future space explorers can live and work.

The three-part competition asks citizen inventors to use readily available and recyclable materials for the raw material to print habitats.

Phase 2 focuses on the material technologies needed to manufacture structural components from a combination of indigenous materials and recyclables, or indigenous materials alone. NASA may use these technologies to construct shelters for future human explorers to Mars. On Earth, these same capabilities could also be used to produce affordable housing wherever it is needed or where access to conventional building materials and skills is limited.

Humanized organs in gene-edited animals

Humanized organs in gene-edited animals is one potential way medicine can deal with the demand for transplant organs.

One potential avenue for research and to help solve the organ shortage is to modify animals to be closer matched to humans in order to have organs capable of being used for transplant. This short paper is an interesting primer into the subject and touches upon the technical and ethical concerns involved here.

It is one possible solution to the problem, however, 3D bioprinting increases in sophistication and other methods are also being developed that would render this approach needless. Still this is an interesting insight into regenerative medicine and one possible path research might take.

#LifespanIO #aging #crowdfundthecure

http://www.futuremedicine.com/doi/10.2217/rme-2016-0096

Why Duct Tape and Cardboard Might Be a Better Option than a 3D Printer

Another POV for 3D Printing.

This is the third post in a series on vintage learning.

A few days ago, I met Manuel Herrera at MORENet. He has an amazing maker space where students engage in creative thinking on a daily basis. It’s a bastion of creativity and wonder and his passion for it is contagious.

However, as we talked about prototyping and design thinking, he mentioned something surprising.

Diamonds aren’t forever: Sandia, Harvard team create first quantum computer bridge

Another article on the QC advancement; however, as I told folks synthetic diamonds are key plus the crystalized formation are proven to be very useful not only in QC processing; but also for the light-based (Quantum) networking. I see this only the beginning (as we have seen with Synthetic DNA data storage) for synthetic gem crystalize formations in their usage in technology. Hoping folks are checking out the 3D Printers creating these synthetics because we truly are on the path of seeing our world transform to new levels never imagined.

Abstract: By forcefully embedding two silicon atoms in a diamond matrix, Sandia researchers have demonstrated for the first time on a single chip all the components needed to create a quantum bridge to link quantum computers together.

“People have already built small quantum computers,” says Sandia researcher Ryan Camacho. “Maybe the first useful one won’t be a single giant quantum computer but a connected cluster of small ones.”

Distributing quantum information on a bridge, or network, could also enable novel forms of quantum sensing, since quantum correlations allow all the atoms in the network to behave as though they were one single atom.

Doctors Can Now 3D-Print Bones On Demand, Thanks to a New “Hyperelastic” Material

In Brief.

  • New 3D printed bones are ‘hyperelastic,’ making them more malleable during procedures.
  • 3D printers in hospitals could provide the hyperelastic bone ink, so surgeons could make implants in 24 hours.

Remarkable.

This best describes the new bone-mending technology developed at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois by Ramille Shah and her colleagues. They used ink made from a natural bone mineral called hydroxyapatite, mixed with PLGA, a mineral-binding polymer that makes the implants elastic.

MIT applies soft touch to robots with programmable 3D-printed skins

Spectators of the DARPA Robotics Challenge finals in 2015 would have noticed that many of the competing robots were padded up for protection in case they took a tumble. MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is looking to build customizable shock-absorbing protection into robots by using 3D printing to produce soft materials that not only dampen the impact of falls, but also allows them to carry out safer, more precise movements.

Robotics engineers have long had a keen interest in soft materials. At their simplest, such materials can protect robots against falls and collisions, but can also protect people in environments were robots and humans are increasingly working together. Going beyond this, soft materials also allow for making completely soft robots that can mimic animal design.

Using 3D printing technology, CSAIL is creating soft materials that can change the basic capabilities of the robot. Called programmable viscoelastic material (PVM), it’s based on the idea of controlling the stiffness and elasticity of a substance to change how it moves and responds. In this way, engineers can tailor the material for the task at hand.