The space agency teamed up with university researchers to investigate the best methods for 3D printing space batteries.
A team of researchers at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) and Youngstown State University (YSU) are collaborating to develop 3D-printed batteries for future lunar astronauts.
3D-printed batteries for lunar habitats.
NASA
Relativity Space, a 3D-printing specialist, launched the inaugural flight of its Terran 1 rocket late on Wednesday night, which successfully met some mission objectives before failing to reach orbit.
Terran 1 lifted off from LC-16, a launchpad at the U.S. Space Force’s facility in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and flew for about three minutes. While the rocket cleared a key objective — passing the point of maximum atmospheric pressure during an orbital launch, known as Max Q — its engine sputtered and shut down early, shortly after the second stage separated from the first stage, which is the larger, lower portion of the rocket known as the booster.
Relativity launch director Clay Walker confirmed that there was an “anomaly” with the upper stage. The company said it will give “updates over the coming days” after analyzing flight data.
Car engines, bespoke medicines, organs for transplant, food, fashion and now even a whole street of houses… Is the all-conquering promise of 3D printing finally coming true? By Tim Lewis.
“The goal is for community groups or individual citizens anywhere to be able to measure local air pollution.”
As per an estimation by WHO, air pollution causes around 4 million annual premature deaths all over the globe. Considering this issue, an MIT research team launched an open-source version of an economical, mobile pollution detector through which individuals can track the air-quality more broadly.
The detector, named Flatburn, can be fabricated through 3D printing or by ordering cheap parts. The researchers have now conducted tests and calibrated the detector concerning existing ultra-modern machines and are making people aware of how to assemble, use, and interpret the data.
Flatburn is an open-source, mobile pollution detector from the MIT Senseable City Lab intended to let people measure air quality cheaply.
Up until now, it was still infamously difficult to include sensors in 3D designs.
Engineers might be able to create smart hinges that can detect when a door has been opened or gears inside motors that can communicate their rotational speed to a mechanic by integrating sensors into rotational systems.
Even while improvements in 3D printing allow for the quick manufacture of rotational devices, it is still infamously difficult to include sensors in the designs.
MIT
A team of engineers at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, has developed a tiny, flexible robotic arm that’s designed to 3D print material directly on the surface of organs inside a living person’s body.
The futuristic device acts just like an endoscope and can snake its way into a specific location inside the patient’s body to deliver layers of special biomaterial to reconstruct tissue, clean up wounds, and even make precise incisions — an amazing jack-of-all-trades they say could revolutionize certain types of surgery.
Engineers from UNSW Sydney have developed a miniature and flexible soft robotic arm which could be used to 3D print biomaterial directly onto organs inside a person’s body.
3D bioprinting is a process whereby biomedical parts are fabricated from so-called bioink to construct natural tissue-like structures.
Bioprinting is predominantly used for research purposes such as tissue engineering and in the development of new drugs — and normally requires the use of large 3D printing machines to produce cellular structures outside the living body.
Paper Advanced Sciences:
Nature has an extraordinary knack for producing composite materials that are simultaneously light and strong, porous and rigid — like mollusk shells or bone. But producing such materials in a lab or factory — particularly using environmentally friendly materials and processes — is extremely challenging.
Researchers in the Soft Materials Laboratory in the School of Engineering turned to nature for a solution. They have pioneered a 3D printable ink that contains Sporosarcina pasteurii: a bacterium which, when exposed to a urea-containing solution, triggers a mineralization process that produces calcium carbonate (CaCO3). The upshot is that the researchers can use their ink — dubbed BactoInk — to 3D-print virtually any shape, which will then gradually mineralize over the course of a few days.
-This would be good for coral reefs.
EPFL researchers have published a method for 3D-printing an ink that contains calcium carbonate-producing bacteria. The 3D-printed mineralized bio-composite is unprecedently strong, light, and environmentally friendly, with a range of applications from art to biomedicine.
Calcium carbonate is an impressive material, in that it combines strength, light weight and porosity. Scientists have devised a new bacteria-based method of 3D-printing the substance, for use in applications such as bone repair and coral reef restoration.
First of all, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard about the 3D-printing of calcium carbonate objects.
Earlier approaches have involved extruding a gel containing mineral particles, which subsequently dries and hardens. Some of the resulting items have been rather soft and fragile, however, or they’ve shrunk as they dried, creating cracks and causing their shape to change.
A precise replica of the patient’s heart is created as a soft, flexible shell.
MIT engineers’ newly developed robotic heart will help doctors adjust therapies to individuals’ unique heart structures and functions. The personalized 3D-printed heart can control and imitate the patient’s capacity to pump blood.
Melanie Gonick/MIT
As explained by MIT, the procedure begins with the researchers converting medical images of a patient’s heart into a three-dimensional computer model, which they then 3D print with a polymer-based ink.
