Lifeboat Foundation

Australian researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale BioPhotonics (CNBP) have developed a 3D printable ‘clip-on’ that can turn any smartphone into a fully functional microscope.

Reported in the research journal Scientific Reports, the smartphone microscope is powerful enough to visualise specimens as small as 1/200th of a millimetre, including microscopic organisms, animal and plant cells, blood cells, cell nuclei and more.

The clip-on technology is unique in that it requires no external power or light source to work yet offers high-powered microscopic performance in a robust and mobile handheld package.

Divergent has created a green 3D print automotive manufacturing platform that radically reduces materials, energy, and cost.

A construction company printed an entire house in 24 hours and it only cost $10,000.

Desktop Metal’s new software lets regular people design objects optimized for 3D printing, no experience required.

The news: Desktop Metal’s new LiveParts is a piece of software that automatically generates designs of objects ready for 3D printing. Users just tell it the structural constraints of the object they’re building, and it uses biology-inspired AI models to quickly generate a design suited to additive manufacturing.

Better components: The software ensures that parts take advantage of 3D printing’s capabilities. “This would enable weight reductions between 25 and 60 percent of many kinds of general-purpose parts,” says Desktop Metal CEO Ric Fulop, “while spreading loads more evenly and improving fatigue resistance.”

Continue reading “This AI software dreams up new designs for 3D-printed parts before your eyes” »

If humans are destined for deep space, they need to understand the space environment changes health, including aging and antibiotic resistance.

A new NASA project could help. It aims to develop technology used to study “omics”—fields of microbiology that are important to human health. Omics includes research into genomes, microbiomes and proteomes.

The Omics in Space project is being led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The project was recently funded by NASA’s Translational Research Institute for Space Health four years of study. Over that time, NASA hopes to develop 3D printable designs for instruments on the International Space Station (ISS), that can handle liquids like blood samples without spilling in microgravity. These tools could enable astronauts to analyze biological samples without sending them back to Earth.

Singapore-based ST Aerospace has collaborated with US-based precision control components provider Moog to explore and develop blockchain and 3D printing-enabled total digital transaction for the global aerospace sector.

Using a new technique they call “in-air microfluidics,” University of Twente scientists succeed in printing 3D structures with living cells. This special technique enable the fast and ‘on-the-fly’ production of micro building blocks that are viable and can be used for repairing damaged tissue, for example. The work is presented in Science Advances.

Microfluidics is all about manipulating tiny drops of fluid with sizes between a micrometer and a millimeter. Most often, chips with tiny fluidic channels, reactors and other components are used for this: lab-on-a-chip systems. Although these chips offer a broad range of possibilities, in producing emulsions for example—droplets carrying another substance – the speed at which droplets leave the chip is typically in the microliter per minute range. For clinical and industrial applications, this is not fast enough: filling a volume of a cubic centimeter would take about 1000 minutes or 17 hours. The technique that is presented now, does this in a couple of minutes.

Heart cells grown in a lab and assembled in the shape of the organ will eventually start beating in unison–and create a heart for a patient that has a higher chance of success in a transplant than one from another human.

‘Optical trap display’ projects graphics into the air, where they are visible from all angles.

Alex Hern