In this week’s abbreviated 3D Printing News Briefs, we’ve got a story on a new type of 3D printing that makes it easy to 3D print small objects, and a distinguished professor gives a TEDx talk about the importance of interdisciplinary research. Wrapping things up, we’ve got a video about an amazing 3D printed 1/6 scale vehicle model.
Shrinking 3D Printer
A team of researchers from MIT, Harvard, and the Pfizer Internal Medicine Research Unit in Cambridge, Massachusetts recently published a paper, titled “3D nanofabrication by volumetric deposition and controlled shrinkage of patterned scaffolds,” in the Science journal about their innovative new method of shrinking 3D printing, which makes it easy to 3D print very small objects. A technique called implosion fabrication 3D prints an object, then shrinks it down to the required size. The shrinking 3D printer can work with different materials, such as quantum dots, metals, and DNA, and can also fabricate complicated shapes like microscopic linked chains as well.MIT researcher Ed Boyden, one of the co-authors of the paper, developed the shrinking 3D printing method by thinking of reversing a process where brain tissue is expanded so it’s possible to see its finer structure. The team found that they could shrink a structure by about 8,000 times in multiple tests, and proved its viability by etching a structure of Alice in Wonderland and shrinking it down to 50 nanometers from 1 cubic millimeter. The research team believes that their shrinking 3D printers could be used to make small, high resolution optical lenses for driving cars, though the possibilities for this technology are practically endless.
TEDx on Interdisciplinary Research
“In regenerative medicine there is a great move to introduce interdisciplinarity in the research programs, as well as in the scholarships,” DProf Hutmacher said in the YouTube video. “However, most of the teams are rather doing multidisciplinary research, which does not lead to what we have done in the past moving a bone tissue engineering concept into the clinic.”
To see the rest of DProf Hutmacher’s TEDx talk, check out the video below:
1/6 Scale Model of 1961 Dodge D100
Using a blueprint of the Dodge, Bogdanov modeled the cab of the truck in Blender and 3D printed it out of polyamide; additional materials used to build the model include aluminum foil, Styrene rods, plywood, artificial leather, and acrylic paint. His 44 minute YouTube video shows some of the modeling work, and then moves on to the nitty gritty details of building all the separate pieces of the truck model, from the doors and fenders to the chassis and grille, and finally assembling everything before painting and weathering the model. Plus, at about the 2:06 minute mark, Bogdanov’s adorable cat makes its first of multiple appearances in the video! If you’re interested in making your own 1/6 scale model of the 1961 Dodge D100 truck, you can download the STL files for both the four motor mount and the tractor wheels. Check out the video for more details.
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