Tag: 3D printing

3D printing clothes: The next revolution will not be hand-stitched [Article]

Charlie Stross’s vision of the printed clothing future:

You go in, go to the scanning booth, and do the airport-equivalent thing in a variety of positions—stretch and bend as well as hands-up. You then look at the styles on display on the shop floor, pick out what you like, and see it as it will appear on your own body on an avatar on a computer screen. You buy it, and a machine in the back of the store (or an out-of-town lights out 24×7 robotic garment factory) begins to print it. Some time later—maybe minutes, maybe hours or a day or two—the outfit you ordered comes to you. And it fits perfectly, every time. Some items are probably still off-the-shelf (socks, hosiery, maybe even those cheap tee shirts), but anything major is printed, unless you can afford to go to the really high end and pay a human being to make it for you out of natural fibres. Oh, and the printed stuff doesn’t have seams in places that chafe or bind.

But it isn’t all good. Read on.

3D printing in a medical environment saving a baby’s life [Article]

No longer science fiction: how 3D printing in a medical environment gave 18-month old Kaiba Gionfriddo a new lease of life. His lungs were blocked, and needed a splint to carve a pathway through his blocked airway. They printed the splint to exact specifications of the baby’s, using a powder called PCL (polycaprolactone). Doctors then took the splint, measuring just a few centimeters long & 8mm wide & surgically attached it to Kaiba’s collapsed bronchus. They saw results within moments:

“When the stitches were put in, we started seeing the lung inflate and deflate,” Green said. “It was so fabulous. There were people in the operating room cheering.”

Printing food in space? [Article, Video]

3D-printing is all around us. This futuristic technology, that has been around over two decades, is only now showing up in the mainstream. Additive printing, as it is scientifically called, is explained in this educative 10 minute video, if you’ve not seen it yet (I expect not, since it has had only 743 views at the time I’m typing this). The applications of this technology are incredibly diverse – as this team at Cornell University demonstrates, but using it to “print” meals for astronauts.  Agree or not with the concept, 3D printing shops will be as ubiquitous as the corner “photocopying” shop used to be in my not so long past.