Two researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem claim to have developed food 3D printing technology capable of printing entire meals from nano-cellulose, a naturally occurring fiber that contains no calories.
3D printed food. Do you need it? No. Do you want it? Not especially. Are companies going to continue exploiting the highly novel concept in order to make money? Of course they are. And since it’s going to happen anyway, why not just get on board? From 3D printed pizza to 3D printed candy, these complex treats are here to stay. Yum!
Imagine printing off a wristband that charges your smartphone or electric car with cheap supplies from a local hardware store.
That’s the direction materials research is heading at Brunel University London where scientists have become the first to simply and affordably 3D print a flexible, wearable ‘battery’.
The technique opens the way for novel designs for super-efficient, wearable power for phones, electric cars, medical implants like pacemakers and more.
In what promises to be one small step for space travel, and one giant leap for the next generation of manufacturing, an Israeli startup is planning to land a vehicle on the moon that has crucial parts made using 3D printing technology.
SpaceIL is among five teams vying for Google’s $30 million in prize money to get a spacecraft to the moon by the end of March. One of the startup’s suppliers, Zurich-based RUAG Space, advised turning to 3D printing to manufacture the legs of its unmanned lunar lander. With financial stakes high and a tight deadline, SpaceIL engineers were at first deeply skeptical, according to RUAG executive Franck Mouriaux. They finally acquiesced after a lot of convincing.
Based in Los Angeles, Relativity Space is developing a new 3D printer for, “scaling and sustaining an interplanetary society”.
Since founding in 2015, Relativity Space has received $10 million in funding – with backers including Mark Cuban and Y Combinator.
The company promises that 3D printing will allow them to go, “from raw material to flight in less than 60 days” and claims their Stargate 3D printer is, “the largest metal 3D printer in the world.”
Building a house by hand can be both time-consuming and expensive. Numerous homebuilders have chosen to automate part of the construction (i.e., by printing the home’s parts) instead.
A new Ukrainian homebuilding startup called PassivDom uses a 3D printing robot that can print parts for tiny houses. The machine can print the walls, roof, and floor of PassivDom’s 380-square-foot model in about eight hours. The windows, doors, plumbing, and electrical systems are then added by a human worker.
When complete, the homes are autonomous and mobile, meaning they don’t need to connect to external electrical and plumbing systems. Solar energy is stored in a battery connected to the houses, and water is collected and filtered from humidity in the air (or you can pour water into the system yourself). The houses also feature an independent sewage system.
How much faster can you build a sneaker, exactly? A lot, it turns out. Wired UK has paid a visit to Adidas, which is hauling shoe manufacturing from labor-intensive Chinese plants into the aptly named Speed Factories in America and Germany.
Using tricks like robotic knitting, advanced plastic forming, and 3D printing (which is provided by Carbon, one of our 50 Smartest Companies of 2017) Adidas plans to make even custom sneakers 90 times faster than it can right now. It plans to crank out 1 million pairs of shoes a year from two Speed Factories—one in Atlanta, Georgia, the other in Bavaria, Germany—by the end of 2017.
Such innovation, it hopes, will allow it to remain competitive with Nike and Under Armor, which currently dominate the sportswear world.
The classic image of a robot is one clad in a rigid metal shell, but that might not be practical in situations where man and machine will need to work together. The emerging field of soft robotics is helping to make that collaboration safer, but recreating muscle is no easy task. Now, mechanical engineers from Columbia University have developed a synthetic soft muscle that’s said to be much more simple to make and run than others, and is three times stronger than the real thing.
Most soft robots are powered by pneumatic or hydraulic systems, with their movements controlled by filling and emptying bladders with liquids or gases. The problem is, that usually requires bulky external components like compressors, which prevent the systems from being shrunk down to practical sizes.
The system developed by the Columbia team is based on a natural muscle. It’s made of silicone rubber matrix pocked with micro-bubbles of ethanol, giving the material low density and high elasticity. It can be 3D printed into whatever shape is needed, then electrically actuated thanks to a thin resistive wire embedded inside. Altogether, it can be made easily, cheaply and safely.
