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Showing posts with the label 3D

Living body parts have been 3D-printed in a significant advance for regenerative medicine, say scientists

The breakthrough, published in Nature Biotechnology, raises the hope of using living tissues to repair the body. Experts described the technology, developed in the US, as a "goose that really does lay golden eggs". The idea of placing individual human cells in a precise pattern to replace a damaged jaw, missing ear or scarred heart muscle holds much promise. But the field has been limited by the huge challenge of keeping the cells alive - they become starved of oxygen and nutrients in tissues thicker than 0.2 millimetres. The team at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre developed a new technique that 3D-prints a tissue riddled with micro-channels, rather like a sponge, to allow nutrients to penetrate the tissue.The Integrated Tissue and Organ Printing System - or Itop - combines a bio-degradeable plastic which gives the structure and a water-based gel which contains the cells and encourages them to grow. When the structures were implanted into animals, t...

Scientists in the US are making detailed 3D maps of the cavities carved by comet dust

Stardust visited Comet Wild 2 in 2004, catching samples from its dusty tail in specially made slabs of "aerogel". By studying the tracks with microscopes and synchrotron X-rays, researchers aim to reconstruct exactly what kind of particles first hit the gel. They are also identifying extra, tiny grains to be extracted and tested. "We want to tell people where the interesting grains are," said Amanda White, a student working on the project at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.She presented her work this week at the 227th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Florida. Most work on Stardust samples to date has selected the grains using regular optical images, concentrating on the relatively large particles that burrowed their way right into the foam. But when the dust first slammed into the gel at 6km/s (13,421mph) it carved out complex shapes, often resembling a teardrop, with a large bulb near the entry point that gradually n...

US researchers have developed molten glass sewing machine by combining 3D printing of glass with a mathematical model

When the nozzle releasing a stream of molten glass is raised above a certain level, that thread begins to wobble. It traces out waves or loops - which the team found could be controlled by adjusting the speed of the nozzle. Those shapes then become the building blocks for intricate, 3D objects. Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pioneered a method for glass 3D printing in 2015. They then started to work with mathematician Pierre-Thomas Brun, who has studied the fluid dynamics of liquid "ropes". The results are documented in a video, which the team presented in the American Physical Society's "Gallery of Fluid Motion" in November.It all started with a collaboration between two labs at MIT, Dr Brun told - one specialising in glass and the other in "mediated matter"."Normally when you 3D print, the nozzle is very close to the piece that you're printing - that's the conventional method. But what they started worki...

Ultrasound captures rat brain in microscopic 3D

They used it to scan the blood vessels throughout the brain of a live rat. Within a few years, the researchers say their system could reach the clinic and help with cancer and stroke diagnosis. For the procedure, published in Nature, the rat was injected with millions of very tiny bubbles, which reflect sound waves much better than blood vessels. "Ultrasound propagates easily in water - or in our organs, because almost 90% of our soft tissue is water," explained the study's senior author, Mickael Tanter, from the Institut Langevin in Paris. "But as soon as it hits a very small microbubble of gas, there's a big reflection. It's a very good scatterer of ultrasound." This is what makes these bubbles, which are already used for some scans in humans, a "contrast agent" for ultrasound.But the key to getting a sharp, super-resolution image - unlike conventional ultrasound, which is limited to capturing objects at millimetre scales - was...

The world's biggest crystal structure model - a 3D chemical illustration made from little balls and sticks

It replicates the repeating lattice of sodium and chloride ions found in a crystal of salt (NaCl). Standing more than 3m tall, the model was built by Dr Robert Krickl from nearly 40,000 balls and 10km of sticks. The world record attempt will be adjudicated by the Guinness Book of Records on 23 November. It will be on public display until 30 November, and has already been commemorated on an Austrian postage stamp.Because of the regular pattern it is built up from, which causes hundreds of the "ions" to form precise lines from multiple angles, the huge model has a rather dazzling appearance. It also has particular significance this week, Dr Krickl said. "This week it's the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prize for discovering what I show with this model: the arrangement of atoms in crystals." The British father-and-son team of William and Lawrence Bragg won the physics Nobel in 1915 for originating the technique that is now known as X-ray crystallog...

Bloodhound Super-Sonic Car is unveiled this week

At the point when the Bloodhound Super-Sonic Car is uncovered for the current week, people in general will have the capacity to see the numerous creative innovations utilized as a part of its development. A few surface boards will be evacuated with the goal that individuals can glimpse inside to get a building's feeling needed to make an auto move speedier than 1,000 mph. Given the bespoke way of Bloodhound, a noteworthy number of its segments have been created utilizing 3D printing methods. This incorporates even the directing wheel. With more than 3,500 specially crafted parts, it would have been restrictively extravagant, and inefficient, for the Bloodhound undertaking to utilize conventional group generation approaches in numerous occasions. The perplexing configuration of the auto likewise requests shapes that are troublesome - in some cases outlandish - to make utilizing conventional tooling. As an outcome, the auto's origi...