Does anyone else find the implications of 3-D printing somewhat terrifying? Printing functional guns that can beat metal-detectors. Printing organs. Making hybrid bio-bots. The whole topic freaks me out.
Vincent Chan, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab and lead author of a paper published last fall describing the work, said he first started looking at using 3-D printers about five years ago. “Our goal coming into this was the holy grail — organ printing,” he said. “But, obviously, it’s very complex and very difficult.” So he and others in the lab began looking at other ways to use the technology.
With the biobots, the printer prints the gel, not the cells. And it prints the gel in a specific shape — something like a tiny springboard, about one-quarter-inch long, that is elevated on a short base. Then heart muscle cells from rats are placed on one side of the board.
“The cells start to spread out and form connections,” Dr. Chan said. And then, being heart cells, they start to beat in unison. The contractions cause the board to curl and uncurl, moving the whole structure forward. With the 3-D printer, the researchers were able to make springboards of different thicknesses to alter the degree of curling, optimizing the movement.
I felt a little let down when the millennium came and we still didn’t have our jet packs and hovercrafts. But I think the futuristic stuff is starting to roll out now. My son’s world is going to be nothing like mine.
Why do they call it 3-D printing when it’s really manufacturing from a down loaded blueprint?
It works like a printer.
Don’t see how a 3-D picture can shoot anyone. It manufactures sections that are joined. It’s not printing. It’s a pantograph.
I mean that it builds things the same way a printer puts ink on paper. It’s just different materials and it’s done in three dimensions.
Well, yeah, we’re getting to the point where you can call it printing, or replicating, or whatever you like. But yes, I can see what you mean, because printing generally means you’re making a replica of a thing rather than the thing itself.
Of course, when things get really freaky is when you start printing 3D printers. Next thing you know you’re transforming the inner planets into computronium.
I’m a huge techno-phile, but I’m with you on this one. Rather than wait two decades and wake up to discover the dark side of the technology, it’s time to have that discussion now amidst all the other technological hangovers that we failed to discuss thoroughly.
The stuff that’s really beginning to roll out now is wind and solar energy generation. (And the fracking bubble is about to burst. Land prices have gone up and new supplies have produced reduced prices.)
The critical conversation in the cell biology field that we need to have is the use of transgenic cells. It’s not the printing technology per se that is troubling but what will be used as the cells.
I’m with you all the way.
freaks me out too
Some day little girls and boys will be able to customize and print their very own Barbie, Ken, and GI Joe dolls and their plastic houses and cars. The clothes might be a bit trickier.
Meh, could be for good or for ill. Like MNPundit, I’m dreaming of a day where there is no need for anything, you just print it. In that sense, it could be a god-send.
I saw it done with an ear on TV. It is freaky but has the potential to help so many folks
Printers break down a lot. What if you are in the middle of printing a heart for a heart transplant and the printer breaks down. I don’t imagine 3D printers have improved on that issue.
>>What if … the printer breaks down
http://news.cnet.com/2300-17938_105-10017882.html
http://epic3dprintingfail.tumblr.com/
Star Trek replicators! I’m all for it. Yes, it can be used for bad, but it can also be used for good. Don’t fear the tools, just keep working on making the people better.
Blah blah blah… just get me one that prints money before it’s all digitized.
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3-D Printers+asteroid mining+sustainable energy = civilization collapse or star trek. One of the other, and it will make conservative ideology functionally obsolete (as opposed to intellectually obsolete like it is now).
Printing organs and guns is pretty freaky, but it doesn’t alarm me anywhere near as much as the practice of harvesting real organs from living (or quite recently living) humans, so to the extent that this technology would head that whole dystopian nightmare off before it could get well and truly underway, hey, I’m ALL for it.
You want to lay up nights worrying about where the race is headed, I’d suggest you pay more attention to what they’re getting up to with neuroscience these days, like implanting memories and other Matrix-like weirdness.
My son’s world is going to be nothing like mine.
Your son’s gonna be just fine, assuming any one of the half dozen or so potential future-destroying events we’re currently facing don’t materialize.
Nope, it’s our generation that’s in trouble, because we’re going to inhabit a good portion of this future right there alongside our kids, and I wonder what kind of psychological toll we can expect from a couple more decades of utter demolition and replacement of one world paradigm after another.
I grew up in a world with rotary telephones and TVs that worked better when you smacked ’em occasionally. When I needed information, I consulted our 1956 Encyclopedia Brittanica. A “computer” was something that Captain Kirk talked to on TV.
Nowadays, a few decades later, I have more or less the entire intellectual history of the human species literally at my fingertips–more of it that I’ll ever make use of, anyway–and I do neurofeedback training in my own home. My crappy cell phone that can’t filter my text messages without getting bogged down is capable (I’m told) of stuff that NASA couldn’t do when I was a kid.
I suppose I’ll be able to keep up with the rest of the species about as well as anybody else over the next few decades, but there’s room for doubt: the human brain has existed in its current form for something going on 200,000 years iirc, and as far as anybody knows, it’s only had to deal with civilization for maybe 5% of that time. Dealing with life-changing technology–aside from perhaps one breakthrough event in one’s life, if one were lucky–has really only been a reality for .05% of our brain’s history.
I don’t think we’re evolutionarily wired for the kind of rapid changes that our generation is facing. That isn’t to say that younger generations won’t have the same problem eventually too, but for the time being, and provided that our information-sharing infrastructure holds up, they have a leg up on us moving into the future.
If Ray Kurzweil is correct about half of the things he’s predicted that have yet to come about, I wonder if my psychological temperament that was formed in the 70s is going to be resilient enough to function correctly in that environment.
Or maybe it won’t be a big deal at all. Bottom line: organ harvesting is horrifying. Printing or growing them in labs may be creepy, but I’ll take it.
Your son’s world will be just like yours; filled with human dickbags; only with a lot less energy and food, and a lot more global warming. In other words, his world will be much, much harder; unimaginable to you; and his chances of having 3-d printed replacement organs will be vanishingly small, because it won’t be economically feasible. Invest in some handtools.
If you had told me when I was in high school in the early 1970’s that I’d be carrying a computer around in my purse, I would have politely laughed in your face. We have “picture phones” like we dreamed of, and have electric cars. There are wind farms and a pretty high cure rate for leukemia, which would have killed my oldest son had he been born back then, instead of in the late eighties.
Bring on the technology. We’ll find ways to manage it.
I think like everything else, they will be what we make them to be: http://www.mtu.edu/news/stories/2013/july/story93519.html
or this: http://www.mtu.edu/materials/printersforpeace/
I can’t afford the printer cartridges as it is!
I want to skip right over the 3 D printer and go straight to one of these things.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHSD0tR2IOU
“The cells start to spread out and form connections,” Dr. Chan said. And then, being heart cells, they start to beat in unison. The contractions cause the board to curl and uncurl, moving the whole structure forward. With the 3-D printer, the researchers were able to make springboards of different thicknesses to alter the degree of curling, optimizing the movement.
hcg recipes for phase 2
“Rule 34” by Charles Stross has use/abuse of 3-D printing tech as a significant storyline element. What’s the main naughty use? Porn, of course.