For a couple of years now, I've been trying to find an excuse to buy a decent 3D printer.
Friends and fellow Ars staffers who had them would gush about them at every opportunity, talking about how useful they can be and how much can be printed once you get used to the idea of being able to create real, tangible objects with a little time and a few bucks' worth of plastic filament.
But I could never quite imagine myself using one consistently enough to buy one. Then, this past Christmas, my wife forced the issue by getting me a Bambu Lab A1 as a present.
Three-dimensional printing is transforming medical care, letting the health care field shift from mass-produced solutions to customized treatments tailored to each patient’s needs. For instance, researchers are developing 3D-printed prosthetic hands specifically designed for children, made with lightweight materials and adaptable control systems.
These continuing advancements in 3D-printed prosthetics demonstrate their increasing affordability and accessibility. Success stories like this one in personalized prosthetics highlight the benefits of 3D printing, in which a model of an object produced with computer-aided design software is transferred to a 3D printer and constructed layer by layer.
We are a biomedical engineer and a chemist who work with 3D printing. We study how this rapidly evolving technology provides new options not just for prosthetics but for implants, surgical planning, drug manufacturing, and other health care needs. The ability of 3D printing to make precisely shaped objects in a wide range of materials has led to, for example, custom replacement joints and custom-dosage, multidrug pills.
Emerging tech startups continue to alter how traditional industries operate, shifting standards and setting new benchmarks for efficiency, reach, and accessibility. These shifts are not speculative, they’re very much measurable, structural, and rooted in specific technological deployments. Startups are not […]
Hatsushima is not a particularly busy station, relative to Japanese rail commuting as a whole. It serves a town (Arida) of about 25,000, known for mandarin oranges and scabbardfish, that is shrinking in population, like most of Japan. Its station sees between one to three trains per hour at its stop, helping about 530 riders find their way. Its wooden station was due for replacement, and the replacement could be smaller.
The replacement, it turned out, could also be a trial for industrial-scale 3D-printing of custom rail shelters. Serendix, a construction firm that previously 3D-printed 538-square-foot homes for about $38,000, built a shelter for Hatsushima in about seven days, as shown at The New York Times. The fabricated shelter was shipped in four parts by rail, then pieced together in a span that the site Futurism says is "just under three hours," but which the Times, seemingly present at the scene, pegs at six. It was in place by the first train's arrival at 5:45 am.
Either number of hours is a marked decrease from the days or weeks you might expect for a new rail station to be constructed. In one overnight, teams assembled a shelter that is 2.6 meters (8.5 feet) tall and 10 square meters (32 square feet) in area. It's not actually in use yet, as it needs ticket machines and finishing, but is expected to operate by July, according to the Japan Times.
ICON, which builds homes using 3D printing, has closed on $56 million in Series C funding co-led by Norwest Venture Partners and Tiger Global, the company has confirmed to TechCrunch exclusively. The raise represents a first close for the Austin-based ICON, according to a spokesperson. Existing backers CAZ Investments, LENX, Modern Ventures, Oakhouse Partners, Overmatch […]
Bambu Lab, a major maker of 3D printers for home users and commercial "farms," is pushing an update to its devices that it claims will improve security while still offering third-party tools "authorized" access. Some in the user community—and 3D printing advocates broadly—are pushing back, suggesting the firm has other, more controlling motives.
As is perhaps appropriate for 3D printing, this matter has many layers, some long-standing arguments about freedom and rights baked in, and a good deal of heat.
Bambu Lab's image marketing Bambu Handy, its cloud service that allows you to "Control your printer anytime anywhere, also we support SD card and local network to print the projects."
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Bambu Lab
Printing more, tweaking less
Bambu Lab, launched in 2022, has stood out in the burgeoning consumer 3D printing market because of its printers' capacity for printing at high speeds without excessive tinkering or maintenance. The product page for the X1 series, the printer first targeted for new security, starts with the credo, "We hated 3D printing as much as we loved it." Bambu's faster, less fussy multicolor printers garnered attention—including an ongoing patent lawsuit from established commercial printer Stratasys.
ICON Technologies Inc., which builds homes using 3D printing, is laying off 114 people, according to a WARN letter filed with the Texas Workforce Commission. A spokesperson for the company confirmed the news to TechCrunch, providing a statement that ICON had “recently made a difficult decision to re-align” its team and team size “to focus […]
Carbon fiber, aluminum, maybe the odd bit of titanium here or there: These are the materials we usually expect race cars to be made of. Now you can start adding thermoplastics like Ultem to the list. Additive manufacturing has become a real asset in the racer’s toolbox, although the technology has actually been used at the track longer than you might think.
"Some people think that 3D printing was invented last year," said Fadi Abro, senior global director of automotive and mobility at Stratasys. The company recently became NASCAR's official 3D printing partner, but it has a relationship with one of the teams—Joe Gibbs Racing—that stretches back two decades.
"Now the teams only have certain things that they can touch in the vehicle, but what that does is it makes it so that every microscopic advantage you can get out of that one tiny detail that you have control over is so meaningful to your team," Abro said.
Charlotte, a green sea turtle, was hit by a boat back in 2008. This left it with an affliction colloquially referred to as the “bubble butt,” a kind of floating syndrome that makes it impossible for a turtle to dive. Most sea turtles suffering from issues like this simply die at sea, since the condition leaves them stranded at the surface where they can’t forage, sleep, and avoid predators like sharks. But fate had other plans for Charlotte.
Charlotte didn’t end up as a shark’s lunch and didn’t starve to death floating helplessly in the ocean. Instead, it got rescued shortly after the boat accident and eventually found a home at Mystic Aquarium in Stonington, Connecticut, where it received professional care. That was the first time Charlotte got lucky. The second time came when a collaboration formed: Adia, a company specializing in 3D-printing solutions; Formlabs, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of 3D printers; and New Balance Athletic, a sportswear giant based in Boston. This team chose Charlotte as a technology showcase, which basically turned the turtle into an Oscar Pistorius of the sea—just without the criminal conviction.
Weights and diet
Sea turtles are marine reptiles, which means they don’t have gills like fish—they need air to breathe. The lungs also play a key role in their buoyancy regulation system, which allows them to rest for extended periods of time at the sea floor or float at a precisely chosen depth. A sea turtle can precisely choose the depth at which it achieves neutral buoyancy by inhaling the exactly right volume of air.
There's a common popular science demonstration involving "soap boats," in which liquid soap poured onto the surface of water creates a propulsive flow driven by gradients in surface tension. But it doesn't last very long since the soapy surfactants rapidly saturate the water surface, eliminating that surface tension. Using ethanol to create similar "cocktail boats" can significantly extend the effect because the alcohol evaporates rather than saturating the water.
That simple classroom demonstration could also be used to propel tiny robotic devices across liquid surfaces to carry out various environmental or industrial tasks, according to a preprint posted to the physics arXiv. The authors also exploited the so-called "Cheerios effect" as a means of self-assembly to create clusters of tiny ethanol-powered robots.
As previously reported, those who love their Cheerios for breakfast are well acquainted with how those last few tasty little "O"s tend to clump together in the bowl: either drifting to the center or to the outer edges. The "Cheerios effect is found throughout nature, such as in grains of pollen (or, alternatively, mosquito eggs or beetles) floating on top of a pond; small coins floating in a bowl of water; or fire ants clumping together to form life-saving rafts during floods. A 2005 paper in the American Journal of Physics outlined the underlying physics, identifying the culprit as a combination of buoyancy, surface tension, and the so-called "meniscus effect."
