Lifeboat Foundation

China’s big win.

Last week a team from Chinese 3D printing construction company WinSun visited Saudi Arabia, meeting with department of housing official and others to discuss the kingdom’s housing shortfall.

According to 3ders.com and others, the Chinese firm’s chairman and vice president met officials from the housing department and investment authority, and were told the Saudi government believes WinSun’s technology could help meet a shortage in available housing. WinSun was invited to open a Saudi factory.

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A new 3D printing method can create almost anything you could imagine.

WOW — now that’s an engineering feat.

While Dubai is keen to become a 3D printing world leader with their Dubai 3D Printing Strategy, they are by no means the only Middle Eastern nation to look into this technology. Last week a delegation of Chinese WinSun officials traveled to Riyadh, the capital of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to discuss construction 3D printing. Among others, the Chinese construction 3D printing pioneers were invited to 3D print up to 1.5 million housing units over the next five years.

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Impressive.

3D printing services will grow from $2.5bn in 2013 to $16.2bn in 2018, according to Canalys Tags: 3D printing, Cloud computing.

Big Data and 3D.

3D printing remains one of those technological areas that holds a great amount of fascination. What began as a type of niche market has expanded rapidly in the past few years to encompass nearly every industry out there, from the medical field to manufacturing.

The outlook is a positive one in terms of 3D printing’s future, with Gartner predicting the amount of spending on 3D printers to exceed more than $13 billion in 2018. While 3D printing has always held a lot of promise, one of the factors truly taking the concept to the next level is big data.

Continue reading “Big Data’s Role in 3D Printing” »

Could we see a day when 3D Printers replace convection ovens and microwaves in the kitchen?

Over the last few decades, a new wave of science has been infused into the world of food in the form of molecular gastronomy. By definition, food preparation and cooking involve physical and chemical changes, and molecular gastronomy simply uses scientific principles to take food in new technical and even artistic directions.

Continue reading “Your Dinner Is Ready To Be 3D Printed” »

Growing up in Jakarta’s polluted slums, Vera Mulyani loved building things. As a child, she dreamed of becoming an architect.

More than two decades later, Mulyani is a self-proclaimed “Marschitect,” and spends her time brainstorming how human life might be sustained on the red planet. After studying at École d’Architecture de Nantes in France and at New York Film Academy, in January 2015 she founded Mars City Design, a think tank of sorts aimed at developing blueprints for the first self-sustaining city on Mars.

Earlier this month, Mars City Design raised $30,382 on Kickstarter to realize the next phase of its mission: Within the next three years, the group wants to 3D-print three to-scale habitat prototypes of Martian cities at Reaction Research Society’s test area in the Mojave Desert.

Continue reading “Mars City Design wants to 3D-print prototypes of Martian habitats in the Mojave Desert” »

Genie out of the bottle.

A new guide into 3D printing rights and responsibilities has been launched to explain what consumers need to know before printing in 3D, including the potential risks in creating and sharing 3D printable files, and what kinds of safeguards are in place.

The website “Everything you need to get started in 3D printing” was developed by staff at the University of Melbourne in response to the growing number of users keen to find, share, and create 3D printed goods online.

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Future Science Group (FSG) today announced the publication of a new article in Future Science OA looking to identify and define key terms associated with bioinks and bioprinting.

The use of 3D printing technologies for medical applications is a relatively new and rapidly expanding field, and is being approached in a multi-disciplinary manner. This has led to overlapping and ambiguous definitions within the field as a whole, and confusion over some terms, for example the prefix of ‘bio-‘. This new piece from William Whitford (GE Healthcare Life Sciences, USA) and James B. Hoying (Advanced Solutions Life Sciences, USA) introduces common definitions for 3D bioprinting-related terms, putting them into context. Terms defined within the article include 3D and 4D printing, bioadditive manufacturing, biofabrication, biomanufacturing, bioprinting, biomimetic printing and bioinks, among others.

“Additive manufacturing has transformed our approach to production in many ways,” notes Whitford. “There is now rapid development in the bioresearch, diagnostic and therapeutic applications for 3D printing. It’s difficult to even keep abreast of the number and types of relevant printing technologies, applications and vocabulary. We here identify some of the terms recently coined in this arena.”