In preparation for Star Trek: Into Darkness, we have been rewatching all of the old Next Generation episodes. One of the series’ most memorable moments is when a crew member casually walks over to a replicator and orders up dinner. Pudding, Klingon delicacies, and yes, even Picard’s “tea, Earl Grey, hot” is just a millisecond away. Now, NASA has announced that it will provide a $125,000 grant to a young mechanical engineer who’s working on a 3D printer that could (almost) do the same thing.

Read the rest of NASA Backs Star Trek-Style Replicator That Could 3D Print Pizza In Space!

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Post tags: 3d printed, 3d printed food, 3D printing, Anjan Contractor, nasa, nutrition, replicator, space travel, star trek, Technology

Recent advances in 3D printing technology have resulted in plenty of breakthroughs in the fields of medical science and prosthesis, but 3D printing is also contributing to the art world in new and unexpected ways. Sculptor Marco Mahler recently collaborated with mathematician Henry Segerman to produce a collection of the world’s first fully 3D-printed mobiles, and they’re pretty impressive. As Mahler explains on his website, the mobiles come out of the 3D printer completely assembled, and their balance points were calculated to 1/1000th of a millimeter. All of the mobiles are now available for sale through Mahler’s and Segerman’s shop at Shapeways.

+ Mobiles by Marco Mahler and Henry Segerman

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Post tags: 3D printing, 3d-printed sculpture, by Marco Mahler, D-printed mobile, digital fabrication, eco-friendly art, green art, Henry Segerman

After weeks of submissions and an intense week of online voting, we’re excited to finally announce the two winners of Inhabitat’s Lighten Up! Lighting Design Competition. We received hundreds of entries featuring projects that employ LEDs in innovative and interesting ways, ranging from a colorful art installation that reacts to changing light to a restaurant donning beautiful ceiling lamps to a research campus adorned with LED back-lit wood walls. We narrowed all the entries we received down to just 30 finalists, and then left it up to Inhabitat readers to decide which two designs were most deserving of $1000 prizes from Elemental LED. So who won? Now the moment you’ve all been waiting for…

Drumroll Please……….

Read the rest of Announcing the Lighten Up LED Lighting Competition Winners!

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Post tags: "wind power", 3D printed lamp, 3D printed light, 3D printing, aerodynamics, Air Turbine, Air Turbine Light, diTTo design, diTTo’s LED Acoustic Cloud Installation, green design, green interiors, green lighting, inhabitat competition, Inhabitat Design Competition, interior lighting design, LED Acoustic Cloud Installation, LED lighting installation, Lighten Up, lighten up competition, Lighten Up LED Lighting competition, Lighten Up LED Lighting competition commercial winner, Lighten Up LED Lighting competition residential winner, lighten up lighting design competition, lighten up lighting design winner, lighten up winner, lighting object, margot krasojevic, Rolluda Architects, wind-powered light Lighten Up LED Lighting competition

The first sure sign of a robot uprising will be when robots gain self-awareness and begin acting autonomously – and if this self-assembling robot is any indication, we’re well on our way to the robopocalypse. Researchers at Harvard and MIT teamed up to produce a 3D-printed inchworm robot that is able to aseemble itself. Using shape memory polymers that automatically fold into desired shapes, the remarkable bot transforms itself from a completely flat, two-dimensional object into a walking inchworm-shaped robot with almost no help from human hands.

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Post tags: 3D printing, 3d-printed inchworm robot, 3D-printed robot, harvard, ICRA 2013, inchworm robot, MIT, robots, self-assembling robot, Self-folding robot

The world’s first 3D-printed gun was successfully fired over the weekend, officially ushering in a new era of “wiki weapons.” University of Texas law student Cody Wilson launched an Indiegogo campaign to fund the Liberator project, but the site suspended the campaign and refunded contributors’ money. Undeterred, the self-described “crypto-anarchist” raised $20,000 independently through his own website, accepting funds via PayPal instead. The gun is made entirely from 3D-printed ABS plastic save for its metal firing pin, and blueprints will be available to anyone through Defense Distributed’s website.

Read the rest of World’s First 3D-Printed Gun Fired Successfully in Texas

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Post tags: 3D printing, 3D-printed gun, 3D-printed weapons, ABS plastic, ATF, Cody Wilson, crime, Defense Distributed, Design, Europol, IndieGoGo, Liberator, News, open source weapon, wiki weapon

The Singapore-based team behind the Portabee 3D printer recently launched a new personal Panther 3D printer made from parts of CNC machines. Touted as a “personal 3D printer that takes personal 3D manufacturing to the next level,” the cheap, entry-level device is built for precision output, utilizing a rigid and durable chassis constructed of aluminium with stainless-steel components.


Read the rest of Super Precise Panther 3D Printer is Made from High-Grade CNC Components

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Post tags: 3d modeling techniques, 3d printer, 3D Printer ideas, 3D printing, 3d printing technology, Design Software, digital fabrication, Panther 3D printer, personal 3d printer, Portabee 3D printer

San Diego-based bioprinting company Organovo has successfully created functional 3D-printed livers—albeit very, very tiny ones. At half a millimeter deep by four millimeters wide, the livers will likely be used for medical tests, but Organovo hopes that they will soon produce full-sized livers that could do away with agonizing waits on long transplant lists.

Read the rest of Organovo 3D-Prints the World’s First Tiny Human Livers

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Post tags: 3D printing, artificial organs, autodesk, bioprinting, organovo, print living tissue, printed livers, printed organs, synthetic tissue

If you’ve always had trouble finding the perfect pair of headphones, this new 3D-printed iteration just might be music to your ears. Made with just a few simple elements, they combine 3D-printed parts with raw materials such wire, tape, solder and magnets. The designer, J.C. Karich, 3D-printed the speaker pieces, ear parts and even the plug, which can fit a standard jack connector. Although the headphones need a power amplifier to play music from a smartphone, Karich claims that the sound quality is actually better than expected.


Read the rest of J.C. Karich’s 3D-Printed Headphones Are Music to Our Ears

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Post tags: 3D Printed Headphones, 3d printed products, 3D printers, 3D printing, 3d printing technology, digital fabrication, eco design, green design, J.C.Karich, J.C.Karich 3d printed headphones, jc karich, sustainable design

A team of scientists at Oxford University has used a custom 3D printer to successfully create synthetic tissue that mimics properties of living tissue. Unlike projects underway by Organovo, the Oxford University team did not culture cells from existing, living tissue and expand upon them, but instead utilized water and oil to create a network of ‘programmable’ droplets that, held within lipid film, can replicate some behaviors of living tissue.

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Post tags: 3D printers, 3D printing, 3d printing biology, 3d printing health, 3d printing science, artificial tissue, bioengineering, living tissue, medicine design, organovo, oxford university, synthetic tissue

April Fools was almost a week ago, but we couldn’t resist sharing one of our favorite fake news stories of the week. ThinkGeek announced the release of a newPlay-Doh 3D printer that works in tandem with the iPlay-Doh 3D app that you download to your iPad to create any design you can dream up. The (imaginary) device can print up to three colors at once by blending them like soft-serve ice cream. It’s easy enough to imagine this product becoming a reality, and it’s probably only a matter of time before toy companies begin marketing the wonders of 3D printing to kids.

READ MORE >

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Post tags: "april fools", 3d printer, 3D printing, 3d printing for kids, Inhabitots, iPad, kids, Play doh, thinkgeek

Researchers at Germany’s Doppelbock University just opened the door to the future of rapid prototyping technology by developing the world’s first 3D-printed 3D printer! Dubbed the Ecophage, the duplicitous device is capable of using readily available materials to create copies of itself – albeit at a slightly smaller scale. Best of all, it’s outfitted with a built-in material re-processor that can convert virtually any carbon-based substance into filament for 3d-printing.

Read the rest of Scientists Create World’s First 3D-Printed 3D Printer!

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Post tags: "april fools", 3d printed 3d printer, 3d printer, 3D printing, april 1st, green design, green technology, grey goo, molecular nanotechnology, self-replicating machines, self-replicating robots, sustainable design, three dimensional printing

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Post tags: 3d printed food, 3d printer, 3D printing, eco design, FREEDOM OF CREATION, future food, green design, Janne Kyttanen, printed food, sustainable design, sustainable food

Excited about that stylish top from J.Crew but wish you could have it for the party tonight? Why not just 3D print it right at home? That’s the vision embodied in a Clothing Printer conceived by industrial designer Joshua Harris. Harris developed the Clothing Printer with a group of colleagues as an entry in the Electrolux Lab design competition in 2010, where it placed in the semifinals.


Read the rest of Joshua Harris’ 3D Clothing Printer Recycles Old Garments to Create New Apparel

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Post tags: 3d printer, 3D printing, apparel, clothing printer, eco-fashion, green design, industrial design, joshua harris, Sustainable Fashion, sustainable style, Urban design

MakerBot is already one of the biggest names in desktop 3D printing, and now the company plans to expand into scanning. CEO Bre Pettis announced the arrival of the Digitizer this week at the Austin’s SXSW Interactive. The scanner consists of a turntable upon which you can mount small objects that can then be scanned by lasers and be digitized into computer files. Easier than writing code from scratch, the new device could be joined with a suite of printers and filament fabricators to create a small-scale design studio in the home.

Read the rest of MakerBot Unveils Prototype ‘Digitizer’ Desktop 3D Scanner at SXSW

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Post tags: 3d printer, 3D printing, 3d scanner, austin, bre pettis, cad file, digitizer, filament, Laser, makerbot, Makerbot digitizer, sxsw, tron

UC Berkeley’s new Dreambox is a vending machine like no other – it incorporates a 3D printer that makes and dispenses goodies right before your eyes! By connecting to a cloud-based computing system hosted within the machine, customers can upload their designs and set them in the cue for printing.

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Post tags: 3d printed vending machine, 3D printing, Dreambox, eco design, green design, sustainable design, uc berkeley

Hugh Lyman, an 83-year-old retiree from Enumclaw, Washington, won The Desktop Factory Competition with his design for a low-cost, open-source machine capable of turning resin pellets into inexpensive filament for 3D printing. The competition, sponsored by Inventables, Kauffman, and the Maker Education Initiative, required that the parts used to make the machine could cost no more than $250.


Read the rest of 83-Year-Old Inventor Designs Inexpensive Open-Source Filament Extruder to Cut the Cost of 3D Printing

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Post tags: 3d printer, 3D Printer filament, 3D printing, 3d printing technology, cheap 3D printing, Desktop Factory Competition, Hugh Lyman Filament Extruder, Hugh Lyman patent, Inventables, Lyman Filament Extruder, Maker Education Initiative, open source design, resin pellets

Nanoscribe GmbH, a German company based in Karlsruhe, has released the Photonic Professional GT, which it claims is “the world’s fastest 3D printer of micro- and nanostructures.” An announcement from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) says that the printer, based on laser lithography, can produce three-dimensional objects smaller than the diameter of a human hair, with “minimum time consumption and maximum resolution.”

Read the rest of Nanoscribe Unveils the World’s Fastest Nano-Scale 3D Printer

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Post tags: 3d printer, 3D printing, karlsruhe, kit, micro, nano, nanoscribe, nanotechnology, photonic

It’s widely assumed that 3D printing represents the next frontier in fabricating objects of all types, but researchers at Germany’s Hasso Plattner Institute have come up with a novel way of creating 3D objects out of 2D pieces of plastic using a laser cutter. LaserOrigami is a remarkable new fabrication technique that is faster than most 3D printers. Instead of using joints, LaserOrigami can create complex 3D objects by folding, bending and stretching plastic with extreme precision, eliminating the need for pieces to be manually assembled.

Read the rest of LaserOrigami Uses a Laser Cutter to Create 3D Objects Faster than 3D Printers

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Post tags: 3D printing, computerized assembly, digital fabrication, futuristic fabrication, germany, Hasso Plattner Institute, high-tech manufacturing, laser cutter, laser cutting, laser origami, laser-cut planter, laser-cut vase, LaserOrigami, lasers

As if the rise of 3D printing in the past few years wasn’t cool enough, MIT’s Skylar Tibbits just unveiled the future of 4D printing in a TED talk this week. It may sound unbelievable, but the new technology combines 3D printing with shape-shifting design. Tibbits explained that the process involves a 3D-printed object that is capable of self-assembling or changing into another shape when exposed to an outside factor like heat, water, light or sound.


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Post tags: 3D printing, 4d printing, eco design, green design, MIT's Self Assembly Lab, Skylar Tibbits, sustainable design, TED talks

German engineer and inventor Marcus Thymark is developing a filament-producing machine that allows 3D printing enthusiasts to grind up and reprocess discarded printed objects and other scrap plastic for re-use. Called the FilaMaker, Thymark’s machine is based on a powerful hand-cranked shredder that can be made from steel or stainless steel. He is working on integrating the shredder with a melter and extruder, which will allow the user to recycle scrap plastic into new filament.

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Post tags: 3D printing, DIY, filamaker, filament, gadgets, grinding, marcus thymark, plastic, recycling, reprocessing, shredder, shredding