Lifeboat Foundation

New technique makes it easier to build stable “tissues”.

Researchers claim to have 3D-printed skin that’s alive and has blood vessels. The new technique could greatly accelerate the healing process for patients who require skin grafts, such as burn victims. In an animal trial phase, the printed skin even connected to a mouse’s own blood vessels.

This could be a game changer for burn victims.

This wearable gill could help you breathe underwater.

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a way to 3D print living skin, complete with blood vessels. The advancement, published online today in Tissue Engineering Part A, is a significant step toward creating grafts that are more like the skin our bodies produce naturally.

“Right now, whatever is available as a clinical product is more like a fancy Band-Aid,” said Pankaj Karande, an associate professor of chemical and biological engineering and member of the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS), who led this research at Rensselaer. “It provides some accelerated wound healing, but eventually it just falls off; it never really integrates with the host cells.”

Continue reading “Living skin can now be 3D-printed with blood vessels included” »

A failing pipe can be tough to spot. It may cause a puddle, produce another sign of damage, or simply burst before detection. A flooded kitchen or laundry room is messy and inconvenient, but the stakes are much, much higher in nuclear power plants—which on average contain many miles of pipeline.

As concern about aging plants escalates, Vanderbilt engineers are working on an early warning system. They are using polymer coatings on the inside of the pipe and 3D-printed polymer devices infused with nanoparticles as sensors to signal the changes on the outside of the pipe. And, they hope, sound.

A huge challenge is to detect the changes in the polymer film occurring inside the pipe. To create a useful and proactive technique, the team wants to use sound, or vibrometry, to identify these internal changes from outside the pipe.

Bio printing footage provided by College of Engineering, and heart valve footage provided by Regenerative Biomaterials Group, Carnegie Mellon University.
https://regenerativebiomaterials.com/

Lulzbot invited us out to showcase the BIO, their OPEN SOURCE 3D printer capable of 3D bioprinting. Materials like unmodified collagen and fetal stem cells! It’s open source, and launches at a price of $7500 USD.

Continue reading “3D Printing Organs is CLOSER thanks to Lulzbot BIO” »

I n August, three graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University were crammed together in a small, windowless basement lab, using a jury-rigged 3D printer frame to zap a slice of mouse brain with electricity.

The brain fragment, cut from the hippocampus, looked like a piece of thinly sliced garlic. It rested on a platform near the center of the contraption. A narrow tube bathed the slice in a solution of salt, glucose, and amino acids. This kept it alive, after a fashion: neurons in the slice continued to fire, allowing the experimenters to gather data. An array of electrodes beneath the slice delivered the electric zaps, while a syringe-like metal probe measured how the neurons reacted. Bright LED lamps illuminated the dish. The setup, to use the lab members’ lingo, was kind of hacky.

University of Maine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center just printed a 25-foot, 5,000-pound boat, the largest object that has ever been printed. The exorbitant act earned the college no less than three Guinness World Records.

The awards are as follows: one for the world’s largest prototype polymer 3D printer, one for the largest solid 3D-printed object, and one for the largest boat which has ever been produced by a 3D printer. The 3D printer is designed to print objects as long as 100 feet by 22 feet wide by 10 feet high, and can print at 500 pounds per hour.

Continue reading “World’s Biggest 3D-Printer Makes World’s Biggest 3D-Printed Boat” »

3D Printing was one example of how technological advancement made manufacturing accessible to all. Will robots take all the jobs? I doubt it, but technological advancement will make many things inaccessible, accessible to many more than before, by lowering the cost of production. This is but one example.

Better clear out several shelves of storage space, vinylheads, because your record collection is about to expand into infinity. Soon, you’ll be able to get absolutely anything on vinyl. Even better—you’ll be able to make it.

The Phonocut is an at-home vinyl lathe, allowing anyone with a digital audio file and a dream to make a 10-inch record.