At these kinds of physical scales, biology is almost certainly a much larger market than mechanical applications. A 20 um line width (slightly less than one thou for US folks) is certainly a tolerance you might encounter on a drawing for subtractive manufacturing, but for addative, feature sizes that small will be strength limited.
Member sizes below the critical diameter for flaw-sensitivity are crucial to the hardness and durability of, for example, human teeth and limpet teeth, as well as the resilience of bone and jade. Nearly all metals, glasses, and ceramics are limited to a tiny percentage of their theoretical mechanical performance by flaw-sensitivity.
Laparoscopes that require smaller incisions are better laparoscopes. Ideally you could thread in a biopsy-needle instrument through a large vein to almost anywhere in the body.
Visible-light optical metamaterials such as negative-index lenses require submicron feature sizes.
I know a research group that is gluing battery-powered RFID transponders to honeybees.
Electrophoretic e-paper displays are orders of magnitude more power-hungry than hypothetical MEMS flip-dot displays. We just don't have an economical way to make those.
And of course MEMS gyroscopes, accelerometers, and DLP chips are already mass-market products.
There's still a lot of room at the bottom, even if EUV takes thetakes purely computational opportunities off the table.
Biological applications (of which tooth and bone would of course be included) are extremely well-suited for additive manufacturing because they're frequently one-offs, and therefore cannot scale, and oftentimes highly insensitive to price. Mass market products are a whole different ball game; even for applications where there isn't currently an economical manufacturing method, I'm very skeptical that there's a path where AM could be scaled out to the volumes required to sell the end component at a commercially viable cost.
To be fair though, I didn't do a good job expressing that, because I just took it for granted that it would be clear that large ratios between feature size and nozzle size are rarely economical for FDM-style AM, which isn't necessarily an obvious observation.
I didn't mean that you could 3-D print tiny laparoscopes or even visible-light metamaterials; I meant that you could 3-D print machines for making tiny laparoscopes and visible-light metamaterials.
I agree that FDM-like 3-D printing is not currently attractive for feature sizes many times larger than the nozzle size. You'd need printers with thousands or millions of "hotends".
With respect to biological applications of 3-D printing, I think you're overlooking the part of the iceberg that's currently below the waterline of economic feasibility. Biological applications of 3-D printing are frequently highly-price-insensitive one-offs that cannot scale because people don't even consider the things that will become possible when prices drop by a factor of a billion or a trillion.
Huh, thanks for the clarification, that's an angle I hadn't considered.
> I think you're overlooking the part of the iceberg that's currently below the waterline of economic feasibility.
Hm. I think to a degree you probably have a point; I certainly agree that people tend to overlook the explosion of new development that is made possible by drastic cost reductions, though with the aside that having price insensitive applications is often instrumental in developing the technology that enables those cost reductions in the first place, because it allows for profitability early on in the technology's maturation, as opposed for "well it won't be profitable until we hit X milestone in Y years".
That being said, it's not clear to me how many mass-market biological applications would be possible under reasonable regulatory regimes. Maybe I'm just showing my ignorance when it comes to small-scale biological applications, but can you name some examples? (Or is this more of a "you never know until somebody does it" kind of thing?)
Tissue-printing type stuff, not plastic
> The ink used for the proof of extrusion demonstration is a ready-to-use, polyethylene oxide–based training bioink purchased and used directly from the vendor (Cellink Start, Cellink)
> The ink used for the honeycomb demonstration and the maple leaf demonstration is a sacrificial, temperature-sensitive, 40% (w/v) Pluronic F-127 in deionized water bioink purchased and used directly from the vendor (Pluronic F-127, Allevi).
> The ink used for the first cell-laden grid demonstration is Pluronic F-127 bioink with B16 cancer cells suspended in solution.
> The ink used for the second cell-laden grid demonstration is Pluronic F-127 bioink embedded with RBCs.
> The ink used for the cell viability experiments is Pluronic F-127 bioink with B16 cancer cells suspended in solution.
Of course I suspect it will be the former but the latter is way funnier.
We've been stuck with these insects for a while. It would be so funny that the solution to get rid of them was in fact the same that wiped out many species before: over exploitation of natural resources.
Our most successful efforts at wiping out wild mosquitos, though, don't produce useful corpses. So I don't think it's particularly realistic for high industrial demand to lead to mosquito extinction anyway.
I mean for a printing nozzle with an inner diameter of 20 µm, how much material would be wasted if it was made out of plastic or metal? I get that no such nozzle is available and/or easily made, but shouldn't that be the point of the invention, rather than "yay, it's biodegradable so we save a microgram of plastic/metal"?
The university's marketing department has been instructed to emphasize sustainability in its press releases, and the website reporting it has, like most news organisations that have survived, made the choice not to hire journalists with critical thinking skills but to have them rephrase press releases.
"100% finer", who uses language like this? I don't even know what it means. How about "half the diameter"?
In other words, kids won't learn "150% more" but instead "2.5x". Nothing will be described as "shrinks by 30%", it'll just be 0.70x.
While advertisers/marketers may love percentages for tricking people with a Big Happy Number, mathematically they are extra work at best, and sometimes they just ruin everything like this "100% finer" nonsense."
The bee is even more impressive: https://superspl.at/view?id=ac0acb0e
This is one of the smallest scale cases I’ve heard of, but not nearly as weird or innovative as it sounds at first blush.
People have long been making analogous use of stomachs, intestines, even skulls if you go back far enough.
backprop1989•2mo ago
metalman•2mo ago
faidit•2mo ago
peasants under technofeudalism don't really need those parts anyway, since we'll be evolving into vat people with brain chips soon in the new necropia
exasperaited•2mo ago
Not a problem for a dancer in a robot suit though.
debesyla•2mo ago
profsummergig•2mo ago
nkrisc•2mo ago
alterom•2mo ago
In the future, humans won't need to die to have their neurons sold off as hardware for the AI.
Incidentally, that's the original idea behind the movie Matrix: humans are used as CPUs for the Matrix. The word is, the idea was too advanced for the audience and was dumbed down into "humans are batteries".
I guess we'll have to treat Morpheus as unreliable narrator, or assume that the real energy in the future is compute, and suddenly the movie makes 100x more sense.
Moosdijk•2mo ago
dmurray•2mo ago
The necroprinter prints cancer.
b3lvedere•2mo ago
GuB-42•2mo ago
amelius•2mo ago
viraptor•2mo ago
Reminds me of the Metalocalypse on Christmas trees: "It's like having a rotting corpse in your house, but the corpse of a tree, you know? It's kind of baddass. It stands and then you humiliate it even further by hanging ornaments all over it,"
You can make anything metal if you try hard enough.
amelius•2mo ago
kragen•2mo ago