Lifeboat Foundation

“One of the biggest roadblocks to generating functional tissue replacements has been our inability to print the complex vasculature that can supply nutrients to densely populated tissues,” said Jordan Miller, assistant professor at Rice University in the US.

“Further, our organs actually contain independent vascular networks — like the airways and blood vessels of the lung or the bile ducts and blood vessels in the liver,” Miller said.

“These interpenetrating networks are physically and biochemically entangled, and the architecture itself is intimately related to tissue function. Ours is the first bioprinting technology that addresses the challenge of multi vascularisation in a direct and comprehensive way,” he said.

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A few years ago, a friend and fellow author Manu Saadia (author of Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek) posed a question to me about the viability of creating actual cities on other planets. It was, in his mind, one of the few things about Star Trek which seemed unrealistic, because of the fact that cities here on Earth thrive due to one important reason: imports/exports, i.e. resource exchange.

As we continue planning ahead for the future of both space travel and space colonization, the need for advanced 3D printing will ultimately dictate our ability to maintain viable civilizations on other planets.

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This revolutionary model could have a major impact on organ donations.

The printed samples will help reveal how long-term space travel affects the human body.

The cosmos are filled with roughly Earth-sized exoplanets. Various moons, comets, and planets have stores of water, organic molecules, and amino acids like those that make up life on Earth.

Cathal O’Donnell, a 3D bioprinting researcher at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Melbournethose odds — he argues in The Conversation that the abundance of potentially habitable worlds out there makes the discovery of extraterrestrial life “inevitable and possibly imminent.”

Would you like to spend a night in a future 3D-printed Mars habitat? You might get the chance.

For the first time, researchers have successfully 3D printed chalcogenide glass, a unique material used to make optical components that operate at mid-infrared wavelengths. The ability to 3D print this glass could make it possible to manufacture complex glass components and optical fibers for new types of low-cost sensors, telecommunications components and biomedical devices.

In The Optical Society (OSA) journal Optical Materials Express, researchers from the Centre d’Optique, Photonique et Laser (COPL) at Université Laval in Canada, Patrick Larochelle and his colleagues, describe how they modified a commercially available 3D printer for glass extrusion. The new method is based on the commonly used technique of fused deposition modeling, in which a plastic filament is melted and then extruded layer-by-layer to create detailed 3D objects.

“3D printing of optical materials will pave the way for a new era of designing and combining materials to produce the photonic components and fibers of the future,” said Yannick Ledemi, a member of the research team. “This new method could potentially result in a breakthrough for efficient manufacturing of infrared optical components at a low cost.”

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German scientists create see-through ORGANS in a step toward 3D-printed parts that could be transplanted in the human body…

Researchers in Germany have created transparent human organs using a new technology that could pave the way to print three-dimensional body parts such as kidneys for transplants.

Continue reading “German scientists create see-through human ORGANS in step toward 3D-printed body parts” »

In an effort to scale up the manufacture of biomaterials, researchers at UC Berkeley have combined bioprinting, a robotic arm, and flash freezing in a method that may one day allow living tissue, and even whole organs, to be printed on demand. By printing cells into 2D sheets and then freezing them as assembled, the new technique improves cell survival during both building and storage.