3D Printing and the Future of Stuff

 3D Printing  

What if instead of going to the store to buy a new toilet brush, all you had to do was walk into your office and print one out? With recent advances in 3D printing, such a scenario might not be as far away as you think.

In the great video above, Hank Green from the SciShow talks about the amazing possibilities 3D printing offers.  In the video, the fast-talking Green takes on everything from printing out a replacement toilet brush on a desktop 3D printer, to the promise of bio-printing and printable meat.

3D printing technology is rapidly integrating with the fast-moving world of stem cells and regenerative medicine with 3D ink being replaced by stem cells.

In the future doctors will use 3D printing and stem cells to make libraries of replacement parts. It will start with simple tissues and eventually maybe we will be printing organs or whole organisms.  Some scientists are even saying that 3D printing is the future of organ transplants.  

Related articles 3D Scanning In The Palm Of Your Hand  Scientists Develop 3D Stem Cell Culture Method To Understand Alzheimer's Disease  Skylar Tibbits Introduces 4D Printing

Microscale 3D printing at the molecular level may also allow for custom-printing drugs.  Chemist Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow has found a way of using a Fab@Home printer to create a chemistry lab, rather than just creating the parts. 

By adding chemical reagents to the list of possible inks, he showed last year that a 3D printer could be used to print a set of reaction flasks and linking tubes out of bathroom sealant, and in the walls of these flasks he printed catalysts and sensors. Another set of liquid inks, the reagents, were then squirted into the printed equipment to carry out simple chemical reactions.

SOURCE  SciShow, Robot Image - Fab@Home

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