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Coffee Mugs, Human Organs, and AK-47s
By: Chris Tell at: http://capitalistexploits.at/
In a post entitled "The Future of Manufacturing" we pontificated on one of the technologies which our team and network had been encountering around the world. What we were seeing with 3D printing we believed was changing our world. Naturally, as investors we found an interest in the technology, even if only for the mental stimulation it elicits.
Though we've been looking, we've not managed to find a suitable private equity deal in which to invest in this space. We missed a couple while still private, unfortunately. Sure, we could buy publicly-listed plays, but that's not typically what we do. Those public companies which sport hundred million dollar plus market caps were, not long ago, startups being financed with sub $5m valuations. You do the math.
A company I was recently introduced to is the world's largest producer of 3D Titanium printed materials. Weapons, intricate machine parts, the list is unbelievable. Things I literally never even knew existed. NASA for example are sending a 3D printer up into space so that astronauts can print themselves tools or spare parts. Why lug an entire laundry list of spare parts if you can just print on demand?
The process is equally unbelievable. You'd be forgiven thinking that there is some sort of black magic at work. What this company and others like them are doing would not be out of place in a Harry Potter movie.
When I mentioned what I have been looking at to my wife her response was, "Is that some sort of jazzed up, turbo-charged Lexmark?". She was being facetious, but I assure you the machines are nothing like your inkjet, though they can be surprisingly small.
The company founder and I spoke about where the future lies. Combining 3D printing with nanotechnology is completely mind blowing. Imagine a world where materials are "printed" only to move about and execute pre-programmed orders. The technology for this exists and is being tested NOW. Little nano bot armies being created, and re-creating themselves and other things.
Right now MIT's Skylar Tibbits are printing objects which can change shape. They do this using "shape memory plastics." Think of your favourite shoe, which is now moulded to your own foot, bunyons and all. Well, how about printing a new shoe which changes its shape according to your specifications? Call it Bunyon shoe 1.0. Pretty cool.
Tailor made products in the future will be exactly that. Imagine for a minute a body scan which takes all your measurements, together with how you walk, run, swing a golf club, or sit in a chair. Feed this information into a computer which then produces you optimal clothing designs for your particular body. Now off to the printer you go and just print your shoes, trousers and shirts. Yes, clothing is being 3D printed.
Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing has already radically changed the prosthetics industry. Take a look at this video.
As nice as it may be to have really comfortable clothing... and how amazing it is to change peoples lives as shown in the video, where this technology gets really important is in life sciences.
There is a scene in Star Wars where Luke Skywalker has his hand repaired by robots. George Lucas knew nothing about 3D printing at the time (or did he?), but his depictions of a future replete with technology is startlingly accurate. Bio-printing involves the printing of human cells. Organs are tricky to print, but skin grafts through to blood vessels are much easier to print due to their structure being predominantly flat.
Printing skin commercially is very close to coming mainstream. It is now possible to utilize laser technology to generate a map of a wound together with precise measurements, and to then print a skin graft specifically for that particular wound. Say goodbye to generic and painful skin grafts.
While it's not mainstream yet, successful printing of bone and muscle implants have been conducted. Organs have already been bio-printed, though I've not come across any evidence of successful implants being done... yet.
Researchers at the University of Sydney, MIT, Stanford and Harvard have successfully printed blood vessels.
"While recreating little parts of tissues in the lab is something that we have already been able to do, the possibility of printing three-dimensional tissues with functional blood capillaries in the blink of an eye is a game changer," said Dr. Luiz Bertassoni, the study's lead author and a University of Sydney researcher.
When?
Apparently experts are predicting that we're 10 years away from seeing much of this on the "shelves." As always, Government are a barrier to development, but what I expect to happen is that "friendly" jurisdictions will open up to the technology and attract a lot of the talent and skill. At then end of the day what is being developed is IP. That IP can and will hop on a plane to friendlier climes.
Certainly my children will be living in a very different world from that which we enjoy today. This is an incredibly disruptive technology and there will be some massive home runs in this space... of that I'm sure.
- Chris
"The next episode of 3D printing will involve printing entirely new kinds of materials. Eventually we will print complete products - circuits, motors, and batteries already included. At that point, all bets are off." - Hod Lipson
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Human body will have service interval like cars now. Replace this organ once every 60 years!
Who dafuq would want to live that long? Death is necessary.
The only game changer will be increased efficiency as humankind has always done and ... more people having to live on handouts with no chance of a job.
That is the cold hearted reallity of the system we live in and also where being at the top you manipulate the system so you can live as a parasite off the rest.
John Coltrane: "A gun, made of a metal alloy powder such as stainless steel would be worthless since its strength would be comprised by the small grain size and the oxide defects in the atomic lattice."
http://www.solidconcepts.com/news-releases/worlds-first-3d-printed-metal...
http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/07/3d-printed-metal-gun-hitting-the-market/
Reminds me of the time that big honking printer started getting an infinite loop of page eject commands. Time to write some Sci-Fi, or it you wait too long it will be non fiction of printers gone wild...
As the oil supply begins to decline, wars will start all over the place. There will be very little energy left over for repairing cells or whatever.
Oil supply decline also means increasing cost for plastics and elastomers since oil is the primary feedstock for many of those materials.
I've always felt it is short sighted for the world to burn its non-renewable storehouse of raw materials, for heating buildings. Far better that we burn coal, because it is more difficult to use as a feedstock.
Its amazing how ignorant of basic materials science the author is. For example, what is the "ink" used to make metal parts such as Titanium, Ti. Why Ti metal powder of course. But Ti metal powder, like Al, Fe and other metal powders is unstable in air and oxidizes to TiO2. So, you're sintering TiO2 particles to form a ceramic, not metal part. It will have none of the bonding, strength and elasticity properties of a desired metal part made from pure Ti metal which has only a thin oxide layer (which actually protects it from further oxidation). So, although you can make plastic models readily by this process, making metal parts with the proper materials properties is a big lie. They would fracture and crack under load just like all ceramics since they lack the metal-metal bonds, having instead M-O-M bonds. A gun, made of a metal alloy powder such as stainless steel would be worthless since its strength would be comprised by the small grain size and the oxide defects in the atomic lattice. You want large grain size and a perfect crystal structure as in jet engine turbines to maximize strength in a metal.
As for making organs or blood vessels-this is absurd. How will the cell wall be fabricated from lipids, not to mention the mitochondia, histones, DNA etc. This must be done in a aqueous, buffered environment. We already have a method to grow tissues in parallel by cell cloning. Printing is a serial process. We can amplify DNA using PCR etc. and then express desired protein components as desired. And even in these cases immune system rejection of grown tissues is still the biggest problem. You must match the cell surface antigens to the individuals unique biochemistry.
Junk science at its worse.
Do Androids dream of electric sheep Dr. Tyrell?
As with most technology, this is just the beginning. You ass-u-me that this will hold for the long term and that process improvements are not forthcoming; an obvious oversight. The metallurgy is well understood and the processes can be adapted/improved to address the concerns and current limitations that you mentioned. Without a doubt, 3-D printing is a revolutionary and not evolutionary technology.
I actually held and dry fired the "3D printed" Colt 1911 last fall. it took a skilled machinist two weeks to deburr and otherwise clean up the parts. The same machinist could have made three or four in that time the old fashioned way.
http://medcitynews.com/2014/07/breakthrough-artificial-organs/
Don't pop the champagne corks yet.
The article mentions using human endothelial cells; where do they get those? I assume a human cadaver, in which case you probably face the rejection issues of organ transplants. Blood vessels have only a monolayer of such cells, so if you want to scrape some to use from the patient, you won't get much (without much damage) and will need to grow them in culture, not a fast process.
In other words, the article you cited is exciting, but the process cannot be as simple and fast as suggested.
Correct Grouchy. I agree. That said I've been watching this space from afar and the advances are amazing. 10 years ago what is being tested in R&D was unthinkable.
Correct!
John, I agree with your comment about printing cellular organs, but there is still commendable work being done presently in building inert "bone scaffolds" into which a body's bone will grow, to replace, for example, a missing piece of jawbone.
Also, regarding metal printing, why wouldn't it be possible to build reasonably strong metal parts from a thin wire "filament" which is laser melted in vacuum?
<delete doublepost>
print gold
bitchez
I am now retarded bitchez
Who knows? Someday they may even devise a way to print sound money
Sound money -- is that a rock band?
Clones!
DUN DUN DUN...
*high pitched scream*
If we don't blow ourselves back into the stone-age that is.
That's been my thought for sometime. Basically from history showing that some civilizations were a lot smarter than we thought. We now have the technology to make anything from the push of a button and also have the power to blow up the entire planet tens of thousands of times and have crazy people in charge of it all.
Talk about a fork in the road.
And as history has shown us, civilizations goes the route of destruction... The fork you speak of indicates we had a choice, that never is the case.