Thursday, February 13, 2014

TECHNOLOGY - 3D Printing Coming of Age

"From ballet shoes to human tissue, printing ideas into 3-D reality" PBS Newshour 2/12/2014

Excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour):  There is yet another technological transformation underfoot.  And this one turns ideas into physical realities right before your eyes.

Science correspondent Miles O’Brien has the story.

MILES O’BRIEN (Newshour):  At Hod Lipson’s lab, they are on the leading edge of a method of printing that presses the process into a whole new dimension, the third dimension.

HOD LIPSON, engineering professor, Cornell University:  This is a real revolution.  It can really change things forever, how we even think about design.

MILES O’BRIEN:  Lipson is an engineering professor at Cornell University.  His lab is a toy box and a playground for a new generation of designers.

Undergrad Jenna Witzleben is designing and printing some ballet shoes.

JENNA WITZLEBEN, undergraduate student, Cornell University:  This is actually a scan of the shoe itself subtracted the — the scan of my foot.

MILES O’BRIEN:  Grad student Robert MacCurdy is working on what they call bit blocks, small circuit boards.

ROBERT MACCURDY, Cornell University:  This gives us kind of a quick way of incorporating electrical functionality into 3-D printing

MILES O’BRIEN:  And Apoorva Kiran is priming the pump for projects that print in more than one material.

APOORVA KIRAN, Cornell University:  This ink is strontium ferrite.  It’s a kind of iron (INAUDIBLE)

MILES O’BRIEN:  3-D printing was invented 30 years ago, but it’s now coming of age.  The devices can print in all kinds of metals, produce food and even human tissue.  And the technology is coming home, just as computers did in the early 1980s.

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