Hearts, kings and spaceships: Five awesome uses for 3D printers

Monday, July 28, 2014, 4:58 PM - "Duck receives 3D-printed foot" is a headline that wouldn't have made a lick of sense to someone reading it 10 years ago.

We're talking about Buttercup, in the video above, who was born with one foot so badly deformed, it had to be amputated. Rather than face a one-legged future, the lucky duck was given a prosthetic, tailor-made via the growing science of 3D printing.

Bit of a tear-jerker, that story, but it's less sci-fi than it once was, as people slowly hear more and more about what this incredible technology can do - which seems to be just about anything.

Here are five incredible things you can make by putting the ingredients in the printer, hitting a switch, and sitting back for a few hours.

Hearts

Scientists at the University of Louisville in Kentucky are old hands at making small body parts, according to the Associated Press. They’ve already made artificial splints, valves and even tested tiny manufactured blood vessels in mice.

They’re a few years away from success, but their next trick: A layer-by-layer reproduction of a functioning human heart, made from the patient’s own fat cells:

As the AP reports, hearts grown in this way would be superior to donated hearts. Because they’re derived from the patient’s own cells, it would eliminate the wait for a suitable donor, and minimize the risk of rejection.

Making something out of living cells, of course, is very different from inanimate material, and figuring out how to keep the manufactured tissue alive long enough for a successfully transplant is just one of the many hurdles.

That’s not to say the team hasn’t already been saving a few hearts. Earlier this year, that same institute may have helped secure a future for a 14-month-old boy born with four serious heart defects.

To help the surgeons prepare, researchers printed a model of the boy’s heart, 1.5 times actual size, based on CT scans. And the technology is so advanced that it only took their machines 20 hours to do it. Total cost: $600.

Being able to hold that in their hands must have been a boon for doctors about to undertake a major and delicate surgery. At last report, the boy’s prognosis was favourable.

We may be far away from living hearts, but even the baby steps are huge milestones.

Kings (also, dinosaurs)

No organic tricks for this entry … scientists didn’t actually 3D-print one of England’s most notorious kings. Just his hunched and scarred remains.

Richard III ruled England for two tumultuous years before being killed in battle 1485. His death marked the end of the house of York, and his Tudor successors took care to portray him in the worst light possible, immortalized by William Shakespeare’s Richard III.

His burial place was thought lost for centuries, until a scan of a parking lot turned up the king’s buried remains. There’s a museum that opened in Leicester dedicated to his story, but the remains themselves are to be sealed in a new tomb in Leicester Cathedral.

Without the actual king to anchor their exhibit, the museum’s organizers ordered a 3D-printed replacement, made out of a kind of plastic:

Aside from looking spiffy, the remains have shed a lot of light on the king (he was shorter than people imagine, and his stature was due to a curvature of the spine from a condition called scoliosis, not from being a hunchback). The damage to some of the bones also tells a quite gruesome story about how he died.

But the technology is useful not just for historians, but paleontologists.

This may seem like an odd place to start but, remember the 2001 Jurassic Park III film? If you don’t (or would prefer not to), have a look at the scene below, where a velociraptor’s nasal resonating chamber was replicated with a field 3D printer.

That seemed ridiculously futuristic at the time, but now institutes like the Smithsonian and American Museum of Natural History use 3D printers as teaching tools for students. For research purposes, a 3D-printed replica fossil is easier to transport between researchers, without the risk of damaging the original.

For more giant creatures like Apatosaurus and its like, 3D printers can make smaller-scale versions of its skeletal structure, allowing paleontologists to piece it together and see how it works, a method unworkable with the gigantic real-life fossils.

Some scientists are more ambitious: They intend to eventually print out entire limbs, including muscle and tissue, and eventually a full dinosaur model, at any scale necessary.

Food

You might call 3D printing the last frontier of processed food.

With the technology improving in leaps and bounds, almost everything from chocolate to pastries to pasta can be produced using one of these machines. Like other formulas, you put the ingredients (usually some kind of paste) into the machine, enter your specs and away you go.

You could eventually even have one of these in your kitchen one day although, as is the case with the “Foodini,” be prepared to shell out more than $1,000:

It’s not just useful for home cooking and restaurants. One company in Germany produces printers designed to take fresh ingredients and make them into food suitable for elderly nursing home residents.

Then there’s the long-term challenge of feeding our planet’s ballooning population. You can make 3D printed hamburger patties out of a mixture of fat and cow muscle grown from stem cells, cutting down the cost (and CO2 emissions) of actually rearing entire herds of cows.

If it can be done on a global scale, this would be huge, given rising consumer demand in parts of the developing world that have been rapidly industrializing. But this dissenting voice notes all the new food we can produce would, by definition, be highly processed, leading to increased rates of obesity.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station could probably live with that. NASA is sending up a 3D printer, and one of things on its eventual to-do list: Pizza.

Making food this way could cut down on storage and refrigeration costs, a boon in an environment where every scrap of storage space and joule of energy counts, although NASA says the printer itself may not get around to making the food for a few more years at least.

Actually, about that space printer…

NEXT PAGE: Giant spaceships, and galaxies in the palm of your hand 

Spaceships

One thing Star Trek was good at was painting a picture of how life might look like in the future. There were holodecks, transporter beams and, of course, replicators: That wonderful bit of space-magic where you keyed in an order and, voila! A flash of sparkles, and whatever bit of technology you wanted was right there, ready for use.

The printer that NASA is installing in orbit would basically be that, only minus the sparkles:

The International Space Station is a series of metal tubes, careening through the most hostile environment known to man, where any kind of resupply is really hard to organize and costs an awful lot of money.

As the folks in the video above note, 3D printing is useful not only for producing experiment materials, but spare parts, out of a pre-determined stock of raw materials.

And if you think that’s useful, imagine how crucial that technology would be on a years-long Mars mission.

When you think of it in that context, though, “spaceship parts” kind of sounds like smallish, nuts-and-bolts components, rather than heavy-duty workhorse infrastructure. But it turns out the technology can produce rocket engine parts as well as small spares (check out the hot-fire test footage in the video below):

NASA says those 3D rocket injectors worked about as well as those produced by traditional methods. It also took only a few weeks from development to testing, which is fast by the standards of rocket science.

And looking to orbit: NASA is funding a company that will combine 3D printing and robotics to build spaceships and infrastructure right in space, without the need to launch components from the ground.

It’s years away from testing, but if it goes through, that’s another cost-cutter. Shooting things into space with rockets is expensive. Way cheaper to just build them up there.

Palm-sized nebulas

Some of the space structures mentioned in the entry up above could be a kilometer or more long. But 3D printers can also take something impossibly huge, and make it small enough to handle.

The binary star system Eta Carinae, located 7,500 light years away, went boom in the mid 1800s, making it the brightest object in the night sky for a time and sending two gas clouds careening into space at speeds of more than 2.4 million km/h.

Astronomers have always been quite fascinated with this night-sky gem, and thanks to 3D printing, they can reach out and touch it:

Yep. They took dozens of observations using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, fed the results into a computer, and managed to get an accurate replica of the galaxy’s shape, palm-sized.

DON'T MISS: Read expert commentary on the breakthrough from Scott Sutherland.

It was a huge boon for them, and the breakthroughs will be great. But what does the technology mean for the average space enthusiast?

Well, aside from the galaxy, NASA recently released a whole suite of 3D print designs, available to the public.

There’s the classics: Scale models of Voyager, Cassini and many other pioneering space probes. But you can also print accurate versions of asteroids like Eros and Vesta, along with landscapes of the near and far side of the moon.

For Mars, they have designs for the enormous Valles Marineris canyon, and the Gale Crater, landing site for NASA’s Curiosity Rover.

Star Wars fans, keep waiting for now, though. It’s all real-life space ships and landmarks, so the Death Star plans are not (yet) in the main computer.