The latest from the wonderful world of 3D printing

This is easily the technology that I'm keenly following more than any other right now.  And for plenty of good reasons...

3D printing is now capable of producing replacement bones using living cells.

Desktop-produced firearms continues to be developed and refined, beyond the control of any government.

Laser-guided 3D printing can now produce metal objects with high precision.  You will soon be taking your car into a garage and have a new custom part created in-house.

High-capacity lithium-ion batteries smaller than the size of a grain of sand have been created in the laboratory and it's thought that they could eventually be used to power ridiculously tiny gadgets, including next-generation medical devices like pacemakers.

And then there's this: 4D printing!  Objects which are manufactured in 3D "folded-up", then are allowed to self-assemble themselves.  One possible use mentioned is being able to buy furniture packed-flat from a store, bring it home and then take it out of the box and watch it put itself together.  More serious applications could be for building construction in hazardous situations.

No doubt parents across the country will be happy to know about 4D printing.  It will potentially bring an end to those most dreaded of words found on just about every toy or game box: "some assembly required"!

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Sand-based battery lasts THOUSANDS of hours

You can't recharge it - yet anyway - but a new battery designed at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel could revolutionize everything from cellphones to electric cars. Prof. Yair Ein-Eli (pictured) worked for almost three years with partners in the United States and Japan to develop the battery which gets its power from, of all things, silicon from plain ol' sand. The new battery is said to provide constant power for thousands of hours, is extremely efficient, and is already drawing considerable commercial interest. It is also very safe on the environment.

Sounds like a winner to me. We could soon see the day when these things are powering our cars... and we can then tell OPEC, literally, to go pound sand :-P

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New battery recharges in 10 seconds

Those wonderful engineers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have conjured up a new type of battery for mobile devices that recharges in just ten seconds. The battery is composed of currently existing materials and is said to be cheap to manufacture on a mass scale. Along with the extremely fast recharge rate, the new design doesn't degrade with repeated recharges as do currently existing batteries.

In addition to the uses this thing will have for gadgets like cellphones and iPods, it's thought that larger versions of these batteries can be used in electric cars: perhaps recharging for five minutes at a "fillin' station" before heading off again for long distance driving.

Sounds like an amazing breakthrough. Along with some really cool stuff I'm hearing from the data storage side of things, there looks to be a lot of neat gizmos heading our way soon :-)

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