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Picture an assembly line that isn’t made up of robotic arms spewing sparks to weld heavy steel, but a warehouse of plastic-spraying printers producing light, cheap and highly efficient automobiles.

If Jim Kor’s dream is realised, that’s exactly how the next generation of urban runabouts will be produced. His creation is called the Urbee 2 and it could revolutionise parts manufacturing while creating a cottage industry of small-batch automakers intent on challenging the status quo.

Urbee’s approach to maximum miles per gallon starts with lightweight construction — something that 3D printing is particularly well suited for. The designers were able to focus more on the optimal automobile physics, rather than working to install a hyper efficient motor in a heavy steel-body automobile. As the Urbee shows, making a car with this technology has a slew of beneficial side effects.

Jim Kor is the engineering brains behind the Urbee. He’s designed tractors, buses, even commercial swimming pools. Between teaching classes, he heads Kor Ecologic, the firm responsible for the 3D printed creation.

“We thought long and hard about doing a second one,” he says of the Urbee. “It’s been the right move.”

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Here’s something Star Trek never thought up: creating 3D works of art in a virtual reality and then replicating your finalized creations. Well, we just went hands-on with a system that does just that. And while our artistic skills might have turned out a little lacking, our minds are still blown by what we might accomplish with the Leonar3do virtual reality sculptor.

We stumbled upon Leonar3do at the New York Inside 3D Printing expo, and couldn’t have been more impressed. The Leonar3do system consists of a snazzy stylus (dubbed “the bird”), a pair of 3D glasses and a set of line sensors, which mount onto your 3D monitor. The line sensors track not only your glasses but the bird as well, optimizing your 3D experience.

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It sounds like the ultimate do-it-yourself project: the print-your-own-home.

In place of bricks and mortar and the need for a construction crew, a customisable building plan which transforms itself from computer screen graphics into a real-world abode thanks to the latest in 3D printing technology.

That dream is still beyond our reach, but several teams of architects across the globe are engaged in efforts to take a major step towards it by creating the world’s first 3D-printed homes.

Amsterdam-based Dus Architects is one of the firms involved – it plans to print a canal house in the Dutch capital.

It’s worth taking a moment to reflect on that premise; the machine will not modestly 3D-print the usual cup, curtain ring or piece of jewellery, but an actual building.

The printer that will make this possible – the KamerMaker – is a marvel in itself. The name translates from Dutch as “room-maker”.

With a shiny metallic exterior, built from the carcass of a shipping container, it is 6m (19ft 8in) tall and would easily fill the average sitting room.

Using different types of plastics and wood fibres, the device takes computer-drawn plans and uses them to make first the building’s exterior walls, then the ceilings and other parts of individual rooms and then finally its furniture.

The pieces will be assembled on site like a huge jigsaw with parts attached to each other thanks to some of their edges having being shaped like giant Lego pieces, and the use of steel cabling to “sew” the elements together.

Each part is created using a layer-by-layer process in which solid objects take shape by printing thin “slices” of the construction materials, one level at a time, which bind together.

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For the first time, scientists have printed structures that mimic the texture, consistency and certain properties of biological tissue.

The manmade “tissues” are nothing more than water droplets encased in oil, stacked atop one another, but the scientists were able to construct stable structures that held their form for weeks, structures that conducted electricity and even structures that folded similarly to how muscle cells do.

“These structures ―you can see them as basic tissues,” said Alex Graham, a doctoral student at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, and one of the authors of the new paper describing the materials. “It’s such a simple structure…but you can foresee in the future you could start to functionalize it in a way that could be useful.”

The researchers used a type of 3D printer to eject an aqueous solution (water containing some salts) into a bead of oil, which was suspended in more of the aqueous solution. By carefully arranging the droplets, the researchers were able to get them to stick together. In other words, Graham said, “You’re just dropping spheres onto other sticky spheres.”

After the “print” was completed, the researchers skimmed off the extra oil, leaving a sturdy, jelly-like structure that somewhat resembled brain and fat tissues.

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In what will be the first operation of its kind, an anonymous man is on track to receive a 3D-printed prosthesis that will replace 75 percent of his skull cap, according to Oxford Performance Materials (OPM), the company that is supplying the cranium replacement.

The news comes after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave OPM its approval to use poly-ether-ketone-ketone (PEKK) as a skull implant. As opposed to metallic compounds such as stainless steel and titanium found in many prosthetics, PEKK has the advantage of being more flexible, more resistant to abrasion, and more similar to bone in terms of density and stiffness.

And now people with skulls injured by disease or trauma are now cleared to get operations in the U.S., even though OPM has been selling 3D-printed implants as a contract manufacturer overseas.

According to TechNewsDaily, OPM’s 3D-printed prosthetics can also encourage cell growth:

“3D printing’s advantage comes from taking the digitally scanned model of a patient’s skull and ‘printing’ out a matching 3D object layer by layer. The precise manufacturing technique can even make tiny surface or edge details on the replacement part that encourage the growth of cells and allow bone to attach more easily.”

OPM president Scott DeFelice says up to 500 patients in the U.S. could benefit from skull bone replacement every month, specifically those with cancerous skull bones, car accident victims and U.S. military personnel. The skull prosthetic will lay the groundwork for using PEKK to replace other bony voids says DeFelice, which will be a huge win for medical science and another win for 3D-printing.