With a 3-D printer, all you need to create whatever you can imagine is plastic or metal alloy wire and a bit of time. Using a technique called “additive manufacturing,” a 3-D printer builds up layers of material into whatever knob, part, utensil, fashion accessory, or miniature you fancy. The future possibilities for 3-D printers are endless: you could use one to build food on long-term space missions, reconstruct crime scene evidence, or even create replacement human organs.While your home 3-D printer can’t make you a new kidney, here are 10 science-inspired 3-D objects that you can make right now in your workshop.
Eat your heart out with this 3-D printed cookie cutter displaying the anterior (front) view of our blood-pumping muscle, perfectly shaped to create anatomically correct Valentine’s Day cookies. At the top sits the aorta, the largest artery in the body and the route oxygen-rich blood takes when it leaves the left ventricle. (Need more cookie-based learning? The same folks make cookie cutters for elements of the periodic table).
The soccer ball-shaped molecule buckminsterfullerene was the first near-spherical arrangement of carbon atoms ever discovered. Scientists made it easy to synthesize buckminsterfullerene in the 1990s, but it also occurs naturally in soot and was even found floating in deep space. A real “buckyball” is too small for the naked eye to see, but now you can make one big enough for your desk!
For the truly ambitious, you can download and print your own humanoid robot parts, including chest and skull plates. Need some inspiration in designing your own automaton? Perhaps you could take a cue from one of the first robots, Westinghouse’s Elektro, a massive golden machine from the 1930s that could walk, talk (using pre-recorded words played back on a record player), smoke cigarettes, and blow up balloons.
Dopamine is one of many neurotransmitters (chemicals that carry signals between nerve cells) linked to feelings of happiness. While it is best known for its role in reward-motivated behavior, dopamine is also thought to play a role in a range of conditions from Parkinson’s disease to ADHD – and can also be injected to treat a heart attack. This printed dopamine necklace won’t directly affect your brain, but you may feel a slight sense of reward when other science nerds compliment you on your good taste.
This ancient trick cup allows an unsuspecting user to consume a drink, but only in moderation. The cup’s stem hides a thin cavity that leads to a hole on the bottom. Fill the cup too full and the liquid floods the chamber, creating a siphon from the hydrostatic pressure (the weight of the water above) and draining the cup right into the overindulgent drinker’s lap. Use wisely.
Galileo was the first craft to orbit Jupiter and assist scientists in researching the gas giant and its moons. The original craft was deliberately destroyed in 2003 when NASA directed it to take a fatal swan dive into Jupiter’s atmosphere. But now it’s been resurrected in convenient toy form! At the top, you can see the low-gain antenna that transmitted data back to Earth. The long boom arms held magnetometer sensors and the generators that provided power by harnessing the decay of plutonium.
The Smithsonian is beginning to digitize many of its artifacts, and is making some of them – such as Amelia Earhart’s flight suit, Lincoln’s death mask, and this wooly mammoth – available for printing at home. These giant beasts crossed a land bridge between Asian and North America and lived with some of the first humans in North America, tens of thousands of years ago.
Technically, you’d need a 4-D printer to make a true Klein bottle. This mathematical oddity (made of two joined Mobius strips) is a bottle that would contain itself – the inside is the outside, and vice versa. The 3-D representation intersects itself, though the 4-D version wouldn’t.
This 3-D printed relief globe exaggerates land masses to illustrate the geological evolution of Earth. Many of the mountain ranges that crisscross continents are the result of tectonic plates smashing together (creating folds) or moving apart (releasing volcanic activity). The globe has to caricature these ridges, though – at accurate scaling, the mountains would be almost unnoticeable!
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