actress of pakistan

Can you guess with what material is this printGREEN 3d printer from Slovenia printing?



The material is mixture of water, fertile soil and seeds. After some time, seeds sprout and plants start to grow. It is a sort of design art  project but I think this technology could be used in some agricultural or gardening machinery.

The team behind this project:Maja Petek, Tina Zidanšek, Urška Skaza, Danica Rženičnik and Simon Tržan. They worked with assistant professor Dušan Zidar to develop it. The original name in Slovenian is “Tiskaj ZELENO”. 
Project homepage:

http://tiskajzeleno.wix.com/tiskaj-zeleno#!printgreen/c4nw



























On personal note: Slovenians are our dear neighbors and I had several technology, art and DIY workshops with them. They have cool art-tech scene and are pretty chill crowd to hang out with.

Here is another cool project from Slovenia:

http://diy3dprinting.blogspot.com/2013/08/koruza-using-diy-3d-printing-for-laser.html

Printing blood vessels out of sugar at Uni Pennsylvania lab.


From video description:

Bioengineers have been steadily advancing toward the goal of building lab-grown organs out of a patient's own cells, but a few major challenges remain. One of them is making vasculature, the blood vessel plumbing system that delivers nutrients and remove waste from the cells on the inside of a mass of tissue. Without these blood vessels, interior cells quickly suffocate and die.
Scientists can already grow thin layers of cells, so one proposed solution to the vasculature problem is to "print" the cells layer by layer, leaving openings for blood vessels as necessary. But this method leaves seams, and when blood is pumped through the vessels, it pushes those seams apart.
Bioengineers from the University of Pennsylvania have turned the problem inside out by using a 3D printer called a RepRap to make templates of blood vessel networks out of sugar. Once the networks are encased in a block of cells, the sugar can be dissolved, leaving a functional vascular network behind.
"I got the first hint of this solution when I visited a Body Worlds exhibit, where you can see plastic casts of free-standing, whole organ vasculature," says Bioengineering postdoc Jordan Miller.
Miller, along with Christopher Chen, the Skirkanich Professor of Innovation in the Department of Bioengineering, other members of Chen's lab, and colleagues from MIT, set out to show that this method of developing sugar vascular networks helps keep interior cells alive and functioning.
After the researchers design the network architecture on a computer, they feed the design to the RepRap. The printer begins building the walls of a stabilizing mold. Then it then draws filaments across the mold, pulling the sugar at different speeds to achieve the desired thickness of what will become the blood vessels.
After the sugar has hardened, the researchers add liver cells suspended in a gel to the mold. The gel surrounds the filaments, encasing the blood vessel template. After the gel sets it can be removed from the mold with the template still inside. The block of gel is then washed in water, dissolving the remaining sugar inside. The liquid sugar flows out of the vessels it has created without harming the growing cells.
"This new technology, from the cell's perspective, makes tissue formation a gentle and quick journey," says Chen.
The researchers have successfully pumped nutrient-rich media, and even blood, through these gels blocks' vascular systems. They also have experimentally shown that more of the liver cells survive and produce more metabolites in gels that have these networks.
The RepRap makes testing new vascular architectures quick and inexpensive, and the sugar is stable enough to ship the finished networks to labs that don't have 3D printers of their own. The researchers hope to eventually use this method to make implantable organs for animal studies.
Text by Evan Lerner
Video by Kurtis Sensenig

via: http://go3dprinting.tumblr.com/

http://www.upenn.edu/spotlights/rep-rap-3d-printing-blood-vessel-networks

From source page:

A handheld ‘bio pen’ developed in the labs of the University of Wollongong (UOW) will allow surgeons to design customised implants on-site and at the time of surgery.
The BioPen, developed by researchers from the UOW-headquarteredAustralian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES), will give surgeons greater control over where the materials are deposited while also reducing the time the patient is in surgery by delivering live cells and growth factors directly to the site of injury, accelerating the regeneration of functional bone and cartilage.

The BioPen works similar to 3D printing methods by delivering cell material inside a biopolymer such as alginate, a seaweed extract, protected by a second, outer layer of gel material. The two layers of gel are combined in the pen head as it is extruded onto the bone surface and the surgeon ‘draws’ with the ink to fill in the damaged bone section.
A low powered ultra-violet light source is fixed to the device that solidifies the inks during dispensing, providing protection for the embedded cells while they are built up layer-by-layer to construct a 3D scaffold in the wound site.

Once the cells are ‘drawn’ onto the surgery site they will multiply, become differentiated into nerve cells, muscle cells or bone cells and will eventually turn from individual cells into a thriving community of cells in the form of a functioning a tissue, such as nerves, or a muscle.
The device can also be seeded with growth factors or other drugs to assist regrowth and recovery, while the hand-held design allows for precision in theatre and ease of transportation.
The BioPen prototype was designed and built using the 3D printing equipment in the labs at the University of Wollongong and was this week handed over to clinical partners at St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne, led by Professor Peter Choong, who will work on optimising the cell material for use in clinical trials.

The BioPen will help build on recent work by ACES researchers where they were able to grow new knee cartilage from stem cells on 3D-printed scaffolds to treat cancers, osteoarthritis and traumatic injury.
Professor Peter Choong, Director of Orthopaedics at St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne and the Sir Hugh Devine Professor of Surgery, University of Melbourne said:
“This type of treatment may be suitable for repairing acutely damaged bone and cartilage, for example from sporting or motor vehicle injuries. Professor Wallace’s research team brings together the science of stem cells and polymer chemistry to help surgeons design and personalise solutions for reconstructing bone and joint defects in real time.”

The BioPen will be transferred to St Vincent’s for clinical projects to be carried out at the proposed Aikenhead Centre for Medical Discovery in Melbourne.
“The combination of materials science and next-generation fabrication technology is creating opportunities that can only be executed through effective collaborations such as this,” ACES Director Professor Gordon Wallace said.
“What’s more, advances in 3D printing are enabling further hardware innovations in a rapid manner.”
Design expertise and fabrication of the BioPen was supported by the Materials Node of the Australian National Fabrication Facility, hosted at the University of Wollongong’s Innovation Campus.

Source:

http://media.uow.edu.au/news/UOW162803?utm_source=uow-homepage&utm_medium=main-banner-1&utm_campaign=news-biopen

Eric David, Chief Strategy Officer of Organovo, talks to San Diego's Disruptive Thinkers about his company's role in the 3D printing revolution: human tissue printing. Filmed at the Co-Merge workplace in downtown San Diego.




Bioprinting and Organovo short video:



http://www.organovo.com/


Organovo company profile video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-A-uH15bQZw

For those special projects where you need to print something with living cells ...

Project description:

CellStruder is a 20mL syringe extruder powered by a NEMA stepper motor, capable of of precise liquid extrusion at the microliter level. Originally developed in Jeff Tabor's lab at Rice University, this device is currently being used for cell printing, enabling research in synthetic biology, biological pattern formation and engineering of cellular logic. An example print of E. coli cells expressing green fluorescent protein is shown above as well as microscopy of printed cells.

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:109040 by Ravi Sheth