3D Printers: An Economic Game-Changer Pt 1

There's a storm brewing in the world of manufacturing. Its a slow steady build up of clouds on the horizon, slow because F=Ma. Truly massive things take a long time to get up to full speed. 3D printers and the technology of rapid prototyping have existed for several years but the amazing (sometimes frightening) implications of these extraordinary machines are only now coming to the fore. There are many parallels  between this imminent revolution and the one which propelled computers out of university labs and onto desks and laps everywhere. 3D printers are right at the point where PCs were just before Bill Gates and Steve Jobs turned them into big business. They're sitting in workshops and hacker-spaces all over the world but have yet to make the leap into the realm of household appliances. The truth is they just aren't good enough. Not everyone is a hacker/tinkerer just like in the 70s not everyone was a programmer willing to invest time, effort and money into getting the damn thing to work. They still aren't but we overcame that with GUIs. The hobbiest 3d printers on sale today are too slow, too complicated to use and too limited in what they can produce. For now.
  Presently these little machines can only make small plastic items, just toys and simple parts for little gadgets and machines but when you have a million intelligent creative people working with these machines how long will it be until they are routinely printing with metal or begin printing circuitry straight into the parts they make?
 The first steps out of the the simple and plastic have already been taken. Accuracy improves with every new model that comes out. 100 micron resolutions are becoming common in the hobby community. The range of materials too increases. The University of Warwick has developed a 3d printable carbomorph material which conducts electricity and changes its properties when heated, compressed etc. With the right electronics attached the material can act as buttons, temperature probes, or anything else which would have required a conductive metal part before. With two extruders on your printer you can now print the bones of a circuit in the same pass as the structural material. The engineering possibilities of this should be obvious. No more seams in your gadgets for example. Engineers in Bath University started a project to design a 3d printer which can print almost all of its own parts! It's not quite there yet. There's still a lot of parts it can't make. the metal bearings and complex electronics are for now beyond the plucky little rep rap but its getting there. The implications of having a machine on your desk which can produce anything you can think of including a clone of itself are staggering. In part 2 I will explore some of these effects some with precedent already and some that are speculative.

Curiosity Is Boring And That's Exciting!

The Mars Science Laborotaire, or Curiosity as it's affectionately known, (paraphilia not withstanding) has been on Mars for a few months now but only lately have the NASA engineers begun to slowly unpack and test one of the most interesting parts of Curiosity's suite of gadgets: it's hammer action drill! A drill might be a common tool here on earth and most people would assume that it is a standard feature on mars rovers since they are sent there to study Mars' geology but in fact curiosity is the first rover with the ability to crack the surface of the red planet. Even the viking landers had scoops but they could only gather samples from soft loose soil. It's deep inside rocks and under the surface where much of the interesting chemistry lies (though Curiosity can't bore very deep hopefully it will find something of interest in those rocks). On a planet with little atmosphere and no magnetic field the surface of mars is bathed in ultraviolet radiation and high energy cosmic rays which would destroy any organic compounds, the ones vital for life, left laying on the surface. If Mars really was wet and warm long ago as many scientists believe and organic material or life did form as many scientists hope the best chance of finding it will be under the surface. It's possible that in the martian soil deep enough to be shielded from the harsh surface, kept warm by residual heat in the planets interior there's a few martian critters alive today. If they are there, or even traces of them, and realistically it was only traces of life and evidence of a watery past that Curiosity was designed to look for, Curiosity has the best chance yet of making some really exciting discoveries inside those martian rocks.