Check out this post from Pete Prodoehl’s RasterWeb that explores some of the food safety concerns for 3D printing + food. This is an area that I have been exploring extensively — and will be sharing some great techniques in the Adafruit Learning System in the near future — so I was happy to see other people covering this.
As a secret preview, I’ll let you know now that I am finding that rolling up your sleeves and learning mold making techniques from those who work in design kitchens is the best place to start to eliminate some of the difficult-to-guarrantee questions about using your 3D printer for making food.
You loved Printing Violations, and you tolerated Printing Violations (Part II), so we’re back again with another episode of Printing Violations, this time looking more closely at the health issues surrounding 3D printed cookie cutters.
Licensing issues are one thing, but there is a safety concern with 3D printed cookie cutters. Here’s a look at some of the issues. (All assume you are using a home 3D printer like a MakerBot, RepRap, Printrbot, etc.)
Is ABS or PLA plastic filament food-safe?
The answers range from “probably not” to “maybe” in most cases. If you use natural filament it will be free of coloring agents, which is a step in the right direction, but unless you are specifically buying “food-safe filament” don’t expect it to be food-safe. (Keep in mind that “food-safe” is something that will be determined by local health departments, and will vary depending on where you live.)
Then there’s the printer itself, and the environment it runs in. My printer lives in a basement where I do other crazy things like run a drill press, spray glue and paint, and generally make a mess. Would you want your cookie cutter manufactured in such an environment? What has the filament come into contact with before it goes into the machine, and what else has been introduced into the extruder as far as foreign materials? If you’ve ever read up on what it takes to make food in your home and sell it commercially, you’ll have some idea of the restrictions involved. (Wait, we aren’t selling food, right? We’ll get to that, be patient!)
Can 3D printed items be treated to be safe(er?)
If you’ve ever looked at a 3D printed object, you may notice the ridges. Since it’s built up layer upon layer, there are spaces into which food could get stuck. Of course you can try to clean your 3D printed cookie cutter, but don’t put it in the dishwasher! For PLA prints, the heat will either melt it, or deform it, or do some other nasty thing to it. ABS may be better, but you will still need to heat it enough to sterilize it, and hope you can get the crevices clean. It’s been suggested that acetone vapor finishing might be helpful. Helpful enough? Not sure.
Of course you could use your printer to make a mold and then make a food-safe cutter out of another material, but that’s not really a 3D printed cookie cutter. You could also try to coat your printed piece with a food-safe coating, but that’s a lot more work.
So why does all this matter? Because right now, there are people printing cookie cutters and selling them, and there are also people 3D printing cookie cutters, making cookies with them, and selling the cookies.
CSA Astronaut Chris Hadfield performed a simple science experiment designed by grade 10 Lockview High School students Kendra Lemke and Meredith Faulkner. The students from Fall River, Nova Scotia won a national science contest held by the Canadian Space Agency with their experiment on surface tension in space using a wet washcloth.
For the first time, a commercially available quantum computer has been pitted against an ordinary PC – and the quantum device left the regular machine in the dust.
D-Wave, a company based in Burnaby, Canada, has been selling quantum computers since 2011, although critics expressed doubt that their chips were actually harnessing the spooky action of quantum mechanics. That’s because they use a non-mainstream method called adiabatic quantum computing.
Unlike classical bits, quantum bits, or qubits, can take the values 0 and 1 at the same time, theoretically offering much faster computing speed. To be truly quantum, the qubits must be linked via the quantum property of entanglement. That’s impossible to measure while the device is operating. But in March, two separate tests of the D-Wave device showed indirect evidence for entanglement.
From the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard:
Inspired by the biology of a fly, with submillimeter-scale anatomy and two wafer-thin wings that flap at 120 times per second, robotic insects, or RoboBees, achieve vertical takeoff, hovering, and steering. The tiny robots flap their wings using piezoelectric actuators — strips of ceramic that expand and contract when an electric field is applied. Thin hinges of plastic embedded within a carbon fiber body frame serve as joints, and a delicately balanced control system commands the rotational motions in the flapping-wing robot, with each wing controlled independently in real-time. Applications of RoboBees could include distributed environmental monitoring, search-and-rescue operations, and assistance with crop pollination.
ICTP announces the release of a free, downloadable book on a new technology that has the potential to revolutionize science, education and sustainable development: three-dimensional (3D) printing. The book, titled “Low-cost 3D Printing for Science, Education and Sustainable Development”, offers a practical guide to this rapidly evolving technology, giving an overview of current research on the topic and its uses in science education. It was compiled and edited by ICTP’s Science Dissemination Unit (SDU) and can be downloaded free of cost from the website.
The affordable and easy-to-use technology is good news for developing countries, where 3D printing could open up exciting opportunities for research, education and humanitarian projects. As an institute dedicated to promoting sustainable science in the developing world, ICTP is prepared to advance the adoption of this technology in these regions. The book’s editors -Enrique Canessa, Carlo Fonda and Marco Zennaro- want readers to understand and explore the huge potential that 3D technology provides.
The book is divided into four main sections:
a detailed view on the technology with information on how to create a 3D printed object, the related open source hardware and software, the kits available in the market today, and a glimpse at future projects;
applications of 3D printing in scientific fields ranging from mathematics, physics to archaeology, space science, and medicine;
innovative ways for the technology to be used in education;
a glimpse of the immense potential the low-cost 3D technology can have on sustainable development including plastic recycling.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
You’re about to see the movie that holds the Guinness World Records™ record for the World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film. The ability to move single atoms — the smallest particles of any element in the universe — is crucial to IBM’s research in the field of atomic memory. But even nanophysicists need to have a little fun. In that spirit, IBM researchers used a scanning tunneling microscope to move thousands of carbon monoxide molecules (two atoms stacked on top of each other), all in pursuit of making a movie so small it can be seen only when you magnify it 100 million times. A movie made with atoms.
American Graphite Technologies Inc. (OTCBB: AGIN), a mineral exploration and technology development company, announces Letter of Intent with a European institute for research and development collaboration for 3D printing.
American Graphite Technologies, in collaboration with the National Academy of Science of Ukraine; National Science Centre; Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology (“KIPT”), Kharkov, Ukraine, will research the properties of graphene contained matter as working material for 3D printing. More details will be released shortly.
Graphene is a nano-material directly derived from graphite. It is a single layer of carbon only one atom thick, and it is very cheap. Graphene has been described as the “miracle material” of the 21st Century. According to mechanical engineering professor James Hone, of Columbia University, graphene is strongest material ever measured, some 200 times stronger than structural steel.
In addition, Graphene is ultra thin, transparent, flexible and electrically conductive. Because of these remarkable properties Graphene can be used to make excellent transistors, gas sensors, lower cost solar cells and display screens in mobile devices etc.
Watch [above] the short film produced by the European Graphene-Flagship initiative, “introducing graphene”.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
Scientists trying to engineer tissue typically start with biodegradable solid or gel scaffolds and then seed living cells onto them. But having greater control over cell spreading and tissue growth would be a big plus for researchers.
A scaffold made of liquid compartments could provide that versatility. A method for fabricating such frameworks has been reported by a team led by Hagan Bayley of Oxford University (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1229495).
To create liquid scaffolds, the researchers custom-built a three-dimensional printer—a device that usually constructs solid objects layer by layer—to squirt tiny liquid droplets from its nozzles. When the machine prints lipid-coated water droplets onto a platform submerged in an oil bath, the 50-µm-diameter droplets adhere to one another. Oil-water repulsion partly drives the interaction.
“Instead of fusing to form a larger droplet, the tiny droplets ‘kiss’ and form a very thin bilayer interface” because of their lipid coatings, says former Oxford graduate student and the report’s lead author Gabriel Villar….
San Francisco’s Exploratorium, which in 1969 rebooted the science museum concept into an immersive, participatory experience, is set to reopen in shiny new digs today at Pier 15. If you’ll be traveling to Maker Faire next month, you may want to pencil in a day for this. From a CNN article:
The culture of the Exploratorium has long been intertwined with the Maker Faire, the Bay Area festival that celebrates do-it-yourself projects. And its new shop, tinkering space and learning space expand on that maker spirit. The area where exhibits are tested and built with an impressive collection of large machinery is situated at the heart of the museum, now completely open so anyone can watch and chat up the staff and students at work.
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