3D Printing Soft Body Parts: a Hard Problem That Just Got Easier

sciencehabit writes: Humans are squishy. That's a problem for researchers trying to construct artificial tissues and organs, and one that two separate teams of engineers may have just solved. Using a dish of goo the consistency of mayonnaise as a supporting 'bath,' a team led by biomedical engineer Adam Feinberg at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, can now print 3D biological materials that don't collapse under their own weight as they form—a difficulty that has long stood in the way of printing soft body parts (abstract). Once printed, the structures are stiff enough to support themselves, and they can be retrieved by melting away the supportive goo. The other team, from the University of Florida (UF) in Gainesville, has a similar system for printing (abstract), but without the slick trick of the melting goo.

"Squishy" . . . ?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

. . . as in "Bags of mostly water" . . . ?

Anyway, 3D printing is yesterday's technology . . . the pros are using 4D printing now: https://www.heidelberg.com/glo... [heidelberg.com]

Whatever the Hell that means . . .

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[PPH]

4D printing

Time is the fourth dimension.

"You want it when??"

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[blindseer]

I'd like french toast in the Renaissance.

Yeah That Or

[Greyfox]

I imagine zero G would make printing squishy things a lot easier. A 3D printed organ facility could probably fund the cost of launching such a facility into space.

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[GTRacer]

Woooooooow. You are one civil grammar Nazi. I'm probably not going to get anywhere with this, but you do know that other languages treat collections differently? Or the GP may have misapplied plurality to the wrong word in the phrase?

In England, for example, a company's name is often treated like a collection, not a single entity: "IBM have announced upgrades to Watson." So learning English may not be a complete answer.

Regardless, please have a nice day!

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[GTRacer]

Out of curiosity, which part was colloquial British slang?