As 3D printing grows ever more popular and people use at-home devices like 3D printing pens and mini-fabricators, we’re going to encounter a pretty serious plastic problem. Plastics already place a heavy toll on the environment, but the plastic filament used to fabricate stuff at home is rarely recycled. Now, in comes Wound Up, a 3D printing filament made of recycled coffee grounds.

The product from 3Dom is actually a coffee-filled wire filament. It’s not completely free of plastic, but its plastic content is significantly lower than comparable filaments. Wound Up can be used in any printer that accepts PLA, and it creates objects with a very unique look.

Things printed using Wound Up look almost like they’re carved from wood. Their rich, deep color is reminiscent of a dark wood while the natural coffee material gives them a natural-looking grain. The inventors say the products created with Wound Up are just as sturdy as their plastic counterparts. One of their example projects is a drinking cup made of coffee grounds.

Even the spool that holds the Wound Up filament is eco-friendly. The Eco-Spool is made of plant sugars and will decompose much quicker than traditional plastic spools. This type of recycled and eco-friendly material could be a real game-changer when it comes to the environmental impact of 3D printing, which is something we should all be concerned about as the practice edges closer and closer to being a routine in-home thing.

The post Caffeine Dreams: Recycled Coffee = 3D Printing Filament first appeared on Gajitz.

With a few notable exceptions, just about all 3D printing up to this point has been done with plastic as a base material. A collaboration between MIT’s Mediated Matter Group, MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and MIT’s Glass Lab has led to a pretty exciting advancement: 3D printing with molten glass.

The group calls their process G3DP. It involves an upper cartridge acting as a kiln at up to 1900 degrees Fahrenheit. The lower chamber anneals the molten glass, allowing it to cool slowly, letting the newly-printed structure harden. The team figured out that by precisely adjusting the orientation and thickness of the optically transparent glass, they can closely control the light transmission, reflection, and refraction qualities of the finished objects.

That may sound a little like mumbo-jumbo, and the video only seems to focus on the (admittedly very impressive) artistic value of the G3DP method. But in simpler terms, it means that this method might help us make higher-quality, less-expensive fiber optics in the near future. It could even be used as a simpler method of making eyeglass lenses – and the decorative possibilities are still a pretty big part of the G3DP method’s appeal, of course. Just imagine these gorgeous bespoke light fixtures all throughout your house!

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We could make a lot of jokes about playing with your food and how you should absolutely do it at every opportunity. But it would probably be more fun to just print out a set of Open Toys so you can start turning your veggies into flying, rolling, and diving machines.

The Open Toys Project is a set of 14 3D-printable objects from Le FabShop that require little more than a few raw veggies and an imagination to enjoy. It is, in the words of the designers, “A Mr. Potato Head in the era of digital fabrication.”

The idea struck designer Samuel Bernier while he was at the annual Summer Workshop at the Domaine de Boisbuchet in southwestern France. His initial concept was to upcycle cork and wood pieces found in nature into simple toys using a 3D printer he had with him.

The workshop happened to coincide with harvest time at the estate, however, which led to instant inspiration: veggies were so much more fun (and easier to play with) than wood or cork. Bernier and his team invented toy pieces that let kids easily turn their vegetables into cars, flying machines, submarines, and wacky combinations of them all.

Le FabShop has published the 3D printing plans for all of the pieces, and they plan to continue designing new pieces. They also encourage other designers to try their hands at adding to the collection – because honestly, you can never have too many options when it comes to making apple airplanes and radish racecars.

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Modern animation is pretty incredible. It’s getting close to being indistinguishable from actual film thanks to advanced computer graphics and futuristic techniques. French artist Julien Maire is taking animation back a few decades to a kind of nostalgic stop-motion era with the short film “Relief.”

Instead of drawings on pieces of film, Relief features tiny translucent resin figurines on a conveyor belt. The 3D figures roll around the belt with a light illuminating one at a time against a projector screen.

As they roll around the belt, the small figures act out a scene of a man digging a hole and then putting the dirt back into the hole. A total of 85 tiny men rotate around and around, eternally taking dirt out and putting it back in. Their never-ending labor is a unique combination of low-tech – stop animation – and high-tech – 3D printing.

Relief isn’t just a movie to be watched on the projector screen; it’s an experience that encompasses the entire humming machine and each tiny, 3D-printed little character that casts its individual shadow. The stop-motion shadow show was built while Maire was doing a manufacturing residency at the iMAL Center for Digital Cultures and Technology in Brussels.

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Before a drug can be approved as safe for human use by the FDA, it has to undergo rigorous testing to ensure its safety. Unfortunately, there are many drugs that seem safe in trials but are then recalled when they are found to cause damage to the liver. Nearly every drug that we take ends up passing through the liver since it is the body’s natural toxin filter, but the testing resources available to drug companies aren’t as effective as they should be. Now, Organovo’s mini 3D printed livers could change that and remove some of the risk of new medications.

Organovo has been printing real human livers – albeit on an itty-bitty scale – since 2013. These exVive3D, as Organovo calls them, are now available for sale to pharmaceutical companies for drug trials. They are roughly hexagonal in shape and consist of of primary human hepatocytes, stellate, and endothelial cell types, which are all found in natural human livers. The mini-organs are stable for at least 42 days, as compared to the 48-hour active lifespan of industry-standard 2D liver cell testing systems.

This is a giant leap forward in drug testing and the creation of safer medicines. Until now, drugs have been tested on lab rats and on tiny single layers of liver cells in the lab, but those tests can’t always predict how the drugs will interact with actual living human livers. Organovo used the exVive3D “livers” to test a drug which had initially been approved by the FDA but later recalled because it was found to cause liver damage. The drug had passed the original traditional drug trials, but the Organovo models detected that it would cause liver damage. Going forward, using these tiny 3D printed livers could – and should, in our opinion – become industry standard for drug testing. Switching over to actual 3D printed organs for drug testing could dramatically reduce drug recalls and associated adverse health effects.

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