An Iowa businessman says 3D-printed human organs can help doctors practice surgeries before actually opening up a real body.

Mark Ginsberg — an Iowa City jewelry store owner, who also has a manufacturing facility with a couple of 3D-printers — has partnered with physicians to help 3D print organ models or whatever they might need, the Iowa City Press-Citizen reported.

A surgeon can provide a CT scan of a patient's organ and that can be translated into information for 3D printing. Recently, Ginsberg 3D-printed a photopolymer heart model for a University of Iowa surgeon, who had a young patient with a hole in the heart, the Press-Citizen reported.

“This way, they can hold the actual heart in their hand, the physiology of that heart, the rendering of that heart, and pregame the direction of the tools, the angle of the tools and how they’re going to attack different vessels,” Ginsberg told the newspaper. Read more…

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If you love LEGOs, you might have imagined building a real house from them. And with the surging popularity of 3D printers, such a dream seems well within reach. Nick Johnson, a spokesman for real estate blog Movoto, decided to find out what it would take to build a 3D-printed house.

"Given that we're due to get our own 3D printer here in the Movoto office soon, I pretty much couldn't be more excited by the possibilities the technology introduces," Johnson wrote in a company blog post. "So, with that, I thought I'd look into exactly how realistic it would be to print the components needed to build a house using one of these devices."

As it turns out, if you were to use today's 3D printing technology, you would be long dead by the time your pieces were printed. In fact, it would take 220 years, four months and 11 days for a single machine to print the 27,735 bricks required to construct a 2,500-square-foot (232 square meters), two-story house. And if you think the endeavor sounds time-costly, you should read the price tag: $332,820 in plastic alone.

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3D-printing company MakerBot announced Monday it's opening a new factory in Brooklyn, N.Y., and is hiring more than 50 new employees in the coming months.

MakerBot, which is already based in Brooklyn, will open its new 50,000 square foot Sunset Park factory Friday. The new facility will help meet the growing demand for more devices, according to the company. MakerBot already has 100 employees, with many building MakerBot desktop 3D printers. Read more…

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You’ve heard of 3D-printed clothes and 3D-printed buildings, but 3D-printed food? We are truly entering sci-fi territory. The Sugar Lab takes simple white sugar as its base material to print delicate 3D structures that can be eaten on their own, or used as a decorative topper for cakes and cupcakes.

The company, founded by married couple Kyle and Liz, started out when they wanted to make their friend a birthday cake but didn’t have an oven. They began to experiment with printing with sugar, until they finally discovered the secret formula to making complex geometric shapes from the sweet stuff.

Suffice it to say, it was too late for their friend’s birthday but they found others interested in buying 3D sugar structures, and thus The Sugar Lab was born. According to their website: Read more…

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