Harvard’s Lewis, who serves as the university’s Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering, is interrogating this problem using a customized, high-resolution 3-D printer that can form microchannels in biocompatible gels. “We can print hydrogel materials down at the micron-length scale, smaller than other groups can print anything,” Lewis says. The smallest microvascular channels her group has been able to print are around 10 microns in diameter.

Today’s 3-D printers can generally only build things out of one type of material—usually a plastic or, in certain expensive industrial versions of the machines, a metal. They can’t build objects with electronic, optical, or any kind of functions that require the integration of multiple materials. But recent advances in the research lab—including a 3-D printed battery and a bionic ear—suggest that this might soon change. ...

People take batteries for granted, but they shouldn't. All kinds of technological advances hinge on developing smaller and more powerful mobile energy sources.

Researchers at Harvard University and the University of Illinois are reporting just such a creation, one that happens to be no bigger than a grain of sand. These tiny but powerful lithium-ion batteries raise the prospect of a new generation of medical and other devices that can go where traditional hulking batteries can't. More...

The future of manufacturing depends on a number of technological breakthroughs in robotics, sensors and high-performance computing, to name a few. But nothing will impact how things are made, and what they are capable of, more than the materials manufacturers use to make those things. New materials change both the manufacturing process and the end result.

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