Slashdot Mirror
Nanoscale Race Car Gets 3D Printed With a Laser
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology have managed to perfect 3D printing at the nanoscale. What may look like a grain of sand to the human eye could in fact be a detailed racing car model, a reproduction of a famous church, or London Bridge. The 3D printer relies on a laser beam directed by mirrors through a liquid resin onto a surface. It can print at 5 meters per second, which is a world record, and the end result is only a few hundred nanometers in size. The next hurdle: printing with bio-material so we can start making our own body parts/organs."
It's stretching it a bit to call it nano-scale. The legend on the images puts the models in the region of 100um. 0.1mm is not really nano-scale, unless the hair on our head is nano-scale. With around 200 lines per layer, we're still talking about hundreds of nanometers for the print resolution.
small is not nano, regardless of how much SEO you're after
It prints at micro scale. Willard Wigen is unimpressed.
Why make a tiny car when they could have actually printed the world's tiniest violin?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil