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3D Printers For Peace Contest
First time accepted submitter Bas_Wijnen writes "3D printing is being condemned in the media because of the potential for printing guns. Engineers at Michigan Tech believe there is far more potential for 3D printers to make our lives better rather than killing one another. To encourage thinking about constructive uses of 3D printing technology Michigan Tech Open Sustainability Technology (MOST) Lab and Type A Machines sponsor the first 3-D Printers for Peace Contest. Designers are encouraged to consider: If Mother Theresa of Ghandi had access to 3D printing what would they print? What kind of designs could help reduce military spending and conflict while making us all safer and more secure? Anyone in the United States may enter and there is no cost."
3D print kevlar body armor, or maybe a ceramic ballistic plate?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Designers are encouraged to consider: If Mother Theresa of Ghandi had access to 3D printing what would they print?
Bread.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I think Mother Theresa would choose not to print anything.
She was a friend of poverty, not of the poor, and considered suffering to be a state of grace.
She was a rather nasty piece of work, who kept the poor in poverty, and prevented many dying people from getting access to medicine.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WQ0i3nCx60
2,000 years of history says they have the wrong idea.
Sintered ceramic teeth -- dentures and bridges, faster and more accessible dentistry.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
3D printers, it is not what the poorer nations need.
Poor countries often have problems getting spare parts. They tend to have old no-longer-supported gear, such as tractors or irrigation pumps. Even when the parts are available they are too expensive to ship, or are pilfered by the postal workers. If a part for your pump or manure spreader arrives two months late, you have already missed the planting season. A printer that can make a part from a spec downloaded over a cellular network would come in very useful. You don't need one on every farm or in every shop, just within a day's walk.
USAToday, May 22, 2013 - Researchers at the University of Michigan have used a 3-D printer to create a custom-made, life-saving implant for baby boy, they report in a letter in 'The New England Journal of Medicine.'
Researchers at the University of Michigan have used a 3-D printer to create a custom-made, life-saving implant for a baby boy, they report today in a letter in The New England Journal of Medicine.
The baby, Kaiba Gionfriddo, suffered from a rare disorder in which one of the airways in his lungs collapsed when he exhaled. The problem caused him to stop breathing and turn blue when he was only 6 weeks old. Even with a mechanical ventilator, Kaiba stopped breathing virtually every day, requiring doctors to perform emergency resuscitations.
"We'd recently had a child in the hospital who died of this, and I said, 'there has got to be a solution that we can find for these kids,' " says co-author Glenn Green, Kaiba's doctor and an associate professor of otolaryngology.
So Green and his Michigan colleagues tried something new.
Using a 3-D printer, they custom-built a tiny, flexible splint that will grow with Kaiba. Researchers used a special material designed to be absorbed by Kaiba's body in about three years, says co-author Scott Hollister, a professor of biomedical and mechanical engineering.
Instead of making a cast of Kaiba's airway with plaster, they used a CT scanner, which gave them a 3-D blueprint.
Like a vacuum-cleaner hose, the C-shaped splint is flexible enough to move when Kaiba breathes. But it's also firm enough to prevent his air tube from flopping shut, says Green.
Kaiba was able to come off the ventilator three weeks after his surgery in February 2012. "Our prediction is that this will be a cure for him," Green says. "The splint will go away and the process will be done."
The porous splint is made from the same material as dissolvable stitches, Green says. Just as a wisteria vine grows through a trellis, Kaiba's body will create new cells to permeate the scaffold. By the time the splint is completely absorbed, doctors hope that Kaiba's own tissue will be sturdy enough to keep his airway open.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/05/22/3d-printer-implant-baby/2348091/
There's been a lot of progress with organic materials and it's almost at the point of printing organs. Livers are at the top of the list.
The tag line "The potential for guns made from commodity parts found at the local hardware store" just isn't sensational enough to move copy. Folks have been hand-crafting zip guns for the better part of a century now, if not longer. Hell, half a century ago you could order a firearm (long or short) through the Sears catalog and have it delivered to your doorstep via the Postal Service. No oversight. No license. No FFL. Wasn't the end of the world until the ignorant, myopic, ratings-chasing, fear-mongering drama queens made it so.
Guns are tools of the weak and afraid. They clutch them close to their chests to make them feel like they have some power in this crazy, cruel world.
But all we really want is love, approval, and security. Hence, teddy bears.
At least it's better than my first impulse to print a vagina.
I really, really want to be for this. Not because I have anything against 3D-printed guns, I'm all for those, but because some of the things on their list are good ideas and make sense. Some of the other stuff is pure nonsense, however.
"Low-cost medical devices." Excellent idea. "Tools to help people out of poverty." Also excellent. Lots of potential in both of these to improve, and in many cases save, people's lives.
But then we get to "Designs that can reduce racial conflict." Err, what? Someone is waaay overestimating how effective their "Coexist" bumper sticker is. It would be nice if 3D printers could produce some sort of object for people to brandish at racists like crucifixes at vampires, but it's not going to happen. "Tools that would reduce military conflict and spending while making us all safer and more secure." Look, I'm for reducing conflict and increasing safety and security, too, but if an object to do that hasn't been created using more-mundane fabrication methods, a 3D printer won't be able to make it, either -- and there aren't any such objects, unless (like me and apparently unlike the folks sponsoring this) you think that being armed makes you more secure.
This is being run by Michigan Tech's Department of of Material Science and Engineering, but it looks like someone from one of the squishy majors snuck in and added items to the list. I hope there are a lot medical and tool ideas submitted (pity they don't have a way to donate money to increase the prize), but I really wish they hadn't included the silly, groan-inducing stuff.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
1. Stopping an attacker more quickly is often the important consideration to designers. Modern firearms achieve that 'more quickly' by increasing lethality. Hollow point rounds, Glazier slugs, and high capacity magazines are generally all methods of stopping more people faster, but the 'stopping' part converts pretty directly to killing more often, or in larger numbers, and trying to make a semantic distinction there is psychobabble. 'Stopping' by deterence is far from all 'stopping', and if we are talking logically here, show me one perp who has ever claimed he would have continued with his attack except he realized the pistol he faced had 17 rounds and not just 6. Yes, I'll freely concede that deterrance sometimes works. Hell, I've used it myself. Now what about all that other stopping?
2. I'm a former enlisted soldier who eventually took a comission as a military officer, and who has actually trained people with things the professionals call guns (up to 120 mm MBT pieces) and not just those silly pistols and rifles and such. I can't count the number of times I have disagreed with someone on the NRA right and recieved that lecture that starts with "Guns don't kill people...", as though anyone who disagrees with any point in their playbook must be that totally ignorant. I've had my claim to service challenged, by people who admit they have never served, but can't believe anyone who disagrees with them over any point at all might have given more to the USA than they did. I've had people tell me that only people who were wounded count as real patriots, or that Desert Shield/Storm didn't count as real combat or even real service, because I disagreed with an NRA talking point. I've had self professed NRA spokesmen accuse me of war crimes, saying without any evidence what-so-ever that if I really served at all, I was probably the kind of bad soldier who shot unarmed civilians and ran from real combat. Your post is more of the same - defending verbal tricks by insulting everybody who disagrees with you.
You don't know me. You probably didn't mean any of your remarks about illogical libtards and such to apply to me. But I have met enough of the people on your side that stoop to that that I do hold you responsible for standing alongside them. Please don't ever thank me for my service, it would sound too much like you spitting on it.
Who is John Cabal?
$20 or less at Home Depot will buy you everything you need to make a .410 or 12 ga. shotgun. No machining required, either.
It's because the rich who own the means of production are absolutely terrified of teh disruptive power this tool gives the poor. They can see what's coming and they want it legislated such that the machines have to be registered because you know, people might print up a gun or knife... but they really want them tied up with loads of red tape to keep them out of the hands of the people.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.