DESIGNING IN THREE DIMENSIONS: Adam Gardner, technician in Arthur Olson’s lab, holds molecular models made by the lab’s 3-D printer. ADAM GARDNER
If you’ve worn out the spike on your stiletto, misplaced your kazoo, or you need a cheap little centrifuge, three-dimensional printing and a growing community of designers devoted to open-source software have the solutions for you. Once considered the realm of tinkerers and toy makers, 3-D printing is providing scientists with a treasure trove of opportunities to custom-design equipment and experiments. Kevin Lance, a graduate student at the University of California, San Francisco, once fixed a broken Pipetboy by simply drawing up the dimensions of the disabled part and printing it out. “It was an obscure internal part. You’d have to spend hundreds of dollars on a replacement,” Lance says. It took him a grand total of a few hours to make the part himself.
...
