Tea, Earl Grey. Hot.

For those in the know: yes, this header is indeed way up on the geek ladder. But it might not take as long as you might think before this science-fiction element joins the mobile phone and tablet in reality. And then you can use the quote to order a cup of tea just like Patrick Steward does. It will materialize right in front of you.

Granted, we’re still a long way off from the replicator. But 3D printing is starting to mature. You’ve probably seen examples, where the technology is used for e.g. rapid prototyping. And that is where you would expect to find this technique, right? It creates tactile mock-ups of your designs, directly from the digital drawing board. The technology is becoming more and more accessible. You can order your design from a company that specializes in 3D printing (you might have seen them at this year’s Dutch Design Week), or you can learn how to use one at one of the many Fab Labs. You can even hack your old Deskjet to create your own DIY 3D printer.

But human nature wouldn’t be human nature if we stopped at inorganic objects. For instance, researchers at Cornell University’s Cornell Creative Machines Lab created a 3D food printer. It prints everything that you can squirt out through a syringe, from cake icing to masa (tortilla dough).
Though a culinary application of 3D printing looks great on the menu, it doesn’t really benefit mankind. So what about medical applications? One of the links above already mentioned the use of bone rapid prototyping, but what if we could print bone directly? With the right materials, anything can be constructed. Use keratin and print a fingernail. The correct mixture of minerals prints enamel to repair damaged teeth. Use of 3D printing in bioscaffolding is already being discussed.
And what if we could print living tissue? Veins, nerves, muscle tissue? Eventually we might be able to reproduce single cells. The printing techniques would have to scale down to the nano level, but since we’re already able to build a car at this scale, anything is possible.

And with that, we’ve come full circle. When 3D printing on an atomic level becomes possible, the sky is the limit in terms of what we would be able to create. Including your cup of Earl Grey. With a twist of lemon.

You are what you eat

If there is one law in innovation, it is that it has no direction. A new technology leads to unanticipated, sometimes striking, applications. And not infrequently, when we see this application, it seems impossible that the technology was not in fact developed for precisely this purpose.

Body artist Lucy McRae’s new concept Swallowable Parfum does not really fall into this category. In fact, the technology she uses, is not particularly new. But a related question pops to mind: why the hell has no-one thought of this before?

The concept is: you swallow a capsule and produce fragrant sweat. In close collaboration with biochemist Sheref Mansy from the University of Trento, McRae aims to use the body’s own system of fat metabolism.

The function of this system is, normally, to get rid of large fat molecules by breaking them into smaller bits, that are subsequently thrown away out of the body – in faeces, but also through the skin, in sweat. Swallowable Parfum takes advantage of this system. The designers deceive it into breaking down molecules of their choice, resulting in small fragrance molecules that are excreted through the skin during perspiration. The result is an organic perfume, created by an interplay between your body and the swallowed capsule.

On November 5th, you can ask McRae – who was also recently featured at our own Discovery Festival – about her progress during the Next Nature Power Show, here in Amsterdam. We think Swallowable Parfum could be very big – the idea is awesome, to start with. Now let’s just hope it will actually work.