This article was taken from the July 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
This F1 car could fit inside the full stop at the end of this sentence. At 285 micrometres in length, it's about the size of a grain of sand. Photographed with an electron microscope, the model was created using the latest version of two-photon lithography or 2PP, a 3D-printing technique in which highly focused laser beams manipulate liquid resin into detailed solid structures. "The complexity and accuracy of the structures that can be produced are particularly suitable for making scaffolds for tissue engineering," says Jan Torgersen, 27, one of the Vienna University of Technology team that built the machine. "This is far more precise than commercial 3D printers and we're not limited to layer-by-layer fabrication."
Molecules in the resin, which induce polymerisation to make it hard, are activated when they absorb two photons at once - that happens only at the centre of the beam, hence the precision. It's fast, too. The car, made up of 100 layers, was printed in just four minutes. Drivers, start your 3D-printer's engines.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
