Category Archives: 3D printing

‘Our imitation is total’: Spanish tech startup aims to put 3D-printed meat on our plates

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Pamplona-based Cocuus is on a loud and disruptive quest to fuse science, technology and nutrition

Cocuus, a cutting-edge tech startup headquartered in an industrial estate on the outskirts of Pamplona, embraces the cliches of its sector every bit as willingly as the drunken tourists who blithely entrust themselves to fate, horns and hooves during the Spanish city’s bull-running festival each July.

Table football? Check. Lager and IPA on tap? Check. Inspirational messaging – preferably an Alice in Wonderland homage that reads, “I believe in six impossible things before breakfast”? Check. What about some sci-fi memorabilia, perhaps a Tintin moon rocket and an Alien xenomorph head? Check. Obviously.

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Not to be sneezed at: how 3D printing is supersizing the tiny world of pollen

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Project allows students, scientists and even fashion designers to create giant models of pollen grains from around the world

As a former secondary school science teacher, Oliver Wilson knows the challenges of communicating big, complex issues. Now, the palaeoecologist is reaching global audiences with a project that brings to life the microscopic world of pollen by producing giant 3D-printed models from high-quality scans of pollen grains.

“Being able to identify pollen is important for many reasons,” he says. Because they can survive millions of years and are tiny and tough, they can help track changing climate patterns, reveal the quality of honey and even provide forensic evidence at crime scenes. “But I love seeing what else people do with the models,” he says. Already they have been used by bee ecologists in Brazil, US school teachers and Irish archaeologists, among others.

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A brief history of concrete: from 10,000BC to 3D printed houses

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The Romans used concrete in everything from bath houses to the Colosseum. Our modern concrete structures will never last as long

“Unlike the Pantheon … virtually all the concrete structures one sees today will eventually need to be replaced,” writes Robert Courland is his weighty tome Concrete Planet, “costing us trillions of dollars in the process.”

While there is some debate over when and where the first concrete was used – the Göbekli Tepe temple in modern-day Turkey was built using T-shaped pillars of carved limestone approximately 12,000 years ago, desert traders used early concrete to make underground water cisterns 8,000 years ago, and the ancient Egyptians used gypsum and lime to make mortars – there is little dispute that the first people to use concrete in the way we do today were the Romans.

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