A 3D printed bunny that contains the code to print itself!

[thewayne]

This is quite interesting. They coded the instructions on how to 3D print the bunny, coded it into DNA, slapped the DNA into nanocapsules, and somehow mixed that into the filament used to print the bunny.

Then they printed the bunny. It's a small thing, 2-3" tall.

Then they snipped off a piece of its ear, put it in a scanner, and read off the instructions on how to print the bunny.

And printed a bunny!

This has some tremendous implications. If your glasses frame or phone case had such information encoded, and the item broke, you could cut off a piece, put it in a scanner, and print yourself a new item!

Not to mention the smuggling story possibilities....

The video on the site that shows the printing and re-printing of the bunny is fairly short and very cool.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/12/scientists-used-dna-to-store-blueprint-data-for-3d-printed-stanford-bunny/

Comments

[rain_gryphon]

How clever!

[thewayne]

I thought it was very cool. Well, otherwise I wouldn't have posted it, kinda axiomatic, donchaknow. ;-)

[moonhare]

"It would be no problem to take a pair of glasses like this through airport security and thus transport information from one place to another undetected,"

Fascinating! And this made me think of an older technology-
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/wire-recording-forgotten-audio-format/

[thewayne]

Wire recordings are fascinating and were used heavily in WW II.  I think it was the Library of Congress has a collection of recovered recordings, I remember listening to some on some sight somewhere.  Maybe it wa linked in the article, I'm sure I previously read it.

[kellan_the_tabby]

COOL

[thewayne]

Very!

[foreverdawning]

This is amazing

[thewayne]

I thought it was a pretty cool application of DNA. They've talked about coding information with DNA for a long time, I think this is the first practical application that I've seen. Well, lab-practical.

[silveradept]

Interesting possibilities, although it would be nice(r?) if somehow the replication information were not embedded in separate capsules of DNA, but somehow wound into the structure of the filament itself.

[thewayne]

I suspect that’s exactly what some of them are thinking about. The problem is that you’d have to real-time print the filament in order to do that, kind of a tall order.

[silveradept]

Yeah. Or somehow manage to engrave the information into the filament as it's being deposited into the platform while it's still liquid. That's tech we don't have right now.