Enlarge / Printables is aiming to build a one-stop site for 3D-printed parts and accessories from brands like Noctua. (credit: Printables.com)

A number of device and accessory brands—including Adafruit, Framework Computer, Noctua, and Raspberry Pi—have started sharing free official 3D-printable models of parts, accessories, and mods on Printables, kicking off what the site hopes is a general trend toward repair-friendly parts and community mods.

Prusa Research, which shifted its PrusaPrinters site to Printables.com in March, writes that it had been "talking with a couple of giants in their respective industries" before launching a new section of the site, Brands . Giving customers the option of locally printing certain parts reduces inventory and shipping needs. By doing so, the company writes, that "makes it easier for brands to support the right-to-repair initiative"—and create some cool mods.

"We hope that in a few years, it will be the norm to release 3D-printable models to accompany the brand's products," writes Mikolas Zuza, marketing specialist at Prusa Research.

Enlarge / The Czinger 21C features tandem seating and a 3.5:1 lift-to-drag ratio. (credit: Rolex/Tom O'Neal)

BMW provided flights from DC to San Francisco and back, plus five nights in a hotel, so we could attend Monterey Car Week in August. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

MONTEREY, Calif.—Perhaps the coolest thing I saw at the 2016 Los Angeles Auto Show was a concept car showing off the work of Divergent 3D. The intriguing thing wasn't the concept itself but rather the direct-metal laser sintering technique that Divergent and its founder Kevin Czinger were developing as a much more rapid way to build low-volume vehicles.

Czinger started developing the 3D printers after earlier co-founding an electric vehicle company. "I learned that what slows down advances in the auto industry is hard-metal tooling and stamping," Czinger told me in 2016. "You need hundreds of millions of dollars up front for hardware design and construction, which needs to be amortized, and changes to that hardware become prohibitively expensive."

Sounds cool—did it go anywhere?

All too often, we get a glimpse of a promising new technology and then never hear about it again. Happily, that's not the case here. Fast-forward six years, and not only are Divergent's 3D printers in use at OEMs around the world, but Czinger is using them to create his own vehicles. They were on display at the Quail, an event that's part summer garden party, part car show. It's now a hot spot for the ultra-low-volume, ultra-high-performance side of the car industry.

Enlarge / 3D-printed lithophanes can help optically impaired scientists “see” data, such as from protein separation gels, with their fingertips. (credit: ordan Koone/Bryan Shaw)

In the 19th century, an art form known as lithophanes was all the rage in Western Europe. These thin engravings were usually made from translucent materials like porcelain or wax. When backlit, a glowing 3D image would appear that would change its features in response to variations in the light source. Now researchers have revived this art form to create tactile graphics to illustrate scientific data that glow with high resolution. According to a recent paper published in the journal Science Advances, these lithophanes are accessible to sighted and visually impaired people, making them a universal visualization tool for scientific data.

"This research is an example of art making science more accessible and inclusive. Art is rescuing science from itself," said co-author Bryan Shaw , a biochemist at Baylor. "The data and imagery of science—for example, the stunning images coming out from the new Webb telescope—are inaccessible to people who are blind. We show, however, that thin translucent tactile graphics, called lithophanes, can make all of this imagery accessible to everyone regardless of eyesight. As we like to say, 'data for all.'"

The word "lithophane" derives from the Greek litho (stone or rock) and phainein (to cause to appear), popularly translated as "light in stone." The art form's roots may date back to ancient China, as many as 1,000 years before the Tang Dynasty. (Historical sources describe paper-thin bowls with hidden decorations.) But to date, no actual lithophanes are known to have been in China before 1800.

Scientists from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem have created wood ink that can be extruded into flat wooden structures, self-morphing into complex 3D shapes as they dry and shrink. The researchers presented their research at last week's meeting of the American Chemical Society in Chicago. The technique could one day be used to make furniture or other wooden products that could be shipped flat to a destination and then dried to form the desired final shape.

As we've reported previously , developing novel shapeshifting materials is a very active area of research because there are so many promising applications, such as building artificial muscles—man-made materials, actuators, or similar devices that mimic the contraction, expansion, and rotation (torque) characteristics of the movement of natural muscle. The shape change comes about in response to an outside stimulus.

For instance, most artificial muscles are designed to respond to electric fields (such as electroactive polymers ), changes in temperature (such as shape-memory alloys and fishing line ), and changes in air pressure via pneumatics . In 2019, a team of Japanese researchers spiked a crystalline organic material with a polymer to make it more flexible, demonstrating their proof of concept by using their material to make an aluminum foil paper doll do sit-ups.

Enlarge / The Chinese already have a number of dams in the generally arid Tibetan Plateau. (credit: Holger Kleine )

A study recently published by a team of researchers at Beijing’s Tsinghua University has revealed plans to construct a 594-foot-tall dam using robots, 3D printing, and artificial intelligence. The researchers claim that no human labor needs to be directly employed in building this massive structure—if the plan moves forward, the dam would produce 5 billion kWh of electricity annually. This much energy will be enough to meet the power demands of 50 million homes in China.

The Yangqu dam is on the second largest river in China, the Yellow River, where it flows through Qinghai Province on the Tibetan plateau. There is already a dam on the river, so the proposal involves enlarging the existing structure and increasing its power generation capacity, making it one of the world’s largest dams. If everything goes as planned, the Yangqua dam will become the biggest ever AI-made 3D-printed structure on the planet.

3D printing without a printer

Construction-scale 3D-printing technology involves the use of giant 3D printers to produce concrete layers that form the structure. In contrast, the researchers at Tsinghua University have developed a method that allows them to 3D-print concrete without a printer . They plan on using an additive manufacturing approach that employs a computerized scheduling system that takes the 3D structure into account. It will use AI-controlled robots instead of a large 3D printer to construct the upgrade to the Yangqu dam.

Enlarge / The taillight of the Celestiq show car is one of the few images Cadillac has released of its next flagship. (credit: Cadillac)

Cadillac's transformation into an all-electric vehicle brand is about to get underway. The first new Cadillac EV will be the Lyriq , which has just entered production; Ars is driving it next week, and we'll be able to tell you about it on June 28.

With a starting price of $59,990, the Lyriq looks reasonably priced to enter the competitive luxury EV SUV space. But the Cadillac EV that follows will be a much more exclusive machine. It's called the Celestiq, and so far, details are scarce ahead of a formal reveal of the show car in late July. Cadillac has said that "from first approach, the striking silhouette of the Celestiq show car leaves a lasting impression, challenging the ultra-luxury space with the spirit of futurism and the avant-garde."

On Wednesday afternoon, Cadillac revealed that it will hand-build the Celestiq and will spend $81 million to set up production at General Motors' Global Technical Center in Warren, Michigan.