Well, it's finally happened.

Defense Distributed, a group focused on making easily printable weapons, has succeeded.

It made a handgun using a 3D-printer, according to Andy Greenberg at Forbes, who was given early access to the process.

Defense Distributed calls its gun the "Liberator."

The gun is made of sixteen pieces each of which was "printed with a Stratasys Dimension SST printer in ABS plastic, with the exception of a single nail that’s used as a firing pin," Greenberg reports. (That just means it was printed with plastic, and a nail was added.)

He adds, "The gun is designed to fire standard handgun rounds, using interchangeable barrels for different calibers of ammunition."

Once Defense Distributed is done fully testing its homemade handgun, it's going to put the blueprints on the web so anyone can print out the design and make their own guns at home.

Defense Distributed also inserts a strip of metal into the gun to make sure metal detectors pick it up.

But, as Greenberg points out the people that print out the design might not be inclined to put metal strips in their guns, thus making them much harder to detect.

Read the whole thing at Forbes >

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The world's first-ever 3D printed gun is available for download.

Below are two videos of it being fired made by the Defense Distributed, the non-profit that developed the gun and is putting the file online for anyone to grab.

Forbes reporter Andy Greenberg was given access to the development and testing process for the gun.

The gun is called The Liberator, an homage to guns that were air-dropped into France to help it fight Nazi invasion. Defense Distributed sees its guns as a way for people to defend themselves.

Greenberg reports that the Liberator is built inside an $8,000 3D printer. The printer melts polymer to make fifteen of the sixteen pieces that make the gun. The sixteenth is a nail that is used as a firing pin. 

Defense Distributed is working on plans to make the gun printable on cheaper 3D printers.

For now, it can only handle a .380 handgun round, says Greenberg. A higher power, 5.7×28 rifle cartridge, was in the gun but it shattered the plastic.

Here's video evidence of the gun being fired. The first is just a test shot, the second is the promotional video from Defense Distributed.

For more on it, head over to Forbes >

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When Defense Distributed put its blueprints for a 3D-printable plastic gun on the internet (see above), the Texas non-profit put an internet freedom spin on the gun control debate.

It also led the US government to suspect the organization of being an arms dealer.

The State Department’s Office of Defense Trade Compliance has asked founder Cody Wilson to take down the blueprints for its “Liberator,” among other weapons, while officials there determine if his organization needs a license to freely dole out the technical documents to anyone, anywhere.

The State Department is empowered to control the export of defense technologies to protect national security and pursue US foreign policy. The same office, until recently, also prohibited the export of US drones to non-NATO countries. Such rules are part of a suite of policies designed to keep munitions, especially the newest technologies, out of the hands of people considered dangerous to the US (e.g, Afghan Islamists, 1994 to present) and in the hands of people helping the US (e.g., Afghan Islamists, 1979 to 1989).

The Liberator wasn’t the only Defense Distributed weapon on the State Department’s list:

That’s right, high explosives and a pistol silencer are among the various munitions that Defense Distributed has blueprinted, not to mention grenades. While the pistol could be seen as a weapon of self-defense, some of the items on that list are bound to infuriate gun control advocates.

The company has complied with the government’s request, although Wilson noted that the files are widely available on file-sharing services. That makes the gesture fairly meaningless, especially since improvements in 3-D printing and free digital communication technologies are bound to keep coming. The site also hosts plans for 30-round magazines for AR-15s, the semi-automatic rifle used in the Sandy Hook school shooting. That kind of in-depth magazine would have been banned by the failed gun control bill; any future effort to regulate magazines will need to somehow account for the internet, as well as gun shops and shows.

It’s unclear whether the export controls will lead to a permanent ban on publishing the blueprints. In the meantime, Defense Distributed may face stiff competition for homemade munitions technology. When it comes to bootleg weapons, Syrian rebels probably have the upper hand:

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Defense Distributed's goal is to evaporate the container described by the Second Amendment, making obtaining a firearm trivial enough that even trying to place restrictions on gun manufacturing becomes useless. It may get there. But first — and not necessarily intentionally — it's leadership is in tossing 3D-printed objects into the great pool of online sharing.

If you click on the "Manifesto" menu item at the group's website, you're taken, somewhat melodramatically, to an essay from the poet John Milton entitled, "Areopagitica: Plea for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing." Preceding any semblance of a free press in England, it, in short, rejects censorship and demands the freedom of the written word. The analogy for Defense Distributed is obvious: Attempting to constrain ideas will always be futile in the long run.

There's another level of depth. Milton was writing 200 years after the introduction of the printing press, the technology that forced the issue of press freedom. At one point, creating written material took time or a lot of people or both. Then it didn't. At first, the printing press was resource-intensive. Then it wasn't.

See where this is heading? 3D printers are new and clunky and expensive. They're hard to find, even in Manhattan. But that will change, and the idea that is contained in a 3D-printable file will be as impossible to contain as a forbidden text is today. Defense Distributed is, by its existence, hoping to make the same statement that Milton is. Access to printable guns is inevitable, just as access to print once was.

A 3D-printed LP.

We've been through this revolution more recently. Once upon a time, people went to record stores, as some of you may remember, to purchase physical recordings of music. Then, once music could be digitized in a format, the MP3, that balanced size and quality well enough, people began to share (pirate) music files. This was a technological shift, if a mostly intangible one. Music — and then movies when that quality-size balance was reached for our newly much-faster internet connections — became much easier to obtain. And it became a lot more difficult for companies who previously sold music and movies to get people to give them money for music and movies.

It is easier to just give it away. Napster was easier to build than iTunes. The Pirate Bay was easier to maintain than Netflix. Defense Distributed's Cody Wilson wanted to set up a similar clearinghouse for 3D printed files — DEFCAD, the sharing site which was the first source for the group's 3D-printable pistol. He spoke with Slate in March.

“It’s still legal in America to make guns and have gun parts, but [3D design-sharing site] Thingiverse took those files down from its site,” Wilson told me. “So when we get to the interesting battles that are yet to come—DMCA takedown requests, physical DRM—we know those people will fold. That’s why we want to build this infrastructure early. And search is a viable way to do it.”

Wilson is talking about the intellectual property battles that arise when people publish designs for 3D printable versions of copyrighted objects. He says DEFCAD won’t censor any blueprints that come its way, and won’t respond to takedown requests from rights-holders under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. He believes that openness could make his site a popular alternative to the Thingiverse, where you can download plans for a “fight the power” pencil holder but not for a weapon—nor a Penrose Triangle that was the subject of a copyright infringement claim in February.

DEFCAD wasn't quite as robust as Wilson hoped. After the government sent Defense Distributed a letter suggesting that certain designs might violate federal prohibitions on exporting weapons, Defense Distributed pulled the files. TorrentFreak reports on what happened after next:

While Wilson promptly complied with the request to remove access to the design, it was shared so widely during the short window of availability that it is now virtually impossible to prevent any further distribution. Currently, there appears to be several torrents available for the design at The Pirate Bay and the site informs us that these will not be censored.

“TPB has for close to 10 years been operating without taking down one single torrent due to pressure from the outside. And it will never start doing that,” A Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak.

Digital files, once available online, can generally be counted on to be available online forever. If the State Department decides that Defense Distributed's pistol design constitutes a class one munition — a stipulation explained by Brian Fung at National Journal — it's not entirely clear what the government could do to limit their availability. The idea is out there.

The difference between Defense Distributed and The Pirate Bay is that the former is largely trying to stretch the boundaries of the law from within. Defense Distributed complied with the State Department, because it wants to show that even under existing rules, the government can't prevent the world of gun ownership from eventually being transformed.

Its Second Amendment point, though, is only a small part of the broader world of 3D design files. Wilson inadvertently stepped in front of a movement that had been quietly happening anyway, the transition of common items into shareable online patterns. As Nick Bilton suggested in a 2011Times article, sharing 3D models may not even be copyright violations.

“Copyright doesn’t necessarily protect useful things,” said Michael Weinberg, a senior staff attorney with Public Knowledge, a Washington digital advocacy group. “If an object is purely aesthetic it will be protected by copyright, but if the object does something, it is not the kind of thing that can be protected.”

When I posed my mug scenario to Mr. Weinberg, he responded: “If you took that mug and went to a pottery class and remade it, would you be asking me the same questions about breaking a copyright law? No.” Just because new tools arrive, like 3D printers and digital files that make it easier to recreate an object, he said, it doesn’t mean people break the law when using them.

The implication in that is massive. If anything can be recreated as a 3D file, anything can be copied.

Defense Distributed sidesteps that with its own designs. Included in the files for the "Liberator," the group's 3D-printable pistol, is a text file that includes the organization's license.

Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose, including commercial applications, and to alter it and redistribute it freely ...

...with minor caveats. Defense Distributed isn't trying to control where its idea goes. Had the group tried to copyright its design — which would itself have been an interesting conversation with the government — it's not entirely clear how enforceable it would be, or what good it would have done. Now, the design is already out in the sloshing world of the internet alongside pirated copies of No Country for Old Men and The White Album, seekable through The Pirate Bay. It wasn't the MP3 and the CD burner that upended the music industry, it was the internet.

The internet will soon make 3D files into a strain on a new aspect of consumer culture — with guns, as an object in the marketplace, included. That is a much bigger deal than whether or not the Liberator is available for download. Defense Distributed and Cody Wilson may have a unique agenda. But in 3D design, their innovation mostly lies in being early. Kind of like Milton.

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Invisibility cloaks made of plastic can now be created at home using 3D printers, researchers show.

The first clues that cloaking devices might one day become more than science fiction, a la "Star Trek" began emerging seven or so years ago.

Since then researchers have made such cloaks a reality by smoothly guiding rays of electromagnetic radiation such as microwave beams completely around objects so they proceed along their original trajectory as if nothing were there.

The first working invisibility cloaks were demonstrated using complex lab experiments. They can now, in principle, get made at home using 3D printers.

"I would argue that essentially anyone who can spend a couple thousand dollars on a non-industry- grade 3D printer can literally make a plastic cloak overnight," said researcher Yaroslav Urzhumov, an electrical engineer at Duke University.

A 3D printer lays down thin layers of material much like ordinary printers, except it deposits layers on top of layers to create 3D objects. Increasingly, they are being used to make items out of plastic, metal, glass, ceramic, and even sugar and mashed potatoes.

Urzhumov said creating an invisibility cloak using a 3D printer was easy and relatively inexpensive. For instance, printers can make ones about 1 inch thick (3 centimeters) and 8 inches wide (20 cm) resembling Frisbees made of Swiss cheese.

Previous invisibility cloaks all included a fair amount of metal, "but with these new cloaks, no metal is involved," Urzhumov told TechNewsDaily. "This makes them easier to fabricate and lighter. Also, when a light wave hits a structure containing a lot of metal, it is attenuated, and the only way to have a cloak without attenuation is to get rid of these metals. Now we know it is possible to make microwave cloaks entirely out of nonmetallic materials, which is very exciting."

The cloaks have open spots in their centers in which to place items up to 5.5 inches wide (14 cm). When microwaves are beamed at those objects from the side, the cloaks make it look as if the items are not there.

"A metal cylinder that would normally reflect a lot of microwave radiation can, once placed in the cloak, become transparent to microwaves," Urzhumov said.

Cloaks that make objects invisible to microwaves could have military and civilian applications.

"If you want to eliminate obstacles such as pillars or small buildings to microwave antennas, you could use these cloaks, which could be helpful for communications and for radar," Urzhumov said.

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Anjan Contractor’s 3D food printer might evoke visions of the “replicator” popularized in Star Trek, from which Captain Picard was constantly interrupting himself to order tea. And indeed Contractor’s company, Systems & Materials Research Corporation, just got a six month, $125,000 grant from NASA to create a prototype of his universal food synthesizer.

But Contractor, a mechanical engineer with a background in 3D printing, envisions a much more mundane—and ultimately more important—use for the technology. He sees a day when every kitchen has a 3D printer, and the earth’s 12 billion people feed themselves customized, nutritionally-appropriate meals synthesized one layer at a time, from cartridges of powder and oils they buy at the corner grocery store. Contractor’s vision would mean the end of food waste, because the powder his system will use is shelf-stable for up to 30 years, so that each cartridge, whether it contains sugars, complex carbohydrates, protein or some other basic building block, would be fully exhausted before being returned to the store.

Ubiquitous food synthesizers would also create new ways of producing the basic calories on which we all rely. Since a powder is a powder, the inputs could be anything that contain the right organic molecules. We already know that eating meat is environmentally unsustainable, so why not get all our protein from insects?

If eating something spat out by the same kind of 3D printers that are currently being used to make everything from jet engine parts to fine art doesn’t sound too appetizing, that’s only because you can currently afford the good stuff, says Contractor. That might not be the case once the world’s population reaches its peak size, probably sometime near the end of this century.

“I think, and many economists think, that current food systems can’t supply 12 billion people sufficiently,” says Contractor. “So we eventually have to change our perception of what we see as food.”

There will be pizza on Mars

The ultimate in molecular gastronomy. (Schematic of SMRC’s 3D printer for food.)SMRC

If Contractor’s utopian-dystopian vision of the future of food ever comes to pass, it will be an argument for why space research isn’t a complete waste of money. His initial grant from NASA, under its Small Business Innovation Research program, is for a system that can print food for astronauts on very long space missions. For example, all the way to Mars.

“Long distance space travel requires 15-plus years of shelf life,” says Contractor. “The way we are working on it is, all the carbs, proteins and macro and micro nutrients are in powder form. We take moisture out, and in that form it will last maybe 30 years.”

Pizza is an obvious candidate for 3D printing because it can be printed in distinct layers, so it only requires the print head to extrude one substance at a time. Contractor’s “pizza printer” is still at the conceptual stage, and he will begin building it within two weeks. It works by first “printing” a layer of dough, which is baked at the same time it’s printed, by a heated plate at the bottom of the printer. Then it lays down a tomato base, “which is also stored in a powdered form, and then mixed with water and oil,” says Contractor.

Finally, the pizza is topped with the delicious-sounding “protein layer,” which could come from any source, including animals, milk or plants.

The prototype for Contractor’s pizza printer (captured in a video, above) which helped him earn a grant from NASA, was a simple chocolate printer. It’s not much to look at, nor is it the first of its kind, but at least it’s a proof of concept.

Replacing cookbooks with open-source recipes

SMRC’s prototype 3D food printer will be based on open-source hardware from the RepRap project.RepRap

Remember grandma’s treasure box of recipes written in pencil on yellowing note cards? In the future, we’ll all be able to trade recipes directly, as software. Each recipe will be a set of instructions that tells the printer which cartridge of powder to mix with which liquids, and at what rate and how it should be sprayed, one layer at time.

This will be possible because Contractor plans to keep the software portion of his 3D printer entirely open-source, so that anyone can look at its code, take it apart, understand it, and tweak recipes to fit. It would of course be possible for people to trade recipes even if this printer were proprietary—imagine something like an app store, but for recipes—but Contractor believes that by keeping his software open source, it will be even more likely that people will find creative uses for his hardware. His prototype 3D food printer also happens to be based on a piece of open-source hardware, the second-generation RepRap 3D printer.

“One of the major advantage of a 3D printer is that it provides personalized nutrition,” says Contractor. “If you’re male, female, someone is sick—they all have different dietary needs. If you can program your needs into a 3D printer, it can print exactly the nutrients that person requires.”

Replacing farms with sources of environmentally-appropriate calories

2032: Delicious Uncle Sam’s Meal Cubes are laser-sintered from granulated mealworms; part of this healthy breakfast.TNO Research

Contractor is agnostic about the source of the food-based powders his system uses. One vision of how 3D printing could make it possible to turn just about any food-like starting material into an edible meal was outlined by TNO Research, the think tank of TNO, a Dutch holding company that owns a number of technology firms.

In TNO’s vision of a future of 3D printed meals, “alternative ingredients” for food include:

• algae

• duckweed

• grass

• lupine seeds

• beet leafs

• insects

From astronauts to emerging markets

While Contractor and his team are initially focusing on applications for long-distance space travel, his eventual goal is to turn his system for 3D printing food into a design that can be licensed to someone who wants to turn it into a business. His company has been “quite successful in doing that in the past,” and has created both a gadget that uses microwaves to evaluate the structural integrity of aircraft panels and a kind of metal screw that coats itself with protective sealant once it’s drilled into a sheet of metal.

Since Contractor’s 3D food printer doesn’t even exist in prototype form, it’s too early to address questions of cost or the healthiness (or not) of the food it produces. But let’s hope the algae and cricket pizza turns out to be tastier than it sounds.

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Shapeways uses 3D printing to allow anyone to create custom-designed products.

The New York company's creations cover the range of art, jewelry, iPhone cases, trinkets, toys, cuff links, mugs, and anything else you can imagine.

If you really like how your 3D printed creation turns out, you can use Shapeways to sell it to anyone you like.

Think of it as Etsy for people who make their stuff using 3D printers.

The company just raised $30 million so that it can bring its 3D printing business more mainstream. Shapeways plans to use the cash to grow its team, build more factories, and continue to overcome technological challenges that come with 3D printing.

"Our vision is big, we want to make 3D printing affordable and accessible for everyone worldwide. This funding will help us realize our vision at an even faster rate," Co-Founder & CEO Peter Weijmarshausen tells us.

Shapeways has been around since 2007, and since then it has produced more than 1 million 3D printed products with 60,000 new designs uploaded each month.

Weijmarshausen sees Shapeways as more of an innovative manufacturing company rather than just a 3D printer. "We enable people to basically open up their own little company. They can design and test their products and bring them mainstream," Weijmarshausen told Business Insider in an interview.

It's surprising that with more than 6 billion product variations that Shapeways' production process isn't extremely complicated.

In fact, the way Shapeways works is simple. Shapeways sets a production cost, and you can mark it up as much as you want and that sets the final price. Depending on the material, customers will receive their items within 10-15 business days. Shapeways even ships your product to customers for you, and at the end of the month you get all the profits your item made. Shapeways will always charge you the same price if you want to sell your item or not.

The amount of users already taking advantage of Shapeways is a testament to the model working. "We are enabling almost a quarter of million people to make their own products. we are definitely growing quickly," Weijmarshausen said.

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At $237, the Buccaneer is the most affordable 3D printer we've ever seen. (Most 3D printers cost at least $1,000).

The device is made by a company called Pirate3D.

Pirate3D designed and built the Buccaneer to be as easy to use as possible.

But the greatest draw to the Buccaneer is its price.

The first backers were able to get the Buccaneer for just $297. If you want to get in now, you can grab one for just $397. That's much cheaper than 3D printers like the Makerbot, which retail for $2,799.

Unlike traditional 3D printers that heat up spools of plastic, the Buccaneer integrates the material directly into the device using cartridges.

Pirate3D says there are no unnecessary wires or pieces to get in the way. 

The device has only been on crowdsourced funding site Kickstarter for five days and it's already blown through an initial goal of $100,000. At the time of this writing, The Buccaneer has already received nearly $600,000 in funding.

Here's a video of the Buccaneer in action:

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There's a company in Chile that wants to let you bring your thoughts into the physical realm.

According to a post on Discovery News, Thinker Thing is working on a combination of software and hardware that will let users sculpt objects using thought alone.

The technology works by presenting basic shapes on screen that slowly morph. A headset that measures electric signals in the brain can tell when the user approves of a change. Over time, the model transforms into the object that that the user has in his or her mind. 

To bring the object into reality, the software then sends the 3D model to a MakerBot 3D printer, which assembles it by stacking layers of material into nearly any shape that can fit within its working space.

To demonstrate its technology, Thinker Thing has created an art exhibit called “The Fantastical Mind Creatures of Chile," in which children create miniature sculptures using the headset.

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MIT is creating 'smart sand' — made of tiny robotic cubes — that will be able to surround an object, map its form, and then replicate it.

We first heard of the project at NPR.

The minuscule cubes contain a microprocessor, magnets for sticking to each other, and a battery. But size is the biggest issue, as the current smart cubes are still too large for anyone to call granules of sand.

The theory is that an object — say a toy car — would be tossed into a bag containing the little computers. The cubes are then able to interact with each other, and can recognize when they're pushed up against a foreign object. A digital silhouette is mapped out, and the data is transmitted to another group of cubes, which will then link together to replicate the object. Remove the extras, and you've got a fabricated match of the toy car.

Check out the video explaining the concept below. 

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Few topics are as hot in manufacturing as 3D printing (also termed additive manufacturing). 3D printers spit out bits of metal or plastic in much the same way an ink jet printer spits out ink. While layering ink on ink doesn’t get you much, layering plastic on plastic allows for objects to gradually be built up. Much has been written about the potential impact of this new way of making stuff. Indeed, we already have several posts on the topic. But most of those stories focus on what could happen once the technology develops. How are firms using it now?

That is the topic of an article in today’s Wall Street Journal (Printing Out Barbies and Ford Cylinders, Jun 6). It emphasizes two primary applications. The first is prototyping.

"At the Beech Daly Technical Center in Dearborn, Mich., Ford engineers use industrial-grade machines that cost as much as $1 million to produce prototypes of cylinder heads, brake rotors, and rear axles in less time than traditional manufacturing methods, said Paul Susalla, section supervisor of rapid manufacturing at Ford.

Using 3-D printing, Ford saves an average of one month of production time to create a casting for a prototype cylinder head for its EcoBoost family of engines, designed for better fuel efficiency. This complex part includes numerous ports, ducts, passages and valves to manage fuel and air flow.

Mr. Susalla said the traditional casting method, which requires designing both a sand mold as well as the tool to cut the mold, can take four to five months."

You should also check out this video with one of the Ford engineers involved in their digital printing shop. 

Prototyping makes sense as an area in which 3D printing can make inroads. To some extent, 3D printing in its current state is characterized by a low set up cost but a relatively high variable cost. Those costs may be high in terms of time instead of dollars. The idea is that if you are going to produce millions and millions of something (like lids for milk jugs), 3D printing is not the way to go. However, that low set up cost makes it attractive for things that are not currently produced in volume. This would be especially true in the development phase in which the design is still subject to change and having a prototype to play with is key to work moving forward.

The other application that the article mentions is parts with tricky geometries.

"Mark Little, senior vice president and director of GE’s global research group, said that building jet engine airflow castings by melting metal powders layer by layer can be more precise than making and cutting the parts from a ceramic mold. GE said this process is technically more efficient and should save the company money in the future. The company declined to speculate on potential cost savings."

“We can make these parts in a way that we simply couldn’t make them before to get better cooling passages and better cooling efficiency,” Mr. Little said.

Note that scale matters in this example as well. Jet engines are inherently low volume items. GE is very unlikely to ever be turning out a million units a year of any one design. Hence, using 3D printing to achieve superior performance or less weight (or both) makes a lot of sense.

A final point. An application that one often hears for 3D printing is that it would allow users to print their own replacement parts. The article throws a little cold water on that prospect when it discusses how Mattel uses 3D printing.

"But the toy maker draws the line at selling consumers software files that would enable them to print out their own toys on low-cost 3-D printers."

A company spokesman said the company couldn’t guarantee toys that consumers printed out would be safe for children, a “topic that the entire toy industry will have to face and embrace” as 3-D printer use broadens at home.

This post originally appeared at The Operations Room

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3D printing color figures of yourself is threatening to become a trend—in Japan last year designers PARTY opened a temporary 3D printing photo booth in a Tokyo gallery where people could turn up, get scanned, and walk away with a mini-figurine of themselves.

And now, following on from that, comes Twinkind who are offering a similar service, but these guys are based in Germany.

Much like the photo booth in Japan, Twinkind is a temporary pop up studio, so will only be open for a limited time in Hamburg. The scanning happens very fast, "in the blink of an eye" according to their website, and uses a multi-camera setup to get maximum detail—and you can even take your pet along to get scanned and printed too.

But it doesn't come cheap, starting at around $300 for a 15cm figurine and going up to $1700 for a 35cm one, which is actually an unnervingly large size for a figurine of yourself. Give it a few years and they'll be one of these studios on every street corner (I hope).

Images via Twinkind

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3D printer manufacturer MakerBot will be acquired by Stratasys, a company specializing in professional-grade 3D printing.

MakerBot is famous in hobbyist and tinkerer circles for its easy-to-use 3D printers.

The acquisition is a stock-for-stock transaction valued at $403 million.

Here are the more relevant paragraphs from the release:

Stratasys, the leader in 3D printing and additive manufacturing, and MakerBot, the leader in desktop 3D printing, today announced the signing of a definitive merger agreement whereby privately held MakerBot has agreed to merge with a subsidiary of Stratasys in a stock-for-stock transaction.  MakerBot, founded in 2009, helped develop the desktop 3D printing market and has built the largest installed base of 3D printers in the category by making 3D printers highly accessible. The company has sold more than 22,000 3D printers since 2009. In the last nine months, the MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer accounted for 11,000 of those sales.

The combination of these two industry leaders is expected to drive faster adoption of 3D printing for multiple applications and industries, as desktop 3D printers are becoming a mainstream tool across many market segments. Upon completion of the transaction, MakerBot will operate as a separate subsidiary of Stratasys, maintaining its own identity, products and go-to-market strategy. The merger enhances Stratasys’ leadership position in the rapidly growing 3D printer market, by enabling Stratasys to offer affordable desktop 3D printers together with a seamless user experience. The merger is expected to be completed during the third quarter of 2013; and it is subject to regulatory approvals and other conditions customary for such transactions.

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Brooklyn startup MakerBot, which brought 3D printing to the masses, was just acquired by Stratasys, a professional-grade 3D printing company, for $403 million in stock.

Bre Pettis, a former schoolteacher, and his co-founders Adam Mayer and Zach Smith started MakerBot Industries in 2009 with the hope of making 3D printing more accessible.

They created a 3D desktop printer called the MakerBot. The company was an instant success and sold out of its first 20 MakerBots in just two weeks. Since then, users have created just about anything they could imagine with the device.

Pettis says there are many similarities between the personal computing industry and the personal manufacturing industry. He compares his machines to early personal computers like the Apple I.

We visited the famed MakerBot Botcave in Brooklyn last year, and talked to Pettis about his vision for the personal manufacturing revolution.

Watch below.

Produced By Robert Libetti & Kamelia Angelova

Music: "I Am Running with Temporary Success from a Monstrous Vacuum in Pursuit" by Chris Zabriskie

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3D printing technology has officially hit the mainstream with the merger of MakerBot and Stratasys. But tinkerers, hobbyists, and medical professionals have been working to improve lives and revolutionize health through 3D printing since the '80s.

Richard Van As of Johannesburg lost two of his fingers in an accident with a table saw. So he started looking for a way to fix his hand, NPR reports. He ended up connecting with a special effects artist from Bellingham, Wash. named Ivan Owen.

The two were able to solve Van As' problem by building a mechanical finger. But one day, Van As received a call from a mother seeking help for her son named Liam. The five-year-old boy was born without fingers on his right hand due to a rare congenital condition called amniotic band syndrome.

Van As and Owen successfully made Liam a mechanical hand, but wondered if they could create the prosthetic hand with a 3D printer.

So Owen emailed MakerBot, and the 3D printing company ended up sending both Van As and Owen 3D printers. What previously took about a week's time to build now took only 20 minutes with a 3D printer.

For the first time, Liam could pick up coins and grab shapes of different sizes with his right hand.

It's not uncommon for kids with ABS to go without prosthetics. For one, prosthetics can cost thousands of dollars, and kids grow out of them quickly, MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis told Business Insider yesterday.

With 3D printing, now anyone can build a prosthetic hand using less than $5 in materials.

"When you look at these types of applications," Pettis says. "It just blows your mind as to what the possibilities are."

Check out a video of Liam using his Robohand below.

SEE ALSO: Hope You Trust 3D Printers — Boeing Uses Them To 'Print' Parts For Its Planes

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NASA's latest rocket test normally wouldn't be big news, except for how a portion of that rocket came to be.

Ryan Whitwham of Geek.com captured the idea in just a headline: "NASA's 3D Printed Rocket Engine Did Not Blow Up."

From Geek:

The procedure employed to produce this engine is known as selective laser melting manufacturing. Whereas normal 3D printers melt and extrude plastics (usually ABS), selective laser melting uses a high-powered laser to melt and fuse metallic powders into the desired 3D structure.

Anyone who's followed the 3D printing exploits of Cody Wilson and his 3D-printed weapons company Defense Distributed knows that production of parts that handle the stresses of heat and pressure has been incredibly difficult. Not only has NASA taken a big step in the process of 3D printing metallic objects, but they've all but made certain the coming manufacturing revolution in America, and likely the world.

The part the space agency produced — a fuel injector — usually takes a year to build. Now, NASA claims they built this iteration in about 4 months, at a mere fraction of the cost.

And NASA isn't the only one who recognizes the benefits, the Department of Defense is in the mix as well.

The military is fielding mobile fabrication labs featuring 3D printers capable of customizing equipment, and Obama is dumping billions into 3D printing investment to back such initiatives.

There's even been talk of 3D printing human tissue— unproven, but if anything, NASA's bold test bolsters such thoughts.

The implications reach even into the relations of the world's super powers.

Last year, Boston Consulting Group predicted"that as much as 30% of America's exports from China could be domestically produced by 2020," Jon Koten of the Wall Street Journal reports.

Indeed, NASA's rocket test was not a step, but a giant leap for the future of 3D printing.

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Stocks of 3-D printers are getting killed today.

ExOne is off nearly -13% after BB&T downgraded them to "hold" over skepticism about the company's prospects of selling itself.

Meanwhile, 3D Systems Corp. is down more than -3%, and Stratasys Inc. is down more than -5.5%. 

The sector have been on a tear for most of the year, but somecommentators have argued it's now entered a temporary bubble. 

ExOne now sees 34.4% of its float in short positions, while and 3D Systems' has hit 28.7%. 

SEE ALSO: Tesla getting crushed

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"Starship Troopers" has pretty much everything you want from a satirical science-fiction action flick.

There's the over-the-top action, with guns that hold seemingly infinite ammo.

There's the incredibly cheesy dialogue, with such gems as, "The only good bug is a dead bug!"

And then there's the awesome technology that the makers predicted we'd have in the future.

While much of it's still in the realm of fantasy — like faster-than-light space travel — the movie also predicted many things that are already part of our everyday tech. And it did so in 1997 — before the internet changed our lives.

All of the students in Starship Troopers use tablet computers (though they're still as thick as tech from the 90s)

Based on the stylus, it looks like the Surface Pro beats the iPad in the Starship Troopers universe.

The movie's government ads are a pretty accurate portrayal of today's visual web, using a combination of interactive links and videos.

The humble lightbulb, you think it might be safe from the clutches of 3D printing, but no. Not at all. Designer David Graas has created 3D-printed LED bulbs that have cityscapes rising from them in a series called Huddle.

What's a skyscaper doing on a bulb? These are Graas' homage to the modern city, a place where humanity huddles together to face its unknown future.

"The mega city, despite its many problems, seems to be our destined habitat now that resources are becoming scarce. It also hold[s] the key to a sustainable future with its concentration of information, technology and talent." he says.

They also look really cool. The bulb itself is actually a "bulbshade" so you don't need a fixture, you just hang it straight from the ceiling or it comes in floor stand version too. They're a fine example of how 3D printing isn't just about printing figures of Yoda, but also how you can customize an everyday product and completely alter its appearance.

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With stock prices near all-time highs, investors have grown increasingly uncomfortable about where the markets may head in the near-term.

Perhaps the better idea is to think long-term.

In a new report titled, "The Search for Creative Destruction," the analysts at Goldman Sachs do just that.

"We showcase eight secular disruptive themes that we believe possess the potential to command greater attention in the coming years," wrote lead analyst Robert Boroujerdi. "Indeed, these stories through product or business innovation are poised to transform addressable markets or open up entirely new ones, offering growth insulated from the broader macro environment and creating value for their stakeholders, in our view."

Goldman's themes cut across all industries from manufacturing to finance to tobacco.

We've put together the most important data within each "destroyer," describing what it does and quantifying its growth potential.

Thanks to Goldman Sachs for giving us permission to feature their charts.

Creative Destroyer 1: E-Cigarettes

Goldman's Judy Hong describes e-cigarettes as basically all the good stuff about regular cigarettes but none of the bad. "Imagine a product that is possibly >99% less harmful than cigarettes, delivers a similar user experience and offers a better economic bargain—this is the proposition of electronic cigarettes (e-ci gs)."

Source: Goldman Sachs

E-cigarettes could grab a tenth of the entire tobacco market.

E-cigs yield higher margins for manufacturers and retailers as they aren't subject to excise taxes or settlement payments. Hong estimates they could hit $10bn in sales over the next several years, compared with more than $1bn this year, while grabbing 10% of the overall tobacco market (and 15% of market profits).

Source: Goldman Sachs

Here's Hong's growth outlook for e-cigs.