One of the main things stopping people from purchasing a 3D printer for their homes is price. The MakerBot Replicator Mini, for example, is available for preorder for around $1,300. 

But if you have dreams of printing 3D doodads and whatchamacallits in the comfort of your own home, that's where M3D's Micro 3D printer comes in.

It's being billed as "the first truly consumer 3D printer" on its Kickstarter campaign page. And, according to CNET, it blew past its funding goal of $50,000 in 11 minutes. (2,184 backers have pledged $586,937 at the time of this writing.)

Both the $199 and $250 options are gone, but the $299 option is still available, which nets you a printer and one spool of filament. 

The Micro can be used right out of the box, and the M3D software that it uses was designed "to be as interactive and enjoyable as a game, making sure it's fully touchscreen-capable with a minimalist and simple-to-use interface." So even 3D-printing newbies can have a go at making their own teacups and iPhone cases.

But expert users aren't left out in the cold: There are expert settings available for people who have some 3D-printing experience. And the Micro is compatible with PLA or ABS, as well as its own filament spools, in case you have leftover plastic laying around.

There's no shortage of 3D printer Kickstarter campaigns, and several have been funded. It's taking a little while for 3D printers to gain momentum and become mainstream. But less-expensive devices like the Micro make 3D printers more accessible for casual users, such as weekend tinkerers or even for students to use in the classroom. 

If it can keep the price of the printer down, it might finally be onto something. 

The Micro is expected to ship later this year and in early 2015. 

Check out the video from the Kickstarter campaign below:

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Doctors and researchers at the University of Louisville are working on 3D printing a functioning human heart out of a patient's own fat cells, reports the AP.

That might sound like a complex and intractable approach, but Dr. Stuart Williams of the university's "Bioficial Heart Program" says it's much easier than you might think: "The heart is one of the easiest — if not the easiest — tissues and organs to print because it's made up of so few cells that have really only one major function, and that is to contract, to beat."

It's especially important that the heart is made out of a patient's own cells because this helps prevent the patient's body from rejecting it.

Williams says that the most difficult part of this process will be to get the heart's components to work together in concert to move blood throughout the body.

Here's a picture from the manufacturing process, in which a heart is being built layer by layer from bottom to top. The AP's full video report is below that.

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A 3D printer called The Micro, from a company called M3D, has gone absolutely nuts on Kickstarter. It has raised an astounding $2.47 million over the past four days and blew by its $50,000 target in less than 11 minutes.

This certainly isn't the first low-cost, consumer-grade 3D printer to go wild on Kickstarter.  The FORM 1 raised nearly $3 million in 2012. Plus, the Buccaneer raised $1.4 million in 2013 and the the RigidBot 3D Printer raised $1.1 million in 2013, too.

So what's so special about M3D's 3D printer? M3D says it's packed a lot of innovation into a low price. While it hasn't said what it will charge consumers once it gets the printer into production, people who contributed on Kickstarter could get one for as low as a $199. There are still some available for a $299 contribution, too.

M3D is using the money to finish the prototype and set up manufacturing in the U.S., it says.

The speed at which this company got its funding is amazing.

It's the fifth-fastest Kickstarter project to date to hit a $1 million, according to researcher Statista. The Micro hit $1 million in 25 hours. That compares to game console Ouya, which hit $1 million in 8.22 hours and watch computer Pebble’s 27 hours.

SEE ALSO: Land Rover Has Invented A 'Transparent' Car

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There's a lot you can do with a 3D printer. Now add "building a house in a day" to the list.

Make that 10 houses.

The WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Co. has printed 10 homes in 24 hours out of recycled materials. 

This isn't the first attempt at 3D printing large structures in a short amount of time. Researchers in California are making a printer that can build a house in 24 hours.

In Amsterdam earlier this month, construction of a 3D-printed house began. The house is made out of plastic bricks that fit together like Lego. It's also being printed onsite.

The Chinese houses, on the other hand, weren't built onsite. They were printed in pieces and then put together in Shanghai's Qingpu district.

The pieces are made using recycled construction materials and industrial waste to form a concrete aggregate, Gizmodo reports. The 3D printer used to build the houses is 500 feet long, 33 feet wide and 20 feet high. Each home costs around $4,800.

"We purchased parts for the printer overseas, and assembled the machine in a factory in Suzhou," the company's CEO, Ma Yihe, told 3ders. "Such a new type of 3D-printed structure is environment-friendly and cost-effective."

SEE ALSO: The Micro 3D printer blew way past its $50,000 Kickstarter goal in 11 minutes

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A Chinese company 3-D printed 10 houses in 24 hours in Shanghai's Qingpu district using recycled construction materials. 

The WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Co. (link in Chinese) designed the printer that made the walls. The buildings' roofs weren't printed because of technological limitations.

The printer used to build the houses is 500 feet long, 33 feet wide, and 20 feet high.

The walls were made out of a material refined from construction waste and mixed with cement.

The inventor and CEO, Ma Yihe, built his own company offices and research center out of the materials. It took roughly a month to build his office, which is about 10,000 square meters.

CEO Ma Yihe says that this way of building is cost-effective and environmentally friendly. The materials can even be tinted different colors according to the customer's needs.

These buildings will be offices at a high-tech industrial park in Shanghai. Ma Yihe says he hopes this process will be used to build skyscrapers in the future. 

Watch the whole video below:

SEE ALSO: A Chinese company 3-D printed 10 houses in a day

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Nine-year-old Kylie Wicker of Rockford, Illinois was born without fingers on her left hand, but enterprising students taking the Engineering Graphics class at Boylan Catholic are using a 3D printer to manufacture a prosthetic hand for her, reports MyFoxPhilly.

Kylie's father, Jeromy Wicker, knew that the school had a 3D printer — a Makerbot Replicator, specifically — and reached out to the school upon learning that 3D printing technology could be used to make prosthetics useful to people like his daughter.

These prosthetics can cost as much as $50,000, a grievous figure compared to the projections of Bud May, teacher of the Engineering Graphics class: "The total cost of this will be barely $5. Maybe a dollar's worth of plastic and a couple of bucks for the fasteners."

Here are a couple of pictures of what the hand looks like:

When it's ready for her on Friday, Kylie's new hand will enable her to do a number of things that were previously impossible or difficult.

"I can finally ride my bike," she told FOX.

For some reason, the B-roll of this news story is embeddable. Check it out below for a few comments from Kylie, her parents, and the teacher leading the class designing her arm.

Philadelphia News, Weather and Sports from WTXF FOX 29

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A lot of people want to get their hands on a 3-D printer. They either want the cheapest or the fastest.

But what about the smallest?

The Lix Pen is a 3-D-printing pen that lets you draw objects out of thin air. It's similar to the 3Doodler, which launched a Kickstarter last year, and raised more than $2 million. 

But the UK-based Lix Pen is billing itself as "the smallest 3D printing pen in the world." Indeed, it's only 0.55 inch at its widest, and it's only around 6.5 inches long. (The 3Doodler is 2 inches wide by 4 inches tall.)

The pens will retail for around $140. The company also has a Kickstarter campaign, which already has raised more than US$600,000 of its US$50,000 goal, and still has 27 days left. 

The red cord is the USB cord. The black  is the plastic filament that the pen heats up to make your 3-D creation.

After a minute of charging, the heating point is hot enough to melt the plastic. It can get up to 446 degrees Fahrenheit.

You can make both rigid and free-standing structures. Here's an example of a rigid structure.

Here's what a free-standing structure looks like.

And these are just some of the items you can make.

Check out how it works here: 

LIX THE SMALLEST 3D PRINTING PEN from LIX 3D PEN on Vimeo.

SEE ALSO: How a Chinese company 3-D printed 10 houses in a day

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Researchers in Australia have 3D printed a mouthpiece designed to combat one of the most common sleeping disorders in the United States—sleep apnea.

Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and Australian dental company Oventus have discovered a way to 3D print a mouthpiece that can prevent dangerous pauses in breath during sleep.

The scientists used a 3D scanner to create a map of the patient's mouth, according to Medical Xpress, and used the results to print titanium-built mouthpiece coated with medical-grade plastic. 

The device features a duckbill that extends from the wearer's mouth like a whistle. This creates two separate airways, which allows air to avoid obstructions in the nose, back of the mouth, and tongue by traveling through the back of the wearer's throat.

Sleep apnea is an involuntary cessation of breathing that occurs during sleep. There are three types of sleep apnea: obstructive, central, and mixed. Obstructive sleep apnea, called OSA for short, is the most common type according to the American Sleep Apnea Association. 

All three types of sleep apnea can cause one to stop breathing repeatedly during sleep, sometimes hundreds of times during the night. These pauses are often longer than one minute, the ASAA notes. The sleeper is usually unaware of these pauses because they do not trigger a full awakening.

If left untreated, sleep apnea can have long term health affects such as high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and depression.

According to the American Association for Respiratory Care, sleep apnea affects up to 18 million Americans, and officials estimate that 10 million Americans with the condition haven't been diagnosed.

The CPAP mask is the most common, non-invasive method for treating sleep apnea. The new 3D printed mouthpiece, however, is a more comfortable solution for those affected by the disorder. Oventus CEO Neil Anderson said the following to Medical Xpress:

This new device is tailored to an individual's mouth using a 3D scan and is used only on the top teeth which make it more compact and far more comfortable.

The 3D printed mouthpiece is expected to be available for patients next year, but it's unclear whether or not it will come to markets outside of Australia. 

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Citi just came out with a list of disruptive innovations that are going to change the world. The top thing on their list is '4-D printing.' Obviously '3-D printing' gets tons of hype, but we had never heard of the 4-D version until then.

Citi credits the concept to MIT's Skylar Tibbits who is in the architecture department.

4-D printing takes "smart" materials from a 3-D printer that can assemble themselves.

So instead of just printing out a chunk of shaped plastic, you can actually create shapes that a fixed 3-D printing nozzle couldn't accomplish. The potential uses for this range from extreme condition architecture to adaptive infrastructure, like pipes that expand and contract depending on water volume. There's also potential in medicine: various implants could be inserted in a packed form, then take their true shape once they reach their destination.  

Tibbits has a bunch of amazing videos on Vimeo showing how 4-D printing works in the lab. 

We GIF'd them for maximum mind blowing.

The first two feature special materials that, when put under water, assemble into something else:

This one features specially cut material that, when shaken extremely rapidly, assemble into miniature balls.

This one's called Self-Folding Sheet.

Finally, a long strand that folds in water.

Here are the videos for the first two:

4D Printing: Truncated Octahedron from Skylar Tibbits on Vimeo.

4D Printing: Self-Folding Surface Cube from Skylar Tibbits on Vimeo.

SEE ALSO: Citi lists 10 huge innovations that are going to change the world

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3-D printers have come a long way since the technology initially debuted in the early 1980s.

Like most technologies, today's 3-D printers have become smaller, cheaper, and more advanced over the past couple of decades. 

As 3-D printers have evolved, so have the ways in which we use them.

The concept of using a computer to print everything from the shoes on your feet to tonight's dinner may sound like science fiction, but affordable 3-D printers have made this a reality.

Platforms such as MakerBot's Thingiverse, which offers an extensive library of ideas and models for 3-D printing, have helped the technology evolve from a a means of creating bottle openers and trinkets to shaping the way medical equipment and clothing are manufactured.

Here are a few common items that you probably didn't know were 3-D printable. 

Pizza

Mechanical engineer Anjan Contractor was granted $125,000 from NASA to create a printer that could produce pizza. The goal was to create a more efficient way to provide food for astronauts on long space missions. In a video posted in late 2013, Contractor said the printer works by laying down the dough, cheese, and protein in separate layers. 

Makeup

Harvard Business School graduate Grace Choi created her own mini 3-D printer called the Mink, which is capable of printing real makeup. The Mink, which will retail for $300 and debuted on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, connects to your computer and allows you to choose different colors by ripping the color code from any makeup tutorial on the internet. With a little help from Microsoft Paint, you can print makeup such as eye shadow just like you'd print a document from your computer.

Guitars

Using a Cubify 3-D printer, the team over at ODD Guitars has built a business on 3-D printing premium guitars. The bodies of these guitars are printed using a manufacturing process called Selective Laser Sintering. The model shown here is based on a Les Paul-inspired design, and starts at $3,500. That may sound expensive, but it's still much cheaper than an actual top-tier Gibson Les Paul electric guitar, which could cost up to $10,000. 

Last month, I covered MediaBistro's Inside 3-D Printing conference at the Javits Center on the west side of Manhattan.

The confab brought together big guys like 3-D Systems with boutique 3-D printer makers from across the country.  

I came away most bullish on 3-D printing's potential in medicine, and less so for everything else, at least for now. Mainstream printing is still too cute — most of the tables were basically filled with 3-D printed plastic cats — to augur a huge market buildup anytime soon.

But that doesn't mean cute is bad — and it doesn't even have to involve animals.

Among the firms represented was The Bobble Shop, a French-based group with a franchise in Washington Heights, that scans your head and puts it on any number of pre-set costumed figurines. Here's how the process works:

I wasn't thrilled with the costume choices available for heads that actually "bobble" (they tended to be sci-fi or military themed), so I went with a blonde samurai for maximum absurdity.

The table was on promo duty, so I didn't have to pay for anything. Below is the result. Despite the hair and the costume, it's kind of unnerving to have something that resembles me this much. As Ernst Jentsch wrote in his 1906 essay on uncanny feelings: "The finer the  mechanism and the truer to nature the formal reproduction, the more strongly will the special effect also make its appearance."

There are actually a bunch of firms that do this. The most high-end one is (where else) in Germany. They're called TwinKind, and their results are even more stunning.

If this is the future of 3-D printing, it won't be very big...but it'll be awesome.

SEE ALSO: Credit Suisse's Bullish 3-D Printing Argument

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We're pretty excited about New Matter, a company launching a crazy-affordable 3D printer called the MOD-t via this Indiegogo campaign that kicked off today. In the short time since the campaign's been live, it's garnered a whopping $100,000 of its $375,000 goal.

The first thing that merits your attention is the cost of the device itself. The regular retail price for this thing is $249, but if you want to get on board early, there are a limited number of units available at $149 and $199.

Compare this to the price of devices by 3D printing hardware company MakerBot, which could easily be considered "the Apple of 3D printing." They start at $1,375 for its Replicator Mini. The Replicator Z18, MakerBot's top of the line model, is $6,500.

So how on earth is the price for the MOD-t so low? We spoke to New Matter co-founder, president, and CTO Steve Schell to find out more.

"In order to create the low-cost hardware, we invented a new mechanism that drives two of the three axes of the machine," he told Business Insider. "Pinion rods drive the build plate, and this unique mechanism has cost advantage because it makes for fewer overall parts. We’ve designed this for high-volume manufacturing and prepared to invest in tooling and injection molding to drive cost down."

In simpler terms, the New Matter team has boiled down a 3D printer so that it operates just as effectively with many fewer parts, and having fewer parts severely reduces production costs. But can a 3D printer really be effective at this cost?

Again, here's Schell:

"In terms of the key specs that matter, we’re matching state of the art and print speed," he said. "We're not trying to compete on performance, but we are generally matching the specs of other printers at a much lower price. There will be a number of users who graduate into a higher-end printer."

So the MOD-t's biggest selling point is that it's a 3-D printer for people intrigued by the technology but aren't willing to drop a four-digit sum for it. If and when their experience with the MOD-t should whet an appetite for more advanced 3-D printing capabilities, consumers can then spring for something pricier and more advanced.

The low-cost hardware is only one aspect of the company, however. There's an expansive app-based experience too, connecting designers and MOD-t owners, making it a snap to print out objects from a curated selection of 3-D models. The obvious comparison here will be to MakerBot's own Thingiverse, a repository where creators share their 3-D files for others to modify and print at home, but Schell isn't a big fan of Thingiverse's implementation.

"There are a large number of mediocre parts on Thingiverse," he said. "There are a few gems as well, of course, but it's difficult to find them because they're lost in a sea of mediocrity. By curating our collection, we hope to provide quality downloads."

If you like the sound of all this, check out the Indiegogo campaign right here. 

SEE ALSO: A review of Microsoft's new Surface Pro 3

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Biozoon is a German company that's introduced "Smoothfood," in which it uses liquefied ingredients to 3-D print a variety of foods, and this could be a gamechanger for the senior care industry, we learn via Gizmodo.

In exactly the same way that hobbyist makers build contraptions by shaping plastic on their own 3-D printers, Biozoon extrudes liquefied meat, carbohydrates, and vegetables into ready-to-eat and easily chewed food items.

Successfully chewing and swallowing food is a common problem for the elderly — dysphagia is the medical name for this — but consider the second word in Biozoon Smoothfood's name. This stuff is designed to be easy to chew and swallow.

Gizmodo writes that six component foods are available for now — cauliflower, peas, chicken, pork, potatoes, and pasta — with more on the way.

For now the food is printed by the company and the sent to its destination. The long-term goal is to get these food printers people's homes, which will make it a snap to "cook up" an easily digested meal.

Here's what some of the food items look like:

"Gelled pumpkin."

"Gelled asparagus dish for people with difficulty chewing and swallowing."

"Pork medallions with red cabbage and potato foam."

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Above is a slow-motion GIF of a 3-D printed gun firing a bullet, but you can see that the gun blows apart and the bullet arcs up slightly just before falling down — hardly enough to hurt someone. This is evidence that 3-D printed guns don't work, according to the BBC.

Tony Gallagher, firearms expert at the National Ballistics Intelligence Service (NABIS) in Birmingham, UK, has tested these weapons, which can be made using any one of a number of at-home 3-D printers, and he told the BBC that "on each occasion they have failed, and all of them have failed catastrophically[...] These guns are of no use to anyone. They're too unpredictable, and pose probably the greatest danger to the user."

Below, BBC reporter Phil Mackey shows a brand new gun and a recently fired one. Before firing, it clearly looks like a gun, but the "after" example is totally busted and useless.

As 3-D printing technology improves, home weapon manufacture may certainly become cause for more legitimate concern. Consider this gun made out of metal, demoed below. While it "cost tens of thousands of dollars, took two days to print, and another three weeks to make it safe enough to use," you'll agree that it's much more effective than the plastic guns discussed above. The concern here is that metallic guns will become easier and more accessible to print or that plastic guns will be redesigned and improved for more stopping power.

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Using 3D-printing methods, researchers have created artificial blood vessels in a lab. The bioprinted structures could be used for transplants or for testing new drugs, scientists say.

Blood vessels are vital parts of the body's circulatory system that supply the organs with nutrients and remove waste. Scientists have developed artificial tissue from the heart, liver and lungs, but creating a synthetic network of blood vessels to support these organs has been a challenge.

"That's where technologies like bioprinting come in," said Ali Khademhosseini, a biomedical engineer at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and senior author of a new study published online this month in the journal Lab on a Chip. "We're trying to create the right architecture for tissues." [7 Cool Uses of 3D Printing in Medicine]

Previous attempts to 3D-print blood vessels take one of two forms, Khademhosseini told Live Science. Researchers either print the actual cells, or they print a structure on which to grow cells, which later dissolves. But printing cells often damages or kills them, and the dissolving structures may contain substances that are harmful to cells, Khademhosseini said.

Printing tissue

In this study, Khademhosseini and his team took a different approach. They printed a template for cell growth that could be pulled out later without damaging the cells.

The researchers printed a network of tiny channels out of agarose, a polymer made from seaweed often used for culturing cells, to serve as a template for the artificial blood vessels, and then embedded the network of passages into a gel. On the gel structure, they grew mouse cells that will develop into bone.

The resulting blood vessels could effectively transport fluids, support living cells and allow the cells to mature, the researchers said. Furthermore, the cells rearranged themselves into a layer of cells on the templates.

The need for artificial blood vessels is significant. In medicine, the state-of-the-art treatment for faulty blood vessels is atissue donor transplant, Khademhosseini said. But a shortage of donors exists, and for patients who are lucky enough to receive a transplant, their immune system may reject the foreign tissue.

With the high demand for tissues for transplants, obtaining blood vessels for testing drugs or cosmetics before they are used in humans is nearly impossible, Khademhosseini said.

Not there yet

While promising, this new method of printing blood vessels has its limitations. For example, they can't print very small blood vessels, like capillaries, because the materials aren't strong enough, the researchers said. However, if they print larger vessels, the cells could rearrange to form smaller ones around them.

Another challenge is that the current printing method requires an opening to remove the template structure.

The researchers are working on improving the resolution of their bioprinting method and the materials they use, as well as testing the 3D-printed structures with living cells, and ultimately in living animals.

"We're far away from humans, but I think [the technology] would be translatable," Khademhosseini said.

Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

• 5 Crazy Technologies That Are Revolutionizing Biotech
• The 10 Weirdest Things Created By 3D Printing
• 11 Surprising Facts About the Circulatory System

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It almost feels like people are playing a game of oneupmanship when it comes to 3D printing: You're 3D printing a building? Well, how about 3D printing a building on the moon. Yeah, well, this guy's 3D printing Coney Island's Lunar Park in its entirety. But experimental tech demands experimental and ambitious ideas, right?

The latest addition to this ever-expanding list of insane concepts is called Sugarbabe and involves 3D printing, a little bio art, and, oh yeah, Vincent van Gogh's severed ear. Using cells from van Gogh's distant relative Lieuwe van Gogh, the ear has been regrown by Dutch artist Diemut Strebe who uses "science basically like a type of brush." 

After growing enough cells from the material obtained from the great-great-grandson of Vincent's brother Theo, they were shaped to replicate van Gogh's detached organ using a 3D printer and the resulting "ear" is being kept alive using a nutrient solution. Lieuwe shares around a sixteenth of the same genes as the Impressionist master, which includes the Y-chromosome passed down through the male lineage. 

And in a surreal twist that brings meta new meanings to the phrase 'fall on deaf (death?) ears', visitors at the The Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany—where the ear is on display—can speak into the reformed appendage using a microphone.

"You can talk to the ear. The input sound is processed by a computer using software that converts it to simulate nerve impulses in real time. The speaker remains in soliloquy. The crackling sound that is produced is used to outline absence instead of presence." explains the museum.

The piece is on display until July 6th and will be coming to New York in spring 2015.

SEE ALSO: Researchers Have 3D-Printed Blood Vessels

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Today's culture of oversharing can tempt us to reveal way too much information online, be it our geographical locations, Facebook friends, age, gender, or anything else. We've gotten a bit numb when it comes to sharing our personal data.

To portray this reality in a more visual and literal way, NYU grad student Xuedi Chen decided to design a dress that reveals more skin as you reveal more personal data online. Chen created the dress, called x.pose, for New York University's Thesis Week, according to CNET.

Chen created the dress by 3D printing the garment with 20 hand-cut reactive displays built into a web-like black skeleton.

A supplementary app tracks the user's data trail and transfers the information to the dress via Bluetooth technology. An Arduino processor takes that information and translates that into changing the panels from white to clear when more data is shared.

On the x.pose site, Chen explains the thought process behind the dress:

In the physical realm we can deliberately control which portions our bodies are exposed to the world by covering it with clothing. In the digital realm, we have much less control of what personal aspects we share with the services that connect us. In the digital realm we are naked and vulnerable ... Since I have already ceded control of my data, I wanted to go a step further and broadcast it for anyone and everyone to see.

The end product works in real-time and mirrors the the amount of data you are sharing at that specific moment.

SEE ALSO: This Woman Redesigned Her Dress To Keep Away Strangers And Protect Her Personal Space

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CreoPop calls itself"the world's first 3-D pen with cool ink," but instead of heating plastic to its melting point like the comparable 3Doodler, it uses stereolithographic technology to harden liquid polymer (the pen's "ink") by exposing it to UV light.

This is exactly the same technology used in Formlabs Form 1 3-D printer, but packed into a form factor that lets you (slowly) draw physical structures in 3-D space, as though you wield a magic paintbrush.

There's no heat at work here. When the CreoPop crew visited BI for a demo, they drew a small 3-D "tattoo" right on my hand:

Andreas Birnik, CreoPop's chief marketing officer, explained that because the device uses cartridges of liquid photopolymers, various additives can be tossed into them so your "ink" can glow in the dark, react to temperature changes, or consist of alternating colors all in one cartridge.

This unique marriage of chemical engineering and gadgetry can be yours through the company's Indiegogo page— $89 gets you a CreoPop pen and five capsules (spares will run $2 apiece).

Check out the introductory demo video below:

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We've previously reported on New Matter, a company making an ultra-affordable 3-D printer called the MOD-t that's currently raising money on Indiegogo. At the time of this writing, supporters have pledged some $544,000, meaning New Matter has raised 145% of its $375,000 target sum with 15 days of fundraising still left.

We call the MOD-t "ultra-affordable" because its $249 price tag stands in stark contrast to pretty much all other 3-D printers out there (early Indiegogo backers scooped up a limited number of MOD-t devices at $149!). Consider the devices by 3-D-printing hardware company MakerBot, which could easily be considered "the Apple of 3-D printing." They start at $1,375 for the Replicator Mini. The Replicator Z18, MakerBot's top of the line model, is $6,500.

So how can New Matter make its printer available for so cheap?

"In order to create the low-cost hardware, we invented a new mechanism that drives two of the three axes of the machine," Steve Schell told Business Insider. He's cofounder, president, and CTO of New Matter.

"Pinion rods drive the build plate, and this unique mechanism has cost advantage because it makes for fewer overall parts. We’ve designed this for high-volume manufacturing and prepared to invest in tooling and injection molding to drive cost down."

In simpler terms, the New Matter team has boiled down a 3-D printer so that it operates just as effectively with many fewer parts. One of the biggest savers here is in the pinion system that drives the build platform. It moves forward, back, left, and right, while the print head only has to move up and down.

The video below will give you a closer look at this reduced part-count design. New Matter engineer Derek Schulte explains the system that moves the build platform:

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To his list of firsts, Barack Obama can add that he was the first U.S. President to have himself scanned and 3D printed.

Obama's 3D-printed bust and mold of his face were on display Wednesday (June 18) at the first-ever White House Maker Faire, a celebration of students and entrepreneurs who are using technology to create new products and businesses, according to the Smithsonian Institution.

A team of Smithsonian 3D digital-imaging specialists scanned the president earlier this year. They used the University of Southern California's Light Stage face scanner to capture Obama's face in high resolution, and handheld 3D scanners and SLR cameras to create a reconstruction of his bust. [The 10 Weirdest Things Created By 3D Printing]

Next, experts in 3D graphics at the software company Autodesk produced high-resolution models, which were printed using 3D Systems' selective laser sintering printers.

The scans and printed models will become part of a collection at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, which showcases multiple images of each president. The 3D portraits will be added to the museum's current collection of works representing Obama.

The Smithsonian launched a 3D scanning and imaging program called Smithsonian X 3D in 2013, to make its museum collections and scientific specimens more widely available to researchers.

The Smithsonian X 3D collection includes models of the Wright Flyer, a canard biplane that was the first successful heavier-than-air powered aircraft built by the Wright brothers in 1903; the remnants of supernova Cassiopeia A; a whale fossil; and a sixth-century Buddha statue. These objects are available online and anyone with a 3D printer can print them on a 3D printer.

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