3D necroprinting uses living tissue as the printer nozzle
3D necroprinting: Leveraging biotic material as the nozzle for 3D printing
A Hacker News discussion of a paper on "3D necroprinting" — a biohybrid technique that uses biotic material as the nozzle for 3D printing. Commenters react to the unfamiliar field of biohybrid engineering, weighing biology's micro-scale manufacturing strengths against the ethical incentives of treating life as a production substrate.
I'm not sure I like the potentially perverse incentives introduced by using life as a substrate for producing manufacturing components, but then again I don't practice veganism so maybe I'm being hypocritical.
- gpm
An alternative approach / really cool project on youtube using a laser guided through fiber into a resin bath as the "nozzle" for an fdm-ish style 3d printer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvV2CH5il3Q
Claims 2um layer height and sub 10um feature size - while the people using mosquito bits are claiming 20um line size.
- rx_tx
This paper was the Technology ig Nobel winner this year [0]
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/09/meet-the-2026-ig-nob...
- sram1337
> Recent advances in biohybrid engineering have pushed this paradigm further, seamlessly integrating biotic materials into engineered systems.
This is the first I've heard of the field of "biohybrid engineering" and it sounds pretty cool. As a layman, it makes sense to leverage the micro-scale "manufacturing" capabilities biological systems seem to excel at over our more traditional(?) manufacturing processes.
I'm not sure I like the potentially perverse incentives introduced by using life as a substrate for producing manufacturing components, but then again I don't practice veganism so maybe I'm being hypocritical.