Quick Dish

Inside this tiny vial of liquid – right in the centre – something appears. The shape could be anything, the technique used to manifest the tiny 'thing' could easily have produced a tiny star, or a squid or a scaffold for growing living cells. This new form of 3D printing focuses a picture painted with laser light into a liquid polymer with solidifies, creating a physical copy. The laser patterns are holographic, giving the object depth to its features, like a flower, or a face. Firing different patterns from slightly different angles, through a rotating projector, produces the final solid object. The whole process takes less than a second. Tweezers transfer the new thing into water, where it’s gently cleaned. This modified form of computed axial lithography, called digital incoherent synthesis of holographic light fields (DISH), may have a bright future in tissue engineering.

Written by John Ankers

John Ankers

Writer

A former researcher in systems biology, John is now an online biology tutor and professional coach supporting the wellbeing of scientists and NHS professionals. He's writing, too, of course.

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• Video (sped up x2) from work by Xukang Wang, Yuanzhu Ma, Yihan Niu and colleagues
• Department of Automation, Tsinghua University; Institute for Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, February 2026