Pulling Faces

From tiny cages carrying drugs inside the body to custom-designed transplants 'printed' out of a patient’s cells, 3D printing is changing modern medicine. Researchers are now looking towards the fourth dimension – time. Here tiny looping 'ribs' of different silicon-based inks are piped in a careful overlapping design – all thanks to a mixture of mathematics, computing and materials science. Each ink responds differently to changes in temperature, growing or shrinking over time – the flat layers of ribs can be triggered to pull themselves into a pre-defined 3D shape. This particular design is the face of Carl Friedrich Gauss, whose geometry inspired the technique. In the future, though, similar principles couple be applied to tissue engineering, or prosthetics – creating shape-shifting designs that adapt to their environment and purpose over time.

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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• Part of a video by J. William Boley and Wim M. van Rees, and colleagues
• Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
• Video copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in PNAS, October 2019