Incredible shrinking 3D printer can make really tiny objects

[Judi Lynn]

13 December 2018

By Douglas Heaven

Making miniscule objects is hard – far easier to make bigger things and then shrink them. That’s the idea behind a 3D printing technique called implosion fabrication.

The method can be used to produce a variety of shapes, from tiny hollow spheres to microscopic linked chains. It also works with different materials, including plastics, metals and DNA.

Most nanostructures are created in layers using 3D printing. This works for flat structures or for shapes, such as pyramids, that can be built from the bottom up, but more complex structures need a different approach.

Ed Boyden at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues discovered they could reverse an existing technique to do the job. They previously developed a method for magnifying small details in brain tissue by embedding it in another material and then expanding it – reversing this gave them a way to make big things small.

More:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2188114-incredible-shrinking-3d-printer-can-make-really-tiny-objects/

[Xipe Totec]

1. The Waldo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldo_%28short_story%29

A typical illustration of the tools in the story is Waldo's handling of his need to perform micro-dissection on the scale of cellular walls. He uses human-sized waldoes to make smaller waldos, then uses those to make even smaller waldoes, and continues the series until he has waldoes small enough to work at the cellular scale.

There are three main factors involved in Heinlein's description of the tools:

They work like human hands: not with a single active lever or twenty different tools, but with components arranged and with actions like human hands. The operator puts his or her hands in "gloves" and the waldos repeat the movements of the hands.
They work in conjunction with viewing equipment that lets the user see the waldos as if they have the size and action of his own hands. This, in conjunction with the first factor, means that waldos are a "no-training" tool: if you know how to use your hands, you can use waldos.
They allow work to be done remotely, in the next room or many miles away, or in an environment that could kill a human or be contaminated by human presence. They can be a different size from normal human hands: either huge for building construction or tiny for micro-manipulation.