“The last couple of years have been incredibly inspiring and exciting for us,” MakerBot CEO and co-founder Bre Pettis said in a release.  “We have an aggressive model for growth, and partnering with Stratasys will allow us to supercharge our mission to empower individuals to make things using a MakerBot, and allow us to bring 3D technology to more people.”

Makerbot produces the popular Replicator 3D printers, which are relatively inexpensive and aimed at desktop users. The company has sold more than 22,000 3D printers since its founding in 2009. It will continue to operate under its own name and produce products distinct from Stratasys.

Makerbot recently opened a 50,000-square-foot factory in Brooklyn and plans to nearly double their staff this year. The company has received a modest $10 million in venture capital funding from companies including Foundry Group and True Ventures (see disclosure).

Minnesota-based Stratasys was founded in 1989 and merged with another 3D printer company, Objet, last year. It focuses on industry-oriented printers. Researchers recently used a Stratasys machine capable of printing with two types of polymer to produce a fracture-resistant material inspired by bone.

Disclosure: True Ventures is an investor in Makerbot and the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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The team used a custom printer and ink to produce the batteries. A nozzle .03 millimeters–or 30 microns–wide deposited layers of nanoparticle-packed paste in a comb-like shape. A second printed comb nestled into the first, their teeth interlocked. These functioned as the two halves of electrodes, which conduct electricity.

After printing, the electrode layers quickly hardened and were placed in a small container filled with solution. The finished product measured in at less than a millimeter wide. The team published their work Tuesday in Advanced Materials (subscription required).

A battery like this could transform fields like robotics, which are limited by how small they can build product by currently available materials. It would benefit tiny flying and swimming drones that must work autonomously over long distances, plus medical implants and discrete, wearable electronics.

Co-author Jennifer Lewis mentioned Harvard’s Robobees–tiny autonomous drones–as a potential application.

“The idea to be able to integrate small sources directly onto those kinds of robotic insects would be powerful and enabling. Right now, everything is tethered to an electric power source. It would be very nice not to have that,” Lewis said.

Other small batteries are made of layers of film, but are too thin to provide much power. This 3D printed variety is dense and thick enough to compete with a traditional battery, and it’s also a lithium-ion battery: the same style as in a cell phone.

“The electrochemical performance is comparable to commercial batteries in terms of charge and discharge rate, cycle life and energy densities. We’re just able to achieve this on a much smaller scale,” co-author Shen Dillon said in a Harvard release.

Next, the team wants to make larger batteries that can be directly printed inside another object. Right now, hearing aids are 98 percent 3D-printed and electronic components must be added later.

“Why not print the whole hearing aid?” Lewis said.

This story was updated at 9am PT to correct the size of the nozzle used to build the battery. It measures 0.03 millimeters wide, or 30 microns. Additional information was also added.

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MIT researchers emulated this unique property to develop a highly fracture-resistant material that can be made with a 3D printer. They published their results Monday in Advanced Functional Materials (subscription required).

Bones are made of collagen and a mineral — soft and brittle materials, respectively. But combine the two into a bone and they become much stronger. The mineral provides structure while collagen distributes energy over a larger area.

The two interlock in complicated ways, so first the researchers modeled a bone on a computer. Software translated this into a design readable by a Stratasys 3D printer capable of printing with two materials. Within hours, the researchers had their synthetic bone. The 3D printer produced a sheet of polymer about half the size of a piece of paper and one-eighth inch thick. Hard polymer formed the hard bricks of mineral while soft polymer worked as flexible collagen mortar. The material was as tough as bone and more than 20 times stronger than printed polymers that resembled just collagen or mineral, the paper said.

The bone-like material resembles a brick wall. Here it is shown against a mollusc’s nacre-covered inside. Graham Bratzel/MIT

“The combination of exciting results from earlier computational investigations and the advancement of 3D printing technology was the basis to this work,” said MIT associate professor Markus Buehler, who co-authored the paper. “We realized that we could manufacture composite materials with great mechanical properties through a relatively simple design process, and this was immediately appealing.”

Buehler said the bone-like material could eventually be used as a lightweight option for automotive and aerospace engineering or to build an actual artificial bone for medical purposes. The design and printing process could also be applied to other natural items, and even new, never-before-seen materials. The polymers are light and inexpensive, and can be scaled up to produce large structures like buildings.

“As of now 3D printing is not a scalable process – printers are typically confined in the volume of parts they can print and we are not aware of practical methods to combine separate parts printed in different printers,” Buehler said. “Increased attention around 3D printing and more studies such as ours, showing that 3D printing is useful for more than just prototyping, will likely motivate the industry to become more scalable.”

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Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before 3D printing spreads to real estate. The blog arm of real-estate search site Movoto did some number crunching, and concluded that it would take a single MakerBot Replicator 2 about 220 years, four months and 11 days to finish the bricks required for a standard two-story, 2,500-square-foot house. And it would cost $332,820 in plastic.

Movoto blogger Randy Nelson came up with the equation by timing how long it took a Replicator 2 desktop printer to build a single brick measuring 8 x 3.5 x 2.75 inches. From there, he extrapolated how many bricks a standard house would require, and multiplied that number by the time – 2.9 days per brick. The reason each brick takes so long is because of its density. Unlike standard 3D printed objects, which are often hollow or rely on geodesic design to keep production time down, each brick in this hypothetical hosue is completely solid and built with the Replicator 2′s .225 millimeter detail setting.

The time, of course, is just a rough guideline, as it doesn’t take into account the standard woes of building a home, including weather and assorted other delays, nor any part of the interior structure of the house.

Still it’s fun to apply Nelson’s equation — and the $48 market price for 1 kg of ABS plastic — to some of the most famous properties in the world:

• A 3D printed White House would cost $5,070,696 and take 3,357 years, 3 months and 23 days.
• The Palace Versailles would cost $101,184,060 and take 66,994 years and 4 days.
• The Empire State Building would cost  $222,336,480 and take 147,209 years, 1 month and 1 day.

The enormous price and time wasted on printing a home brick by brick obscures the ways in which 3D printing could actually streamline home construction, with large-scale printers using cement or sustainable materials to product a house as one continuous structure the same way that smaller printers create models. While it may not be efficient now, there’s certainly a chance that 3D printing will make an impact on building in the future.

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That first RE.WORK summit will take place on 19 September, which is also the second day of GigaOM’s Structure:Europe conference in London. The RE.WORK program will kick off with a focus on the areas of: the internet of things, 3D printing, nanotech, artificial intelligence, robotics, computing systems and sensors.

“We’re trying to showcase emerging technologies and breakthrough ideas,” summit founder Nikita Johnson told me. “It’s all about reworking big challenges that we’re facing in the future. We want to bring the technology and science aspect, but with mission of positive impact.”

While the first of these summits will focus on technology, others will have different themes: one in December will deal with urbanization, RE.WORK Health will take place next year, and still others will handle energy, education and the environment. The first three meetings will take place in London, with others set for Dublin, Berlin and other European cities. Events will also be followed up with smaller meet-ups, Johnson added.

Apart from Solve For X, other initiatives in this space include TED, to a certain extent (RE.WORK looks to be a bit more collaborative and interactive) and the engineering-led Global Grand Challenges Summit.

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It’s not that the State Department did anything wrong here – indeed, if I were in the U.S. I’d be alarmed if there was a lack of action on their part. It’s just that, even though Defense Distributed quickly complied, the exercise was utterly pointless. The files are out there, hosted on catch-me-if-you-can services such as Mega and The Pirate Bay, which has a whole “physibles” section devoted to downloadable 3D-printed object designs (a good chunk of which are for weapons parts, by the way).

Stop doing that thing I can’t control! Please?

Analogies are not hard to find. As a journalist who spent many years working in the U.K., I am acutely aware of the absurdity of that country’s libel laws in the information age. British publishers sometimes have to shy away from information that everyone else in the world is happily publishing online – it may keep them safe from being sued, but it certainly doesn’t stop British people from reading and sharing these scurrilous rumors (and, occasionally, facts).

In effect, the State Department’s attempt to enforce American arms control regulations amounts, in this case, to censorship. I don’t mean that in a free-speech-justifies-weaponry sense; I simply mean that what was once a matter of controlling the trade in physical hardware has now become a matter of trying to stem the flow of bits and bytes.

This is precisely the same problem faced by record labels suffering a premature album leak, or those trying to stem the aftermath of a Bradley Manning-style leak, or even the European regulators who want to institute a “right to be forgotten” when anyone who’s ever used the internet could tell them it’s a fool’s errand.

Can we talk about this?

Personally, I strongly disagree with what Defense Distributed’s Cody Wilson has done – I think it is irresponsible, and it may well lead to the loss of lives (though many have pointed out that it’s a heck of a lot easier to buy a ready-made gun than to make one yourself). However, in a way I’m glad that he’s done it.

I have zero doubt that similar designs have already been successfully executed by those who just don’t want to make a song and dance about it, and I would much rather have this sort of activity out in the open, stimulating an open debate. After all, what Wilson and the sharers of his designs did was completely inevitable. It may never become an issue on the scale of music and film “piracy” — I suspect more people like free media than want to shoot things — but it was always going to happen.

The challenge now, for regulators and for all of us, is to find a new approach to the control – or lack thereof – of things we don’t like, but that are now impossible to stop with mere border controls or targeted investigations. Perhaps most importantly, we need to find a way forward that doesn’t remove the liberties of those who like to share designs for less harmful objects.

It won’t be easy, but new problems require new solutions. Let’s talk.

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The story of the Robohand is as inspiring as an Oprah interview. One of the participants, however, noted that he didn’t intend to help those missing a limb. Instead, he sought out a 3D printed hand to save himself after a wood working accident shaved off four of his fingers. And yet, thanks to a collaboration between carpenter Richard Van As in Johannesburg, and a Seattle prop designer a five-year old born without fingers now has a more functional hand.

There’s also an Indigogo campaign to raise money to make more of these and help more children and adults born without fingers get their own Robohands. It’s heartwarming.

The collaboration between the two also emphasizes the best of what the internet and connectivity has to offer. This story wouldn’t have happened without a 3D printer, but it also wouldn’t have happened without the rapid dissemination of information enabled by the internet. For example, the South African woodworker first learned about Ivan Owen in Seattle because a video Owen had done showing a robot hand he had made went viral.

Then, there’s the building of the hand, which costs about $150. After Owen and Van As developed the plans for a hand, they made the plans open source and freely available on the internet. At a point where plenty of people are worrying about the IP infringement implications of 3D printing, such as printing out a proprietary design such as LEGOs or the dangers of evading regulations by printing harmful devices such as guns, this story is a reminder that people will use 3D printing for good as well.

Yes, this story is being pushed hard by MakerBot, the company that makes 3D printers (there are more than 15,000 of them in use today), but it’s also a reminder that as any new technology is introduced it will be used for both good and bad. And with regulators having met last month in Washington DC a conference to discuss some of the implications of 3D printing technology, it’s good to remember that 3D printers are a tool capable of good or bad when pondering upcoming laws and regulations.

We are lucky to live in a time when technological advances are making new things possible at pace that is possibly more rapid than any other time in human history. We have the rapid dissemination of knowledge and ability to share across continents thanks to broadband. Crowd funding tools now allow a wider spectrum of people to raise money for their ideas and we also have tools like 3D printing to turn digital designs into physical products.

And perhaps most of all, we have an engaged community of people who have the technical know-how reaching out to those around the world who have the curiosity and intelligence to make a difference. Now those billions can have the tools as well.

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New York-based Shapeways sells 3D printing services to designers and makers and also has an Etsy-like marketplace for creators. The startup, a transplant from the Netherlands, was printing more than 100,000 products a month and had over 150,000 users inside its community last year, so has no doubt grown that audience and volume since then.

Last month Shapeways debuted their new API which enables developers to create consumer facing applications that can tap into the Shapeways printing network and marketplace. That’s important because, as GigaOM Pro analyst Mike Wolf explained it, the API gives Shapeways greater access to the bigger, non-maker audience who want access to 3D printed objects but don’t want to learn how to use sophisticated 3D design software.

Shapeways has been planning to expand through its new New York factory, which is supposed to occupy up to 30,000 feet in Long Island City. Previously, much of the printing work was being done in Europe at its Eindhoven factory in the Netherlands or through partners.

Check out our Field Guide to 3D Printing on GigaOM Pro (subscription required), which defines 3D printing as:

[A] process that produces physical 3D objects by adding layer upon layer of material. Direct from a computer model, objects are “grown.” These objects can be almost anything: engineering prototypes of automotive components, tooling for manufacturing, medical implants, architectural models and sellable goods for end users.

We’ll be digging into 3D printing more at our RoadMap conference on connected design in November in San Francisco. To be the first to register for this event sign up here.

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