*The implications of a development like this are startlingly wide and broad, not because of the stuff they think they might print – light-cloaking devices, living tissues – but because of stuff they might print that has qualities that nobody has yet seen or imagined.
*This is a classic disruptive case of a technology – "rapid prototyping" –
that begins by doing something old in a cheaper and lousier way, and ends up
doing something completely novel and alien to that which was originally intended.
*A true nanomaterials fab would layer its products atoms by atoms, and would likely
be one of the least "rapid" factories in the world.
via @bradholtz
http://www.theengineer.co.uk/1012265.article?cmpid=TE01
(...)
"The team developed a technique that uses two lasers: an excitation laser to start polymerisation and a depletion laser to almost immediately stop it, thus limiting the size of the resultant features.
"The team has now achieved a spatial resolution of 65nm and is hoping to get down to 30–40nm soon, with an ultimate goal of 10nm. This threshold could exploit a whole range of phenomena, such as the cloaking principles of metamaterials..."
