[HN Gopher] Engineers repurpose a mosquito proboscis to create a...
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Engineers repurpose a mosquito proboscis to create a 3D printing
nozzle
Author : T-A
Score : 88 points
Date : 2025-11-26 22:38 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (techxplore.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techxplore.com)
| backprop1989 wrote:
| Calling it a necroprinter is equal parts ominous and spectacular.
| metalman wrote:
| hopefully the name will stick, as it realy is ,,ominous and
| spectacular ,,and will get people thinking about what might
| come next
| faidit wrote:
| didn't elon say that hands and fingers are the hardest part
| of making robots?
|
| peasants under technofeudalism don't really need those parts
| anyway, since we'll be evolving into vat people with brain
| chips soon in the new necropia
| exasperaited wrote:
| > didn't elon say that hands and fingers are the hardest
| part of making robots?
|
| Not a problem for a dancer in a robot suit though.
| debesyla wrote:
| Reminds me of something from Warhammer 40k universe. Next
| someone is going to put ChatGPT helper inside a human skull,
| probably :V
| profsummergig wrote:
| In the future, when humans die, their neurons will be sold
| and repurposed in local AI's.
| nkrisc wrote:
| "Oh, look, he's dead. Let's sell his neurons." The neuron
| harvester says as he wipes the blood from his knife.
| alterom wrote:
| _> In the future, when humans die, their neurons will be
| sold and repurposed in local AI's._
|
| In the future, humans won't need to _die_ to have their
| neurons sold off as hardware for the AI.
|
| Incidentally, that's the original idea behind the movie
| _Matrix_ : humans are used as CPUs for the Matrix. The word
| is, the idea was too advanced for the audience and was
| dumbed down into "humans are batteries".
|
| I guess we'll have to treat Morpheus as unreliable
| narrator, or assume that the real energy in the future is
| compute, and suddenly the movie makes 100x more sense.
| Moosdijk wrote:
| https://youtu.be/IAuapNwJ2vQ?si=E332G7AhFfxDIcSx
| dmurray wrote:
| And then you find that the inks they've tried it with are
| solutions of cancer cells.
|
| The necroprinter prints cancer.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| "Hi, i'd like some dead nozzles for my necroprinter please.
| What do you mean i can only pay with SoulCoin?"
| GuB-42 wrote:
| See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necrobotics
| amelius wrote:
| It is silly. By that standard, your leather shoes should be
| called necrofootwear.
| viraptor wrote:
| I mean... Yeah?
|
| Reminds me of the Metalocalypse on Christmas trees: "It's
| like having a rotting corpse in your house, but the corpse of
| a tree, you know? It's kind of baddass. It stands and then
| you humiliate it even further by hanging ornaments all over
| it,"
|
| You can make anything metal if you try hard enough.
| amelius wrote:
| But right now we're addicted to plastic.
| kragen wrote:
| They say the mosquito proboscis has a 20 mm inner diameter, "100%
| finer" than commercial alternatives (presumably meaning half the
| diameter). Not having read the paper, I'm guessing it can't
| handle 210deg molten PLA.
| nbadg wrote:
| From TFA, they're using it to print bioinks. Think scaffolding
| for cell cultures.
|
| At these kinds of physical scales, biology is almost certainly
| a much larger market than mechanical applications. A 20 um line
| width (slightly less than one thou for US folks) is certainly a
| tolerance you might encounter on a drawing for subtractive
| manufacturing, but for addative, feature sizes that small will
| be strength limited.
| kragen wrote:
| Mechanical applications at that scale are not well developed,
| but that doesn't mean their potential is small.
|
| Member sizes below the critical diameter for flaw-sensitivity
| are crucial to the hardness and durability of, for example,
| human teeth and limpet teeth, as well as the resilience of
| bone and jade. Nearly all metals, glasses, and ceramics are
| limited to a tiny percentage of their theoretical mechanical
| performance by flaw-sensitivity.
|
| Laparoscopes that require smaller incisions are better
| laparoscopes. Ideally you could thread in a biopsy-needle
| instrument through a large vein to almost anywhere in the
| body.
|
| Visible-light optical metamaterials such as negative-index
| lenses require submicron feature sizes.
|
| I know a research group that is gluing battery-powered RFID
| transponders to honeybees.
|
| Electrophoretic e-paper displays are orders of magnitude more
| power-hungry than hypothetical MEMS flip-dot displays. We
| just don't have an economical way to make those.
|
| And of course MEMS gyroscopes, accelerometers, and DLP chips
| are already mass-market products.
|
| There's still a lot of room at the bottom, even if EUV takes
| thetakes purely computational opportunities off the table.
| BlaDeKke wrote:
| I can't wait for MEMS flip-dot displays.
| denkmoon wrote:
| "They mounted the mosquito proboscis on a standard dispensing
| tip and used it to deposit specialized bioinks.", "They then
| successfully printed bioscaffolds used to support cell growth
| and high-resolution microstructures".
|
| Tissue-printing type stuff, not plastic
| PetitPrince wrote:
| From the paper:
|
| > The ink used for the proof of extrusion demonstration is a
| ready-to-use, polyethylene oxide-based training bioink
| purchased and used directly from the vendor (Cellink Start,
| Cellink)
|
| > The ink used for the honeycomb demonstration and the maple
| leaf demonstration is a sacrificial, temperature-sensitive, 40%
| (w/v) Pluronic F-127 in deionized water bioink purchased and
| used directly from the vendor (Pluronic F-127, Allevi).
|
| > The ink used for the first cell-laden grid demonstration is
| Pluronic F-127 bioink with B16 cancer cells suspended in
| solution.
|
| > The ink used for the second cell-laden grid demonstration is
| Pluronic F-127 bioink embedded with RBCs.
|
| > The ink used for the cell viability experiments is Pluronic
| F-127 bioink with B16 cancer cells suspended in solution.
| kragen wrote:
| Aha, thanks! That makes a lot of sense.
| sirobg wrote:
| I wonder if at scale this will lead to mosquito farms or to
| mosquito extinction in nature.
|
| Of course I suspect it will be the former but the latter is way
| funnier.
|
| We've been stuck with these insects for a while. It would be so
| funny that the solution to get rid of them was in fact the same
| that wiped out many species before: over exploitation of natural
| resources.
|
| cc https://tornyol.com/
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I mean, ideally it would lead to _both_. We can wipe out the
| farmed mosquitos when we find something else that produces
| similar tubes.
|
| Our most successful efforts at wiping out wild mosquitos,
| though, don't produce useful corpses. So I don't think it's
| particularly realistic for high industrial demand to lead to
| mosquito extinction anyway.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Breeding mosquitos is way easier than capturing them.
| agumonkey wrote:
| And then there are farm to breed mosquitos in order to neuter
| others
| unwind wrote:
| This is cool and great and all, but isn't it a bit ... stretched
| to motivate this by the fact that the nozzle is biodegradable?
|
| I mean for a printing nozzle with an inner diameter of 20 um, how
| much material would be wasted if it was made out of plastic or
| metal? I _get_ that no such nozzle is available and /or easily
| made, but shouldn't that be the point of the invention, rather
| than "yay, it's biodegradable so we save a microgram of
| plastic/metal"?
| dmurray wrote:
| Yes, it's silly. They surely use orders of magnitude more
| consumables (latex gloves, plastic bottle tops for
| chemicals...) in preparing a batch of mosquito proboscides than
| the hypothetical nozzle would take up.
|
| The university's marketing department has been instructed to
| emphasize sustainability in its press releases, and the website
| reporting it has, like most news organisations that have
| survived, made the choice not to hire journalists with critical
| thinking skills but to have them rephrase press releases.
| froh42 wrote:
| I'm so disappointed they didn't print a tiny benchy in their
| videos.
| bolangi wrote:
| > Its inner diameter is 20 micrometers, which is about 100% finer
| than the best commercially available tips.
|
| "100% finer", who uses language like this? I don't even know what
| it means. How about "half the diameter"?
| wlesieutre wrote:
| I can only assume the new nozzle is infinitely fine
| dtgriscom wrote:
| It's a new world, where politicians claim they can cut prices
| by hundreds of percent.
| Terr_ wrote:
| If I had my 'druthers, all percentages would be replaced by
| multiplication factors. I would especially eradicate
| percentages combined with modifiers like "more", "less", "grows
| by", etc., which easily leads to awkward or impossibly
| ambiguous statements.
|
| In other words, kids won't learn "150% _more_ " but instead
| "2.5x". Nothing will be described as "shrinks by 30%", it'll
| just be 0.70x.
|
| While advertisers/marketers may love percentages for tricking
| people with a Big Happy Number, _mathematically_ they are extra
| work _at best_ , and sometimes they just ruin everything like
| this "100% finer" nonsense."
| danybittel wrote:
| If you want to see a mosquito and it's proboscis up close, I
| recently scanned one into a gaussian splat:
| https://superspl.at/view?id=b4cbf5d6
| th0ma5 wrote:
| Sick!!
| simgt wrote:
| I had no idea a DSLR with a macro lens could get you this
| close. Would you mind sharing more about the process?
|
| The bee is even more impressive:
| https://superspl.at/view?id=ac0acb0e
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| He has a Patreon:
|
| https://www.patreon.com/DanyBittel
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| That is a really great scan!
| literalAardvark wrote:
| That's an incredible technique I had no idea about, thank you
| injidup wrote:
| Why the word "sustainable" in here? It's like every product pitch
| these days needs the word "sustainable" in it to pass legal.
| knowitnone3 wrote:
| wonder if graphene nanotubes would work here. "Single-walled
| carbon nanotubes have diameters around 0.5-2.0 nanometres"
| stevemadere wrote:
| There's a long history of using various organs from dead animals
| as parts/tools in agricultural and industrial processes.
|
| This is one of the smallest scale cases I've heard of, but not
| nearly as weird or innovative as it sounds at first blush.
|
| People have long been making analogous use of stomachs,
| intestines, even skulls if you go back far enough.
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