Science in Three Dimensions: The Print Revolution
5th July 2012
Christoph Zollikofer witnessed the first birth of a Neanderthal in the modern age. In his anthropology lab at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, in 2007, the skull of a baby Homo neanderthalensis emerged from a photocopier-sized machine after a 20-hour noisy but painless delivery of whirring motors and spitting plastic. This modern miracle had endured a lengthy gestation: it took years for Zollikofer’s collaborators to find suitable bones from a Neanderthal neonate, analyse them with a computed-tomography (CT) scanner and digitally stitch them together on the computer screen. The labour, however, was simple: Zollikofer just pressed ‘print’ on his lab’s US$50,000 three-dimensional (3D) printer.
July 5th, 2012 at 13:20
And we needed to know what a baby Neanderthal skull looked like because…?
And again, if they had the bones in front of them, why didn’t they just glue them together in the first place?
Every now and then you can trust scientists to go–for no discernable reason–twice around the barn to come in the front door,