Carbon Prints Amazing Materials

A sleek mechanical arm plunges into a pool of what looks like milky gray ink in Carbon's lab in Redwood City, California. The black arm slowly moves upwards, pulling a latticed plastic cube out of the bath, shiny and dripping with ink: a large-scale model of the porous structure of bone. Joseph DeSimone, Carbon's CEO and cofounder, looks on. DeSimone, a polymer chemist, helped invent these machines, and he still gets a kick out of watching them work. It is a form of 3-D printing, but it's done in a novel way that is faster than previous techniques and works with many more types of plastics.