Engineers repurpose a mosquito proboscis to create a 3D printing nozzle

https://techxplore.com/news/2025-11-repurpose-mosquito-proboscis-3d-nozzle.html

by T-A • 8 months ago

95 50 8 months ago

backprop1989• 8 months ago

Calling it a necroprinter is equal parts ominous and spectacular.

metalman• 8 months ago

hopefully the name will stick, as it realy is ,,ominous and spectacular ,,and will get people thinking about what might come next

faidit• 8 months ago

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

debesyla• 8 months ago

Reminds me of something from Warhammer 40k universe. Next someone is going to put ChatGPT helper inside a human skull, probably :V

profsummergig• 8 months ago

In the future, when humans die, their neurons will be sold and repurposed in local AI's.

Moosdijk• 8 months ago

https://youtu.be/IAuapNwJ2vQ?si=E332G7AhFfxDIcSx

dmurray2• 8 months ago

And then you find that the inks they've tried it with are solutions of cancer cells.

The necroprinter prints cancer.

b3lvedere• 8 months ago

"Hi, i'd like some dead nozzles for my necroprinter please. What do you mean i can only pay with SoulCoin?"

GuB-42• 8 months ago

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necrobotics

amelius2• 8 months ago

It is silly. By that standard, your leather shoes should be called necrofootwear.

viraptor• 8 months ago

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.

kragen6• 8 months ago

I am definitely going to do this now. But shouldn't the rest of the word be Greek too? Let's put on our necropodes to go for a walk? Or necropapoutsi? That's not a classical root.

kragen6• 8 months ago

They say the mosquito proboscis has a 20 μm inner diameter, "100% finer" than commercial alternatives (presumably meaning half the diameter). Not having read the paper, I'm guessing it can't handle 210° molten PLA.

nbadg3• 8 months ago

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.

kragen6• 8 months ago

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.

denkmoon• 8 months ago

"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• 8 months ago

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.

kragen6• 8 months ago

Aha, thanks! That makes a lot of sense.

sirobg• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

Breeding mosquitos is way easier than capturing them.

agumonkey• 8 months ago

And then there are farm to breed mosquitos in order to neuter others

unwind• 8 months ago

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 µm, 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"?

dmurray2• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

I'm so disappointed they didn't print a tiny benchy in their videos.

bolangi• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

I can only assume the new nozzle is infinitely fine

dtgriscom• 8 months ago

It's a new world, where politicians claim they can cut prices by hundreds of percent.

Terr_• 8 months ago

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."

pennomi• 8 months ago

Fine means small, and it’s not a terribly uncommon definition, especially when talking about materials, like paper or textiles.

kbelder• 8 months ago

So "100% smaller". I'm not sure it improves the sentence much.

danybittel• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

Sick!!

simgt• 8 months ago

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

AndrewKemendo2• 8 months ago

He has a Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/DanyBittel

AndrewKemendo2• 8 months ago

That is a really great scan!

literalAardvark• 8 months ago

That's an incredible technique I had no idea about, thank you

fuzzythinker• 8 months ago

Thanks, interesting site. Tried to scroll down to find the "about" link but inf-scrolled. /about didn't work too.

injidup• 8 months ago

Why the word "sustainable" in here? It's like every product pitch these days needs the word "sustainable" in it to pass legal.

knowitnone3• 8 months ago

wonder if graphene nanotubes would work here. "Single-walled carbon nanotubes have diameters around 0.5–2.0 nanometres"

stevemadere• 8 months ago

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.

Engineers repurpose a mosquito proboscis to create a 3D printing nozzle

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