NatNet 3D Molecular Printing - Is This Legit?

I stumbled upon this site today, from a company which claims to be working on something huge. When I say "huge," I mean an advance in 3D Printing that even some of the most optimistic industry leaders would probably tell you will not be possible for another 20-30 years at best. Nat.Net claims that they are working on a 3D Molecular printer capable of printing almost anything, including a pear. Their big unveiling is only a day or two away at the Frontiers of Interaction Conference in Milan Italy on October 24 and 25th.

The website is located here: http://www.natnet.it/

Judging from their social networking presence it appears that Nat.Net is a relatively new idea/company. They have 136 Facebook friends, and just 15 Twitter followers, yet they had their Twitter account open for over 4 months now. 3D Molecular printing is something straight out of a science fiction movie, yet many scientists and futurists believe that such a device may be possible down the road. Could this company actually be working on anything close to a molecular printer? What are your opinions?

Here is a video from Nat.Net:
http://vimeo.com/71213455

Personally I don't believe it. Too far ahead of their time. If this was possible, every single one of the world's problems would be solved in an instant. Not to mention, I would invest my life savings into this company.
Abe

I'm wondering how the Conference went today in Italy. What ever came of this? Does anyone have details about their supposed unveiling?

Well here is a bit of an u[date. The did the presentation, and here are a couple pictures. Their facebook page says everything went awesome:

Attachment 87

Well here is a bit of an u[date. The did the presentation, and here are a couple pictures. Their facebook page says "Brilliant success for Nat.Net at Frontiers Of Interaction 2013!":

https://scontent-b-mia.xx.fbcdn.net/...17453578_n.jpg
https://scontent-a-mia.xx.fbcdn.net/...99511580_n.jpg

Here is another image released from the conference. I wish someone from this forum was there. I am intrigued, but extremely skeptical:
https://scontent-a-mia.xx.fbcdn.net/...53380100_n.jpg

I've contacted them about setting up a forum for them on this site. They said they will get back to me in a few days. I'm intrigued as well.

Eddie

We know today that biological structures are at the nanoscale floppy and wiggle frantically.
This is the reason why even with very advanced technology they cannot be directly assembled in place by nanorobotics.
What may be possible in the not so near future is to preproduce the necessary molecules and place them appropriately at very low temperatures.

Food is the hardest to synthesize and the cheapest product by mass since it's already self replicative.
So it's questionable wether it makes sense to synthesize just copies of existing food.
Creating novel luxury food is another story.

What we really want are productive nanosystems aka atomically precise manufacturing systems as outlined in the technical book Nanosystems.
There is no way this is what they are talking about here.

Taking a wild guess (which is probably wrong)
what they may have could be a MEMS printer with a lot of material cartridges.
Such a printer would not be able to replicate itself (specifically the nozzles).
How far you could get to the appearant shape smell and consistency of a pear with that kind of system I don't know.

One must concede them to have coosen a clever advertisment.
It will draw tremendous attention.

Here is another interestinghttps://scontent-b-iad.xx.fbcdn.net/...50849912_n.jpg graphic they just posted to Facebook:

A pear has a rather compact code creating it - the DNA
but every pear created by the same DNA has a different shape
and a completely different arrangement of atoms.
Storing one specific fully grown pear would take a ridiculous amount of memory
1 liter = 10^24 nm^3 = around 10^26 atoms = at least 100,000,000,000 Petabit

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Originally Posted by mechadense

Storing one specific fully grown pear would take a ridiculous amount of memory
1 liter = 10^24 nm^3 = around 10^26 atoms = at least 100,000,000,000 Petabit

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Yeah, but there's a huge amount of repetition, so it would compress magnificently.

Everything about this smells like 3 day old fish.

I'm from Milan. Got to admit it was a clever advertising move (we're pretty good at marketing nothingness around here) but also I don't dislike the idea. It takes from RepRap in that it's a community built around an idea for the future. We all think the destiny of 3D Printing is molecular 3D Printing and we know how far a goal that is (a bit like warp speed space travel i'd say). Actually it's theoretically more feasible than warp speed but like many have thankfully explained it is way beyond out technical and scientific capabilities. And it will be for a long time. Still, 3D Printing is the beginning of that road

Theoretically, it's very possible. In fact I would go as far as saying that in my lifetime (I'm 32) this will likely be possible. Having said this, I don't think the technology exists today to do even close to such a thing. They gotta show, not tell.

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Their big unveiling is only a day or two away at the Frontiers of Interaction Conference in Milan Italy on October 24 and 25th.

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So what was shown in the big unveiling on October 24-25? Is it legit or not?

It is legitimately a potential, someday, possibly, maybe.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DerekPeterson

So what was shown in the big unveiling on October 24-25? Is it legit or not?

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I guess that's a secret as well. I would think that if it was anything groundbreaking, there would have been at least one or two people blogging about it.

Quote:

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Compro01

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mechadense
Storing one specific fully grown pear would take a ridiculous amount of memory
1 liter = 10^24 nm^3 = around 10^26 atoms = at least 100,000,000,000 Petabit

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Yeah, but there's a huge amount of repetition, so it would compress magnificently.

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If you use DNA as quasi compression you only can reproduce topology not form and shape of every cell.
The kind of compression present in DNA is obviously not exactly suitable for a printing process.

If you compress more computer like you must ditch some information to get your repetition/symmetry.
Candidates to ditch are:
1) The orientations of the water molecules
2) The deformation states of proteins
3) ... some other stuff
One might say that those protein deformations get erased through thermal vibrations very quickly and it therefore is sufficient to store only the rigid body coordinates of the proteins. But where to draw the line what to store and what not? Think about Proteins with multiple metastable configurations.
Soft watery heavily diffusing bio-systems are therefore hard to compress and even harder to build.
Whilst building they move away under your tool-tip which is fatal when building blindly so they are not really amenable to mechanosynthetic production.
Proposed technical systems can circumvent all that trouble by choosing rigid non-diffusing structures (with those one can build almost anything but food).


For people who are really interested in serious attempts to reach atomically precise manufacturing I can recommend following two books:
A technical investigation:
Nanosystems: molecular machinery, manufacturing and computation
A non technical introduction:
Radical Abundance: how a revolution in nanotechnology will change civilization

So It's been about 3 months since this story originally broke, and we don't know anything else since that first post. They have been extremely quiet, and there Facebook page has not had a post on it in 10 weeks. Has anyone heard anything at all about these guys lately?

It had to have been a publicity stunt of some sort. Not sure what the purpose was for doing all that though....

Their website http://natnet.it doesn't load any longer. Looks like they were fibbing perhaps. I'm not sure what it accomplished though....

Everybody wants a Star Trek replicator, so of course someone was willing to promise them one. But there is some legitimate progress on the nano-scale digital fabrication front. Researchers at the University of Vienna have been working on a system for some years now that uses crossing laser beams to build objects on a molecular scale: http://www.tuwien.ac.at/en/news/news.../article/7444/ Apparently they can build any form they want this way, but not in any material.

Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com

One day, there will be a 3D Printer that can break down molecules and reconstruct them however they'd like. However I see that as being at least 15-20 years down the road. Could even be closer to 50-100.

It looks like their website is now back up....
However they haven't had an update on twitter or facebook since the end of october (3 months already).

I think by now it's as good as certain that this natnet printer was a hoax in every respect.
It didn't even draw all that much attention.

I've started collecting relevant bits and pieces about the real form of atomically precise manufacturing on my growing web-page.
Among other things I try to include:

• the current point of progress
• the many points where work needs to be continued or yet started
• a rough sketch for atomically precise small scale factories which are a yet distant useful guiding aim point for this technology - design decisions are exclusively based on lots of thoroughly tested knowledge

http://apm.bplaced.net/