Sound too good to be true? It might be. But if you want to give it a go, you can go to your dentist to have him or her take an impression of your teeth; you know, like one of those casts you had made to mold your retainer once upon a time? Then you send the cast off to a dental lab to have it made into a 3D file. On the very off chance that you don’t have a dental lab in your Rolodex, Blizzident will refer you. Once you have the file in the proper format, you load it onto Blizzident’s servers, and you can order your very own teeth-brushing machine for $300.

Sure, it seems like a crazy idea, and it would be risky to stop brushing your teeth altogether, but it’s an intriguing proposition. For example, have you ever tried to brush a toddler’s teeth? It’s not so easy. And while $300 is expensive for a product that’s unproven, the more people who give it a shot the better it might get. And if it works, it’ll save you a mint in dentist fees.

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Evill, a recent graduate of Victoria University in New Zealand, wants to update the process of healing of broken limbs with something a little more modern: 3D printing.

Evill created the Cortex cast, a breathable, lightweight, recyclable and washable exoskeleton that mimics the body’s trabecular, the small honeycomb-like structure that makes up your inner bone structure.

The cast lets in plenty of air, which prevents that stuffy, itchy feeling.

The Cortex cast employs a similar fitting system as other casts, with X-rays to determine bone fractures. Evill’s prototype used a hacked Kinect for Xbox for the 3D scanning, but a more sophisticated and precise scanning process is in the works.

The post 3D-Printed Casts appeared first on Print 3D.

Beauty is an American bald eagle that got shot in the head by a poacher and consequently lost the top half of her beak.

Now, if you are a bald eagle, losing half of your beak is pretty much a death sentence – you can neither feed nor groom yourself. (Imagine eating with a single chopstick or chewing with one jaw.)

So it was no surprise that when the eagle was found in 2005 near a landfill in Alaska, it was emaciated despite being surrounded by abundance of food.

The eagle was relocated to Birds of Prey Northwest, a nonprofit organisation located near Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. There, she was nursed back to health by a small army of volunteers. At first, the eagle was force-fed liquified food through a tube daily. Later, after her health improved, the eagle resumed eating solid food that was fed to her using forceps. During this recovery time, it was hoped her beak would grow back, but the bone was too badly damaged: Beauty would never recover.

At this point the expert opinion was that the bird ought to be euthanized. Luckily, mechanical engineer Nate Calvin heard about the bird’s plight and came up with an ingenious plan to help.

Mr Calvin, a founder of the Boise-based Kinetic Engineering Group, made a mold of Beauty’s shattered upper mandible, laser-scanned it, fine-tuned it in a 3D modeling program, and created a prosthetic beak from a nylon-based polymer. He then recruited his personal dentist to implant a titanium mount fitted onto the remaining part of Beauty’s beak which basically serves the function of a dental implant as it holds the prosthetic beak in place.

Thanks to her new 3D printed beak today Beauty is able to eat, drink and groom entirely on her own. Unfortunately, the beak is not fixed so securely as to return the eagle in the wild but Beauty seems to thrive in her new home.

The post Bald Eagle Gets 3D Printed Beak Prosthesis appeared first on Print 3D.