Engineers from the University of Illinois have built a 3-D printer that offers a sweet solution to making detailed structures that commercial 3-D printers can’t: Rather than building a layer-upon-layer solid shell, it produces a delicate network of thin ribbons of hardened isomalt, the type of sugar alcohol used to make throat lozenges.
The water-soluble, biodegradable glassy sugar structures have multiple applications in biomedical engineering, cancer research and device manufacturing.
The image above shows an example where the technique has been used to print a tiny rabbit.
