r/todayilearned • u/geosunsetmoth • 4h ago
TIL that "Necroprinting" is the practice of building 3D printers using the mouth of a dead mosquito as a nozzle, producing results that are better than commercially available printers
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adw99536.0k
u/JoeBrownshoes 4h ago
Finally! A use for mosquitos!
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u/Laura-ly 4h ago
The only good mosquito is a dead mosquito.
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u/stereosalvation 4h ago
I'm doing my part!
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u/beaureeves352 4h ago
I'm from Buenos Aires
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u/Studnaught_Onatopp 4h ago
Would you like to know more?
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u/VT_Squire 3h ago
yeah, like how the same director gave us Showgirls.
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u/baron_von_helmut 2h ago
Don't forget Robocop, Total Recall and Basic Instinct. Dude did some bangers.
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u/ZenMasterOfDisguise 1h ago edited 29m ago
Robocop was an adaptation of the Judge Dredd comics where Paul Verhoeven used the ideas from the source material, but created new characters and gave it a new name
Total Recall was an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale". Again Verhoeven took ideas from the source material but didn't keep the name or the characters (well technically he just renamed the main character from Douglas Quail to Douglas Quaid)
Starship Troopers was the opposite, Verhoeven kept the name and the characters from the source material, but completely changed the story and the themes from the novel
...his least accurate movie adaptation from literature was the only one he actually named after the source material that inspired it. He famously never even read the book Starship Troopers before making the film
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u/60APES 4h ago
Mosquitoes have become helpful pollinators with the decrease of the bee population
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u/Nisseliten 4h ago
People forget that part.. Only the females sting, the males are all pollinators who feed on nectar..
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u/EeethB 4h ago
So we keep only the males! What could go wrong?
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u/SquirrelDragon 4h ago
I, for one, welcome our new Mosquito Patriarchy
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u/nitefang 4h ago
People also forget that there are tens of thousands of species of mosquitoes, and hundreds of species in basically every region that has any at all. And only some species bite humans. We could extinct those and it won't touch other species which will still get eaten by predators and will still pollinate plants.
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u/iwilltalkaboutguns 2h ago
I've read everywhere that mosquitoes have killed more humans than anything else in the history of humankind. More than heart disease, more than cancer, more than war and famine, in fact, some have estimates that mosquitoes have killed half of all humans that have ever lived. Billions uppon billions.
Im all for eradicating the ones that bite and transmit disease, something else will take their place.
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u/jefbenet 3h ago
Not strictly true. Some live modified mosquitoes can prove useful in wiping out certain invasive or specific dangerous mosquitoes.
Otherwise, I wholeheartedly agree. The more dead the better.
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u/MixSaffron 3h ago
I'm going to start building Mosquito farms that are the size of 3,000 football fields and my company "MoSqueeto" IPO's tomorrow for $120 a share.
Who wants in?!
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u/nygration 3h ago
Of the hundreds of mosquito species only a handful bite. Most are important pollinators.
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u/FUCKING_HATE_REDDIT 3h ago
Mosquitoes are amazing pollinators, better even than bees. They don't eat blood, they use it to feed their babies.
And yeah, they also caused 2 billion dead people. But that's just a small percentage of mosquitoes.
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u/BoonDragoon 3h ago
Shit, and here I thought they were just reinforcing and stabilizing ecosystems around the globe by facilitating lateral carbon transfer through the food web and by influencing the feeding behavior of large herbivores during periods of peak plant growth in addition to a billion other little things.
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u/gundog48 1h ago
reinforcing and stabilizing ecosystems around the globe by facilitating lateral carbon transfer through the food web and by influencing the feeding behavior of large herbivores during periods of peak plant growth
This sounds like something you'd read on the homepage of a corporate website and still have no idea what it is they do! Although this is actually coherent, it just reminds me of it!
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u/-SaC 4h ago
Who the bloody hell came up with that idea, and are they under careful observation?
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u/slice_of_pi 4h ago
All I can picture is some dude swatting one, then squinting down at it.
"You sure got a purty mouth."
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u/Azalus1 4h ago
"I bet that hole is real small"
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u/nmole10 4h ago
We all read that in the same deep sultry voice that no one wants to hear over their left shoulder, right?
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u/ElSoyFannyBandito 4h ago
Bro😂😂 I had to stop to comment because I honestly thought I was the only one who immediately heard that voice.
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u/Lumpyyyyy 4h ago
Have you seen the one where people use dead spiders as grippers?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-use-dead-spiders-to-grip-objects-180980498/
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u/voretaq7 4h ago
You never know what bonkers-ass science will produce an interesting or useful result.
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u/thissexypoptart 4h ago
Human beings and our ancestors have been using animal parts for practical applications since before behaviorally modern Homo sapiens. Hell, since before Homo sapiens at all.
Calling this “necroprinting” is some serious clickbait. What’s next, buying meat at the supermarket is “necrocooking”?
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u/calvinwho 4h ago
We were literally smeared in whale hork while draped in various thing's skins
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u/slice_of_pi 4h ago
Maybe you were. I draw the line at putting beaver anal gland fluid in my food as a flavoring.
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u/calvinwho 4h ago
Ooh yummy berry buttholes! I do like strawberry flavored stuff, so this is where I use my cognitive dissonance rather than religion
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u/Thesmokingcode 2h ago
You'll be happy to know whatever you are eating almost certainly doesn't contain any beaver butt juice.
Natural castoreum is extremely expensive so synthetics are the commonplace now and have been for quite awhile.
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u/Quantentheorie 2h ago
whale hork
well whale, specifically, not. For what it's worth we seem to have gotten the hang of hunting big marine animals very, very late.
Terrestrial Megafauna on the other hand... really anything you can drive off a cliff to let the impact kill it.
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u/Quantentheorie 3h ago
Human beings and our ancestors have been using animal parts for practical applications since before behaviorally modern Homo sapiens. Hell, since before Homo sapiens at all.
We regularly let ourselves be inspired by nature when there is a problem to which there seemingly exist solutions in nature. The bold thought "why build it, if it already exists?" is really just going back to the ancient intermediate step we've gotten used to skipping.
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u/KingCarbon1807 4h ago
"What if I took that horse, and BOILED it?"
"...hey man, everything ok at home?"
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u/MetricAbsinthe 4h ago
This is the type of guy who first looked at a cow and was like "I bet if I squeeze those, it'll be delicious"
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u/anahorish 4h ago
Are you not aware that lactation is also a feature of the human species?
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u/zoobrix 4h ago
Ya the whole whoever drank milk from a cow first was so brave joke seems to forget babies exist, it isn't exactly a huge mental leap to look at this big animal and think "hey, looks like I could get some milk there!"
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u/BrokenEyeReborn 4h ago
Especially if the big animal also has babies, and you see them getting milk
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u/Wakkit1988 4h ago
Then you think to yourself, "Why not me?"
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u/OHoSPARTACUS 3h ago
You really would though. That’s sustenance from an animal over a long period of time rather than one time use. And in return the cow gets protection from predators and curated access to its own food. That’s every bit as normal of a natural symbiosis as any other.
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u/Wakkit1988 2h ago
Ants do it with aphids, it's a brilliant idea.
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u/iwannaberockstar 2h ago
Now I'm imagining tiny ant hands squeezing tiny aphid tits for some tiny aphid milk droplets.
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u/skwerrel 4h ago
Ok ok, but the first guy who forgot he filled up a water skin with some milk, found it at the bottom of his stuff a couple months later, and instead of burning the foul smelling solid mess it had turned into as any normal person would, they just shrugged and gave it a shot.
And thank goodness for that awful disgusting person, because cheese is life.
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u/DisconnectedShark 3h ago
A hypothesized story of what happened is that an animal stomach was used as a container for milk. The animal stomach, especially if taken from a younger animal, will have rennet, an enzyme [set] that coagulates and curdles milk, turning it into cheese. The traveler took it with him/her on a journey for a few hours, and the walking/riding on a different animal caused a churning reaction.
This kind of thing can happen in the course of hours, so you'd get a soft cheese/curds fairly quickly. From there, you can experiment with longer durations.
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u/cdmpants 3h ago
That's incredibly interesting
iirc soft cheeses require low and slow heating as well
On a hot day, against a large animal, sealed up in a container, you'd also get that heat you'd need, I imagine.
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u/DUNG_INSPECTOR 1h ago
I think people overlook how much of a motivation potential starvation is. I bet you'd eat all sorts of disgusting things if your life literally depended on it.
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u/ars-derivatia 4h ago
Not to mention, you know, the cows clearly already doing the squeezing and drinking.
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u/ishkariot 4h ago
Milking is not the problem, letting it go "bad" and turn into buttermilk, yogurt or cheese is the real brave one
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u/SortaHow 4h ago
That's my first thought. Milk itself does make sense, but the first person to eat cheese probably looked insane.
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u/Shimaru33 3h ago
You remind me the Worcestershire sauce.
Long story made short: some English nobleman went to Asia, tasted a local soy sauce and like it so much, when he came back, he came close to madness trying to find it there in Britain, but they just couldn’t get the spices right. He hired a group of chemists to work on it and failure after failure, they abandoned the project. And a barrel full of one sauce in the basement.
At the time when they cooked that sauce, the taste was horrendous, so they didn't bother trying to fix and forgot about it. Half and year later, when doing cleaning, they found the old, discarded barrel with the inedible sauce and rather than, you know, throw it away, they actually tasted it. They didn't go blind and found the sauce was actually fairly good.
And that's how the worcestershire sauce was born.
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u/BrokenEyeReborn 4h ago
I'd be willing to bet that the first guy who cooked eggs was expecting there to be a chicken inside
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u/PocketFlan420 4h ago
Bruv, all it would've taken is one thirsty mf noticing his cow feeding its calf.
I'll never understand how this decade old dead joke still gets wheeled out lol.
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u/PlaceboGazebo 3h ago
Probably the same people who turned a dead spider into a pneumatic robot gripper. Called that one necrobotics.
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u/Meior 4h ago
I like that the title specifies a dead mosquito.
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u/Charlie_Warlie 4h ago
yeah I feel like the whole "using a dead part of an animal" is too focused on when you consider we use animal parts for other things. leather jackets are "necrofashion" and a makeup from animal products is "necro cosmetics"
Maybe some would prefer we use these terms
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u/NightOfTheLivingHam 4h ago
Necrofashion? Is that what the Necromongers wore in Chronicles of Riddick?
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u/ZebraTreeForest 3h ago
The best red makeup pigment is made from crushed up bugs cccc:
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u/brunonunis 3h ago
Also, a widely used red food die ( don't know if is the same bug though)
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u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 1h ago
It is, and it's by far the safest red dye out there. Actually one of the most safe dyes period.
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u/JJBrazman 2h ago
And eating the flesh of dead animals is Necrophagia! Even when served with a red wine reduction.
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u/FauxReal 4h ago
They're trying to distance themselves from Flintstone technology and being accused of holding animal slaves in servitude.
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u/OrchidBright6238 2h ago
Whole thing just raises more questions for me.
Presumably they’d farm them and kill them rather than just.. finding dead ones?
If so, how many vegans would refuse to use these machines?
I’m assuming if they’re already dead, a vegan wouldn’t care. I mean.. vegans use cars running from oil which is dead things not killed for that purpose.
I’m too high.
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u/SequenceofRees 4h ago
Bruh that sounds like something straight out of Warhammer !
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u/Gfunk98 1h ago
If it was warhammer the mosquitos would still be alive or at least have their mind and nervous system still intact forever while their body is used as parts for a machine lol
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u/retailguy_again 4h ago edited 3h ago
My first reaction was, WTF did I just read? Then I read the article. A 20 micron nozzle is tiny. (For my fellow US citizens, that's less than .001 inch.)
Now I'm impressed.
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u/b0w3n 2h ago
I'm just confused on the mechanics of the whole situation, how are they feeding plastic into that??
Like I can physically see their diagrams and pictures but my brain is going "nah no way this works".
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u/666666thats6sixes 1h ago
how are they feeding plastic into that??
Very, very carefully.
sorry
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u/jooooooooooooose 2h ago
This post title annoys me. You could make a steel nozzle that small. There is just no point, at all, to do it.
Resin based printers (SLA, DLP, and especially 2PP) easily hit 20um features and some smoke that number by a literal order of magnitude.
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u/MrSlaw 1h ago
some smoke that number by a literal order of magnitude.
Which printer is managing +/- 0.000078"? That's absurdly small, to the point where your body heat from handling the part would almost definitely affect the accuracy of any potential measurements.
For reference, that's ~2% the diameter of a single strand of hair.
Even measuring something to within a half-thou (0.0005") requires pretty strict temperature and operational controls if you want it to be at all repeatable.
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u/battlepi 1h ago
they're talking about resin printing which just hardens with UV light (and maybe other ways). You can get pretty precise.
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u/MrSlaw 1h ago
I understand, but as someone who works in metrology, that's quite literally microscopic.
2um is roughly the length of a E. coli bacteria...
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u/battlepi 1h ago
it intersects two light beams at a point basically the size of the light beam to instantly harden a resin. It is pretty cool, but not very durable in the forms I've seen.
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u/jooooooooooooose 1h ago edited 1h ago
UpNano & nanoscribe* both print at nanometer scale
& yes I am familiar with the woes of industrial metrology systems and the requirement to manage thermal expansion
the imaging device of choice here is typically SEM
(Got nanoscribe confused with nScrypt, but nScrypt has 10um nozzles for DIW printing & directly rebuts the authors saying the mosquito snout is 100% better than commercially available)
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u/Silly_Rub_6304 1h ago
A typical 3D printer nozzle is 0.4mm (the most popular), or perhaps 0.2mm or 0.6mm.
20 microns is 0.02mm.
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u/Meph616 4h ago
Mosquiticus learned of the weakness of flesh and it disgusts them.
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u/Beginning-Pop3127 3h ago
I crave the strength and certainty of... insect organs? Not using steel? Sounds like hersey to me
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u/Sh00ter80 4h ago
This is like something out of Rick & Morty.
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u/Educational-Wing2042 3h ago
Or Warhammer. Technology is evil… unless it’s fitted with a few skulls
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u/overwatchretiree 4h ago
Wouldn't it degrade, being made out of organic material? I should just Google it, shouldn't I...
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u/DisconnectedShark 4h ago
You could just read the source.
Although some of their technical properties are undisputably superior, other characteristics are inferior to those provided by the female mosquito proboscis dispense tip, namely fragility, consistency, biodegradability, and cost (table S3).
So yes, it is biodegradable. In other sections, they highlight this as a potential advantage compared to non-biodegradable tips that could result in trash, but they also acknowledge the biodegradability as a potential disadvantage.
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u/o_MrBombastic_o 4h ago
Plus we're not going run out of mosquitoes anytime soon so should be easily replaceable
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u/DagothNereviar 4h ago
And if we were going to run out, we could just 3D print more
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u/Geek-Yogurt 4h ago
I used the mosquito proboscis to make the mosquito proboscis.
-Thanos, probably, idk
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u/MyOtherAcctsAPorsche 4h ago
To 3d print more mosquitoes you don't use their mouth. Try the opposite side.
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u/MedicalDisscharge 4h ago
I love how they're marketing it as an eco friendly alternative when they're using insect faces
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u/rillip 4h ago
It's a valid point. You get biodegradable materials from nature. Sustainability isn't about not using natural resources. It's about using natural resources, like insect faces, wisely.
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u/SumpCrab 3h ago
Yeah, but we are talking about like 0.0001% of the machine being biodegradable. Not exactly changing the world here.
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u/Nozinger 3h ago
It kinda is though. While the nozzle is only a small part o the macchine it is the one part that needs to be replaced regularly. And the smaller you go with the nozzle the more often you need to replace it.
Needless to say a mosquito proboscis is an insanely small nozzle for very small parts.Not something you'd use in your home 3d printer. At that size we're realistically talking about a new nozzle every day if not every few hours.
That said the demand for 3d printers with that nozzle size is also not that high at the moment so the efect it would have is indeed not that big.
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u/I_dont_bone_goats 4h ago
It’s like how wood is a sustainable building material
You can always grow more insect faces
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u/sioux612 4h ago
My guess would be that the nozzles turn into a consumable thing at that point similar to a tungsten carbide mill
Yes they cost quite a bit, but before you risk a thousands in damages you just replace the tip religiously
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u/iMogwai 3h ago
An important consideration when integrating any biological material into an engineered biohybrid system is the natural lifespan of the biological component. Unlike traditional synthetic parts, biological elements are susceptible to material degradation over time. This transient nature can substantially impact the long-term performance of the system; to address this limitation, lifespan tests have been conducted on 10 female mosquito proboscis dispense tips. Results revealed a minimum lifespan of 9 days when stored in ambient conditions, with a 30% failure rate after a 14-day period (fig. S17). When stored under optimal conditions (−20°C in a freezer), female mosquito proboscides have been shown to remain functional after an entire year of sample aging.
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u/mdb917 3h ago
They last about 9 days in ambient conditions, and about a year in optimal conditions. And they are so cheap to make that the degradation doesn’t matter, just grab another (couple thousand lol)
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u/OtterPeePools 4h ago
The giant underground farms, you see, the "skeeter farms" . And then we move them above ground.
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u/herculesmeowlligan 4h ago
Hey, quick question, what the fuck?
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u/Enconhun 3h ago
Brother imagine my confusion. From the title I thought they are using mosquitos to repair and/or build 3D printers. I was like "wtf is wrong with screwdrivers and wire cutters? Who the fuck thought it would be a good idea to build mechanical parts using a damn mosquito?"
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u/KilgoreDurden 3h ago
This sounds like one of those lies that people plant in order to track how quickly lies spread in the day and age of the internet and social media 😂
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u/huxtiblejones 4h ago
This reads like Warhammer 40K prequel lore, soon we will find that floating human skulls make amazing computers
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u/zennim 4h ago
Don't know about skulls, but the human brain sure is a supercomputer...
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u/mascotbeaver104 4h ago
Just wait until this sub finds out about the guy who ported Doom on to rat neurons
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u/Lan777 1h ago
Somebody tell a megacorp about this and make sure to pitch it as the next most profitable thing ever.
I need them to do their thing and wipe out the moquito population by seeking infinite growth of their industry.
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u/Eragon_the_Huntsman 1h ago
Bad incentive structure. Now they're breeding mosquitoes for use and there are even more of them.
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u/ThatsTheMother_Rick 1h ago
This entire paper is way too far over my head for me to find the answer, so maybe someone can help me out. How would the mouth of a dead mosquito be structurally strong enough to be used as the nozzle of a 3d printer?
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u/forchinski 4h ago
In time, the mosquitos understood what it meant to have their biology harvested by another species
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u/Sovchen 2h ago
Wait what? Nevermind how they're squeezing hot plastic through that, why not just use a regular hypodermic needle?
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u/Alklazaris 31m ago
Also a mosquitoes "needle" is far better at resisting clogs then a human created needle of exact size. Something about the internal structure... guess it's too complicated to manufacture ourselves with economic viability.
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u/DisconnectedShark 4h ago
They apparently got the idea from other work on "necrobotics", dead cyborg spiders.