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A few months back, we talked about the challenges faced by libraries in the era of ebooks, digital information and shrinking budgets. An emerging idea, now being pioneered at one New York state library, is to offer 3D printing facilities to enable constituents to develop and innovate new ideas and products. The Fayetteville Free Library of Fayetteville, NY recently has assumed a new mission in efforts to serve its constituencies with 3D printing facilities. The "FFL Fab Lab" is a space set aside with 3D printing technology, which seeks to encourage innovation and learning of the concept. At the foundation of the FFL's Fab Lab will be a MakerBot Thing-o-Matic 3D printer, donated to the library. The Fab Lab's 3D printer uses plastic as its raw material.

Technology is a lovely thing, but sometimes it scares the bejeezus out of us. This working 3D-printed gun is one such case. Gun enthusiast "HaveBlue" has documented in a blog post (via the AR15 forums) the process of what appears to be the first test firing of a firearm made with a 3D printer.

The last time we ran into Ben Heck, the tinkerer extraordinaire was waxing poetic at Maker Faire about the Raspberry Pi and cheese curds. One more thing he also talked about, however, was his latest 3D printer project, which he now explains in greater detail in the latest episode of the Ben Heck Show. Improvements made to the device include use of a Birdstruder for easier access to the filament and the ability to print off an SD card if you don't have a computer handy. The 3D printer also sports an expanded 200-square-millimeter print area with a solid copper cover for added sturdiness and accuracy. As usual, size matters for Mr. Heckendorn so the device got a boost in portability, now neatly folding James Bond-like into a briefcase that measures 18 x 14 x 4.2 inches. Interested in a briefcase printer of your own? Well, Heckendorn mentioned during the Maker Faire interview that he's already working on an improved version and thinking about putting it up on Kickstarter so hope springs eternal. In the meantime, you can glean more details about the device by checking out the video after the break.

The Smithsonian, the world's largest museum, is planning on producing 3D scans of its collection and making them freely available to the public to print out at home on their 3D printers (or incorporate into their virtual worlds). CNet's Daniel Terdiman has the story:

As if 3D printers weren't mind-blowing enough, iRobot (yes, the company responsible for the Roomba) has just filed a patent for a robot-assisted all-in-one fabricator that can print, mill, drill, and finish a final product - and all without human intervention. Called the "Robotic Fabricator," the system is a precursor to machines that will eventually be able to autonomously construct other machines from scratch - including itself.

The brain appears to be wired in a rectangular 3D grid structure, suggests a new brain imaging study funded by the National Institutes of Health. "Far from being just a tangle of wires, the brain's connections turn out to be more like ribbon cables - folding 2D sheets of parallel neuronal fibers that cross paths at right angles, like the warp and weft of a fabric," explained Van Wedeen, M.D., of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), A.A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and the Harvard Medical School.

PopFab is a multi-tool for the 21st century. At its heart is a computer-controlled motion platform and a means of attaching various toolheads. These enable PopFab to make objects from a digital plan in a variety of ways: current capabilities include 3D printing (as you are about to see), milling, vinyl cutting, and drawing - with more on the way. PopFab has traveled the world as a carry-on item of luggage to Saudi Arabia and Germany, and within the USA to Aspen in Colorado. We hope that this is only the beginning.

Proposed Q&A site for operators of 3D printers, heads of hacker spaces, hardware hackers, service bureau owners, MakerBot tinkerers, product entrepreneurs, MAKE magazine subscribers, and all others who want to make physical things with computers.

Scientists are pioneering the use of 3D printers to create drugs and other chemicals at the University of Glasgow. Researchers have used a £1,250 system to create a range of organic compounds and inorganic clusters - some of which are used to create cancer treatments. Longer term, the scientists say the process could be used to make customised medicines.

Last year Golan Levin's son decided to build a car. Aside from the minor inconvenience of being 4 years old, the younger Levin faced an engineering challenge. His Tinkertoys, which he wanted to use for the vehicle's frame, wouldn't attach to his K'Nex, the pieces he wanted to use for the wheels. It took his father, an artist, hacker and professor at Carnegie Mellon, a year to solve that problem. In the process he cracked open a much larger one: In an age when anyone can share, download and create not just digital files but also physical things, thanks to the proliferation of cheap 3-D printers, are companies at risk of losing control of the objects they sell?

CAVE2™, the next-generation large-scale virtual-reality environment, is a hybrid system that combines the benefits of both scalable-resolution display walls and virtual-reality systems to create a seamless 2D/3D environment that supports both information-rich analysis as well as virtual-reality simulation exploration at a resolution matching human visual acuity.

It's easy to get lost in CAVE2. The next-generation virtual reality platform is one of the most advanced visualization environments on Earth. It combines 320 degrees of panoramic, floor-to-ceiling LCD displays with an optical tracking interface that gives rise to a "hybrid reality system" capable of rendering remarkably immersive 3D environments - whether you wish to explore the labyrinthine vasculature of the human brain, or soar swiftly over the vast canyons of Mars.

Archaeologists may not need to get their hands so dirty any more, thanks to the kind of digital technology being pioneered at Southampton University. Its 'µ-VIS Centre for Computed Tomography' possesses the largest, high energy scanner of its kind in Europe: a 'micro-CT' machine manufactured by Nikon. Capable of resolutions better than 0.1mm - the diameter of a human hair - it allows archaeologists to carefully examine material while still encased in soil. Using visualisation software, archaeologists can then analyse their finds in 3D. This keeps the material in its original form, and postpones any commitment to the painstaking process of excavation by hand.

In addition to a high-tech grocery cart and an augmented-reality mirror, one of the futuristic projects on display at Microsoft's TechForum event earlier this week was a research project exploring the possibilities for using a transparent LCD display in conjunction with a Kinect sensor to let people interact with virtual objects in a 3D space by moving their hands around behind the screen.

I gave a talk in late 2011 at 28C3 in Berlin called "The Coming War on General Purpose Computing" In a nutshell, its hypothesis was this: * Computers and the Internet are everywhere and the world is increasingly made of them. * We used to have separate categories of device: washing machines, VCRs, phones, cars, but now we just have computers in different cases. For example, modern cars are computers we put our bodies in and Boeing 747s are flying Solaris boxes, whereas hearing aids and pacemakers are computers we put in our body. * This means that all of our sociopolitical problems in the future will have a computer inside them, too-and a would-be regulator saying stuff like this: "Make it so that self-driving cars can't be programmed to drag race" "Make it so that bioscale 3D printers can't make harmful organisms or restricted compounds" Which is to say: "Make me a general-purpose computer that runs all programs except for one program that freaks me out."

Professor Lee Cronin is a likably impatient presence, a one-man catalyst. "I just want to get stuff done fast," he says. And: "I am a control freak in rehab." Cronin, 39, is the leader of a world-class team of 45 researchers at Glasgow University, primarily making complex molecules. But that is not the extent of his ambition. A couple of years ago, at a TED conference, he described one goal as the creation of "inorganic life", and went on to detail his efforts to generate "evolutionary algorithms" in inert matter. He still hopes to "create life" in the next year or two.