The consortium tested the practicalities of usingaprinter on the Moon by setting up a D-shape 3D printer, which are used to print very large house-sized structures, in a vacuum chamber with simulated lunar material.
By stringing together thousands of these so-called droplets (which measure about 50 microns across) usinga custom-built 3D printer, the Oxford team believes it has engineered a "new type of material" that could eventually be used to ferry drugs throughout our internal systems to a specific target site, fill-in for damaged tissues or even mimic neural pathways via specially printed protein pores.