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REAL LIFE NEWS: THE BEST INVENTION EVER - A CHOCOLATE PRINTER

by Hazed

It's not often that I read about a new gadget and immediately lust after it. But here's one that I really, really, really want: a personalized 3D chocolate printing machine.

3D printers are starting to become really useful, extruding liquid metal or plastic which builds up in layers and then hardens to form real objects. Recently the printers started to be used to produce food sculptures. Now comes news that researchers at the University of Essex, England, have developed a 3D printer that uses chocolate. The machine is still a prototype, but several retailers have expressed an interest in it.

Just like any other 3D printing technique, chocolate printing starts with a flat cross-section image, said Dr Liang Hao, who is the lead scientist on the project. "And then you do a 3D shape - layer by layer, printing chocolate instead of ink, like if you were layering 2D paper to form a 3D shape." Once a layer has been printed, it solidifies, and then the printer moves onto the next layer.

The appeal to retailers is obvious: customers would be able to design any object on a computer which could then be printed out in chocolate.

Yum!

Read more about the chocolate printer here.

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