 My name is Charles Juan. I am the Director of the Patent Reform Project at Public Knowledge, and we've got a great panel, you know, as the guy who works on patents, you know, I get to see a lot of cool technologies. And the people we've got on this panel, you know, have some of the coolest things that I've seen, you know, in my entire life. So, you know, this is going to be really great. We're going to be talking about 3D printing in the environment. And so starting from your left, we've got Ryan Hoover, who's an artist and researcher who works at the intersection of digital fabrication, biological systems, attritional crafts. And then we have Tyler Rodani, who is the founder of a company called Filovot, which works on recycling 3D printed materials to make new filaments. And then on the other side, we have Ali Kuller. She, through the lens of biology, material technology and computation seeks to develop a new language of design. She works on a lot of biological 3D printing materials, which is, you know, really cool stuff. And then finally, we have Blake Marshall, who works at the Department of Energy. He manages research and development programs that advance the state of the art in additive manufacturing technologies. So what I wanted to do is what I want to start out by, you know, just going down, just going down, you know, in our, you know, if you could each talk a little bit about what you're working on in terms of 3D printing space, because it's really interesting stuff. So, Ryan, why don't we start with you? Thanks for having us here. I'm excited about this panel. So I guess my work is, as we mentioned, really looking at these intersections of digital and biological systems. So designing primarily bioprinters. So we're taking, so typically bioprinting, a lot of this is focused on tissue engineering, so things coming from folks trying to 3D print new organs or small tissue samples. We're taking a lot of those technologies, but applying them to other purposes. Looking at these as possible technologies for developing new materials. So this, which I think is a real need, we've kind of heard a few people touch on this already today. There's only so many little plastic things that you want in your life. So for 3D printing to really become a meaningful technology, we need to expand our materials. Additionally, we also need materials that are better for the environment, and plastics are not necessarily so great in that regard. So I think that there's these materials, we also need advances in printers that are really open, and we need better software as well. I think that they really can handle the, all of the complexities of 3D printing and all of the complexities of biological systems that we're working with, and the complexities of this environment. So I'm trying to understand all these things together, and help these animals when they're coming to us. Awesome, thanks. This is too many microphone players who make fun. Tyler, you come at this from a somewhat different angle, I guess, from an entrepreneurial angle. So can you talk a little bit about the company that you started? Yeah, so my company is called Filibot, and we make a machine that makes the feed stock for 3D printers. 3D printers, or the type of 3D printers we use, use a plastic wire to build up the objects, and our machines will be able to take failed prints, stuff how they're cycling bin, and then converts it into this feed stock. So we're creating like a closed-loop recycling environment, and we're also allowing for new polymers to be made with our machines. Biologically, we had a company or a college take a Tylenol or an ingestible plastic and fuse it with Tylenol, and they 3D printed different shapes and tested like the dispersion rates in the human body. So our machines are really like expanding materials, and also doing recycling. Awesome, thanks. And so moving on, so Al, you've got a fascinating background, sorry, I'm with architecture, you know, going into kind of the biological manufacturing space. Can you talk a little about the work that you've been doing? Sure, I mean I started off as an architect and got a bit disillusioned, but I think the same reason that I love designers do get disillusioned, because we sort of come from this petrochemical sort of industry, especially you know, so manufacturing used a lot of petrochemicals, and I started doing research in ways of design, and thinking about new ways that we could, you know, revolutionise design, and I started focusing on some of the biofabrication, which is pretty much the next generation of 3D printing or additive manufacturing, and it's also the stuff that Ryan is on. And basically it has its origins in the biomedical industry, we're also using natural systems and natural sort of the building blocks of nature, things like proteins, cellulose, collagen to grow and form through things from engineering cells to tissue pulses of growing products. And there's a big movement in this new form of additive manufacturing or biofabrication, which is actually thinking of applying that technology to consumer products, and hopefully for my perspective, one day we'll be able to grow new architecturally new products around our stands, and be able to design it back straight back into the earth again, if that's what they want, so otherwise just sort of rethink the way in which we design. Awesome, thanks. Oh, thank you. Sorry, I'll have to say. She's got so much history stuff to say. No, but I actually work for one of the companies that are really using this to revolutionise products. We're from a company called Modern Meadow that are trying to grow leather in a lab, just so you can see some of the applications where this would be used at. There's also other companies, I organise a conference once a year called Biofabrication, which looks at these technologies, and currently I think that in the next year one of the first companies will start producing engineered spider silk for particular clothing, as clothing is one of the biggest waste producers in the, you know, globally right now, so they're engineering spider silk to create fabrics, which is just quite revolutionary. We've seen that on some shelves from Steve. Awesome, thank you. And finally we've got Blake, who is at the Department of Energy. I see that you've used 3D printing to make a car, a house, a boat, lots of huge stuff. So tell us a little bit about your experience at the Department of Energy working with 3D printing technology. Great, yeah. And first off, just thank you for having me. This is a subject matter that is very near and dear to my heart. So I actually started out with Natural Sciences and then moved on to Lifecycle Energy Modeling, and now the Department of Energy, we work on advancing these technologies to the next level. So it's actually a lot of R&D work to bring the next generation of printers on. So the intersection of environment and 3D printing is something that I think about a lot, and I often get asked that question, you know, how does 3D printing get saved under here? And the answer is typically, you know, it's somewhat complicated, right? As we've heard from Tyler, another panelist here, it starts out with that material question, right? If we only have to use energy to transform one particular, you know, the areas where you need it, where you need to pass material, you could potentially use less energy or use less material. You could also substitute materials that are less energy-tensive for others that are just put into plastics and things like that. So there are many, on the material side, we have a lot of potential benefits. You also have what you can make with 3D printing, when it opens up the field of different designs. You can make things that were impossible to do that would be another way. It's great. So you can have things that are lightweight, topology-optimized structures, and you can then be put that on a vehicle, for instance. You can save energy for 10 years, 20 years, as long as that vehicle drives around with the same energy. You can also use it to make an energy product. So we're currently working on a project right now, and we're printing a wave mold for a wind turbine. So essentially working on a full-size plane, but it's about 40 feet long, and we're going to be flying it in about a year, a wind turbine, and we're supplying this main print to the mold process. So, of course, if you can enable that, the cheaper or better wind turbine, of course, is going to be that way. So there are many of the ways in which they're correct, but I guess the point being, those are things that are potentially possibilities, but we're not there. Manufacturers cannot adopt technology unless it's reliable, it's consistent, and it delivers the properties of the components that we need. Many of these producers aren't there, so a lot of what you can do is just push the events of the state of the art being a product of technology, and generically, material sets themselves, which none of that matters unless it's in a product, right? None of that matters unless it's out there saving energy, enlarge, and we're actually trying to talk about saving energy, and the environment can be taxed. Yeah, you know, lots of really interesting thoughts there. Tyler, I think that you had some things you wanted to add? Yeah, just real quick on what 3D printing can do. So there's this bearing with a herringbone gears inside that act as the ball bearings. You can't make it on any other traditional method, and you can't make it with a billion dollar machine. You can only make it with 3D printing, and this 3D printer could be scrap parts pulled from an e-waste dump, so it's very interesting. Yeah, definitely. So let's talk a little bit about materials, because I think that's come up a number of times, because material engineering is obviously very important in terms of environment concerns and also just in terms of the technology, so it seems like we've got a couple of people who are working on novel materials, Tyler, you're obviously working on recycling materials. What are the advances that you see coming right now, or in the future, in terms of materials for 3D printing? I'll let Amy start with that. You look like you have something to say about that. I mean, the materials I work with aren't for traditional 3D printing, you know, it's new ways of additive manufacturing, but what's really amazing about the technology that I'm involved in is that there's no waste. You can pretty much engineer something to grow the material that you want, in the quantities that you want, in the shape and form that you want, with zero waste, zero land usage. I know in the company that I work for, zero need for cows, really. We just need a bit of salt, you know, a little bit of salt sort of matter from a cow you can use out of pasture, and you know, a couple of weeks later you have a better product. So it really is revolutionizing the way in which we think about the supply chain and the waste that's resulting currently. Yeah, I think there's a number of interesting new materials that are kind of coming out now. I think there's, I feel like in the past, in the past three or four years, there's been a lot with just kind of FDM printers and better plastics and things like that, which is important. I don't really feel like this plastic's too hard right off the get here. So, but I think more, to me, what's more interesting are these materials that we'll be using for bio fabrication. So that, and we can think of materials kind of in two different sets. One is typically going to be some kind of matrix into which your living thing is growing on or in. So there's, I think, a lot of great work happening around hydrogels for that and 3D printing hydrogels, particularly with photopolymers. I think that's a really exciting area of research that I've been working on with another engineer. So I think that's one area. But then I think there's so much to explore in terms of the actual biological materials, whether those are plant materials, you know, even maybe even some mammalian materials. There's a lot of complex ethical questions that we might start asking ourselves. But I think that there's plenty of precedent and we have the tools to address those issues successfully if we get to do that. Right. I think you touched on a good point in that there are, I think, we're viewing it, is that there are the potential to use many different materials is huge. We can only harness right now a very small amount of that in terms of making place for all of them. Everyone knows we can put various different plastics for it, since we're not going to reward everyone who uses APS or PLA, because you know it better, right? You just have, it's more likely that you'll get a reliable build out of that sort of. So honestly, I think we're at the tip of the iceberg and also 3D printing technologies in general are very diverse. So we're talking about very small scale, biomematerials up to, you know, sort of larger, sort of certain structures that you're not going to look at. It's not going to work very wide open. But people are looking at, you know, multi-materials structures, all kinds of composite materials. We do a lot of work in metal alloy development, higher temperature alloys, and looking on, you know, addressing the crystallogram of the texture of something like an enamel or high temperature nickel alloy. So I mean, in terms of metals, wide open, most of the alloys today grow and optimize for processing. So it works fine just for processing, but because the, the experience within the process of pre-printing, it just doesn't work so well, but for your printer, right? So the whole world people see more and more, especially on the entailer, creation of applications. Yeah, I think also closing that loop is very important, you know, developing the material that is kind of like the bottom part. It's a lot of work, but then qualifying that material is super important. Like there's like really great work happening at NIST around that. NIST seems like maybe the most boring organization on the planet, but they were thinking of something new that's really, but I love it. It's an aller, like the kind of work people are doing there, it's just really brilliant. And it's super critical. Again, like we were saying before, that you can have a great material in the world, but if you, if you can't put numbers to it, you know, nobody's going to apply it. So having like really closing that loop so we can have a material development, a qualification of materials and then pulling them back into the design software. You know, if you're, if you're designing something very solid works, you can run like a finite element in house, except it's going to want to be a well-known aluminum alloy. You can figure out like what those strengths are. You know, if you want to make it out of mycelium, nobody knows how to do that, right? And it'll be a while, I don't know. But you know, having, so being able to account for these really diverse materials across a lot of the scales. Actually, so, so Tyler, you know, I'm guessing that you've got some experience with, you know, trying out different materials that work with machines by yourself. Yeah, I mean, the, the type of technology fill by is based around is, is just the plastic. We put different binders in to like a wood fill plastic, a metal fill, stuff like that. So that's really specific to that type of technology, but I think overall we're seeing a huge growth and huge application growth even with 3D printing with the technology and with, with the materials. I mean, a multi-material printer that you could really, 3D print full phone is going to be amazing. And I, I honestly, I think we're headed that way. Well, so I mean, you know, give me your assessor, you know, what, what do you think are the things that have to happen before we, before we get there? Well, every, every process of 3D printing is different from bio to FDM to laser to metal. Being able to combine all that to one machine is really where it's going to be at. And you do have different processes like the bios is mostly, correct me if I'm wrong, you have to build the structure and let it grow into it. But like the metal powder burning, you have a hot laser and that would probably kill anything organic. So to make all that like work together, and I think that's going to be the biggest step binding it all. Yeah, you know, I think that, you know, those are, those are definitely going to be some really interesting challenges. I'm guessing, like you've also dealt with some of the challenges of, you know, trying to integrate a lot of these different technologies towards the other end and large scale manufacturing. Yeah, I think that's very true. We again are trying to be a little less farther out there in terms of, we're trying to get the near term things to market with yourself. A lot of the issues we have are just in terms of material performance reliability. What we find is that simply compositing that first level saying, you know, okay, ABS by itself isn't good enough. What happens if we add direct fiber? And that's where we have this all about our challenge, about our challenge is and then that's not trivial, right? You're talking about two very different materials interacting in very complex ways, where you have this amperosity, the chemistry changes, etc. And you can change the fiber level of the fiber. And then there are open questions that still take a lot of development in terms of ground, but even that first step I think, yeah, there's various kind of positive materials. And then, you know, there are ways in which you talk about making two rather than tell us, you know, it's a little far out. So in terms of taking two, like the basic saying, we're working on this, but how do you how do you print electronics into FDM? Because that's an area where you can see something like the drone or maybe whatever. We're almost there. We can make the shapes, we can make the forms. There are ways in which you can print electronics that's being done in a lot of various ways, but getting those two to work together, things don't like to stick to it. It doesn't, yeah, ABS or whatever. There are good ridges, there are gaps, there are holes. It's not a little bit of space that matters where the printer's going and it turns the corner. You know, all these sort of challenges are out there, but I think that would be one of the areas where we see sooner or later someone really getting some products to market in that space. I'd like to respond to that as well. I think one of the key things about the sort of multi-material and multi-technology future that we imagine is where the answer lies is actually creating multidisciplinary teams to work together. That's the successful future. It's actually getting different people from different backgrounds. I mean, that's why I'm an architect working in bio fabrication because it's just that sort of creative collision that we need and that's where we're going to find a lot of the magic of the future on free printing and additive manufacturing. So it's getting completely, people that you never thought would work together together in a room and getting them to brainstorm the solutions because that's where the magic lies. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think that that's a really great point that there's a lot of collaboration that's going on and, you know, Ali and Ryan, you both, you both host conferences on kind of new developments and do you see that sort of interaction between participants going on? I mean, yeah. And in my, the company I work for right now, we have cell engineers, we have mechanical engineers, we have physicists, we have, you know, us lowly architects, we have, like, just so many, so much of intellectual capacity get together in a room and really quite amazing stuff. And the conference we have as well, I mean, the sort of diversity of people that attend is just quite incredible and it's just beautiful to see what they do when we start putting these people together in a room. Yeah, but if you haven't been to biofabric game go next year, it's an amazing conference. It really is fantastic. Well, you've got one too, right? Yeah, so we host the conference called the Bioprinting Breakout, which is really geared specifically around bringing in just a wide range of expertise. So a lot of people coming from the kind of biomedical field of petition engineering, but then artists, designers, you know, computer scientists, material engineers, again, getting everybody all under one roof. And that's something that's organized through a group of us at the Baltimore Underground Science Space. So it's a, it's a hackerspace. We talked a lot about the value of hackerspaces. So this is, it's a hackerspace for biology. So it attracts a really wide range of people because it's rare to have all these disciplines under one roof. Even in a university, there are multiple buildings on the side. So creating those sorts of spaces is really important. So I think that's one great area. And again, these interdisciplinary things are so, so necessary. The other thing we're trying to do at MICA as well, where I also teach is really bring, bring those things together. There's a lot of examples where artists kind of go into these sort of lab spaces, which are great as an arts and residence model. But we also need the interest. You know, people are researching about like, oh, the arts are great. They make our sciences and technology better. But like, okay, that's true. But that's not, that's not the primary value of arts. Arts are valuable in and of themselves. And, and actually bringing in these scientists and engineers and the arts makes, makes that better. So we have an engineering residence at MICA. We have, you know, we've just built a small bio lab there as well. So really, really having these interdisciplinary things and having them in all sorts of spaces, but in hacker spaces, schools, the companies that are really, really thinking are all super valuable. Yeah, you know, lots of, lots of really interesting opportunities for kind of collaboration cross-pollination. So, you know, we're supposed to be talking about the environment. So, you know, I guess, you know, what are the environmental challenges that you see, you know, coming up that you think that 3D printing can, can start addressing? You know, I think there's something that you can all ask, so why don't we just go down with whatever all, all, let's start at the other end. So Blake? Sure, yeah, we're looking at a lot of the current applications. It's really wide, the wide net when you're talking about, we don't, we don't only look at the importers or things like that. So, one example would be, on the, we do look at generic generators, like if we say, if we can prove the efficiency of something like a gas turbine system by a few percent by printing turbines with integrated cooling channels that can sustain that operating environment, I mean, probably some of them are not possible, they're still the same energy right now in the future, and that is something we're very, very concerned about. If you've got officials, I think that you can stop the question if you want to. In fact, you can envision a scenario in which you take your used packaging, your solar bottle, or whatever, and you have a home system that can potentially even recycle that in some way, um, and see what it sounds like, or it's going to be, um, you know, like this guy. The future is now, folks! So, I think that's obviously, uh, reusing this is much better than processing the original materials. Um, pretty applied openly. I think one of the, some of the more interesting, at least intellectually, is what designers don't know is still, um, everyone designs with what unit, and especially if they're firm, they need to produce things, like limit, they operate through the constraints of what they can make, and the mentality switch between, okay, well, I really do have free-form capability now, assuming they've been perfectly prepared for these things, of course, but, um, it's not ingrained in almost anyone's, um, mind, and still, even though, even though they're really ahead of the term, still, I mean, they still have to remind themselves, oh, I don't need to use straight lines here, I don't have to, I don't have to put bonding flanges here and there, I'll just make it one piece, like, take that challenge of, say, an assembly that does multiple different things, um, well, what does it really do? You can take away all those pieces, forget about it, and say, what is the service that this thing provides? It's probably a simpler solution that doesn't include all these pieces, right? So, re-envisioning that whole system and putting it together, you can save a lot of other things, because there's areas where you can end up with a, the assembly, essentially, that used to be assembly, you can end up with something that's more complicated than this, by virtue of all the reasons. So, we're not there yet, um, you know, and there are many possible examples, you know, high-surface area components, kind of like heating shakers, potentially do a lot of that. Mixing of gases at a small scale, uh, excelsis fashions, there's so many of these that's potentially, we're not, we're not there yet, we're not, we're not, we're in a lot of areas. I'll leave. Um, I suppose so, from, from my perspective, I mean, I think everybody would agree with me that we need to stop, to stop, uh, the excess of the use of unnatural resources. Um, and going forward, there's two ways. I believe we can go about it. One is, obviously, the recycling route, and we have people like Phillip up doing that. There's a company called Pilot for the Oceans, there's pilot team of the Oceans of all the, the plastic that's floating around there, they want to try and make plastic from that. Um, and then there's the, the only way as well where we actually just take, uh, the use of natural resources out of this natural environment and do it in, in alternative ways, either the lab or, you know, the use of, uh, different, sort of recreated artificial environments. Um, and I think the problem with the, the second option, the sort of environmental one, I mean, the biologic one right now, is just the scalability of it. So we've got the technology down, we know we can do it. The next big challenge is going to be to scale it up to something which is usable and actually has a, a measurable impact on the things, um, of natural resources involving in some manufacturing and all those processes that are currently producing everything from that ocean. Yes, so, um, the, the 3D printers we work with, again, are of one type, the plastic, and I think recycling across every, uh, type of 3D printing is, is really important because, with 3D printing, you have that option to have very little wasted material, because you're adding material to build the object, um, instead of taking away, right? So that in like, in metal 3D printing and bio is going to be very important. The reason I picked, uh, FDM, uh, this type of 3D printing process, because it's the most widely adopted, um, it's the one that is the most common out there, and, uh, being in Vermont, I just had this, this, uh, recycling, um, this reusing attitude instilled in me. And that's why I work with, uh, the FDM types. But it's definitely needed across every, um, every 3D printing style and every, every application. So, I think if we, if we look at the environment, if we look at nature and see how things are built there, um, we'll see that, that it's all additive processes. You know, you start from, uh, DNA to RNA to eventually proteins, and that's helping keep the structure from the bottom up approach. Um, so I think, sort of, aligning ourselves with that, it is important, and, and, and see, uh, these additive manufacturing technologies as a possibility. Um, but I think, again, we need, um, software that helps us integrate all this thing, the machines and workflows that integrate all those things together. And, but, it definitely, I mean, we can see that there are examples of it, uh, already moving forward. Um, I think, I think, awesome. Thank you. Um, so I'd like to open this up to questions, so we can go right there. Yeah, I have a question, but I guess it's for everybody, but specifically for Blake, the, uh, my experience is that software is the cranky part of the whole mess. And if, if, like an organization like yours were to take on software as a major, you know, how do you, the visualization evidence, everybody pranks things and then they throw them away or whatever. It's a nice, you know, an environmental issue. But for me, it's more, I use software, I mean, uh, solid works. And I know that there's idiosyncrasies, Rhino, and some of these other things on Viva, that they all have their own specialties. But you have to spend years and years to get down to that 3D, I mean, I've been doing 3D stuff since the 80s. And so, but I still struggle with a lot of the, the software, and you can't just jump from one to the next because it's all 5K to do it. Whereas if an organization like yours were to say, we're going to focus on this. And, you know, worrying about all the different software companies is not really your problem. If you could get it to wear students as, you know, as young as you can get them, could get into, start developing, you know, working with the software, in my mind, that takes all sorts of electronic stuff out of the way, all the machinery and all the other stuff. And then you start making things that really make a difference. If the software visualization can get you there. And without the super funding of like an organization like yours, you know, Autodesk is going to come in and give free software all over the place. But they have a vision of selling software to, as soon as you get out of school, that you're hooked on their thing. Whereas if, as a government entity, you could focus on things like making software ubiquitous, like the telephone, you know, like making it so that people could think, you know, quickly. For me, that would make a big difference. That's a very good point. And there are a lot of different facets to that. I think that you're, you know, I totally hear your comments. And I try to address the various pieces. Who will have an hour here? But the first is, the first thing I just saw right now is the telephone. I said the telephones are in my favor in the middle of the night. I think that would be the bold and the standard that I think would help a lot. And you do see things in the business case. You do see things in Autodesk giving away their free software. That's what I'm going to tell you. They're being pushed. They're not just changing tele-democratized software solutions. And they, in that sense, could be seen as new. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I think the business case for software of the last decade is a little bit of a future personal perspective. So that's one thing I'm looking forward to. But otherwise, I think thinking about it in terms of software modularity is also going to help. There's, you know, let Autodesk and the internet, let the cells on the internet, wherever you make it, whatever, but make it be available to interface with other plugins, models, et cetera. So that you can, even if it was even customized as needed, but your own interface, how it is displayed is up to you. I think that lets the idea of sort of that open up. But I think we're heading that direction. We personally will not fund technology or software solutions unless they interface with other, with others. I mean, I'm certainly not going to just say, um, company acts, you know, full funds, you know, you're going to make this full software, you're going to sell it, and you're going to profit. Specifically, don't do that. Try to make it the opposite. And then, lastly, the software doesn't end at the development side of things. From there, your slicing software, your file format between your CAD-CAM program is down to your, it's now a STL file. STL files are great for a really well-seemed future. There's a lot of work here in Carolina. There are a lot of different pages with a lot of other programs. Standards are working on it, especially in the American X community, and you know, there's a lot of network. So I hope they really have a better understanding of that. All right, slicing software again into machine size, you know. See, I'm thinking more of the development, you know, so open source is wonderful, except what you need help. I mean, I can call up the server right away and get, and get, walk through something. Like, how do I do some complicated thing? Whereas, what I'm thinking more is if the power of the government to, to actually do R&D themselves in this area, I think, in my mind, would take us to the next level. Because I, you know, that's where I see the kink in the whole thing. Like, everybody's developing their own little thing. And then, but when you actually go to production, that's when the, that's when the electricity starts getting in the middle. Good book. I think standards development is something like this. Right. All right. I want to grab a couple other questions out here. So working in a maker space, it's still a very new community. We have such a diverse amount of people, some of the people that are there in the shop. And so my question is, how do we develop this culture of sustainability in the shop? How do we make makers sustainable? How do we teach them initially, like from the beginning, to think sustainably with, you know, when it comes to creating their products or creating, you know, whatever they dreamed of, as the technology is still developing and it's amazing what you guys are doing. On our end, how do we support that, effectively, but, you know, have people thinking the way that you're thinking. Yeah. So I think one of the big things is that 3D printing, you can really customize whatever you need. And 3D printing, like, oh, it doesn't work. We'll start over and do it again, right? But we just received, we received pallets of failed prints at our warehouse and we sort through them. And we just got our biggest shipment of failed prints and it was three pallets and just bags and bags of failed 3D printed parts. Now, sure, that's less material than if you're going to do it traditionally, but just like not using that mentality of, oh, we can just print it again. I think you need to instill that, yes, we can print it again, but just do it right the first time or try to do it right the first time. So we have all the software behind it that can help visualize and test the objects. I think that you also have to cut yourself some slack in the hacker space in education. You're researching, you're figuring stuff out. It's going to be inefficient, and that's part of learning. So I think I would focus a little bit less on the very particular efficiency of what it is that you're doing and focus more on people actually understanding the larger systemic issues and being able to design. Hey, Thomas, I'm Source 3. My question's kind of a little bit bigger, less the environment they have. Our company, over the last years, been working with brands and other companies to try to bring three products, three print products in marketplaces. So we just launched a three print album cover and journey steps and stuff like this, and really kind of interesting stuff. And I'm also formerly doing systems, so I knew that it would be dangerous for a lot of these printers to kind of be able to talk to them, but one of the things we're running into now in particular, because now people are looking at us and going, oh, okay, we're really interested in this, become certain material issues, material issues like CPSC, things like that, even if I don't have a piece maker, come out there with these three printed EM machines that are saying are qualified and clear and produced. You don't know, you're like, okay, I'll take that face down, but I don't know if that's right or not. Well, kind of, you're talking like probably you're thinking about them all, right? It's one day, all these pieces are going to come together. Who's looking at or we're trying to work with industry today that says that's great, but we've got set guidelines, and by the way, try to break them down as possible. We've found ways to sneak around, and even then now we're past that when we can't just right. So are there things that are being looked at for that, you know, who's doing that, and who are they talking to, you know, so that down the road, when these things become available, more commercially, you know, we know that all the quality of things involved. Yeah, so we were mentioning 3D printed electronics and when you have like a circuit with electricity flowing through it, you really need to have it like certified as a UL or a BR fire rating, because it can't overheat and burn. So in our application, we use plastic as a binder. So even if you have like hard carbon to get that conductive property, that might not get qualified for your print. So there's like, there's a lot of certification that needs to happen. So, you know, to understand the process and how it all works together, to make sure that the techniques that are being developed can be used in the future. So I'm at the School of Education at Virginia Commonwealth University, and I work with a lot of educators. And one of the questions I'm getting a lot beyond my print food is the, the, there's not a whole lot of studies that I've found out, so they're actually measuring partially in or otherwise related to the printed and enclosed environment. With AES especially, you've got those doctors' fumes going off, and the parents and everything. So, you know, what kind of research and what is being done to really evaluate the safety and using materials currently they're using, and the current materials we're thinking about using, because in these educational environments, that's a big concern. I don't have a comprehensive understanding of all the work that's been done, but there was work. And I think we're doing a lot of research on that. I think it was one of the national sciences foundation. There was a study on PLA versus ABS, and it was, I did find styrene levels to be quite high with ABS, and particular matter from which it died. There is a more current, it's not all yet, but there's currently a journal on industrial ecology is publishing a special issue on environmental issues, and I think it's a very white mess, or it may, maybe, be building questions about that. So, just keep your eyes out for that. I think it's the journal of industrial ecology. I think a quick note on that. So, like, when you have a laser cutter in a maker space, you have to have a vent. So, maybe when you're printing with ABS, you have a vent, you have like a carbon HEPA filter that's, you know, closed in the box, and that's something we've looked into, and something people have asked us, because our machines are actually heating a larger volume of plastic, so it's a very real concern for us. It's something we're not turning our eyes to. We're actually, you know, working to solve solutions to that point. All right, we'll take one more question. This is kind of a down-to-earth question. I'm actually more belated in this world. I'm a lawyer, and I do a lot of energy in logistics and infrastructure work, but I was curious as to whether the Department of Energy can or has been thinking about the R&D side of reading solar panels that are being used by the cabinet person on solar panels rather than, because apparently it's still fairly expensive to do it if you have to go to an outside entity, and I just wanted to go to an outside entity, and I just wanted to go to an outside entity. Exactly. Oh, that is really cool. There has been some work on packaging, like employable units, or things like your field care or something like that, because solar panels themselves, they're just a very complicated industry, and they're not able to get there yet. You know, for certain projects, no products, they just will never be cost-effective, that's really cool to them, if they work out about a little process, they're certainly going to be like that. So, I think there has been, you know, similar to directing, but I don't think if I'm going to print a third of the solar panel, it would probably be the future of something, whatever. That's a good question. So, I don't know about all of you, but I could sure use a 3-printed fan right now, it's really complicated. I want to thank my panelists. This was a fantastic panel, we're a lot more eager to hear from you.