The official launch of the ‘The New Ancient’ 3D printed art and design collection has been announced by 3D printing and additive manufacturing company, Stratasys. The collection includes ‘Vespers’, a series of exploratory 3D printed death masks, designed by Neri Oxman and her team, which will be unveiled to the public at the grand reopening of London’s Design Museum next week.

For centuries, legend and mystery has surrounded the seven wonders of the ancient world. Not least because only one of the seven structures (the Great Pyramid at Giza) is still standing - the others have been long lost in the myths of time. Indeed, the other six were destroyed (mostly by fire) long before photography or any renaissance artist could accurately capture what they looked like.

Stratasys announced on Wednesday that it was to acquire MakerBot, the New York based privately held manufacturer of desktop 3D printers. No surprise there you might think, although the Stratasys shareholders may have been a little taken aback by the price. MakerBot was founded in 2009 with an aim to develop cheap, open-sourced, 3D printers based on Stratasys’ own FDM technology which had at that time just come off patent.

Stratasys Inc announces findings from an independent and extensive performance study characterising the effects of time, temperature and environment on the mechanical properties of PC (polycarbonate) and ABS plastic parts made via the Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) process.