"One of the presentations at the TED Conference in Vancouver this week that had much of the tech elite oohing and ahhing was something called CLIP (no relation to Microsoft's reviled animated helper) or Continuous Liquid Interface Production."

"It's a new way of 3-D manufacturing introduced by a company called Carbon3D. CEO and co-founder Joseph DeSimone says what we've been calling 3-D printing is actually 2D printing. It's like ink printing a line over and over again until a little structure emerges, except instead of ink it's, say, plastic. This type of printing is mostly useful for making prototypes, but not really a part that could withstand regular use."