Swiss scientists at ETH Zurich announced they have developed a 3D printing process that will produce geometrically complex objects from glass.

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Today, glass is a commonplace item. Glass clads buildings across the world, contains the liquids that we use, warps itself into artistic shapes, and might even be the conduit through which you’re reading this article. However, the mastery of the manufacturing and distribution of glass has historically been a complicated tale that’s riddled with monopolistic secrecy, international intrigue and the wild accumulation of wealth.

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While today’s glass manufacturing environment deals less with the dark arts of statecraft and more with mundane proprietary law, transmuting the material from its base materials to a complex and transparent solid has proven difficult for additive manufacturing pioneers. In recent years, various attempts to 3D print glass have been somewhat successful, but for each successful method there have been critical drawbacks—fused deposition modeling […]

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