A s a metal platform rises from a vat of liquid resin, it pulls an intricate white shape from the liquid -like a waxy creature emerging from a lagoon. This machine is the world's fastest resin-based 3D printer and it can create a plastic structure as large as a person in a few hours, says Chad Mirkin, a chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The machine, which Mirkin and his colleagues reported last October 1 , is one of a slew of research advances in 3D printing that are broadening the prospects of a technology once viewed as useful mainly for making small, low-quality prototype parts. Not only is 3D printing becoming faster and producing larger products, but scientists are coming up with innovative ways to print and are creating stronger materials, sometimes mixing multiple materials in the same product. 20 | Nature | Vol 578 | 6 February 2020 Feature © 2 0 2 0 S p r i n g e r N a t u r e L i m i t e d . A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d .

W hen linguist Lauren Gawne roams the valleys of Nepal documenting endangered Tibetan languages, she takes pains to distinguish each dialect's geographical origin. But when it came to producing maps of her results, for many years her cartographic methods were somewhat crude. "My old maps were [made] using MS Paint on top of some copyrighted map that I really shouldn't have been using," she says. Her next solution wasn't much better: "My mum tracing a map off an atlas so that I had something a bit cleaner to work with. " The one after that-"using Google Earth and dropping pins on it"-was generic, ugly and "looks horrible in a PowerPoint". So in 2013, she jumped at the chance to join a workshop on mapping and visualization at the University of Melbourne in Australia, where she was working on her PhD. There she discovered the free, open-source program TileMill, created

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