I'm pretty sure its even worse than that. As I understand the UV light is being shined on a block of mostly cured UV resin from a UV resin printer. It seems that the fish are dying because the uncured resin leeches into the water.

UV resins (as used in 3d printers) are often oxygen inhibited, so a derivative work patent could be filed on the combination of UV light in an oxygen free environment (joke).

You bring up good points.

Also, interesting that Carbon3d's CEO, (Carbon3d being 3d printer that indeed works by curing resin with light), from the beginning has been flaunting future applications in biological sciences: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a14586/carbon3d-3...

I feel like there should be a two troughs to the hype cycle: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gartner_Hype_Cycle.s...

One for the normal disillusionment, the second for discovering that this new hot thing is actually bad in some notable way. And then sometimes we recover from that, sometimes we don't.

I think light-curing 3dprinters will never catch on in a big way, because I can't imagine normal people handling the uncured resins in a safe way on a mass scale.

Article link suggests that much of the bad stuff happened with the stereolithagrphy printers, I hope more research is done on safety of FDM printers. While polylactic acid (safest material that can be used) is basically corn... inhaling burning corn fumes is still probably carcinogenic.

About the PLA fumes - this has actually been extensively studied and there's no notable amounts of decomposition at normal PLA melt temperatures - that is, if there's no visible charring on your part, there's no measurable decomposition fumes. ABS fumes are much more significant, but they appear to be at about the same level as searing meat in a frying pan. I'm sure if you put a zebrafish embryo near frying pan fumes it would be harmed, but that isn't saying much.

In other news, scientist applies for patent on fix for underdone cooked food - "We found that by applying heat we could could..."

While I agree that a patent may not be justifiable, the method of toxicity doesn't appear to be a biological contaminant, rather the material itself (or an impurity thereof). So it's different from the usual processes to sanitise lab equipment.

I read it that way at first too for some reason, but decontamination doesn't only apply to biological contaminants, and he never said sanitize.