A primer on 3D printing from Lisa Harouni. Then, 7 platforms that bring collaborative creation and the open-source ethos to additive manufacturing.
The future will look very different as we strip the information-carrying functions out of proxies and reduce them to their bare essentials. Entertainment centers will be redefined. Libraries will take on new charters. Educational institutions will be restructured. Cities will be transformed. This will happen because much of our physical infrastructure was just a low-bandwidth interconnection disguised as something real.
The High Cost of Low Bandwidth - Bill Davidow - Technology - The Atlantic (via infoneer-pulse)
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The Cube
3D printer aims to be the first popular consumer product of it’s type:
The Cube™ - the first 3D Printer designed for your home!
From the living room to the kitchen, the Cube’s portable, plug and play design enables everybody in the family to express their creativity like never before.
With ten different material colors to choose from enjoy the freedom to print in your true colors or to mix it up.
Cube™ 3D Printer is ready-to-print your ideas, provide a new dimension to your imagination and help you share your creations with others in the Cubify™ community.
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¡Dame el código fuente de mi marcapasos! Cyborg lawyer demands software source - Software - News - ZDNet Australia
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KickSat.org
I’m Zac Manchester, a graduate student in Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. Over the last several years a few collaborators and I have designed, built, and tested a very tiny and inexpensive spacecraft called Sprite that can be built and launched into low Earth orbit for just a few hundred dollars each!
My goal is to bring down the huge cost of spaceflight, allowing anyone from a curious high school student or basement tinkerer to a professional scientist to explore what has until now been the exclusive realm of governments and large companies. By shrinking the spacecraft, we can fit more into a single launch slot and split the costs many ways. I want to make it easy enough and affordable enough for anyone to explore space.
Sprites are the size of a couple of postage stamps but have solar cells, a radio transceiver, and a microcontroller (tiny computer) with memory and sensors – many of the capabilities a bigger spacecraft would have, just scaled down. This first version can’t do much more than transmit its name and a few bits of data – think of it as a shrunken down Sputnik – but future versions could include any type of sensor that will fit, from thermometers to cameras.
(via engineeringisawesome)
Barcelona was recently ranked the number two smart city in Spain in the IDC report
Transparent aluminum starts out as a pile of white aluminum oxynitride powder. That powder gets packed into a rubber mold in the rough shape of the desired part, and subjected to a procedure called isostatic pressing, in which the mold is compressed in a tank of hydraulic fluid to 15,000 psi, which mashes the AlON into a grainy “green body.” The grainy structure is then fused together by heating at 2000 °C for several days. The surface of the resulting part is cloudy, and has to be mechanically polished to make it optically clear.All that work pays off. AlON can do amazing things. Here, for instance, a 1.6″ thick AlON plate successfully resists a huge, powerful .50 AP bullet that smashes easily through more than twice that thickness of conventional laminated glass armor, with plenty of energy left over to extremely kill a plastic mannequin head.
It’s expensive, of course, and so generally reserved for high-performance applications, especially in military fields. AlON is manufactured by Massachusetts-based Surmet Corporation for use in armored windows, lenses for battlefield optics, and “seeker domes,” which are the clear round windows covering the sensor heads on the business ends of many missiles. If you want to read further, Tom Scheve has prepared a good bibliography over at HowStuffWorks.
Stop the Wall – New York entrepreneurs speak up against SOPA and PIPA’s threat against the thriving ecosystem that powers our economy and society. Video by m ss ng p eces.
10 Futuristic Materials
Full Story: Lifeboat Foundation
