The Digital Fabrication Revolution…
A new digital revolution is coming, this time in fabrication. It draws on the same insights that led to the earlier digitizations of communication and computation, but now what is being programmed is the physical world rather than the virtual one. Digital fabrication will allow individuals to design and produce tangible objects on demand, wherever and whenever they need them. Widespread access to these technologies will challenge traditional models of business, aid, and education.
The roots of the revolution date back to 1952, when researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) wired an early digital computer to a milling machine, creating the first numerically controlled machine tool. By using a computer program instead of a machinist to turn the screws that moved the metal stock, the researchers were able to produce aircraft components with shapes that were more complex than could be made by hand. From that first revolving end mill, all sorts of cutting tools have been mounted on computer-controlled platforms, including jets of water carrying abrasives that can cut through hard materials, lasers that can quickly carve fine features, and slender electrically charged wires that can make long thin cuts.
Today, numerically controlled machines touch almost every commercial product, whether directly (producing everything from laptop cases to jet engines) or indirectly (producing the tools that mold and stamp mass-produced goods). And yet all these modern descendants of the first numerically controlled machine tool share its original limitation: they can cut, but they cannot reach internal structures. This means, for example, that the axle of a wheel must be manufactured separately from the bearing it passes through.
In the 1980s, however, computer-controlled fabrication processes that added rather than removed material (called additive manufacturing) came on the market. Thanks to 3-D printing, a bearing and an axle could be built by the same machine at the same time. A range of 3-D printing processes are now available, including thermally fusing plastic filaments, using ultraviolet light to cross-link polymer resins, depositing adhesive droplets to bind a powder, cutting and laminating sheets of paper, and shining a laser beam to fuse metal particles. Businesses already use 3-D printers to model products before producing them, a process referred to as rapid prototyping. Companies also rely on the technology to make objects with complex shapes, such as jewelry and medical implants. Research groups have even used 3-D printers to build structures out of cells with the goal of printing living organs.
Additive manufacturing has been widely hailed as a revolution, featured on the cover of publications from Wired to The Economist. This is, however, a curious sort of revolution, proclaimed more by its observers than its practitioners. In a well-equipped workshop, a 3-D printer might be used for about a quarter of the jobs, with other machines doing the rest. One reason is that the printers are slow, taking hours or even days to make things. Other computer-controlled tools can produce parts faster, or with finer features, or that are larger, lighter, or stronger. Glowing articles about 3-D printers read like the stories in the 1950s that proclaimed that microwave ovens were the future of cooking. Microwaves are convenient, but they don’t replace the rest of the kitchen.
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TED: Ideas Worth Spreading “On TED.com, we make the best talks and performances from TED and partners available to the world, for free. More than 900 TEDTalks are now available, with more added each week. All of the talks are subtitled in English, and many are subtitled in various languages. These videos are released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.”
The metals most resistant to chemical reaction or oxidation are gold, silver, mercury, and the platinum group (including palladium, iridium, rhodium, ruthenium, and osmium). Osmium is the hardest of the group and has the highest melting point. – Provided by Reference.com
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NFL Films and the Magic of Seeing Sports
Near the end of every National Football League season for decades, as fatigue accelerated its woozy, inverse dance with field temperatures and the playoffs neared, the staff of NFL Films routinely faces certain hazards.
For starters, when traveling to shoot teams like the Green Bay Packers, Pittsburgh Steelers, or New England Patriots in their perennially inclement winter habitats, the cinematographers’ cameras often required more weather-proofing than the players. Despite that utmost precaution, the shooters’ 16-millimeter film would still occasionally freeze and snap in the camera, requiring the machines’ urgent triage during some of the most dramatic passages of the games they were entrusted to document. Even the NFL Films crews assigned to the balmy climes of San Diego or Miami or the impervious domes of New Orleans or Atlanta had to eventually schlep their footage back to the organization’s Mt. Laurel, New Jersey, headquarters, where it was hastily processed and edited for dissemination in the days, the weeks, the years and the generations to come. And then they were off again.
As long as virtually anybody ever involved with this chain remembers, one of its constants was Steve Sabol. Back when he was 19, Sabol hadn’t filmed much of anything, but his father, Ed, and a partner had successfully wheedled rights to capture footage of the 1962 NFL Championship featuring the Packers versus the New York Giants.
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Common RNA pathway found in ALS and dementia.
How memory load leaves us ‘blind’ to new visual information.
Special issue: What is reality? – New Scientist.
Visual Perception And Hidden Brain Functions – Science News – redOrbit.
Seeing Too Much: The science of topless sunbathing – The Guardian – Science | e! Science News.
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The Deadly Corruption of Clinical Trials
IT’S NOT EASY TO WORK UP a good feeling about the institution that destroyed your life, which may be why Mary Weiss initially seemed a little reluctant to meet me. “You can understand my hesitation to look other than with suspicion at anyone associated with the University of Minnesota,” Mary wrote to me in an email. In 2003, Mary’s 26-year-old son, Dan, was enrolled against her wishes in a psychiatric drug study at the University of Minnesota, where I teach medical ethics. Less than six months later, Dan was dead. I’d learned about his death from a deeply unsettling newspaper series by St. Paul Pioneer Press reporters Jeremy Olson and Paul Tosto that suggested he was coerced into a pharmaceutical-industry study from which the university stood to profit, but which provided him with inadequate care. Over the next few months, I talked to several university colleagues and administrators, trying to learn what had happened. Many of them dismissed the story as slanted and incomplete. Yet the more I examined the medical and court records, the more I became convinced that the problem was worse than the Pioneer Press had reported. The danger lies not just in the particular circumstances that led to Dan’s death, but in a system of clinical research that has been thoroughly co-opted by market forces, so that many studies have become little more than covert instruments for promoting drugs. The study in which Dan died starkly illustrates the hazards of market-driven research and the inadequacy of our current oversight system to detect them.
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How a broker spent $520m in a drunken stupor and moved the global oil price
PVM Oil Futures trader Steve Perkins bought 7m barrels of crude in late-night trading binge on his laptop, driving the oil price to an eight-month high.
by Rowena Mason
It’s probably not uncommon for City traders to wonder how they burnt so much cash during a drunken night on the town.
But Steve Perkins was left with a bigger black hole in his memory than most when his employer rang one morning to ask what he’d done with $520m of the oil trading firm’s money.It was 7.45am on June 30 last year when the senior, longstanding broker for PVM Oil Futures was contacted by an admin clerk querying why he’d bought 7m barrels of crude in the middle of the night.The 34-year old broker at first claimed he had spent the night trading alongside a client. But the story began to fall apart when he refused to put the customer in touch with his desk for official approval of the trades.
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Creepshots and revenge porn: how paparazzi culture affects women
First published online by Kira Cochrane.
On the popular website Reddit, where users submit and share content, a member of a forum called “creepshots” was handing out advice last week. His subject? How to photograph women surreptitiously. “Don’t be nervous,” he wrote. “If you are, you’ll stand out. Don’t hover too much, get your shot and move on if you can … You’ll look less like a creep if you have photos of things other than just hot chicks’ asses.”
He offered this advice in the comment stream attached to a gallery of photos of women snapped unawares at airports. Those images joined hundreds posted by group members of women waiting for trains, packing groceries, standing on escalators; the camera homing in on their bottom, crotch or breasts. And they joined thousands more on creep websites as a whole, a large, thriving online subculture. The point is to catch women unawares, lay claim to something off-limits, then share it around for bragging rights and comment.
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The Myth of Male Decline
How is it, then, that men still control the most important industries, especially technology, occupy most of the positions on the lists of the richest Americans, and continue to make more money than women who have similar skills and education? And why do women make up only 17 percent of Congress?
These books and the cultural anxiety they represent reflect, but exaggerate, a transformation in the distribution of power over the past half-century. Fifty years ago, every male American was entitled to what the sociologist R. W. Connell called a “patriarchal dividend” — a lifelong affirmative-action program for men.
The size of that dividend varied according to race and class, but all men could count on women’s being excluded from the most desirable jobs and promotions in their line of work, so the average male high school graduate earned more than the average female college graduate working the same hours. At home, the patriarchal dividend gave husbands the right to decide where the family would live and to make unilateral financial decisions. Male privilege even trumped female consent to sex, so marital rape was not a crime.
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Brazilian woman selling her virginity to help homeless
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Studies show advances in gastrointestinal cancer treatments | e! Science News.
Techmeme: New Tracking Frontier: Your License Plates (Wall Street Journal).
“What are some creative ways to deal with monitor screen glare?”.
Fish getting smaller as the oceans warm.
Key mechanism for controlling the body’s inflammatory response discovered.
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Great Apes Running Out of Living Space
A continent-wide survey of suitable great ape habitat in Africa has found that the creatures are rapidly losing ground, literally. Over the past 20 years, the amount of habitat suitable for great apes has been dramatically reduced. Eastern gorillas and Cross River gorillas have lost more than half of their habitat, while Western gorillas and bonobos have each lost about a third. Various other species have suffered considerable losses as well. In some regions, the loss of habitat is the result of extensive deforestation and hunting. In others, it is due to widespread hunting of the great apes themselves for bushmeat.
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Louis C.K. and the Rise of the ‘Laptop Loners’ by Adam Wilson
LOUIS C.K. EMERGES from the subway station: sullen, sweating. His balding crown of carrot colored hair is slightly brighter than his ruddy, freckled skin. The man is overweight but solid, like a fullback long past glory, in love with French fries, who still hits the gym. He’s got broad shoulders, thick arms, A-cup man breasts, and a sizable gut that hangs over his beltline. His black t-shirt is half a size too small, constricting his movements, and adding to the general impression of physical discomfort.
C.K. makes it up the subway steps and arrives at street level, exhaling as if he’s crested some unprecedented summit. He marches into a pizza joint, scarfs most of a giant slice in three bites, then disgusted, throws what remains in the garbage. To watch him eat is akin to watching a junkie shoot heroin; one can trace the convergence of shame and sublimity. All the while there’s music playing, the syncopated up beat of seventies funk. The singer repeats: “Louie, Louie, you’re gonna die.” The camera cuts to another set of stairs, this time a declension, C.K. hustling down to a door marked “Comedy Cellar.” The juxtaposition is stark: here lies humor, at the intersection of pathos and indigestion. We must armor ourselves with laughter.
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Common RNA pathway found in ALS and dementia.
Scientists find missing link between players in the epigenetic code.
Blocking key protein could halt age-related decline in immune system, study finds.
Hubble portrays a dusty spiral galaxy.
New insights on control of pituitary hormone outside of brain has implications for breast cancer.
Bills, bills, bills: manage your accounts like a real pro | Ars Technica.
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New Blood Test Accurately Detects Early Lung, Breast Cancer in Humans
Researchers at Kansas State University have developed a simple blood test that can accurately detect the beginning stages of cancer. In less than an hour, the test can detect breast cancer and non-small cell lung cancer—the most common type of lung cancer—before symptoms like coughing and weight loss start. The researchers anticipate testing for the early stages of pancreatic cancer shortly. The test was developed by Stefan Bossmann, professor of chemistry, and Deryl Troyer, professor of anatomy and physiology. Both are also researchers affiliated with Kansas State University’s Johnson Cancer Research Center and the University of Kansas Cancer Center. Gary Gadbury, professor of statistics at Kansas State University, helped analyze the data from tests with lung and breast cancer patients. The results, data, and analysis were recently submitted to the Kansas Bio Authority for accelerated testing.
“We see this as the first step into a new arena of investigation that could eventually lead to improved early detection of human cancers,” Troyer said. “Right now the people who could benefit the most are those classified as at-risk for cancer, such as heavy smokers and people who have a family history of cancer. The idea is these at-risk groups could go to their physician’s office quarterly or once a year, take an easy-to-do, noninvasive test, and be told early on whether cancer has possibly developed.”
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Extinctions | Watch Free Documentary Online
More than 90 percent of all organisms that have ever lived on Earth are extinct. As new species evolve to fit ever changing ecological niches, older species fade away. But the rate of extinction is far from constant. At least a handful of times in the last 500 million years, 50 to more than 90 percent of all species on Earth have disappeared in a geological blink of the eye.hough these mass extinctions are deadly events, they open up the planet for new life-forms to emerge. Dinosaurs appeared after one of the biggest mass extinction events on Earth, the Permian-Triassic extinction about 250 million years ago.
The most studied mass extinction, between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods about 65 million years ago, killed off the dinosaurs and made room for mammals to rapidly diversify and evolve.The causes of these mass extinction events are unsolved mysteries, though volcanic eruptions and the impacts of large asteroids or comets are prime suspects in many of the cases. Both would eject tons of debris into the atmosphere, darkening the skies for at least months on end. Starved of sunlight, plants and plant-eating creatures would quickly die. Space rocks and volcanoes could also unleash toxic and heat-trapping gases that—once the dust settled—enable runaway global warming.
New evidence suggests we might be heading into an abrupt climate change on Earth – one powerful enough to cause mass extinctions.
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