Lifeboat Foundation

Great gift for kids and getting them started with 3D printing to boot.

One of the world’s largest toy makers, Mattel, has long embraced the idea of helping kids build their own toys. Back in the 1960s, the company released the very first ThingMaker, which let kids create figurines by pouring liquid plastic into molds and then heating them up in an oven. Now, Mattel thinks it can bring back the toymaker movement with its own affordable 3D printer.

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In a world of economic scarcity, public housing has become essential for sheltering our species’ most vulnerable populations. Interestingly, the island city-state of Sinagpore having a unique approach to public housing, with 80% of the resident population living in government buildings and, more than that, the small nation implemented some housing practices that the United States has sometimes been too afraid to tackle when it comes to public housing: socioeconomically integrated public developments. Now, Singapore is moving beyond these important strategies to novel methods of construction, namely 3D printing.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=NKeeHahhNL4

When the idea of a medical transplant is brought up, most people’s thoughts are usually drawn to procedures such as blood transfusions or organ replacements. But, oftentimes, we forget the importance of our bone structure, as well as the 2 million painful bone transplants that take place every year around world. Previously stuck in a Medieval-like operation method, surgeons had little option but to replace their patients’ bones with the bones of animals or human cadavers, and even this procedure can oftentimes led to complications due to the body’s rejection of the foreign replacement. But 3D bioprinting has been a major influence in changing the entire nature of this traditional surgical procedure, new methods of creating bone grafts have been developed by researchers around the world from Montana State University to Tokyo. 3D printing has become a recent revelation in skeletal reconstruction surgery, with 3D printed synthetic implants and even harvested stem cell materials proving to be a much safer and efficient surgical alternative.

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A team of researchers from Germany have developed what could become a revolutionary treatment for male infertility — they build spermbots. The key is a tiny metal helix that attaches to individual sperm cells, allowing them to move more effectively. You can think of it like a prosthetic tail for sperm.

Male fertility issues are usually not related to having an unusually low sperm count, but to having sperm with low motility. That is, they don’t get around very well. Each sperm has a copy of half of a man’s genome in the “head” portion. The tail is actually a flagella with banks of energy-producing mitochondria to power its movement. If either the tail or power source don’t work correctly, a sperm cell will have trouble reaching and fertilizing an egg.

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Bon Appétit — could 3D Printers be coming to make your next 1st Class Meal on a flight, or in resturants with robot servers? The US Army believes it is the new way for them.

Beats the heck out of MREs.

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Bioprinting companies can be successful at start-up investment conferences, although they are sometimes outshone by more immediately accessible products. Bioprinters have the potential to drastically change life expectancy and quality in the long term, but can “only” help out with scientific research in the short term and that, often, is not exciting enough for start-up awards.

That was not the case at the recent SVOD (Silicon Valley Open Doors) Europe, an investment conference that began in 2005 and went global in 2015. The event then came to Europe for the first time in an effort to connect the Eastern European tech community with more established ecosystems. This year, the event took place in Ireland and “local” startupper Jemma Redmond took home the top prize with the Ourobotics 10 material 3D bioprinter.

I have been following Jemma and her team’s progress, from the pre-conference preparation all the way up to her presentation, via Facebook feed and other updates. The event took place at Google’s Dublin HQ and the winning team received, among other things, $5,000 in Google Adwords credits. Clearly happy about this success, Jemma told me they faced off against 25 other teams.

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Researchers are only steps away from bioprinting tissues and organs to solve a myriad of injuries and illnesses. TechRepublic has the inside story of the new product accelerating the process.

If you want to understand how close the medical community is to a quantum leap forward in 3D bioprinting, then you need to look at the work that one intern is doing this summer at the University of Louisville.

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Made In Space and NanoRacks have been making news lately with the announcement of partnerships to change the way objects are imagined and built off the planet, and now the companies have joined forces to provide a novel new service for CubeSat developers.

They call it “Stash & Deploy,” and the service will leverage the NanoRacks heritage in CubeSat deployment and the capability of Made In Space to provide 3D printing capabilities and deliver – on-demand – satellite manufacturing, assembly, and deployment in the space environment.

The plan calls for a variety of standard and customer-specific satellite components to be “cached” within a satellite deployment vehicle such as the International Space Station, and the components will be “stashed” for rapid manufacture of CubeSats.

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Hmmm; we’re definitely not at the end of the golden age of innovation. In fact, once Quantum technology has evolved to the point where it is available to the broader public; we will see a new explosion of new innovation occur as a result.

This is the first of two excerpts from “The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War,” published this month by Princeton University Press. The second will explain the implications of all this for the next quarter century.

Can future innovations match the great inventions of the past? Will artificial intelligence, robots, 3D printing and other offspring of the digital revolution do for economic growth what the second industrial revolution did between 1920 and 1970? The techno-optimist school of economics says yes. I disagree.

Continue reading “Why the golden age of growth is behind us” »