Lifeboat Foundation

Last week saw an announcement that Optimus Ride, an autonomous shuttle company in Boston was purchased in an acqui-hire by Magna, the Ontario based Tier One Automotive company. In an acqui-hire, the company has generally failed, but a buyer pays to pick up the assets and to hire the team, which took time to create. Usually it’s only enough to reward the preferred investors, the team gets options in their new employer.

Optimus Ride built a shuttle on top of the GEM 6-seater electric shuttle platform, adding sensors and their autonomy tools. It evolved out of MIT.

Also announced as shutting its doors was Local Motors, maker of the Olli shuttle. Local Motors began with a focus on 3D printing to make smaller volume vehicles. The started with the Rally Fighter, a vehicle that was crowd designed after contests. Over time, founder Jay Rogers believed that 3D printing could bring a vehicle to production faster and at lower cost than conventional methods than conventional methods, and entered the Shuttle market, partnering with various partners to make them autonomous. Recently, we reported how an Olli shuttle in Whitby, Ontario had a crash resulting in serious injuries. Early reports suggested it was in autonomous mode, but it was later revealed it was being manually driven at the time. That made it mostly a non-story, but the real story of Olli did not go so well, either.

Continue reading “Two Self-Driving Shuttle Companies Fail In One Week. What Does It Bode?” »

Researchers at University College London (UCL), Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (USC) and biopharma firm FabRx, have managed to convert an everyday smartphone into an on-demand personalized drug 3D printer.

Using the visible light created by a mobile phone screen, the modified M3DIMAKER LUX system has already proven capable of 3D printing blood-thinning tablets in specific shapes, sizes and dosages. Operable via a user-friendly app, it’s hoped that with further R&D, the team’s machine could be deployed in future by those living in isolated areas, under the remote supervision of GPs to ensure patient safety.

“This novel system would help people who need precise dosages that differ from how a medication is typically sold, as well as people whose required dosage may change regularly,” said the study’s lead author Xiaoyan Xu. “The tablet’s shape and size are also customizable, which enables flexibility in the rate at which the medication gets released into the bloodstream.”

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3D printed lab meat, and plant based meats will be more widespread in our future. Would you eat stem cell 3D printed lab meat or plant based meat? Why or why not? What are the differences between natural vs unnatural. Growing up in Texas I know most Texans frown on it, as BBQ is a religion. Is 3D printing meat sustainable\.

Whether it comes from a plant or the cells of an animal, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the meat of the future will probably not be coming from the flesh of slaughtered animals. Instead, whether made from plants or cells, it will be formed into ‘meat’ by a 3D printer. In September of 2021, a Japanese team of researchers at the University of Osaka announced that they had 3D printed Wagyu beef. Beef connoisseurs will recognize the name; Wagyu beef is prized (and suitably priced) for its flavor and fat marbling. Legends abound about the cows such beef derives from, how they are allegedly coddled and massaged, fed a special diet that includes beer — but much of those tales are either exaggerated or pure urban legend. As Joe Heitzeberg, the co-founder and CEO of Crowd Cow explains, There are four breeds native to Japan. Of those four breeds, one of the breeds is genetically unique. It has a genetic predisposition to create this crazy marbling of fat on the inside of muscle tissue. No other livestock does that. The researchers at the University of Osaka used two different types of stem cells from Wagyu cows to create cultured meat, growing living animal cells onto some type of matrix where they are then incubated and grown into animal tissue that has never been part of a living animal. There are currently no reports on the taste of the cultured Wagyu beef but we can assume it’s ‘good’ and given a little time, the technology should be able to produce excellent Wagyu cultured meat — at what price, however, is another big question mark. But there’s another simpler solution that could be a better meat replacement than cultured meat, as even meat grown from stem cells still contains cholesterol and some of the negative health concerns associated with animal protein. Plant-based imitation meat is also being created with 3D printers, and the results are surprising even hardcore meat lovers.

Continue reading “Staking a Claim on the Steak of Tomorrow: 3D Printing Tech is Making ‘Meat’” »

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar, in collaboration with TCS Research and Wageningen University, recently devised a new strategy that could improve coordination among different robots tackling complex missions as a team. This strategy, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, is based on a split-architecture that addresses communication and computations separately, while periodically coordinating the two to achieve optimal results.

The researchers’ paper was recently presented at the IEEE RoboCom 2022 conference, held in conjunction with IEEE CCNC 2022, a top tier conference in the field of networking and distributed computing. At IEEE RoboCom 2022, it received the Best Paper Award.

“Swarm-robotics is on the path to becoming a key tool for human civilization,” Dr. Sudipta Saha, the lead researcher of the team that carried out the study, told TechXplore. “For instance, in medical science, it will be necessary to use numerous nano-bots to boost immune-therapy, targeted and effective drug transfer, etc.; while in the army it will be necessary for exploring unknown terrains that are hard for humans to enter, enabling agile supervision of borders and similar activities. In construction, it can enable technologies such as large-scale 3D printing and in agriculture it can help to monitor crop health and intervene to improve yields.”

In a groundbreaking new study, researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities used a customized printer to fully 3D print a flexible organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display. The discovery could result in low-cost OLED displays in the future that could be widely produced using 3D printers by anyone at home, instead of by technicians in expensive microfabrication facilities.

The research is published in Science Advances.

Continue reading “Researchers develop first fully 3D-printed, flexible OLED display” »

You might not have to send your devices in (or buy replacement parts) if the display breaks — you could just make new screens yourself. University of Minnesota Twin Cities researchers have developed what they say is the first fully 3D-printed flexible OLED display. In theory, you wouldn’t have to depend on panels made at large, distant factories to build or repair your gadgets.

The new approach combines two methods of 3D printing to print the six layers needed for a functional display. The team used extrusion printing to make the electrodes, encapsulation, insulation and interconnects, while active layers were spray-painted at room temperature. Past attempts by various teams either had issues with light uniformity (consistency across the whole panel) or relied on techniques beyond 3D printing to put some components in place, such as spin-coating or thermal evaporation.

The prototype was just 1.5 inches wide and used just 64 pixels. Any practical uses would require much higher resolutions (a 1080p display requires over 2 million pixels), and the scientists also want to improve brightness. It might also take a while to adapt the technology for home use. The university used a custom 3D printer that costs as much as a Tesla Model S — it might take a while for the method to be viable on off-the-shelf printers, even including high-end models like FormLabs’ $4,850 3B+.

Formlabs, one of the few companies to turn 3D printing into a useful, real-world tool, is here at CES to show off two new printers. The Form 3+ and 3B+ are updates to the models it launched in 2019, with these units described as its “fastest 3D printers to date.”

New for 2022 include higher-intensity lasers, new material settings and faster, more durable hardware, with a promise of 40 percent faster prints. It also comes with the Build Platform 2, an updated deck for manufacturing that makes it easier to remove prints when they’re done.

At the same time, the company is showing off ESD Resin, enabling you to build components that dissipate electrostatic discharges. This should, Formlabs hopes, open up new opportunities for prints that can be used inside the electronics industry and other high-tech operations.

Virginia mom April Stringfield is now the owner of Habitat for Humanity’s first 3D-printed home — built in record time, thanks to new construction tech.

The massive time and money savings from 3D printing means the nonprofit is very likely to print more in the future.

Continue reading “3D-printed home cuts construction time from 4 weeks to 28 hours, says Habitat for Humanity” »

A major obstacle to widespread study and clinical use of 3D tissues is their short shelf-life, which may be anywhere from a just few hours to a few days. As in the case of an organ transplant, a bioprinted tissue must be transported rapidly to the location where it is needed, or it will not be viable. In the journal Matter on December 21^st, researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School describe their work combining 3D bioprinting with cryopreservative techniques to create tissues which can be preserved in a freezer at-196°C and thawed within minutes for immediate use.

“For conventional bioprinting, there is basically no shelf life. It’s really just print, and then use, in most cases,” says lead author Y. Shrike Zhang (@shrikezhang), a biomedical engineer at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “With cryobioprinting, you can print and store in the frozen state for basically as long as you want.”

Continue reading “3D-bioprinted tissues can now be stored in the freezer until needed” »