3D printing explained: what's all the fuss about?

Image: Complex prototyping is easy with the right 3D printing kit, such as the Replicator 2 

It's rare that a truly new technology comes along, promising to revolutionise the world. Just as the printing press and spinning jenny empowered cottage industries with the ability to spread knowledge and manufacture goods, 3D printers promise to enable a next-generation industrial revolution of home-made and customised products.

In the industrial world, 3D printing is known as Additive Layer manufacturing, which should give you a hint as to how the process works. Thin layer after layer of material is built up, in a way that means a final fully-formed widget, hip bone, gun or part is produced.

It contrasts with traditional machine lathing, which has garnered the name Subtractive manufacturing, because material is removed to make a final part.

How to print in 3D

So how can you get started with 3D printing to become part of the revolution? The short and sweet answer is you'll need a 3D printer, suitable material for that printer, a 3D model to print and suitable software to do just that. Some of the big names in 3D printing are MakerBot, Up! Plus, Afinia and the most affordable RepRap design.

The MakerBot Replicator 2 is one of the best known 3D printers on the market, with a price tag of £1,800 / US$2,200 / AU$2,685, while 1kg (2.4lbs) of print filament costs around £52 / US$48 / AU$66. The MakerBot Replicator 2 has a print layer resolution of 0.1mm or 256dpi.

Image: The UP! Plus is another well known printer

In old-school print terms this sounds almost archaic, but this is more than fine enough to print perfectly smooth, curved objects that can be as large as 285 x 153 x 155mm (11.2 x 6 x 6.1 inches).

The Up! Plus 2 printer is a good contrast because it retails for US$1,650 (around £1,055 / AU$1,735) and has a 0.15mm or 166dpi resolution and maximum print volume of 140mm cubed.

Researchers Find Global Cooling as Devastating as Global Warming for Marine Life

Global cooling can be just as detrimental to marine life as global warming, according to a new study.

Many studies have focussed on the effects of global warming, Now, researchers have shown that a phenomenon called "global cooling" that occurred about 116 million years ago was associated with the loss of marine life.

The study was conducted by researchers from Newcastle, UK, Cologne, Frankfurt and GEOMAR-Kiel who found evidence of  major marine life loss when the earth experienced a brief cold spell during the mid-Cretaceous greenhouse period. The study also quantified the magnitude of the climate change.

For the study, researchers analyzed the geochemistry and fossilized records of marine species in the sediment core taken from the North Atlantic Ocean.

Global temperatures began to drop primarily after the super-continent, Pangaea began to drift apart, hence creating large oceanic basins. In the study, researchers showed how the rise of water bodies around continents reduced temperatures around the world by increasing the surface area for marine algae to grow. The dead algae were buried in the sediments and locked up a certain amount of carbon with them that reduced the atmospheric Carbondioxide.

World's Largest Solar Sail to Launch in November 2014

The Sunjammer project, slated to launch in 2014, will demonstrate "propellantless propulsion" offered by solar sails.

A huge solar sail designed to demonstrate the viability and value of propellant­­­-free propulsion is slated to blast into space in November 2014, mission officials say.

NASA's Sunjammer spacecraft — whose 13,000-square-foot (1,208 square meters) sail will allow it to cruise through the heavens like a boat through the ocean — is scheduled to lift off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral late next year.

Sunjammer will be a secondary payload on the Falcon 9, whose main task is launching the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) toward a gravitationally stable location called the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 1, which lies about 900,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from our planet.

Source: http://www.space.com

World Population May Reach 11 Billion By 2100

The world's population could reach 11 billion by the year 2100, according to a new statistical analysis.

That represents 800 million more people than was forecast in 2011. Most of that increase comes because birth rates in Africa haven't dropped as fast as projected.

"The fertility decline in Africa has slowed down or stalled to a larger extent than we previously predicted, and as a result the African population will go up," said study co-author Adrian Raftery, a statistician at the University of Washington, in a statement.

Ever increasing

The United Nations reported that the population hit 7 billion in October 2011. That's an amazing increase from the mere 5 million people who lived on the planet in 8000 B.C. or the 1 billion who were alive in 1805.

The huge surge in population is expected to cause mega-city populations to swell, which could worsen environmental problems and overcrowding.

Right now, Africa's population stands at 1.1 billion, but that is expected to increase four-fold, to 4.2 billion, by 2100.

Transparent Solar-Cell Screen Charges Phone

Transparent solar cells use materials that only absorb infrared and ultraviolet light and let visible light pass through

Today’s mobile devices are constantly in use—so constantly that battery life is a huge problem. I recently hosted an afternoon barbecue at a community pool; over in one corner, folks jockeyed for a turn to charge their mobile devices at the one available outlet. Meanwhile, the sun shone down brightly on mobile phones scattered across the picnic tables, as the batteries on those idle devices quietly drained.

The SunPartner Group, a 30-employee startup in Aix-en-Provence, France, thinks that’s a real waste. Folks sitting in restaurants, in outdoor cafes, or at their desks typically pull out their phones and put them face up in front of them; put solar cells on the phones and there’d be a lot less scrambling to find a wall outlet. And they’ve built a low-cost transparent panel that does just that. They’re now testing it with a number of manufacturers and expect to see it built into mobile devices early next year.

Sunpartner isn’t the first to think mobile phones should use solar power to charge themselves. A few years ago, several cell phone manufacturers tried putting solar cells on the back of phones—like the Samsung Crest and the Sharp Solar Hybrid. Turns out, though, that people weren’t inclined to put phones face down on the table—they missed alerts, and were worried about scratching the screen. And solar cells on the back of cell phones never caught on widely.

3D printing powered by thought

Imagine if you could print objects just by thinking about them. In this article it is investigated whether this is far-fetched dream or a real possibility.

Image: Thinker Thing, a start-up based in Santiago, Chile, says it has developed a way of printing 3D objects from people’s thoughts. 

It’s definitely not a bird. Nor is it a plane. The garish orange piece of plastic, small enough to hold in the palm of a hand, could pass for a missing limb of a toy tyrannosaurus. It may not look all that impressive, but it’s notable for two reasons. One is that the monster arm has emerged from a 3D printer. The other is that it is, in fact, the first ever object made from thought.

This milestone was reached with little fanfare last month at the Santiago MakerSpace, a technology and design studio in the Chilean capital. The toy limb’s shape was determined according to the wishes of its designer, as gleaned from a headset picking up his brainwaves. The man in question was George Laskowsky, Chief Technical Officer of Thinker Thing, the Chilean start-up developing the mind-controlled 3D printing system.

Image: This toy arm is the first object from thought successfully created by the start-up.

Engineers and designers have been using 3D printers for more than two decades. More recently, prices have tumbled and desk-top devices are increasingly being pitched at consumers. The touted possibilities appear to be endless – from bones to buildings to burritos – making some observers predict revolutionary consequences like the eventual demise of the factory. Because 3D printers build objects layer by layer from materials such as plastic or metal dust, a key advantage is the comparative freedom they give designers. Yet the design software is not easy to master, especially if you are four-years-old and haven’t yet learnt to hold a pencil properly.

Hubble Discovers Possible Planet Forming 7.5 Billion Miles From Its Star

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope may have discovered the farthest forming planet from its star in the constellation Hydra. The exoplanet is forming 7.5 billion miles from its star, nearly double the distance from our Sun to Pluto if it was travelling within our solar system.

NASA announced the discovery of a possible newly-forming planet on Thursday. The exoplanet is orbiting around the red dwarf star TW Hydrae within the constellation Hydra, located 176 light-years from Earth. The new planet is approximately six to 28 times the mass of Earth, according to the news release. Astronomers were able to discover the new planet by observing a gap within a protoplanetary disk of dust and gas, approximately 41 billion miles wide, that is surrounding TW Hydrae. Of the 900 discovered exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system, this potential planet is the farthest from its star.

Astronomers speculated the gap, approximately 1.9 billion miles wide, was being formed by this new planet as it consumed nearby material. In addition to its incredible distance, what’s unique about the new planet is the relatively quick time period of its formation.

Lone Signal: Text an extraterrestrial

Now you can text E.T.

“E.T. phone home” is taking on a whole new meaning.  Lone Signal, a startup company focusing on space and technology, is combining our collective fascination with extraterrestrial life, capitalism, and science in a way rarely seen outside the movie theater.  On July 18th they will send text messages and mobile photos from around the globe, into deep space, reports Bloomberg Businessweek.

More specifically, the texts will be transmitted towards Gliese 526, a red dwarf star orbited by planets with earth-like atmospheres that may be inhabitable, or inhabited.  To catapult the far enough, Lone Signal took out a 30-year lease on the Jamesburg Earth Station radio telescope near Carmel, California.

This is not the world’s first METI (messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence).  A cryptic message was first beamed to a star cluster 25,000 light years away in the constellation Hercules.  Leaving Earth via the Puerto Rican Arecibo radio telescope in November of 1974; it has yet to reach its target.  Only 17.6 light years away, it will still be 2050 before a response would have enough time to return from Gliese 526.

Eat Vegetarian, Live Longer?

People who eat a vegetarian diet live longer than those who eat meat, according to research published this week.

Researchers from Loma Linda University in California followed 73,308 members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which encourages a vegetarian diet, for almost six years. There were 12 percent fewer deaths among vegetarians over that period compared to meat-eaters, the researchers reported in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

Other studies have pointed toward similar connections, but this research analyzed a larger group of people. Specifically, researchers found that vegetarians were less likely to die from heart disease, diabetes and kidney failure.

Fake Forest Converts Sunlight Into Energy

Arrays of tree-like nanowires facilitate solar water-splitting
 in a fully integrated artificial photosynthesis system. 

One hour of global sunlight contains enough energy to meet the demands of every human on the planet for an entire year. And a recent breakthrough by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory could make harnessing this energy for human consumption a reality.

Researchers have developed an "artificial forest" that can convert solar energy into chemical fuels.

In a process that mimics photosynthesis, this artificial forest soaks up light and uses it to generate oxygen and hydrogen, two gases that can be used to power fuel cells.