The Art of 3-D Printing

As part of our special report on manufacturing, we asked Neri Oxman, a professor at the MIT Media Lab and an internationally recognized artist whose work is part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to create a sculpture that would illustrate the future of manufacturing. (See a gallery of images here.)

What she produced, in collaboration with MIT materials science professor Craig Carter, is a powerful demonstration of the possibilities of 3-D printing, using techniques that take advantage of the capabilities of 3-D printers in ways that conventional manufacturing techniques cannot.

3-D printing encompasses a range of technologies—from inkjet heads mounted on gantries that can deposit plastics layer by layer to form intricate models, to more recent laser-based systems that sinter metal powders to make durable parts for airplanes. 3-D printers have mainly been used for prototyping, but they are becoming an option for manufacturing as well, and may eventually even be used to print buildings, Oxman says. But designers and architects haven't yet learned to take advantage of their capabilities.

Oxman, who trained as an architect, says buildings are designed today with an eye toward the components they can be made of—sheets of plywood, panes of glass, steel beams, and concrete columns. As a result, those designs are limited, in much the way Lego bricks constrain the shapes that children can build. There are similar limitations in conventional manufacturing; there are some shapes that simply can't be built with existing molds and machining tools, and designers have had to design with these limits in mind.

Oxman is exploring ways to break with conventional design thinking by looking to patterns and processes found in nature, and using equations that define these processes to generate new designs. The results are often surprising shapes and structures that can be made only with 3-D printers.

To help develop the algorithms needed, Oxman has teamed up with Carter and others. In some cases, the algorithms provide new aesthetics, but they can also have practical applications—such as varying the structure to help bear loads. For one sculpture—a model of a chaise longue reclined chair—the team combined algorithms taken from nature with a map of the pressure a body exerts on a chair. The result depends on where the algorithms determine the chair needs to be soft to provide comfort and where it needs to be stiff to provide support.

source: technologyreview.com

Magnetic Memory Miniaturized to Just 12 Atoms

A memory-storage element made at IBM Research points to future computing systems built atom by atom.

• Thursday, January 12, 2012
• By Katherine Bourzac

The smallest magnetic-memory bit ever made—an aggregation of just 12 iron atoms created by researchers at IBM—shows the ultimate limits of future data-storage systems.

The magnetic memory elements don't work in the same way that today's hard drives work, and, in theory, they can be much smaller without becoming unstable. Data-storage arrays made from these atomic bits would be about 100 times denser than anything that can be built today. But the 12 atoms making up each bit must be painstakingly assembled using an expensive and complex microscope, and the bits can hold data for only a few hours and at low temperatures approaching absolute zero, so the miniscule memory elements won't be found in consumer devices anytime soon.

As the semiconductor industry bumps up against the limits of scaling by making memory and computation devices ever smaller, the IBM Almaden research group, led by Andreas Heinrich, is working from the other end, building computing elements atom-by-atom in the lab.

The necessary technology for large-scale manufacturing at the single-atom scale doesn't exist yet. Today, says Heinrich, the question is, "What is it you would want to build on the scale of atoms for data storage and computation, in the distant future?"

As engineers miniaturize conventional devices, they're finding that quantum physics, which never had to be accounted for in the past, makes devices less stable. As conventional magnetic memory bits are miniaturized, for example, each bit's magnetic field begins to affect its neighbors', weakening each bit's ability to hold on to a 1 or a 0.

The IBM researchers found that it was possible to sidestep this problem by using groups of atoms that display a different kind of magnetism. The key, says Heinrich, is the magnetic spin of each individual atom.

In conventional magnets, whether they're found holding up a note on the refrigerator or in a data-storage array, the magnetic spins of the atoms are aligned. It's this alignment that leads to instability when magnetic-memory elements are miniaturized. The IBM researchers made their tiny memory elements by lining up iron atoms whose spins were counter-aligned.

source: technologyreview.com

Researchers Engineer a Mightier Mouse

Mice that grow larger muscles and can run for twice as long as their unaltered littermates before tiring could point toward new treatments for the muscle loss that can occur with aging.

The mice were engineered to lack a molecule called NCOR in their muscle tissue. In a second, related study, knocking out the same molecule in fat resulted in mice that were overweight but sensitive to insulin, a result that could lead to more targeted treatments for diabetes. Both studies were published in the journal Cell last week.

NCOR acts as a dimmer switch for other molecules in a cell. It is known as a corepressor, slowing the production of transcription factors, which in turn regulate the expression of genes. Dimmer-switch molecules are often good drug targets thanks to this subtle effect, says Johan Auwerx, a researcher at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, who led the first study, which involved knocking out NCOR in muscle. "That's better from a medical standpoint, because you don't want to turn a molecule all on or off," he says.

Because NCOR acts on different molecules in many parts of the body, Auwerx and others have been using genetic techniques to create mice that lack the protein in only certain types of tissue. Knocking out the molecule in all tissues from birth is lethal.

According to the second study, eliminating the molecule in fat had a very specific effect: fat cells became more sensitive to insulin, as did cells in the muscle and the liver. Insulin resistance is one of the hallmarks of metabolic syndrome, a precursor to type 2 diabetes, so the findings could inform drug development for the disease.

"The results suggest that adipose is the organizing tissue for metabolic syndrome," says Jerrold Olefsky, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego, who led the second study. "If you can treat it, you get systemic effects on other tissues."

On a molecular level, knocking out NCOR appeared to mimic the effect of a class of diabetes drugs known as thiazolidinediones, or TZDs. These drugs target the same molecule as NCOR, but have significant side effects, including hepatitis, liver failure, water retention, and heart failure. Some have been pulled from the market.

The researchers did not see any of these ill effects in the mice, suggesting that if you target treatment to adipose tissue, "you get rid of unwanted side effects," says Olefsky. "Targeting NCOR is better because it has a much more selective role."

Olefsky's team also identified more than 100 genes that are activated by deleting NCOR in fat. They're now studying these genes as potential drug targets.

The mice that lacked NCOR in their muscles had a different outcome—their muscles had many more mitochondria, the fuel source of the cell, which allowed them to run longer. "That means better capacity to keep energy levels up," says Auwerx. The researchers knocked out the same gene in the muscle tissue of worms, which also grew larger muscles, suggesting that the same trick should work in other animals.

Auwerx is now looking for drugs that can modulate NCOR levels. Fasting brings levels down, while glucose pushes it up. The results could be useful in treating aging-related muscle loss, which occurs even in old people who exercise, as well as diseases such as muscular dystrophy.

The future of Mars exploration

(CNN) -- With NASA's "Curiosity" rover due to launch on November 25, Mars exploration is once again on the space agenda.

"Curiosity" -- full name Mars Science Laboratory "Curiosity" -- will search for signs that Mars is, or ever was, able to support microbial life.

But even as the Science Laboratory is being prepared for launch, more missions to the Red Planet are being planned and new technologies are being researched that will allow ever more information about Mars to be collected.

Take our quiz and find out how much you know about the future of Mars exploration.

Iconic Yahoo billboard coming down after 12 years

Since 1999, it has greeted visitors to San Francisco while standing as a symbol of the Bay Area's status as a tech hub: A Yahoo billboard, retro-styled to look like a 1960s-era motel sign, with the tag line, "A nice place to stay on the Internet.

"Now, it's finally coming down.According to a report in the San Francisco Egotist, a sales manager for Clear Channel Outdoor in San Francisco has confirmed the billboard space will be available for new ads starting December 1.Some bloggers are already speculating that a more of-the-moment Bay Area tech company, such as Facebook or Google, may take its place.The neon Yahoo billboard near the onramp to eastbound I-80 is a holdover from the dot-com boom of the late 1990s and inspired sister billboards in New York City and Los Angeles.It has outlasted four Yahoo CEOs, most recently Carol Bartz.The billboard's space entertained passing motorists with such messages as, "FREE E-MAIL. ALL U CAN EAT BUFFET" and "YOU LOOK CUTE TODAY."The inevitable Save the Yahoo! Billboard page has already sprung up on Facebook, where it had amassed more than 800 likes as of early Friday afternoon.


http://edition.cnn.com/

RIM facing mass defection over BlackBerry blunders

RIM may believe its BlackBerry outage compensation is “a pretty comprehensive set of efforts” but it may not be enough to staunch the flow of users ditching the platform, according to new research. A full 30-percent of large scale BlackBerry users plan to jump ship in 2012, Enterprise Management Associates‘ figures claim, with a mere 14-percent of users themselves happy with their RIM smartphone. In comparison, 44-percent of iPhone users were content with their device.

“We expected to see some market share loss by RIM,” EMA research director Steve Brasen suggests, ”but these results were far more dramatic than we could have anticipated.” BlackBerry always had its security and reliability counting in its favor, but last week’s outage – which lasted for up to three days for some users, and saw RIM admit it had no idea what was the cause of the technical fault – has scraped away at that confidence.

As well as throwing free apps at users – with the promise of over $100 worth of previously premium titles now being given away free through the BlackBerry App World over the next four weeks – RIM has also attempted to court frustrated enterprise customers. They’ll be offered a month’s free technical support, usually a subscription-based service, in the hope that the extra attention will encourage them to stay.

Nonetheless, if EMA’s figures are correct, RIM’s market share among enterprise customers with 10,000 or more users will drop next year from the majority platform, at 52-percent, to just 36-percent.

[via InfoWorld]

Sears’ Alphaline digital download store closes down

Another digital content provider has apparently gone quietly to the graveyard, with RoxioNow-powered Alphaline Entertainment no longer operational. The service – which launched back in December 2010 as a partnership between retailer Sears and platform provider Sonic Solutions – has been taken offline, with the company’s site now suggesting that, as of September, Alphaline was no longer available.

“We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause you” the terse message on the site reads. “If you have purchased content for ownership through Alphaline Entertainment, we have sent you an email setting out how purchased content for ownership is being handled.”

There’s no mention on Sears’ site as to what happened to the service, though it’s likely that waning appeal in an over-saturated digital downloads marketplace saw usage underwhelm. Alphaline was charging around $19.99 for movie purchases or $3.99 for rentals, with availability promised for the same day as physical media release. Back in March, Sears added further compatibility with internet-connected TVs and other platforms.

Did you use Alphaline Entertainment for digital downloads or rentals? Received an email telling you what to do with your purchases now? Let us know in the comments.

[Thanks Chris!]