WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

The ability to 3D print materials onto people that read their minds as well as other things will revolutionise everything from medicine to interfaces.

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As you’ll know by now from reading this blog increasingly we can pack sophisticated brain reading tech into glasses and sticker decals – and now scientists have developed a new technology that can measure brain waves using electronic, temporary tattoos. The researchers say the method could act as a quicker and more convenient way to monitor brain activity and diagnose neurological conditions, such as seizures, epilepsy and brain tumors, compared to traditional Electroencephalogram (EEG) tests.

During an EEG test, technicians normally use rulers and pencils to mark up a person’s head before gluing electrodes across the scalp. These electrodes are then connected via long wires to a machine that records brain activity. Alternatively, a cap with electrodes can be directly placed on the head.

However, this whole process is time-consuming and inconvenient, say the developers of the new technology. It generally takes around one to two hours to set up an EEG test, said co-developer Nanshu Lu, a professor of engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. The electrodes then need to be monitored about every two hours because the glue that attaches them to the scalp dries up, she told Live Science in an email.

The new technology, on the other hand, uses a robot that is digitally programmed to jet ink made of conductive material onto specific positions on a person’s scalp – saving both time and labor, say the researchers. Currently, this printing process still takes an hour as the team has to manually correct for a persons’ head movements, Lu said. However, if future adaptive printing can be fully automated, the whole printing process can be done within 20 minutes, she added.

The ink then dries into a thin film, known as an electronic tattoo, that is 30 micrometers thick – approximately half the width of a human hair. Like regular EEG electrodes, these E-Tattoos can then be used to detect changes in the electrical activity of the brain.

In a new study, published Monday in the journal Cell Biomaterials, the researchers tested the technology on five people with short hair to compare it to conventional EEG technology. They found that the E-Tattoos were just as good at detecting brain waves as the conventional EEG electrodes that were placed next to them.

Furthermore, the E-Tattoos stayed on the participants’ heads and could record brain activity for at least a day, while the EEG electrodes began dropping off after six hours. Once measurements are made, E-Tattoos can be simply scrubbed off using alcohol wipes or washed off using shampoo, Lu said. EEG electrode glue, on the other hand, is more difficult to get out of hair.

The ink formula can also be modified to create tattoo lines onto the scalp, meaning that the wires that connect the E-Tattoos to a monitor are much shorter than they would be in a regular EEG test.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

The number of global risks are proliferating and the ability for civilians to manufacture increasingly powerful weapons and weapons systems at home is only going to get worse.

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I first wrote about 3D printed ghost guns, as well as 3D printed grenade launchers, guided missiles, and explosives, many many years ago, and on Monday, after a five-day search to find the man who shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City, police arrested a suspect, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, and charged him with murder.

When asked to provide identification, investigators say that Mangione – a former high school valedictorian and software engineer from a prominent family in Baltimore – gave the same fake ID used to check into a New York City hostel in the days before the assassination. A search of Mangione yielded a manifesto apparently saying that “these parasites had it coming.”

Law enforcement also found a “black 3D-printed pistol and a black 3D printed silencer” in Mangione’s backpack, according to the police report. The gun, the report noted, had “one loaded Glock magazine with six nine-millimeter full metal jacket rounds.”

Officials say they believe it’s the same weapon the shooter is seen wielding in surveillance footage of the killing. Investigators and online sleuths are now going through Mangione’s digital footprint, including his Goodreads and Reddit accounts, in an effort to understand his character. For the official investigation, though, one of the most important details will be where and how Mangione obtained his weapon.

The fact that the suspect allegedly used a “ghost gun” — a gun that is essentially homemade and often lacks a serial number like the ones required on guns sold by major manufacturers — would usually make the weapon harder to trace. But this case may be a bit simpler: As 404media has reported, and several 3D gun printing hobbyists on the internet have pointed out, the gun found on Mangione has the same frame characteristics as the Chairmanwon V1, a weapon named after its designer. Chairmanwon’s designs are well-known among homemade gun hobbyists. (Vox reached out to Chairmanwon for confirmation but did not hear back by publication time.)

And while this might be the first high-profile shooting attempt using a 3D printed gun, the fact that a ghost gun was likely used shouldn’t come as a surprise. In the last few years, they’ve become much more frequent at crime scenes, presenting serious challenges for investigators trying to solve crimes.

Federal gun regulations require manufacturers to print serial numbers on their weapons. They also require that federally licensed firearms dealers perform background checks when someone comes to them looking to purchase a gun.

Background checks are meant to ensure that people who aren’t legally allowed to own a gun, including minors and people convicted of felonies, aren’t able to buy them. In the event of a crime, the serial numbers help investigators know who purchased the weapon, allowing them to determine whether the person who purchased the gun used it in a crime or whether someone else did.

But with ghost guns, people can avoid the regulations.

As 3D printers have become more accessible, so has a niche market of people designing, printing, and selling weapons kits for home assembly. Because they lack serial numbers, ghost guns aren’t easily traceable. And selling them online, as kits, has allowed both manufacturers and purchasers to evade the regulations required for other gun purchases. That has made ghost guns an especially appealing option for people who aren’t able to purchase guns legally, or want to use them for illegal purposes.

As a consequence, the number of ghost guns recovered from crime scenes has exploded. The number of these privately made guns submitted to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) for tracing increased more than 1,000 percent between 2017 and 2021. Gun violence researchers have also pointed to the popularity of ghost guns among teenagers amid an epidemic of youth gun violence.

Ghost gun makers have frustrated lawmakers in part because the gun makers have been able to get around the existing regulations. But in 2022, ATF broadened the definition of firearms under the Gun Control Act of 1968 as part of the Biden administration’s promise to crack down on ghost guns. Essentially, the change forced ghost gun makers to operate like regular gun manufacturers and dealers, requiring them to include serial numbers on their products and do background checks on prospective buyers.

Gun rights groups challenged the decision in court in Garland v. VanDerStok, which asked a judge to consider whether ghost gun kits and the frames used to assemble them could be counted as firearms subject to gun control laws. In 2023, a judge ruled in favor of the gun rights groups. But the Supreme Court issued a stay, allowing the law to stay in effect while they heard the case. In oral arguments in October, it appeared that the justices were likely to uphold the regulations on ghost guns when they issue a decision later this term.

Meanwhile, the regulations do seem to have made an impact on the number of ghost guns being used in crime scenes. According to analysis by The Trace, the number of ghost guns being recovered from crime scenes seems to have dropped significantly since the 2022 rule in cities that collect relevant data. Legal challenges to one of the major producers of ghost guns found at crime scenes also almost certainly played a role.

Forcing private gun makers to operate like gun manufacturing companies seems to have helped, but it won’t entirely take care of the problem. As long as people can easily print and manufacture their own 3D weapons, they’re likely to find ways to keep printing guns without serial numbers, and some of them will surely show up at crime scenes. But as certain gun makers become more prominent, it will likely become easier for some of the guns to be identified. In Mangione’s case, the police – assuming they have the right suspect – got lucky: When they approached him five days after the crime, he still had the weapon on him.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

New ways to print materials are allowing us to give them new qualities and properties which opens up new use cases.

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The Titanium-alloy metamaterial has a unique lattice structure that reportedly makes it 50% stronger than the next strongest alloy of similar density – cast magnesium alloy WE54, used in aerospace. Lattice structures of hollow struts are inspired by light and strong plants like the Victoria water lily.

RMIT Professor Ma Qian explains that decades of trying to replicate the hollow cellular structures in metals have been frustrated by manufacturing issues and load stress concentrating on the insides, leading to premature failures.

While the stress should ideally be evenly spread, often less than half the material bears most of the compressive load, making a large part structurally insignificant, notes Qian.

The RMIT team has combined the hollow, tubular, lattice structure with a thin band inside for strength.

They report the cubic topology to be the strongest design for both strut and plate-based lattice metamaterials, which perform the same when loaded along the x, y and z axes. CAD software merged the designs, and the material was 3D printed with laser powder bed fusion (LPBF).

‘We chose to do this manually instead of programmatically to highlight that the design of these advanced metamaterials is not hidden behind copious amounts of code or software – it is highly accessible,’ asserts Qian.

The group fabricated multi-topology Ti-6Al-4V TP-HSL specimens with densities of 1-1.8g/cm³. At the highest density, these are reported to have compressive yield strengths of 263MPa, while the WE54 magnesium alloy has a yield strength of ~170MPa. These specimens also have ultimate compressive strengths of up to 376MPa and elastic moduli to 11GPa.

The new structure is found to have only half the stress concentrated on the lattice’s weak points. The double lattice design deflects cracks along the structure, says the team, which enhances the toughness.

RMIT PhD candidate Jordan Noronha claims the structure could be printed at several millimetres and up to several metres using different printers. The researchers think that the printability, strength, biocompatibility, corrosion and heat resistance mean it could be used for devices like bone implants or rocket parts.

LPBF is ideal for making advanced metallic metamaterials as it can produce sub-millimetre scale features at high resolution at unsupported angles over 30°, says Qian. He says their only consideration was removing the metal powder from the internal structure, but they have spent recent years optimising this using increasingly complex geometries.

Although the technology is exclusive, the group thinks it will become more accessible. They aim to refine the material for maximum efficiency and find high-temperature uses.

Qian notes that these metallic lattice materials are akin to natural materials and so are multifunctional, and 3D printing means they are unconstrained by the geometric and architectural requirements of traditional manufacture.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

How we build buildings is changing, slowly, but surely.

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As Microsoft looks to make its new data centers out of Carbon neutral, or Green concrete and with more organisations like BIG, ICON, Lennar, and the US Marines 3D printing buildings, bunkers, communities, and even rocket pads, we’ve now seen the first data center being 3D Printed.

Tasked with building a new data center in an urban area of Germany, the team behind the Wave House harnessed the benefits of 3D printing technology to inject a sense of style into the unglamorous world of cloud-computing infrastructure, creating Europe’s largest 3D printed building in the process.

The Wave House is located in Heidelberg and was designed by SSV and Mense Korte, and created by Peri 3D Construction for developer KrausGruppe. It measures 600 sq m (6,600 sq ft). As mentioned, its unusual appearance comes from an attempt to spice up what could otherwise have been a rather boring building.

See how it was done.

“Due to the typical absence of windows and large openings in all or the main areas of data centers, for safety and other reasons, data centers tend to look quite dull and uninspiring,” explained a press release by COBOD. “As long as such data centers are placed far outside the cities this problem is perhaps of less concern, but the trend towards making data centers more in the vicinity of the users and therefore locate them in suburban areas and cities has created a need to make the data centers more visually appealing.

“A challenge that in the Heidelberg project was solved by the architects SSV and Mense Korte by giving the walls a wave design, a design feature that also gave name to the building: the Wave House. Such wave designed walls could not have been realized using conventional construction methods, so instead 3D construction printing technology was used due to the design freedom of this construction method.”

The build process was similar to other 3D printed architecture projects I’ve reported on and made use of a single COBOD BOD2 printer, the same model which was also used in Europe’s first two-story house and the world’s largest 3D printed building. The 3D printer extruded a recyclable cement-like mixture out of a nozzle in layers, at a rate of 4 sq m (43 sq ft) per hour to form the exterior walls, which measure a length of 54 m (177 ft), a width of 11 m (36 ft) and a height of 9 m (29.5 ft).

The printing process took around 140 hours. Following this, humans then put the finishing touches to the project, including the roof and doors, plus the lighting and all the wiring and gear required for a modern internet-connected data center. However, a robotic painter by Deutsche Amphibolin-Werke was used to paint the interior.

According to the Kraus Gruppe, the 3D-printed construction process resulted in significantly less CO2 than traditional methods would have. The entire project, including both robot and human labour, took only a few months to complete.

3D printed architecture has moved decisively into the mainstream in recent years and the Wave House follows several notable projects including an earthquake-resistant 3D-printed house, the world’s tallest 3D-printed tower, and an ambitious development of 100 3D-printed homes. COBOD says it hopes to eventually automate a minimum of 50% of construction processes on building sites, which should be great for company profits, though perhaps not for the job security of some human builders.

Sources: COBOD, KrausGruppe [in German]

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

The way we manufacture products, including cars, could change radically in the decades ahead.

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As 3D printing gets better and cheaper we’re seeing more things being printed than ever before – including bikes, buildings, bridges, buses, dams, EV’s, hearts, hypersonic aircraft, leather and food, and race cars. The 2024 Goodwood Festival of Speed felt special this year and for Czinger, a custom 3D printed race car, it was. The automaker’s 21C set the production car class record up the 9-turn, 1.16-mile (1.87-km) hill climb. Not only did it set the record, but it also achieved the 5th fastest time amongst all competitors.

With driver Chris Ward in the captain’s chair, the Czinger 21C clocked in a 48.83-second run with 3rd through 6th place all separated by less than 0.9 of a second. The overall winner was the Ford Supervan 4.2 – you should use the word “van” loosely – with a 43.98-second go.

This isn’t the first time the Czinger 21C has made the news. Back in 2021, driver Joel Miller lapped the famed racing circuit Laguna Seca in Monterey, CA for a record time of 1:25:44, beating Randy Probst’s 2019 McLaren Senna time by a smidge over two seconds. But there are a few interesting things you should know about the Czinger 21C that make it particularly cool.

See it in action.

It has a fighter plane seating position, offering “room for two” but with two inline seats. This is not unlike the arrangement in an F-16B Fighting Falcon, putting the single passenger directly behind the driver, letting them feel all the stomach-churning cornering and speed G-forces but without all the fuss of being able to see out the window. As long as the driver is under 5 ft (152 cm) tall, there’s plenty of leg room in the back for your average toddler.

Providing those bubbly-tummy G’s is a modest 2.88-liter twin-turbo V8 that revs up to a conrod-torturing 11,000 rpm, giving it a healthy 950 hp (708 kW) and 550 lb-ft (746 nm) of wheel-spinning torque to the rear axle. Not to mention the two electric motors that add 150 hp (112 kW) each, putting the ZING in Czinger at a whopping 1,250 hp (932 kW) in a car that only weighs 2,760 lb (1,250 kg).

That’s Formula 1 power-to-weight territory. By the way, the company does offer a 1,350 hp (1,007 kW) option as well, should the 1,250 hp not feel sufficient. The 21C also uses a 7-speed sequential gearbox, similar to what you’d find in a sport bike or a WRC rally car, but with an extra gear to hit that 219-mph (352-km/h) top speed.

Czinger has only been around for the last five years. It’s based entirely in Los Angeles, CA, from the design process to manufacturing. What’s particularly interesting is that it’s a 3D printed machine, using an “in-house invented Human‑AI production system” and “printed on novel additive manufacturing machines where it is materialised in patented alloys.”

According to Czinger’s website, “Every component of the 21C’s structure is Pareto optimized for its precise function, not a single gram of material goes to waste.” Pareto’s 80/20 rule states that 80% of effects come from 20% of causes.

Father and son team Kevin and Lukas Czinger intend to build 80 of these magnificent machines with a price tag of about $2 million a pop.

Source: Czinger

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Most of America’s infrastructure is legacy and crumbling so the government has put out the call for new infrastructure innovations.

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What if we had self-healing potholes, bricks, and concrete, or reinforcement free 3D printed bridges? Or bridges that, instead of lasting just 50 years, could last 10 times longer, for 500 years? Sounds fanciful, but these are some of the heady concepts that US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg hopes will eventually become reality through the newly formed Advanced Research Project Agency for Infrastructure, also known as ARPA-I.

Washington is no stranger to skunkworks projects — loosely formed research and development outfits that experiment around a specific idea, often taking on projects deemed too risky for private industry, with the goal of producing major innovations. How major? Ever hear of GPS tracking? Autonomous vehicles? The internet? All can trace their origins to DARPA, the Defense Department’s long-standing R&D outfit.

The Future of Aluminium, by Keynote Matthew Griffin

Buttigieg thinks that Americas crumbling infrastructure is due for a similar moonshot effort.

“Some of the sorts of innovation that might make that possible are well beyond something that is in the planning horizon for even the most forward-looking engineering company or state government,” Buttigieg said in an interview with The Verge. “So those are the kinds of things I think we’d go after if we have research taking place at this exceptionally high altitude.”

ARPA-I was authorized as part of the Biden administration’s signature $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which passed in 2021. In essence, the goal of the new agency is to futureproof the nation’s infrastructure against climate change, massive technology disruption, energy transition, or any other imminent challenge we have yet to conceive of.

The nascent R&D project is having a coming out party of sorts at an event in Washington Tuesday, June 13th. Policymakers, scientists, CEOs, technologists, labor leaders, and others will gather to discuss how the project can best position itself to secure major breakthroughs for infrastructure.

It’s also an explicit call for funding. The 2023 omnibus appropriations deal, in which President Biden and House Republicans agreed to lift the debt ceiling, included about $3.2 million for ARPA-I to help get the project started. But more will be needed to fund the labs and academic institutions that will form the core of the project over the years. Biden has requested $19 million for ARPA-I in 2024.

The Future of Louisiana and Infrastrucutre, by Keynote Matthew Griffin

We can only speculate on the projects that the ARPA-I researchers will ultimately take on, but based on conversations with people involved in the planning, it is likely to address a number of major themes, including climate change, road safety, clean energy, and environmental justice. New types of materials for infrastructure, such as roads or street furniture, will likely be explored — or perhaps new types of materials never before used in infrastructure will be invented through ARPA-I.

Another phrase that came up during the course of these conversations was “spatial awareness” and “spatial management”: the idea that the movement of people and goods is due for a major paradigm shift. There could be an opportunity for ARPA-I researchers to bring new technologies, like machine learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and data collection, to better inform our “spatial intelligence” about our transportation systems.

Of course, when you say “data collection” or start talking about sensing technology, you make yourself a target of civil liberties groups who have legitimate concerns about government surveillance. ARPA-I planners claim that they won’t be gathering data on individuals but rather on the broader movement of people, vehicles, and goods through public places. But the burden of proof will be on the developers of the technology — whatever it may be.

For Buttigieg, a potential benefit of ARPA-I will be stretching our infrastructure dollars much further, so fixing a road or a bridge or a wastewater system also helps lengthen its lifespan.

“If we’re going to spend tens of billions of dollars every year maintaining and upgrading what we’ve got, let’s invest a little bit and figure out how to make what we have last longer,” he said. “Design things that we can’t even imagine today that might make some of today’s legacy technology unnecessary.”

ARPA-I won’t be the only government “skunkworks” project in operation. In addition to DARPA, there are two other government-funded R&D agencies currently at work: ARPA-H for health innovations, which is being run out of the National Institutes of Health; and ARPA-E for energy, within the Department of Energy.

The challenges for ARPA-I will be immense. A recent white paper by the Federation of American Scientists said the agency will need to navigate a byzantine system of state, local, and federal government, as well as quasi public and private entities. Government funding for infrastructure often lags behind other sectors, including defense, health, and energy. There is plenty of private sector investment, through automakers and aircraft manufacturers, but little funding for infrastructure.

“We haven’t really seen productivity gains in infrastructure because we’ve been doing things the same old way for a long time,” Robert Puentes, president and CEO of the Eno Center for Transportation, told The Verge. ARPA-I has the potential to revitalize the sector, he argued.

“They are given the chance to try and fail,” Puentes said of the groups that will receive funding through this project. “We don’t really do that in transportation.”

Arati Prabhakar, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said that ARPA-I will bring together “talented individuals” as program managers whose job it is to understand the scope of the challenge. Those program managers will then be responsible for three core tasks.

“Number one, they set a very big bold, barely feasible goal, something that seems maybe almost impossible, but if you could make it true, it’s a big deal,” Prabhakar, who ran DARPA under President Barack Obama, said in an interview. “The second thing they do is, they don’t just throw out, like a cool idea. They build a plan that might actually be able to show that that goal is possible.”

And lastly, “they execute like mad,” she said, lining up universities, companies, labs, “whatever it takes. Go find the people to do that work.”

Prabhakar recalled an example from her time at DARPA, in which a program manager — a geneticist who was also a medical doctor and an Air Force colonel — said a global pandemic was inevitable, and vaccine development times would need to be shortened in order to respond. They identified a small company at the time that was working on a new type of vaccine for cancer and convinced them to shift focus to a rapid response for a future pandemic.

The company, which was Moderna, agreed, and the vaccine type was the messenger RNA, or mRNA, vaccine that would go on to establish a foundation for the development of the Covid-19 vaccine.

“So that’s how you change the world, right?” Prabhakar said. “You’ve got to do something that seems impossible, but there’s actually a way to get there. And then you show it through a prototype; you get people to change their minds. And that’s how a different future unfolds.”

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Robotics has come a long way in a decade, and now companies are making them look much much more human-like.

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A 20-second video from inside a Chinese humanoid robot factory is causing some consternation today around social media. It shows a range of highly realistic-looking, partially skinned humanoids under construction.

The video, uploaded by user ‘meimei4515,’ is uncredited, but shows several moving androids with human-like hair and skin – in stark contrast to most of the general-purpose humanoids we’d normally cover, which are designed to look like robots, rather than trying to fool anyone.

They’re starting to look uncannily human!

Here, there are rows of pretty cyborg-ladies, disembodied heads on stands, fully human-like presenter types wearing shirts and pants, and a surreal tree of humanoid arms, flexing and twirling their white-fingered hands in concert. It looks for all the world like a grittier version of Westworld’s backstage workshop.

Whoever took the video says something in Chinese at the beginning, which translates roughly to “before that, the employees had already started mass production.”

So, what are we actually looking at here? As it turns out, the arm-tree is the giveaway. Chinese company ExRobots has shown it before in expo displays. According to the company’s (translated) website, it builds “efficient and friendly smart guide services for government agencies, medical institutions, and service retail industries.”

To show off its wares, ExRobots runs an ‘Ex Future Science and Technology Museum‘ in the city of Dalian, which looks to us somewhat like a robotic version of Madame Tussaud’s wax museum, with Einstein and Edison among the animatronic characters on site. There’s certainly no shame here about leaning into fleshy titillation – extra care has clearly been put into the boobular fembots, down to the goosebumps on their silicone leg skin.

The museum allows visitors to ‘drive’ a humanoid head with their own facial expressions using motion capture, and there’s a rotating dais you can stand on for three minutes to be 3D-scanned, after which there may be some sort of facility to have body parts 3D printed, as shown in the following video from China Global Television Network – the idea is to demonstrate the company’s ability to produce custom animatronic mascots and presenters for corporate clients.

So no, dear dribbling hordes of social media commenters, you’re not looking at your new AI girlfriends. You’re also not looking at a company here that seems interested in useful humanoids. You’re looking at an advanced animatronics operation. The video is attention-grabbing because this is a company designed to grab attention. There’s not much meat in this sandwich.

Source: ExRobots

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Space suits cost billions of dollars to develop and NASA’s old suits have needed a redesign for a long time.

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Astronauts, prepare for takeoff. SpaceX just unveiled groundbreaking new gear for the upcoming Polaris Dawn mission.  Over the weekend, the company shared an update on its website that the crew would be sporting a newly developed ExtraVehicular Activity (EVA) spacesuit during the historic five-day trek, which is set to include the first commercial astronaut spacewalk. The suit itself is a modified version of the Intravehicular Activity (IVA) suit that crews currently wear aboard the Dragon spacecraft for its missions, and this is the first time it will be used during low-Earth orbit. According to SpaceX, Polaris Dawn is scheduled to launch no earlier than summer 2024.

“Building a base on the moon and a city on Mars will require millions of spacesuits,” the company wrote on its website. “The development of this suit and the execution of the spacewalk will be important steps toward a scalable design for spacesuits on future long-duration missions as life becomes multiplanetary.”

Experience the new space suit from SpaceX

In terms of the design, the EVA suit features improved mobility and a 3D printed helmet with a new visor to reduce glare. In addition, the helmet includes a heads-up display and built-in camera that gives the wearer information on the suit’s pressure levels, temperature, and humidity. Of course, to ensure the crew’s safety during extravehicular activities, the suit also has added seals and pressure valves.

The launch of the private Polaris Dawn mission has been continuously delayed since the Polaris Program was initially announced in February 2022 by billionaire Jared Isaacman. The timeline has been greatly slowed due to several challenges, including the creation of the all new EVA spacesuits.

“We’ve got to redesign the suit so that you actually move around in it. It’s quite hard to still be mobile in an inflated suit,” SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said in a presentation posted to X (formerly known as Twitter) earlier this year.

Polaris Dawn is the first of the program’s three missions developed for human spaceflight. During the mission, the spacecraft will orbit Earth for up to five days, hoping to set the record for the highest Earth orbit ever flown. At the same time, the crew will conduct its own research on the effects of spaceflight and space radiation on human health. They will also be the first to test a laser-based communication system for SpaceX’s Starlink satellites.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Today if water gets into reinforced concrete the steel rusts, expands, and wrecks the infrastructure costing the world hundreds of billions of dollars to fix, but what if you didn’t need steel any longer?

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Humans have been building walls, bridges, and other structures without any steel or mortar reinforcement for a long time. And, now a team led by Holcim has put a 3D printed spin on the idea, and hopes to use it to revolutionise modern sustainable infrastructure.

The project, named Phoenix, is a new iteration on the previously revealed Striatus bridge, and was developed by Holcim, with the Block Research Group at ETH Zurich, Zaha Hadid Architects Computation and Design Group, and Incremental3D.

It reaches a maximum height of 2.6 m (8.5 ft) and its longest span is 17 m (55 ft). How it works is, the bridge’s building blocks were created using a 3D printer, which extruded a cement-based mixture in layers to built up the blocks’ structure, following an exact computer-made plan. Boosting its green cred further, the cement mixture incorporated 10 tons of recycled materials, including much of the original Stratius bridge.

Check out the first of a kind bridge

The blocks were then arranged into the correct position so that compression from their geometry and the bridge’s abutments hold everything together firmly in place. This makes for a far more efficient structure that uses up to 50% less building materials compared to a standard bridge and, of course, is much easier to disassemble and recycle if required.

“Concrete is an artificial stone, and like stone, it does not want to be a straight beam, it wants to be a masonry arch,” explained Philippe Block, Co-Director, Block Research Group at ETH Zurich. “Following these historical principles allows us to keep materials separated for easy recycling and to dry-assemble the structure for easy deconstruction and reuse. 3D concrete printing allows us to use material only and exactly where needed. The result is a sustainable and truly circular approach to concrete construction.”

Looking to the future, Holcim and its partners are now further developing the Phoenix and exploring how it can be scaled up. Provencher Roy also recently produced an impressive recycled glass-based bridge in Canada, plus researchers elsewhere made one from river mud and so forth.

Source: Holcim

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

What if rather than protecting the data from hackers we created new unhackable data storage materials instead?

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If one day you decide to turn on a 20-year-old computer, you might find you can’t access the files anymore. Indeed, after a few years, hard drives become faulty as their moving parts start to wear out. Solid-state drives have no moving parts and are thus longer-lasting in theory, although, in practice they can also fail in different ways.

While modern solid state drives are getting more and more reliable, most of us resort to keeping multiple backups to protect our data from being lost. But a new study published in Advanced Science proposes a new way of storing data that is immune to degradation. And, as a big bonus, the system is also, allegedly, unhackable and protected against hackers although yes we can definitely argue and I’d agree that in the long run nothing is ever truly unhackable.

The Future of Cyber, by Keynote Matthew Griffin

The improved data storage is achieved thanks to Mechanical Metamaterials. These are a kind of material that, unlike any naturally occurring materials, responds to temperature changes by stretching and bending.

“Mechanical metamaterials are going through a second youth,” said Daniel Ramos, researcher at the CSIC Materials Sciences Institute of Madrid, who was not involved in the research.

In the study, scientists combined three kinds of plastics as building blocks to obtain a square grid of “pixels” of different heights. The plastics they chose were actually metamaterials that change shape in very precise ways when exposed to heat. This way, the researchers could choose how to distribute the pixels and thus encode the desired information in the grid.

“Our computers and phones store information as 1s and 0s that are locked up inside the electronic properties of a silicon chip. Here, we store information in the structure of the material itself,” said Chang Qing Chen, corresponding author of the paper and professor at Tsinghua University in China.

A precise sequence of temperatures is required to decode the information hidden in the grid. If the wrong sequence is applied, the information is erased forever, meaning that if someone tries a random sequence in an attempt to hack the system, it is virtually impossible to succeed.

Thus, the level of security is much higher than that of our current computers’ hard drives. These are protected, for all practical purposes, as cracking the data by guessing codes at random would require several lifetimes even with billions of high-performing computers running all at once. However, it’s still true that enough guesses could in principle make it possible eventually to read out the hidden data.

“If a thief steals your USB flash drive and has the computational resources, the thief can eventually crack your encrypted data by trying code after code after code. With [this experiment], the data becomes irreversibly scrambled or erased the fist time a thief makes a bad guess,” said Guy Genin, co-author and professor of mechanical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.

An added advantage is that, in principle, this grid of metamaterials can store a greater density of data per cubic centimeter than the systems we currently use. Mingchao Liu, also a co-author and researcher at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, thinks that they might even move beyond binary data – which all of our current computers are based on – and onto more complex types of digital data.

“Because we do not use transistors, we are not limited to binary data (1s and 0s). We might eventually store digital information rather than just binary,” he said.

The main challenge ahead is making the whole setup much smaller. The current system is several centimeters long and stores very small volumes of data.

“But it’s a proof of concept of a very interesting way of storing data in the future,” Ramos said.

The present study was limited by the resolution of the 3D printer that was used to generate the materials. But this resolution has dropped tenfold over the last couple of years, argued Chen. The researchers expect to be able to print finer and finer materials in the near- to mid-term future and hence store much larger volumes of data in a much smaller space.

“Memory chips at present store terabytes, but we are still in the kilobyte range. But just because we are way behind does not mean we cannot catch up,” Chen said.

Reference: Zhiqiang Meng et al., Encoding and Storage of Information in Mechanical Metamaterials, Advanced Science (2023). DOI: 10.1002/advs.202301581

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