While China had their Industrial Revolution rather late in the global game, their production might and speed means they’ll likely advance new digital fabrication techniques before the rest of the world does. For example, it’s been ten years since the American outfit Contour Crafting first proposed 3D printing houses, but aside from a brief surge of TED-Talk-inspired press in 2012, they’ve been mostly quiet. In that time, meanwhile, China has begun developing their 3D-printed-house-erecting capabilities in earnest. The Shanghai-based WinSun Decoration Design Engineering company recently printed ten sample structures of 200 square meters each. What’s amazing is that they produced the entire lot in less than 24 hours, and that the cost of each house is less than US $5, 000. The concrete-like building material comes “entirely out of recycled materials [and is] a mixture of construction and industrial waste” which the company claims is environmentally friendly (although they don’t provide specifics on the material). (more…)
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China on the Forefront of 3D-Printed Housing
kelk1 sends this article from the Stanford News Service: “Stanford bioengineers have developed faster, more energy-efficient microchips based on the human brain – 9, 000 times faster and using significantly less power than a typical PC (abstract). Kwabena Boahen and his team have developed Neurogrid, a circuit board consisting of 16 custom-designed ‘Neurocore’ chips. Together these 16 chips can simulate 1 million neurons and billions of synaptic connections. The team designed these chips with power efficiency in mind. Their strategy was to enable certain synapses to share hardware circuits. … But much work lies ahead. Each of the current million-neuron Neurogrid circuit boards cost about $40, 000. (…) Neurogrid is based on 16 Neurocores, each of which supports 65, 536 neurons. Those chips were made using 15-year-old fabrication technologies. By switching to modern manufacturing processes and fabricating the chips in large volumes, he could cut a Neurocore’s cost 100-fold – suggesting a million-neuron board for $400 a copy.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Boyers, Pennsylvania, is home to the Iron Mountain storage facility, a former limestone mine that is now the storage site of more than 15 million photographic negatives and prints, all preserved hundreds of feet underground. This documentary , produced by the Hillman Photography Initiative , takes you inside for a glimpse at the collection and the folks who maintain it. Read more… 
There is a vine that is capable of contorting the size, shape, color, orientation, and vein patterns of its leaves to match nearby foliage. It’s able to match not just one or two other species, but a whole host of them. Nobody has any clue how it knows what neighboring plants look like . 
