Stratasys ‘ has a new $330, 000 3D printer, but this one has the potential to do a whole lot more than monochrome figurines. In fact, the company says it’s the first machine able to create objects in colored, flexible materials. The Objet500 Connex3 3D printer uses rubber and plastic as base materials, although according to Stratasys (the company which now owns the MakerBot series ) material combinations will be able to offer different levels of rigidity, transparency and opacity. Colors , meanwhile, are produced by the same mix of cyan, magenta and yellow you’ll find on your inkjet printer at home — it even comes with six palettes of rubbery “tango” colors, if you’re perhaps looking to channel your ’90s tastes into some tasteful flexible booties, as seen above. At the technical level, the printer can go as fine as 16-micron layers, offering a high level of detail and finish, and can pump out around 30kg of resin (that is, base material) per run. Talking to the BBC , a Stratasys spokesperson said the advanced printer could cut down industrial design prototyping times by 50 percent, although he was talking about the time from prototype to market, not printing time itself. The Objet500 Connex3 launches today, although those flexible color printing materials won’t be available to buy until Q2 later this year, so hold on to those neo-boot dreams for now. Filed under: Misc , Wearables , Science , Alt Comments
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Stratasys’ new 3D printer creates flexible materials in color, speeds up
wiredmikey writes “Microsoft on Friday said that attackers breached the email accounts of a “select number” of employees, and obtained access to documents associated with law enforcement inquiries. According to the company, a number of Microsoft employees were targeted with attacks aiming to compromise both email and social media accounts ‘..We have learned that there was unauthorized access to certain employee email accounts, and information contained in those accounts could be disclosed, ‘ said Adrienne Hall, General Manager at Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group. ‘It appears that documents associated with law enforcement inquiries were stolen, ‘ Hall said. Targeted attacks like this are not uncommon, especially for an organization like Microsoft. What’s interesting about this is that the incident was significant enough to disclose, indicating that a fair number of documents could have been exposed, or that the company fears some documents will make their way to the public if released by the attackers—which may be the case if this was a ‘hacktivist’ attack.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
