3D printing isn’t just for making unique stuffed animals or weird fake meat . It allows us to fabricate objects we never could with traditional manufacturing. Here are some of the incredible things we can print now, which were nearly impossible to make before. Read more…
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Objects That Couldn’t Be Made Before 3D Printers Existed
Mark Wilson writes: Sundar Pichai is the new CEO of Google as the company undergoes a huge restructuring. Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are moving to a new company called Google Alphabet which will serve as an umbrella company for Google and its various projects. Google itself is being, in Page’s words, “slimmed down” and the change is quite an extraordinary one. Page quotes the original founders’ letter that was written 11 years go. It states that “Google is not a conventional company”, and today’s announcement makes that perfectly clear. There’s a lot to take in…Google Alphabet is, essentially, the new face of Google. Page chose to make the announcement in a blog post that went live after the stock markets closed. This is more than just a rebranding, it is a complete shakeup, the scale of which is almost unprecedented. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Google Is Restructuring Under a New Company Called Alphabet
jones_supa writes: North Korea has announced that it is winding its clocks back by half a hour to create a new “Pyongyang Time” — breaking from a time standard imposed by what it called “wicked Japanese imperialists” more than a century ago. The change will put the standard time in North Korea at UTC +8:30. North Korea said that the time change, approved on Wednesday by its rubber-stamp parliament and officially announced on Friday, would come into effect from August 15, which this year marks the 70th anniversary of the Korean peninsula’s liberation from Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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North Korea Is Switching To a New Time Zone
An anonymous reader writes: A little over a month ago, Bill Gates made headlines when he decided to double down on his investments in renewable energy. Now, he’s written an article for Quartz explaining why: “I think this issue is especially important because, of all the people who will be affected by climate change, those in poor countries will suffer the most. Higher temperatures and less-predictable weather would hurt poor farmers, most of whom live on the edge and can be devastated by a single bad crop. Food supplies could decline. Hunger and malnutrition could rise. It would be a terrible injustice to let climate change undo any of the past half-century’s progress against poverty and disease — and doubly unfair because the people who will be hurt the most are the ones doing the least to cause the problem.” He also says government is not doing enough to fund such research, and that energy markets aren’t doing a good enough job of factoring the negative effects of carbon emissions. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Why Bill Gates Is Dumping Another $1 Billion Into Clean Energy
An anonymous reader writes: Inkjet printer cartridges have been the bane of many small businesses and home offices for decades. It’s interesting, then, that Epson is trying something new: next month, they’re launching a new line of printers that come with small tanks of ink, instead of cartridges. The tanks will be refilled using bottles of ink. They’re reversing the economics, here: the printer itself will be more expensive, but the refills will be much cheaper. Early reports claim you’ll be spending a tenth as much on ink as you were before, but we’ll see how that shakes out. The Bloomberg article makes a good point: it’s never been easier to not print things. The printer industry needs to innovate if it wants us to keep churning out printed documents, and this may be the first big step. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Epson Is Trying To Kill the Printer Ink Cartridge
An anonymous reader writes: Yesterday we discussed Soylent, the artificial food substitute created by Rob Rhinehart and his team. As it turns out, this isn’t Rhinehart’s only unusual sustainability project. In a new post, he explains how he gave up on alternating current — a tough proposition for anyone living in the U.S. and still interested in using all sorts of modern technology. Rhinehart says, “Most power in the US is generated by burning coal, immediately squandering 67% of its energy, then run through a steam turbine, losing another 50%, then sent across transmission lines, losing another 5%, then to charge a DC device like a cell phone another 50% is lost in conversion. This means for 100 watts of coal or oil burned my phone gets a mere 16.” The biggest hindrance was the kitchen. As you might expect for the creator of Soylent, he doesn’t cook, and was able to get rid of almost all kitchen appliances because of that. He uses a butane stove for hot beverages. He powers a small computer off batteries, which get their energy from solar panels. For intensive tasks, he remotes to more powerful machines. He re-wired his apartment’s LED lighting to run off direct current. Have any of you made similar changes? How much of an effect does this really have? Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Giving Up Alternating Current
An anonymous reader writes: Soylent has announced today their latest product, Soylent 2.0. It comes premixed and ready to drink in recyclable bottles. Each bottle is one fifth of a scientifically balanced daily meal plan, will last up to a year unrefrigerated, and will cost you $2.42. A Soylent blog post reads in part: “Not only are its ingredients vegan, Soylent 2.0 reaches an unprecedented level of environmental sustainability with half of its fat energy coming from farm-free, algae sources. This next generation agricultural technology has the potential to reduce the ecological impact of food production by orders of magnitude, signifying a major step towards a future of abundance, a world where optimal nutrition is the new normal.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Soylent 2.0 Comes Bottled and Ready To Drink
An anonymous reader writes: Google scrapped an early version of its smart glasses in January, but has developed another model just for businesses. The company hopes to get this newest version of Glass in the hands of healthcare, manufacturing and energy industry professionals by this fall. Recode reports: “The new model can fold up like a traditional pair of glasses and is more rugged for outdoor use. However, unlike most other smart glasses, it still sports a small screen to the upper right of the user’s vision, rather than displaying an image in the center of one’s view like the ODG R7 or Microsoft HoloLens.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
MojoKid writes: Today at a press conference in San Francisco, Intel and Micron unveiled 3D XPoint (Cross Point) memory technology, a non-volatile memory architecture they claim could change the landscape of consumer electronics and computer architectures for years to come. Intel and Micron say 3D XPoint memory is 1000 times faster than NAND, boasts 1000x the endurance of NAND, and offers 8-10 times the density of conventional memory. 3D XPoint isn’t electron based, it’s material based. The companies aren’t diving into specifics yet surrounding the materials used in 3D XPoint, but the physics are fundamentally different than what we’re used to. It’s 3D stackable and its cross point connect structure allows for dense packing and individual access at the cell level from the top or bottom of a memory array. Better still, Intel alluded to 3D XPoint not being as cost-prohibitive as you might expect. Intel’s Rob Crooke explained, “You could put the cost somewhere between NAND and DRAM.” Products with the new memory are expected to arrive in 2016 and the joint venture is in production with wafers now. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Intel and Micron Unveil 3D XPoint Memory, 1000x Speed and Endurance Over Flash
An anonymous reader writes: According to Symantec’s latest Intelligence Report, spam has fallen to less than 50% of all email in June – a number we haven’t seen in over a decade. Of all emails received by Symantec clients in June, junk emails only accounts for 49.7% down from 52.1% in April which shows a huge drop. Year over year, spam has decreased as well due to internet providers doing a better job at filtering and shutting down spam bots. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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A Welcome Shift: Spam Now Constitutes Less Than Half of All Email