3D printing replacement blood vessels!
Researchers at University of Pennsylvania say they may have found a way to create vasculatures using sugar and a 3-D printer. The design starts with sucrose and glucose and, with a custom RepRap 3-D printer, the scientists were able to turn the mixture into a free-standing, three dimensional vascular template.
via Scientists Build Vascular Network Using Sugar and a 3-D Printer – IEEE Spectrum.
Truly great essay about the mistake in believing that “real life” is somehow divorced from “online”, and that somehow AFK is a better, more true existence. I couldn’t agree more.
In great part, the reason is that we have been taught to mistakenly view online as meaning not offline. The notion of the offline as real and authentic is a recent invention, corresponding with the rise of the online. If we can fix this false separation and view the digital and physical as enmeshed, we will understand that what we do while connected is inseparable from what we do when disconnected. That is, disconnection from the smartphone and social media isn’t really disconnection at all: The logic of social media follows us long after we log out. There was and is no offline; it is a lusted-after fetish object that some claim special ability to attain, and it has always been a phantom.
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But this idea that we are trading the offline for the online, though it dominates how we think of the digital and the physical, is myopic. It fails to capture the plain fact that our lived reality is the result of the constant interpenetration of the online and offline. That is,we live in an augmented realitythat exists at the intersection of materiality and information, physicality and digitality, bodies and technology, atoms and bits, the off and the online.
And my favorite quote from the whole thing:
The clear distinction between the on and offline, between human and technology, is queered beyond tenability.
Read the whole thing, it’s well worth the time.
Hey librarians: You think you’re good at finding things? Try this test on for size:
Daniel Russell stood in front of a crowd of investigative journalists in Boston last week and showed us this picture of a random skyscraper in an unknown city:
Russell posed a riddle:What’s the phone number of the office where this picture was snapped?
via How to solve impossible problems: Daniel Russell’s awesome Google search techniques.
I’ve said it before, but the rise of the cheap sensor, combined with ubiquitous connectivity, is going to do more to change the way we interact with our world than you can imagine.
The coolest thing at Google I/O this year isn’t a cheap tablet or a pair of overpriced glasses or even a killer keyboard. It is, believe it or not, an alarm clock. But not just any alarm clock — this is an alarm clock with potential. What you see above, and demonstrated in the video after the break, is the gadget that was handed out to attendees who went to learn about the Android Accessory Development Kit.
Inside Google’s amazing Accessory Development Kit demo hardware (video) — Engadget.
7 | Burritobot: A 3-D Printer That Spits Out Burritos | Co.Design: business + innovation + design.
Although the Burritobot’s canisters make it a robot cousin to Taco Bell’s sour cream guns, the idea of using 3-D printers for food is not new at all. A growing movement of geeks, makers, academics, and startups have been playing with the idea of personal fabricators for home use. The Fab@home Project over at Cornell University has developed 3-D printers in conjunction with the French Culinary Institute that create a wide range of foods. Fast Company has previously written about Cornell’s 3-D printed scallop nuggets that resemble tiny space shuttles; other foods successfully created inside 3-D printers include cakes, cookies, ramen noodles, and beef patties. Various startups, such as Essential Dynamics, are also working on the technology. These printers all work by creating “inks” out of edible ingredients that can then be turned into real foods via a few hours in the 3-D printer.
With a single CSS stylesheet, publishers can take XHTML source content and turn it into a laid-out, print-ready PDF. You can take your XHTML source, bypass desktop page layout software like Adobe InDesign, and package it as an ePub file. It’s a lightweight and adaptable workflow, which gets you beautiful books faster.
ALA Annual 2012 is going to be huge, not only because it’s the first time my lovely daughter Eliza will be accompanying me to the conference (my wife Betsy is also coming, but she attended Chicago as well, so it’s not all new to her) but because it’s the first time I’ve actually scheduled “arrive early, do tourist stuff” for the conference. We’ll all be rolling into Anaheim on Tuesday before ALA, and doing Disney stuffs on Wed and Thurs. On Friday starts the conference proper for me, while they get to hang out and have fun. Below you’ll see my all-too-full schedule, and I’ve just really started to add things…I’m sure it will get even more full as the next week progresses.
You’ll also noticed that at times I’m double or triple booked. I’d love to not do this, but there truly are a ton of programs that I don’t want to miss, and I’m going to do my best to flit in and out and see as many as I can.
If you see me around, say hi!
And we are one step closer to a Daniel Suarez novel.
One of the downsides of electronic text is its verifiability against the original. Do we need an MD5 style hash verification system for ebooks?
Google’s Project Glass product lead Steve Lee walks us through his experience with the development of the company’s sci-fi-inspired eyewear–from his team’s “hundreds of variations and dozens of early prototypes” to his vision of the future.
