plastic variety

A California-based nonprofit has built its first 3D printed homes in rural Mexico.The new homes are proof of concept of New Story’s ambitious plans to change housing.The company’s special 3D printer adjusts for air conditions and builds the homes fully in situ.A planned 3D-printed neighborhood has its first completed houses in rural Mexico. The houses are made with a huge 3D printer that’s 33 feet long, and the project was delayed for a few months while the machinery was held up in customs by understandably puzzled officials....

Be on the Mark Measured twice yet your cut came out slightly off? Maybe it’s because you used two different tape measures. For best results, use one tape measure throughout the job. Tapes can vary.2. Do Some Tape Measure Math Your eye may not be good at estimating the halfway point on a long board, but it’s surprisingly good at dividing small lengths—about 1/2 in. or less. The next time you need to find a midpoint, simply measure the overall length, then divide it roughly in half....

A reconstruction of Leonardo da Vinci’s mechanical lion is on display at the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris.The display, erected in homage to da Vinci and his work, will be open to the public until October 9.Leonardo da Vinci was a multi-hyphenate visionary known equally for his art and ahead-of-his-time engineering designs. He’s responsible for creating timeless masterpieces including The Last Supper, the Mona Lisa, and several sketches for devices like a self-propelled cart, diving gear, and a parachute....

The discovery of more construction debris inside KC-46A Pegasus aerial tankers has prompted the U.S. Air Force to again halt delivery of the new aircraft. The Air Force found foreign object debris, or FOD inside the planes, delivered by Boeing, that it believes could present a safety issue during flight. According to Air Force Times the service stopped accepting planes on March 23rd, after finding construction debris inside a closed up section of one of the aircraft....

The search for planets orbiting other stars has revealed that worlds like Earth are rather rare. Rocky planets that are about 1.5 times the radius of Earth, or Super-Earths, are much more common—so astronomers eagerly look to these Super-Earths for signs of any life clinging to the rocks. To launch something like an Apollo moon mission on Kepler-20b, your rocket would need to be about the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza....

So many initial perceptions of what dinosaurs looked like have proved to be wrong, and now another can be added to the pile. Many dinosaurs, including the famed T. Rex according to a new study, couldn’t stick their tongues out. That’s a notable difference from how dinos are typically portrayed, movies like Jurassic World are often keen to show velociraptors and others with fully functioning tongues. Even though dinosaurs are ancestors to birds, this biological difference shows how evolution has played a role in animals that populate the world today....

Above: A parade marking the end of the Gulf War in 1991.President Trump’s big military parade will not happen—at least not in November as planned. In signature fashion, Trump issued a series of bombastic tweets to make the announcement, blaming local officials in Washington, D.C. for rising costs that made the parade prohibitively expensive. The news came out earlier this week that the parade, initially pegged as costing in the neighborhood of $14 million, would actually cost more like $92 million to pull off, according to one U....

Media Platforms Design Team “The Variable,” Lost’s landmark 100th episode and the 14th this season, focused on an aspect of time travel that we’ve already discussed in this column a few times before: free will. Frazzled physicist Daniel Faraday has decided to tell everyone what he knows—that he and the other “Lostaways” are from the future, that Miles is Chang’s grown son, that something horribly catastrophic is about to happen on the isand—because he is now convinced that he can alter the past to change the future....

Google cofounder Larry Page has spent the past few years building his very own flying car company, and finally that company’s first flying car is available to customers. The startup Kitty Hawk has revealed the newest version of its Flyer vehicle, and says that it only takes an hour of training for a user to learn to fly it.Page’s Kitty Hawk startup operated in complete obscurity until its existence became known in 2016, although details on the specifics of the company remained a mystery until a year later, when it formally unveiled their ‘Flyer’ prototype....

You’ve seen it before in countless movies. While you’re screaming “don’t go out on the lake, idiot,” some foolhardy adventurer or careless teen traipses out onto a frozen lake and takes a deadly plunge. Although fictional characters have a natural knack for survival, real-world consequences can be extremely dangerous.Pike Pole Fishing’s self-rescue guide is a much-watch video for anyone who might wind up atop any icy body of water. What’s great about this survival video is that it’s not just animations or explanations—you witness a survival tutorial first hand....

As Japan prepares for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, like other countries it plans on using the occasion to celebrate its cultural heritage. That includes restoring heritage sites and upgrading its famed rail system, but as former President Obama once noted, it also extends into anime. That’s why Japan plans to launch robots from the Mobile Suit Gundam series into space aboard a satellite.In a collaboration between the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the University of Tokyo, two models that stand just under four inches depicting Gundam and Char’s Zaku robots will be sent into orbit on a 11-inch-long, 3....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhoever coined the term “all-season tire” in the late 1970s probably wasn’t trying to mislead tire buyers. Instead, they were trying to play catch-up with Goodyear’s hugely successful Tiempo, a tire that was wonderful “for all seasons, for all year,” . according to its TV jingleStill, near-universal confusion sprung from the name all-season. Most people have the mistaken belief that all-season tires are better in spring showers and fall rains than regular tires....

The reckoning has come. Charlie Isaacs, the hotshot physicist who has for so long straddled the containment wall separating the plutonium-bomb design groups—Reed Akley’s “Thin Man” and Frank Winter’s implosion device—must now pick a side or risk being torn apart. Akley, nominally Charlie’s boss, knows that Charlie has been using members of his team to perform calculations on the shockwave necessary to make implosion work for Winters’ team. He appears at Charlie’s house late in the night, toting a gun to emphasize that he feels he’s been shot in the back....

Researchers from Tongji University in Shanghai, China, have developed a liquid material that can be cut up and molded into different shapes like gelatin or Play-Doh. The material is created by coating liquids in a hydrophobic layer that holds the liquid in place. The research team expanded on previous methods of using hydrophobic substances to make stable liquid marbles and water-resistant textiles. By drying a silica-based gel on glass slides, the team was able to make layers of silica particles just 20-nanometers thick....

Exploring the surface of Mars can be a perilous endeavor for a robot. Consider the plight of the wheeled Mars rover Spirit: The six-wheeled, 400-pound robot has been stuck in the Martian sand­ since January 2010—when it was downgraded from rover to science station—and the dust collecting on its solar panels may prevent it from even being able to carry out this task. As we look back on the successes and setbacks of the six-wheeled Spirit, researchers are testing out a variety of other rover ideas that could last longer, collect more data and go places on Mars that no bot has ever been....

During World War Two, rumors swirled about any number of strange projects the Nazis might have been up to. One story that refused to die was that the Nazis had a secret Antarctic base. The persistence of this myth prompted Colin Summerhayes, a marine geologist and oceanographer at Cambridge, to take the unusual step of publishing a peer-reviewed paper disproving the idea of the frozen Nazi base.Stories varied across decades, but two things in particular tend to be cited as evidence: the fact of a Nazi expedition into the Antarctic during 1938-39, and a supposed quote from Karl Dönitz, the naval Admiral who became President of Germany after Hitler’s suicide....

Big things come in small packages. That’s the latest finding of the Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, which has discovered that inside every proton in every atom lies greater pressure than the heart of a star.The scientists found that a proton’s building block, known as a quark, faces a pressure of 100 decillion Pascal near the center of a proton. How much is 100 decillion?1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That’s about 10 times greater than the pressure seen at the heart of a neutron star....

Media Platforms Design TeamLife depends on imbalance—biological systems capitalize on the give and take between stability and instability to move, breathe, and eat. The cell and its components are never static.This fact is a huge hurdle for scientists trying to build an artificial cell. Attempts to harness these dynamic functions with synthetic materials often fall flat in the laboratory. To build a truly bio-mimetic machine, scientists must reproduce the hallmark of living things: the ability to change spontaneously....

View full post on YoutubeIt turns out that there really might be a science to Rock, Paper, Scissors, the game of last resort for people who just can’t agree. That’s according to the research of three researchers from three different Chinese universities who published a paper on Arxiv. They observed 360 students divided into 60 teams of six, with each team locked in 300 rounds of the game.Let’s say you’re playing best three out of five and you lose the first game....

View full post on TwitterThe Navy had better hope loose tweets don’t sink ships. A video inadvertently shared by the U.S. Navy’s research and development arm this week revealed a previously unknown hydrofoil ship. The video, shared by Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division, showed the vessel zooming at high speed while riding on foils. The video was taken down shortly afterward, but on April 8, the Twitter account @lfx160219 uploaded the post seen above to Twitter....