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Researchers from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have developed a way to 3D print bathrooms, and they do it in less than a day. The team spent four years developing a concrete formula that could flow through the hoses and print nozzle, but harden fast enough to hold the next layer of material. The green compound includes geopolymers that are made from fly ash waste. Once the research...

A group in Chicago had a great idea – they wanted to develop a series of floating gardens in creating the Wild Mile along a man-made canal of the Chicago River. The problem, not surprisingly, was the garbage that kept finding its way into these gardens.  While the group had an army of volunteers that were more than willing to pick up the trash by hand, the uneven flow of the river made it difficul...

After talks stalled in Chicago, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles, Elon Musk’s The Boring Company has finally landed its first paying customer, inking a $48.6 million deal with the Las Vegas Convention Center. The contract calls for the construction of a one-mile tunnel connecting the two ends of the building.  The project will encompass three underground passenger stations, a pedestrian tunnel and...

Researchers at the University of Cincinnati are developing robotic pets to help care for the elderly. Led by professor Claudia Rebola, a team of researchers is working to make robotic pets more realistic and practical. For example, they could one day check your vitals when you pull them in for a warm embrace (hug). The team recently received a $1 million National Science Foundation grant to redesi...

Researchers from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College and City University of Hong Kong have created a biohybrid floating-plane robot. The robots were inspired by Transformers toys and whales. The robot can shape shift it's elastic body and is propelled by a light-controlled cellular engine. The idea is that this roughly 10 mm robot could one-day perform highly-targeted drug d...

Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu have found an interesting new application for an industrial robot: squeegeeing blood. Yuan and Yu combined a Kuka robot, Cognex visual-recognition sensors and software to create "Can’t Help Myself", an examination of our increasingly automated global reality.  The robot uses sensors to detect when the blood flows too far and then uses the end effector...

One C-47 troop carrier was so visible in the D-Day Invasion of World War II that it was emblazoned with its own message for Adolph Hitler: “That’s all… brother.” It’s been nearly 75 years since that day, and you might assume that one of the lead aircraft of the main invasion force would be on display in a museum somewhere – but you’d be wrong.  A few years back, an Air Force historian named Matt S...

A 45-year-old executive was fired after he, and his former escort-turned-girlfriend, racked up nearly $5.8 million dollars on his company credit card. Scott Kennedy worked as a top financial executive at Nemera's plant in Buffalo Grove, IL. The French company designs and manufactures drug delivery products, like nasal, injection, dermal and inhalation devices. Kennedy first met Crystal Lundbe...

The developer of a two-seat flying car recently tested a larger prototype that company officials hope will finally help realize the potential of urban air mobility. Lilium famously pioneered a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft and took it for a debut flight in 2017. This month, the company, founded by engineers from the Technical University of Munich, unveiled a five-seat aircraft and showed f...

Last month, we reported on a situation that was captivating China and perplexing Tesla. In a video that was widely shared on social media, a Model S sitting idly in a parking garage is recorded bursting into flames. At the time, Tesla took a judicious approach and dispatched a team to China to work with investigators to determine whether the video was real and, if so, what the heck was going on. B...

A team of researchers at the University of Waterloo have developed a new fuel cell that reportedly lasts 10 times longer than any other current technology.  The researchers believe that this advancement, coupled with mass production, could finally make the fuel cell economically viable and provide a suitable replacement to traditional gas-powered engines. According to the researchers, the cost wou...

This week, New York, NY-based AI SpaceFactory won $500,000 by taking first place in NASA's 3D Printed Habitat Challenge. Now, if that sentence alone can't get kids interested in STEM, we're beyond saving.  The competition asked participants to manufacture sustainable shelters for deep-space habitation, including the Moon and Mars. The team created MARSHA , a 15-foot tall prototype t...

The U.S. House of Representatives has begun investigating a Cleveland-based supplier and aerospace manufacturer for “extreme profit margins” and “excess profit”. The remarks stem from reports that TransDigm has been a “bad actor” and “gouging taxpayers” by realizing some pretty impressive profit margins on parts for aircraft such as the Apache and Chinook helicopters and Falcon and Globemaster pla...

Pierpaolo Lazzarini wants to build an unidentified floating object. The U.F.O. 1.2 has been under development for about three years and now the Italian designer is finally ready to make his floating houseboat a reality. Spanning 12.5 meters in diameter, the U.F.O. has two living spaces: a main entrance and communal area above the water, and an underwater bathroom and bedroom.  According to designb...

A Hawaiian engineer was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for bribing public officials in Hawaii and the Federated States of Micronesia.  53-year-old Frank James Lyon pleaded guilty to paying $250,000 to Hawaiian officials to secure $2.5 million in state contracts. The bribes secured work for Lyon’s engineering and consulting company in Hawaii.  Lyon also admitted to bribes that led to nearly $8 mi...

The Hellfire missile offers an interesting perspective, not just on military technology, but product lifecycle in general. The missile was initially developed with a shaped charge, which means the explosion it generated was intense, but channeled to produce a very narrow, focused blast. This make sense as its primary application was taking out heavily armored tanks and vehicles. The precision of t...

Edmunds.com says that more than 63 percent of the new vehicles sold last year were SUVs or trucks, which is no surprise to automakers who have spent the last few years slashing their small car models to line up with the market. But they’re not ready to fully let go just yet. According to Bloomberg , automakers have a plan to save some of their dying sedan models, but it’s not exactly novel: a rece...

Typically, if there’s demand, someone will figure out how to supply a product. However, in the case of a key naval defense asset, even a contract that has grown by more than to 50 percent in three years, reaching $264 million, wasn’t enough demand to justify continued production. The eight-pound, three-foot long sonobuoy is described as an expendable, waterborne sensor that is deployed by the hund...

There was something eerie about this situation out of Ohio that was putting some residents on edge: in the small town of North Olmsted -- a suburb west of Cleveland -- people were finding that their garage door openers and vehicle key fobs were no longer working. The New York Times reported that the complaints began to surface in late April when about a dozen residents in either North Olmsted or n...

Running through an airport probably isn’t anyone’s idea of a particularly good time, but for the visually impaired, the air travel experience can be an especially daunting one. Navigating swarms of people through expansive corridors and dozens of nearly identical gates likely couldn’t be done without at least some assistance from airport personnel. Teams from Carnegie Mellon University, however, r...

On April 30, 2017, 60-year-old Lawrence Ray Shiner Jr. was repairing a 145-foot-tall boiler at the Kapstone Paper and Packaging paper mill in North Charleston, SC.  While he was repairing the boiler, he was buried in an "avalanche of salt cake" and died as a result of the industrial accident.  A new wrongful death lawsuit filed by Shiner’s estate is attempting to hold Palmetto Industrial...

It looks like Adidas isn’t just for Run DMC anymore. The company is having a banner year, dazzling investors by beating forecasts in the first quarter, though its explosive growth has an unwanted bedfellow -- supply chain problems that are limiting the company’s ability to meet demand. It all started in 2016, when Adidas initiated a turnaround strategy, pledging to focus on growing the brand in Ch...

Roughly a decade after being introduced to the U.S. market, Daimler recently announced that it will stop selling the infamous ForTwo Smart vehicle in the U.S. and Canada after the 2019 model year.  Depending on your perspective, the move shows either the positive momentum of the U.S. economy and significant improvements in automotive engineering efficiencies, or it reinforces the simple fact that...

Researchers from VTT Technical Research Center in Finland have created a new coating using nanocellulose. Nanocellulose naturally adheres to wood and forms an airtight film on the surface. This makes nanocellulose-based coatings a good fit for the protective wood treatments. The coating is based on HefCel technology (High-Consistency Enzymatic Fibrillation of Cellulose), which was developed and pa...

Early reviews of Samsung’s new Galaxy Fold have been critical of the new folding screen, but I think the most hilarious came from iFixit as part of the website’s product teardown, “Like a beautiful butterfly, our Fold's life was tragically short … Also like a butterfly, this thing is alarmingly fragile.” iFixit is a website that provides information to give people more access to repairs. Sinc...