Rachel Martin

Adam Ellsworth, Brinson White and Jason Dunn of Made in Space testing 3D printing in microgravity. Smile, guys! [Photo: madeinspace.us]Made in Space, a Silicon Valley startup located at the NASA Ames Research Center, aims to get a 3D printer into the International Space Station by 2014. Why make parts in orbit? It’s practical: Maintenance of the International Space Station (ISS) currently requires expensive rocket launches to carry replacement parts and tools into space.

With the ending of the US Space Shuttle program, the US currently has to rely on other countries for supplying the space station. If the ISS had a 3D printer and a ready supply of feedstock (the plastic, metal, or even concrete “ink” used by the printer), the most the astronauts would need from Earth is an email with a CAD file of the part they want.

Say it with me: Awwwwwww! [Photo: poopster.corgiaddict.com] You’ve probably seen the picture of the dog dressed up as an Imperial All-Terrain Armored Transport walker (better known as an AT-AT), but if you haven’t, follow this link. While Laika the greyhound’s Halloween costume is pretty hard to beat, that doesn’t mean your favorite furry friend can’t get in on the nerdy dress-up fun. Etsy shop To Scarborough Fair will even help you out!

Coming out of Atlanta, GA, the Etsy store provides hats of all shapes and colors for your small domesticated animal, including wizard hats (with attached curly hair!), Robin Hood peaked caps, top hats decorated with gears (for the steampunk time traveler) or white damask (for the classy feline wedding guest). A disgruntled but nonetheless dignified-looking grey cat named Pixie models all the hats and bows, even enduring a hand-felted cowboy hat.

[Photo: MIT]We’ve talked about augmenting plants with electronics. What about building plants from scratch -- that is, designing a machine to replicate a leaf’s ability to use solar energy? With recent contributions from two research teams, from MIT and Champaign, IL, an artificial leaf is closer to reality than ever.

As they taught us in middle school, plants use energy from sunlight to turn carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and chemically-stored energy, in a process called photosynthesis. Scientists don’t necessarily want to recreate photosynthesis as such, but they’re very interested in what happens during it: The breakdown of water into H2 and O2 provides hydrogen fuel, while processing carbon dioxide can create hydrocarbon fuel.

A group of developers at Pheromone Lab recently ran into the problem of having to push a button 10,000 times: After building an iPad photography app for a client, they had to load-test it to prove it would keep working after the nth use.

Gilberto Esparza's nomadic plant. Two researchers based in Switzerland are creating this guy’s housebroken cousin. [Photo: plantasnomadas.com]The cyborg plant is not a new concept. The robot plant replacement is even less new: You can buy one for a price of $4.19 from ThinkGeek, after all. But a team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich isn’t interested in solar-powered plastic toys or surgically-altered self-lighting plants that hang on a wall (creepy!)--they’re giving plants the ability to feed, water, and sun themselves, by augmenting them with iRobot technology and wheels.

Aline Veillat and Stéphane Magnenat fitted an iRobot Create platform with light and sound sensors, as well as wheels, according to New Scientist. The plant that perches on top of the platform is carried toward light and water so that it can photosynthesize, away from noises so it stays out of the path of humans and interested animals, and back to a set charging station so that the platform itself doesn’t run out of juice.

Diagram of molecular motor setup from Sykes Laboratory at Tufts, showing the copper surface (orange), the LTSEM tip (grey), and the methylsulfanylbutane molecule, with spin direction indicated in green. [Image: Tufts University[In the grand tradition of science interns throughout history, a handful of high schoolers, undergrads, grads, and post-docs spent months counting stuff. That’s not news: Interns were basically invented to fetch coffee and count things. But, as with (now-) famous interns Geiger, Marsden and Muller, counting stuff for months has paid off enormously: a team of Tufts chemistry researchers and their supporting interns has confirmed the feasibility of the smallest motor known to humankind.

The electric engine measures a single nanometer wide, 99.5% smaller than the previous tiniest-motor-ever record holder.

An artist rendering of a Y dwarf star. [Image: NASA]Stars, as astronomers and space geeks know, are hot. Nuclear-fusion hot, enough to warm an entire planet 93 million miles away (that's us, guys!). Of course, they burn at a wide variety of temperatures, corresponding to the color of their emitted light--from the 52,000-Kelvin blue-white Class O stars, to our familiar 5800 K yellow Class G sun, all the way to seemingly chilly 700 K brown dwarfs.

A newly-confirmed class of stars, though, requires an understanding of "hot" that's much more prosaic than the critical point for nuclear fusion--think of a warm spring day, one where your air conditioner is broken. A new study by NASA, part of the WISE mission, has collected evidence of the very coolest of star classes: the room-temperature Y dwarfs.

No castles yet, but it’s only a matter of time. [Image: WikiHouse]Prefab housing has been around since the 1940s. The entire point of prefab was not to have to worry about the construction--all that happened somewhere off-site. It was anonymous and standardized, and led to perfectly serviceable homes that lacked even a breath of personality. After decades in which prefab was relegated to postmodernist architects, the modern DIY movement got to it, resulting in WikiHouse: a mix of Wiki software, computer-aided design programming, and CNC machining techniques that puts building design straight into the hands of the end users.

00:/, a London architectural practice, released WikiHouse as a plugin for Google Sketchup as part of their contribution to a discussion on open-source design. A video of their prototype is up on the website—a large shed-like structure, designed and built in about 24 hours. The official debut, and construction of the first complete WikiHouse, is scheduled for the Gwangu Design Biennale in South Korea during September and October this year.

Now that the Internet and news media have brought viewers closer to celebrities than ever before, the backlash is setting in: we’re sick of it. Enough already! Hundreds of thousands of Internet users have already shielded themselves from celeb saturation using Greasemonkey scripts like tumblrsavior, or browser plug-ins along the lines of Shaved Beiber. But that wasn’t enough for MAKE blogger Matt Richardson—he wanted his TV to shut up about Sheen, too.

Aww, look at the cute little robot! Well, I'm sold. [Photo: Ultimaker Blog] The personal fabrication laboratory, or "fab lab", simply wouldn't be complete without a desktop 3D printer. Since September 2010, this specific little niche has been filled by MakerBot Industries' Thing-O-Matic, a CNC tool that turns computer designs into physical objects. But three Dutch makers at a lab in Utrecht are challenging the Thing-O-Matic's reign with their own plastic-printing desktop device: the Ultimaker.

Siert Wijnia, Martijn Elserman, and Erik De Bruijn met at Fab Lab/Utrecht in Holland--Wijnia happened to be the manager of the MIT Media Lab-affiliated fabrication center. The three makers set out "to [make] a better 3D printer, not necessarily to start a business," says De Bruijn, but after the Ultimaker debuted at a December 2010 robotics conference, they decided to try their hands at running a business after all.

DARwin-OP (Dynamic Anthropomorphic Robot with Intelligence—Open Platform) might be the cutest little humanoid robot money can buy (if you have $12K lying around); his bright blue eyes, convenient carrying handle, and 18-inch stature could convince you he’s like the purse dog of robotics. But that adorable exterior hides some unexpected dark corners, including very strong feelings about beer, as shown in this video from Trossen Robotics’ blog.

While the little robot’s opinion of Tecate versus Bud Light may be ambiguous—does he like the red can, or is he just disinterested in kicking the crap out of the blue one?--one thing is clear: DARwin’s got a bright future in soccer tournaments against that showoff Honda ASIMO.

Yeah, we're not sure why this person is tapping a blank white touchscreen, but that won't stop us from using this stock photo. [Photo: Shutterstock]Many current smartphones utilize some degree of haptic technology--that is, tech that stimulates a user’s sense of touch to communicate information.  As of now, the haptic feedback systems are pretty basic: When you touch a "soft" key (one that appears on your touchscreen, as opposed to a key on a physical keyboard), the screen or even the entire phone will vibrate, simulating a click.  But using the research of Ed Colgate, mechanical engineering professor at Northwestern University, poking a touchscreen could soon make the touchscreen poke back.

His idea depends on changing the direction of the screen’s vibration.  Right now, screens vibrate laterally, in the plane of the screen.  Colgate introduced vertical oscillations, so that the screen vibrates in and out—which will modulate the amount of contact between the finger and the screen, which will fool your finger into believing it’s touching a texture completely different from that of coated glass.  Tiny lateral oscillations along with the vertical ones would stretch the finger’s skin receptors in the same way that touching something with depth would, simulating the dips and hollows and ridges that appear on a physical keyboard.