Lyman Filament Extruder II...

Inventors rule!

Most low-cost 3D printers use ABS plastic filament as the raw material from which they produce objects.  This raw material costs ten times what ABS costs in its more common form: pellets.  So Inventables sponsored a contest, with a $40,000 prize, for a low-cost machine that would turn ABS pellets into ABS filament.  Hugh Lyman won the contest with his Lyman Filament Extruder II, at right.

Awesome!

100,000 DPI...

I used to think that 600 dots-per-inch (DPI) color laser printers were fantastical, futuristic devices, printing 360,000 dots in every square inch.  Researchers at IMRE have completely blown that resolution away by inventing a technique for printing at 100,000 DPI (that's a trillion dots per square inch!).  Awesome!

Cheap, Accurate Magnetic Field Sensor...

...that uses a drop of orange paint as the sensor medium.  Seriously.  Coming soon to a Digi-Key or Mouser near you...

No-Ice, not De-Ice...

What if you could prevent ice from forming in the first place, say, on airplane wings, ship's superstructures, or on pipes?  Then you wouldn't need to use chemicals or manual labor to get rid of the ice – it simply wouldn't form in the first place.  Well, shortly we may be able to do just that!

This is a Big Deal...

High coercivity magnets without rare earth elements.  If this discovery turns out to be scalable to industrial volumes, it will remove a huge strategic natural resource advantage that China has today...

Shannon's Law Not Inviolable?

This looks very interesting.  I haven't read the white paper yet, and I don't know how practicable the implementation is, even if the underlying theory is sound.  But I do know this: if it really works and if it really can be built, it changes everything...

Robot Arms...

Here's something from over a year ago, but new to me: Dean Kamen talking about the prosthetic arms he's developed for injured veterans.  If you're into technology at all, then you already know who Dean Kamen is – the Thomas Edison of our time.   This invention of his is both amazing and heartwarming.  You'll need kleenex for some of the video...

African Ingenuity...

Fascinating story about a African kid creating a wind-powered lighting system from scrounged materials such as shock absorber pistons, bicycle dynamos, and old engine fans...