S&T - Useful udpates - 3D printed homes; Fossilized brain

Interesting updates on science and technology

 S&T - Useful udpates - 3D printed homes; Fossilized brain

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• 3D printed homes: It is clear by now that 3D printing excels at producing objects that are too complicated or expensive to churn out using conventional manufacturing techniques. Personalised medical equipment that would otherwise require many templates can easily be run off, and also fiddly industrial components, whose structural peculiarities would make conventional manufacturing tough.

1. It is time to take these to a bigger scale now. Many projects around the world that are attempting to 3D print entire houses.
2. The UN estimates that more than 20% of the world’s population lives in housing either too small or too unsafe to meet their basic needs. 3D printing could offer a faster and cheaper way to build homes.
3. Home construction is a leading source of carbon-dioxide emissions, partly from the production and transport of building materials such as steel and cement. 3D printing could help alleviate this problem, whether by using fewer carbon-intensive materials or simply by speeding up the construction process.
4. Two companies in California (Palari Homes and Mighty Buildings) can print all the components of a house in 24 hours before attaching them to a permanent foundation on site. Made from a paste-like composite which is hardened with ultraviolet light, the houses are already in high demand.
5. A firm named 14Trees, a project under way in Malawi, says it can print affordable homes in 12 hours, generating one-third of the carbon dioxide that local building techniques would otherwise use. In Mexico, a homelessness charity called New Story plans to build houses made from speedily produced components. And three weeks ago in Eindhoven, Europe’s first 3D-printed home was handed over to its tenants.
6. The future looks brighter, as the government of Dubai wants a quarter of all new buildings in the country to be 3D-printed by 2030, and Saudi Arabia plans to print 1.5m houses over the next decade. Interest from NASA suggests that dwelling places might even be printed on other worlds.
7. Construction work on the Moon or Mars will clearly mean using only 3D printing methods.

• Fossilized brains: Brain tissue is very squishy. Unlike bones, shells or teeth, it is rich in fat and rots quickly, seldom making an appearance in the fossil record. So when an invertebrate paleontologist in Australia noticed a pop of white near the front of a fossilized horseshoe crab body where the animal’s brain would have been, he was surprised. A closer look revealed an exceptional imprint of the brain along with other bits of the creature’s nervous system.

1. Unearthed from the Mazon Creek deposit in northeastern Illinois, and dating back 310 million years, it’s the first fossilized horseshoe crab brain ever found.
2. These fossils are so rare that finding them is ultra rare.
3. The find helps fill a gap in the evolution of arthropod brains and also shows how little they have changed over hundreds of millions of years.
4. Soft-tissue preservation requires special conditions. Scientists have found brains encased in fossilized tree resin, better known as amber, that were less than 66 million years old. They have also found brains preserved as flattened carbon films, sometimes replaced or overlaid by minerals in shale deposits that are more than 500 million years old. Such deposits include corpses of ocean-dwelling arthropods that sank to the seafloor, were rapidly buried in mud and remained shielded from immediate decay in the low-oxygen environment.
5. This arthropod was not a crab but is closely related to spiders and scorpions. The extinct penny-size horseshoe crab was buried more than 300 million years ago in what was once a shallow, brackish marine basin. Siderite, an iron carbonate mineral, accumulated rapidly around the dead creature’s body, forming a mold. With time, as the soft tissue decayed, a white-colored clay mineral called kaolinite filled the void left by the brain. It was this white cast on a dark-gray rock that helped Bicknell spot the uniquely preserved brain impression.
6. This is a completely different mode of brain preservation. The extinct Euproops brain showed a central cavity for the passage of a feeding tube and branching nerves that would connect with the animal’s eyes and legs.
7. Comparing this ancient brain structure with that of Limulus polyphemus, a horseshoe crab species still found along the Atlantic coast, it was noticed that similarity existed. While the horseshoe crabs look somewhat different on the outside, the internal brain architecture hadn’t really changed despite being separated by more than 300 million years.
8. It’s as if a set of motherboards has remained constant over geological time, whereas peripheral circuits have been variously modified.

 

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