Ways 3D printing is making the world a better place

A new generation of prosthetics

“Turning disabilities into superpowers” is the defining vision of UK-based Open Bionics. Their mission is to create “affordable, assistive devices that enhance the human body.”

Their first product was  the Hero Arm, which they describe as “the world's first medically certified 3D-printed bionic arm, with multi-grip functionality and empowering aesthetics.”  It is “a lightweight and affordable myoelectric prosthesis.” 

The company now offers a selection of themed covers for the Hero Arm, including Star Wars BB-8, Marvel Iron Man, Disney Frozen and Deus Ex.  They are “custom-made using innovative 3D-printing and 3D-scanning techniques.” 

Dedication to helping children by providing them with 3D printed hands is also the driving passion behind a group of volunteers who formed e-NABLE. Its members now number in the thousands, and they have made it possible for thousands of children around the world to regain hand function. See the video below:

  

Quick and economical home construction

Another way 3D printing is being used to make the world a better place is by reducing the cost of home construction enough to make new houses accessible to those whose income puts adequate shelter beyond their reach.

One company that has made this its mission is ICON. Its tagline is “We’re changing the way people live.” It set out to apply 3D printing to houses and envisions whole communities set up that way in a kind of 21st-century version of Levitton.

Last year ICON built the Chicon house, described as “the first permitted 3D-printed home built in the United States” in Austin, Texas in 2018. It took a few weeks to print “and sparked the imagination of customers, investors, press, and the SXSW conference community.”

Now it has advanced the technology to the point where it can get a house up in just  a day and at a cost of just $4000 as you can see in this video:

ICON believes that its 3D printing applied to concrete is the solution to low-income housing, both in the USA and abroad. To that end, it has partnered with a charity called New Story that has provided funding for homes in Mexico, Haiti, El Salvador, and Bolivia and for needy households.

“By partnering with ICON in select regions, New Story will be able to see out their vision more efficiently and deliver the promise of a life beyond survival to thousands more,” it reports.

4. Homes on Mars 

Applying 3D printing to home construction also has ramifications for the space program. In planning a mission to Mars, NASA has to deal with the challenge of setting up shelter for the people who will be living on the red planet. To that end, it launched  the 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge

 See the video below:

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10 Surprising Ways 3D Printing Is Being Used Now

Planning a supply chain for space

photo from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Carina_Nebula_composite_of_visible_and_infrared_light_(captured_by_the_Hubble_Space_Telescope).jpg

The replicator that can produce food, clothes, and other necessities on demand is familiar to all devotees of Star Trek. That device was actually essential for the Enterprise's extended mission, to keep the ship properly equipped without having to pack along whatever the crew might need at some point light years away from a home planet. Though such replicators are still in the realm of science fiction, we are getting closer to the point of extended space trips.

Going back to the moon and maybe even Mars
NASA just finalized a $2.8 billion contract with Boeing Co. to produce the Space Launch System (SLS). SLS is a rocket powerful enough to carry astronauts where no human has gone before. That includes exploration of asteroids, the moon, and, ultimately, Mars. The first test flight is planned for 2017, and the first manned flight for 2021.

While Boeing is working on NASA's rockets, MIT is working on supply chain management that solves the logistical challenges inherent in extended space travel. 

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Space & the Supply Chain

3D printing brings the stars to the blind

Discussions of big data often touch on the challenge of visualization. An even greater challenge, though, is rendering the data into something that is comprehensible to people who have to use senses other than sight.

3D printing brings the stars to the visually impaired by rendering Hubble's images into tactile form.
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Reaching for the Stars With 3D Printing

Don't leave earth without it

Whether it will be in just a matter of years or of decades, the possibility of regular people taking trips into space the same way they travel to the far reaches of the globe could become a reality within our lifetime. The question is: when you set off for such a trip, what do you pack along for money?
While previous generations may have packed travelers’ cheques, such paper relics just don’t seem to fit in with the space age. The only feasible solution to the problem of payments in, to, and from space, is a digital one. PayPal believes it will handle that problem with its introduction of PayPal Galactic.  But that answer raises a number of other questions. Read more here

Related post: http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2013/05/star-trek-and-final-frontier-of-currency.html

Missions in space may come and go, but the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has always stuck to a mission of bringing in data.

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One of its early achievements in this field was sending a spacecraft close enough to Venus to get accurate readings of its surface and atmosphere. On Dec. 14, 1962, the Mariner 2 spacecraft got within 34,762km (21,600 miles) of the planet. Over a 42-minute period, it was able to pick up many points of data that proved Venus, which had been thought of as Earth's twin, would be uninhabitable, with a surface temperature of 425°C (797°F) and a toxic atmosphere.

This picture (from NASA's site) of the data gathered in that mission is cropped. The paper showing the data that was gathered is actually much longer, as this uncropped version shows.

Back then, the data covered a roll of paper, but the data NASA handles today takes supercomputing power to process. As Nick Skytland wrote in NASA blog post in October:

In the time it took you to read this sentence, NASA gathered approximately 1.73 gigabytes of data from our nearly 100 currently active missions! We do this every hour, every day, every year -- and the collection rate is growing exponentially...
In our current missions, data is transferred with radio frequency, which is relatively slow. In the future, NASA will employ technology such as optical (laser) communication to increase the download and mean a 1000x increase in the volume of data. This is much more then we can handle today and this is what we are starting to prepare for now. We are planning missions today that will easily stream more [than] 24TB's a day. That's roughly 2.4 times the entire Library of Congress -- EVERY DAY. For one mission.

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Big Data on the Final Frontier