Your Next Pair Of Shoes Could Come From A 3D Printer

The assembly line at Feetz has 100 humming 3-D printers. Their sole purpose is to make shoes. Each printer is named after a cartoon character: Wonder Woman, Scooby-Doo. Though whimsical, the printers are out to upend mass retailing by making every shoe to order, cheaply. Each printer can be reset to make different sixes and takes up to 12 hours to make a pair. Ordering is done online, where customers can download an app, take smartphone snapshots of their feet and create a 3-D model. Shoes, which cost $199 are made of recycled material and are thickly padded for comfort.

With the rise of new technologies like smartphones and 3D printers, fashion start ups like Feetz are changing the ways goods are ordered, made and sold. Traditionally, manufacturing is the most expensive part of the retail supply chain. Creating foods in small batches is difficult and costly. Most are manufactured overseas, and shipping goods to the US adds time and cost to the process. The beauty of instant, customized fashion is that goods can be made at lower cost and more quickly – in a personalized style. These are still early days for 3D printing. The offerings are not very diversified, and they are limited to basic goods.

Soon, Shades To Help Record What You See

Messaging service Snapchat announced on 24 September it will launch a line of video catching sunglasses, a spin on Google’s “Glass” abandoned by the technology giant a year ago. The California based company, which also announced it is changing its name to Snap Inc, said its ‘Spectacles’ will be “available soon”. They’ve been working for the past few years to develop a totally new type of camera. The sunglasses will come with an integrated video camera that will make it easy to create ‘Memories’.

Earlier this year, Snap added a way to save images as “Memories”, a shift for a service known for messages that disappear after being viewed. Spectacles if billed to have one of the smallest wireless cameras in the world, capable of capturing a day’s worth of “Snaps” on a single charge. The sunglasses will connect to Snap software wirelessly using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connections. The camera on the sunglasses will record video from the perspective of wearers, boasting of a 115 degree field of view, and can also capture video snippets intended for sharing at the service.

Spectacles would put pressure on GoPro, whose mini-cameras are designed to let people capture video of endeavors from personal perspectives. Last year, Google halted sales of its internet linked eyewear Glass following criticism about privacy since the device was capable of capturing pictures and video. Glass connected to the internet using Wi-Fi hot-spots or more typically, by being wirelessly tethered to mobile phones.

New Method To Aid Burn Victims Grow New Skin

Researchers have developed a novel method that measures the limit to which human skin can be stretched, an advance that could help grow new skin for burn victims. Surgeons use various techniques for tissue expansion procedures designed to grow skin in one region of the body to graft it on to another site (sometimes used for burn victims). This procedure stretches the skin, typically, by inflating a balloon with air or silicone under the surface. Skin grows more in regions where it is stretched – during pregnancy, for instance – but stretch it too much and the tissue might break. The new predictive technique could be employed as a method of predicting the limit to which the skin could be stretched. The outermost layer of skin, the stratum corneum, regulates water loss from the body and protects underlying living tissue from germs and the environment, in general. It is pretty tough, protecting the body from extreme temperatures, rough surfaces, and most paper edges. The results could help create new topical medical and cosmetic products.

Holographic TV Next Big Thing

A research team at the BBC has been working on an incredible new ‘holographic TV’ – and they have already produced some stunning results. The experiment brief was to invent a device using low-fi and low-cost materials that could be used to completely change our way of viewing the small screen. The team admitted that they had seen the phenomenon of a holographic image created by people using their mobile phones, but they wanted to extend the scale and go one step bigger. People had created small ‘holographic’ displays using mobile phones and so it occurred to researchers making a super siz

ed version of these low-cost displays would give them a way to see how ‘holograms’ might work on a larger scale, something comparable to the size of a living room TV, they took a 46” TV that they had in their office and then asked a local plastics cutter to make a simple acrylic pyramid shape based on some sketches that they had done. By placing this acrylic pyramid on their flat screen TV, they were able to try out a modern-day version of an Old Victorian Theater technique and created the illusion of floating ‘holographic’ like images. The team then used archive footage from the BBC to view images in stunning 3D. However, don’t expect to see a holographic TV in the shops any time soon.

Rosetta To Finish 12-Yr Probe With Comet Crash-Land

After 12 years chasing a comet across 6 billion km in space, European scientists will end the historic Rosetta mission by crash landing the spacecraft on the surface of the dusty, icy body at the end of the month. Data collected by Rosetta and its Lander Philae has helped scientists better understand how the Earth and other planets were formed. The Spacecraft has managed several historic firsts, including the first time a spacecraft has orbited a comet rather than just whizzing past to snap fly by pictures, and the first time a probe has landed on a comet’s surface. It was also the first mission to venture beyond the main asteroid belt relying solely on solar cells for power.

After two years of circling comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, collecting a treasure trove of data that will keep scientists busy for years to come, the comet’s distance from the sun is nearing the point where solar power will become too weak to operate the spacecraft. In the final hours of its controlled descent on September 30, Rosetta will be able to take close-up pictures of the comet and collect data on gases closer to the surface before joining Philae and shutting down forever.

Scientists said the spacecraft by far exceeded their expectations by surviving the trip for as long as it did. It successfully sent its 100 kg washing machine sixed Lander down to the surface in November 2014 in what was considered as remarkable feat of precision space travel, even if the Lander ended up bouncing and coming to rest in the shade where it could not be recharged. Rosetta has detected key organic compounds in the comet, bolstering the motion that comets delivered the chemical building blocks for life long ago to Earth and throughout the solar system.

Not Just Birds, Fish Sing Dawn & Dusk Choruses Too

Fish sing dawn choruses in the ocean just as birds do on land. Seven fish choruses have been identified by researchers which varied from “foghorn” cries to “grunting” noises. Using a pair of sea-noise loggers positioned at different points in the coastal waters of port Headland in Western Australia, scientists monitored the ocean continually for 18 months and recoded distinct choruses occurring at different times of the day, particularly at dawn and at dusk, with songs predominantly heard between early spring and late summer. The study found the majority of this submarine soundscape was emitted through repetitive solo calls from fish; however these sounds also overlapped creating the choruses. You get the dusk and dawn choruses like you would with the bird in the forest. Sound provides information about the behavioral functions of fish, such as spawning, feeding, territorial disputed or distress and studying fish noises may help provide valuable ecological knowledge.

How Tech Unlocked Secrets of Ancient Biblical Scroll

Nearly half a century ago, archaeologists found a charred ancient scroll in the ark of a synagogue on the western shore of the Dead Sea. The lump of carbonized parchment could not be opened or read. Its curators did nothing but conserve it, hoping that new technology might one day emerge to make the scroll legible. Just such a technology has bow been perfected by computer scientists with biblical scholars in Jerusalem, they have used a computer to unfurl a digital image of the scroll. It turns out to hold a fragment identical to the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible and at nearly 2,000 years old, is the earliest instance of the text.

The writing retrieved by the computer from the digital image of the unopened scroll is amazingly clear and legible, in contrast to the scroll’s blackened and beaten up exterior. The scroll’s content, the first two chapters of the Book of Leviticus, has consonants – early Hebrew texts didn’t specify vowels – that are identical to those of the Masoretic text, the authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible and the one often used as the bases for translations of the Old Testament in Protestant Bibles. The Dead Sea scroll contain versions quite similar to the Masoretic text but with many small differences. The text in the scroll found that the En-Gedi excavation site in Israel decades ago has none. This is the earliest evidence of the exact form of the medieval text.