NASA just threw a $125,000, six-month grant at a project by Anjan Contractor, a mechanical engineer at Systems and Materials Research Corporation in Austin to develop a working prototype of his proposed universal food synthesizer.

The feedstocks for this device, including all the carbs, proteins, macro, and micro nutrients are in powder form. Does placing 3D food printers in households allow a world population, that’s on its way to an estimated nine billion people by 2040, to synthesize healthy meals from powder-filled cartridges? Such dehydrated food stocks would have long shelf lives.

In light of all this it would seem the Star Trek food replicators are really not all that far off. The fictional devices featured in that series were capable of fiddling with reality at the subatomic level to reproduce pretty much anything edible. Also not far off is the Mission to Mars. 78,000 people recently applied for Mars One. The ETA for the first colonists on that mission is just ten years from now in 2023. How would you pack for that little trek?

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First, they asked Monsanto what their ideal future looked like in fifteen to twenty years. Monsanto executives described a world with 100 percent of all commercial seeds genetically modified and patented. Anderson Consulting then worked backwards from that goal, and developed the strategy and tactics to achieve it. They presented Monsanto with the steps and procedures needed to obtain a place of industry dominance in a world in which natural seeds were virtually extinct.
Integral to the plan was Monsanto’s influence in government, whose role was to promote the technology worldwide and to help get the foods into the marketplace quickly, before resistance could get in the way. A biotech consultant later said, “The hope of the industry is that over time, the market is so flooded that there’s nothing you can do about it. You just sort of surrender.”
The anticipated pace of conquest was revealed by a conference speaker from another biotech company. He showed graphs projecting the year-by-year decrease of natural seeds, estimating that in five years, about 95 percent of all seeds would be genetically modified.
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Anthony Atala asks, “Can we grow organs instead of transplanting them?” His lab at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine is doing just that — engineering over 30 tissues and whole organs.

Most 3D printers use a technique called extrusion, through which the printer melts plastic and lays it down in layers to create a 3D object. But the Form 1 features stereolithography, which uses a laser to cure liquid resin into microscopic layers, resulting in much more precise creations.

For $3,300, the Form 1 package includes the 3D printer, software, and post-processing kit that comes with a finishing tray to hold components, rinsing solution to remove excess resin, water bath, dipping basket, scraper to remove excess material, tongs and drip trough.

The idea of a relatively affordable desktop 3D printer has shaken up the competitive landscape. Lesser models can be as cheap as $1,300, while some of the top models can run over $100,000.

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Over winter break, Cornell students began building an affordable and environmentally sustainable model house in Nicaragua. The students, who are part of Cornell University Sustainable Design — an organization that promotes sustainability through design — traveled to Nagarote, Nicaragua to build the house. The house will serve not only as a home for a family, but also as a platform to demonstrate ideal eco-friendly housing initiatives, said Kai Keane ’14, one of the students who led the project.

The house and its landscaping — part of the Sustainable Neighborhoods Nicaragua project — are the product of more than three semesters’ worth of research on designing sustainable and affordable housing for low-income Nicaraguan families, according to Keane. The house is scheduled to be completed around mid-February 2013, according to SNN’s press release.

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When a farmer grows Monsanto’s genetically modified soybean seeds, has he simply “used” the seed to create a crop to sell, or has he “made” untold replicas of Monsanto’s invention that remain subject to the company’s restrictions? The question is now headed to the United States Supreme Court.

“The current intellectual property environment of transgenic crops has spurred the privatization and concentration of the world’s seed supply,” said a brief filed by the Center for Food Safety and Save Our Seeds, groups that have been highly critical of Monsanto and genetically modified crops. “Market concentration has resulted in 10 multinational corporations holding approximately two-thirds (65%) of commercial seed for major crops, reducing choice and innovation, and increasing prices for the American farmer.”

The brief asks the court to end the practice of allowing corporations to place conditions on the sale of its seed and to reject an “end-run around patent exhaustion” for regeneration. “Farming is using seeds, not constructing or manufacturing seeds,” the brief states.

Monsanto, alarmed at the possibilities of what the Supreme Court might do, has circled the wagons.

The Biotechnology Industry Organization warns that advancements in agricultural, medical and environmental research “depend critically on a strong, stable and nationally uniform system of patent rights and protections.”

Universities, economists, intellectual property experts and seed companies have weighed in on Monsanto’s behalf.

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The Filabot brings a miniature recycling plant to your desktop, grinding down everyday plastic waste and transforming it into ready-to-use material for your 3d printing. Water pipes, drink bottles, plastic wrappers and Lego bricks can be fed into the machine which grinds, melts and extrudes the plastic into a filament of either 3mm or 1.75mm diameters. It can also melt down unused 3D prints, allowing for increased experimentation..
Filabot brings affordability and sustainability to 3D-printing. The debut model is still under development and no official price has been announced. The company will launch a range of machines, at different levels of completion. Users can adapt and develop their own kit – from the Filabot Core (which comes without a grinder), to the open-source Filabot Wee, which users can build from downloadable plans.
The home-manufacturing revolution is well under way. And, thanks to an invention by American college student Tyler McNaney, it’s affordable.
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 Consider the First Source!

When we align our objectives with the Divine will, when we strive for the attainment of a worthy goal, when we begin our work with a well defined plan, and when we have ability to work together with others effectively, we have already achieved the trajectory for success. For we know that “all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”

Learn how to enjoy boundless opportunity and unlimited progress!

The Optical Cavity Furnace is a relatively new type of furnace that uses light and optics rather than other sources to create silicon-based photovoltaic (PV) cells. The new process uses only half the amount of energy to make conventional PVs.
The recent innovation uses a series of lamps in a reflective chamber to create temperature uniformity at high-heat levels throughout the chamber. It’s so uniform that, when heated up to 1,000 degrees Celsius, the entire furnace interior only varies by a few degrees. The heat is used to convert silicon wafers into fully functional photovoltaic cells.
Light Has Multiple Advantages in Furnaces. Photons have special qualities that prove useful in creating solar cells. When light is shined on silicon atoms that are bonded electronically to each other it changes their potential.
The Optical Cavity Furnace shines visible and near-infrared light to heat the solar cell, and also shines ultraviolet light to take advantage of photonic effects that occur deep within the atomic structure of the cell material. This combination offers unique capabilities that lead to improved device quality and efficiency.
Iron and other impurities can degrade the silicon quality quickly. But shining the right light on it can remove that impurity from the silicon. Optics can also make a lot of things happen at the interfaces in a cell, where, for example, metal can reflect the light and speed the diffusion of impurities. The lamps in the furnace help fool the impurities in the silicon into moving out of the way, by creating vacancies.
Bhushan Sopori, NREL Principal Engineer said “We call it injecting vacancies.” A vacancy refers to the lack of a silicon atom. “If the atom is missing, you have a vacancy here, an empty space.” Those spaces prompt the impurities such as iron to feel much more like moving – and they do so at a much lower temperature than would otherwise be required. The iron moves in with the aluminum, creating an aluminum-iron mix that, happily, is needed anyway as a contact point.
Removing impurities can change a cell’s efficiency from 13 percent to 17 percent. What that means is that 17 percent of the photons that hit the improved cell are converted into usable electricity.
The absence of cooling water and confinement of energy in the OCF proves to be a big advantage for lowering the energy payback time of solar cells.
Other advantages of the photonic approach:
Silicon cells often have silver contacts in front and aluminum contacts in back. They usually are fired simultaneously as the cell is being formed. The OCF by selectively heating the interfaces of silicon and metal can better control the process, and thus create stronger field surfaces and improved cell performance.
The Optical Cavity Furnace uses photons of light to remove weak, cracked wafers from the processing line. Photons can more easily produce a thermal stress in a wafer and screen out bad wafers. The photon process tests the wafers’ integrity right after they are cut. The conventional method requires physical twisting and bending of the wafers to test for weakness.
“Its main purpose is to process the wafers into solar cells. We have developed the furnace configurations for major steps used in silicon solar cell fabrication, junction formation, oxidation, and metallization firing,” Sopori said.
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