Lifeboat Foundation

3D printing technology is changing and will change pretty much everything. Besides printing the intermittent novelty project at home with a desktop printer, additive manufacturing or 3D printing technology is being used in a large group of businesses changing the manner in which we design, build, create, and even eat.

NASA is planning to use 3D printing technology to construct housing on Mars for future colonies while organizations like byFlow are using the emerging technology to create food and intricate edible tableware. The uses and applications appear to be both limitless and exciting, yet this is only the beginning. Things being what they are, what sort of changes can we expect to see in the medical industry?

The reason why the process is so incredibly fast is because the excavation and laying of the foundation on-site can be completed at the same time as the construction of the modules. It would also require nearly 70 percent less on-site, labor according to The B1M.

In fact, most of the segments of Marriott’s planned hotel are being built in Poland and then shipped across the Atlantic. The rooms will be ready made according to Marriott, including bedding and even toiletries.

Continue reading “This Company Says It’ll Build an Entire Skyscraper in 90 Days” »

Park Las Vegas, sponsored by Bleutech Park Properties, Inc. is breaking ground in the Las Vegas Valley in December 2019 as the first city in the world to boast a digital revolution in motion, redefining the infrastructure industry sector. This $7.5 billion, six year project, will be constructed of net-zero buildings within their own insular mini-city, featuring automated multi-functional designs, renewable energies from solar/wind/water/kinetic, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality, Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, supertrees, and self-healing concrete structures.

Bleutech Park’s mixed-use environment featuring workforce housing, offices, retail space, ultra-luxury residential, hotel and entertainment will introduce a new high-tech biome to the desert valley.

The news: Alphabet X, the company’s early research and development division, has unveiled the Everyday Robot project, whose aim is to develop a “general-purpose learning robot.” The idea is to equip robots with cameras and complex machine-learning software, letting them observe the world around them and learn from it without needing to be taught every potential situation they may encounter.

For now: The early prototype robots are learning how to sort trash. It sounds mundane, but it’s tough to get robots to identify different types of objects, and then how to grasp them. Alphabet X claims that its robots are currently putting less than 5% of trash in the wrong place, versus an error rate of 20% among the office’s humans.

The big idea: Robots are expensive and confined to performing very specific, specialized tasks. Getting robots that can operate safely and autonomously in messy, complex human environments like homes or offices is one of the biggest challenges in robotics right now.

Nanoracks wants to expand from hosting experiments on board the International Space Station to running their own mini stations built from used rockets, with a first launch scheduled for a SpaceX Falcon 9 next year.

SpaceX is going to launch a payload for client Nanoracks aboard one of its new rideshare missions, currently targeting late 2020, that will demonstrate a very ambitious piece of tech from the commercial space station company. Nanoracks is sending up a payload platform that will show off how it can use a robot to cut material very similar to the upper stages used in orbital spacecraft — something Nanoracks wants to eventually due to help convert these spent and discarded stages (sometimes called “space tugs” because they generally move payloads from one area of orbit to another) into orbital research stations, habitats and more.

The demonstration mission is part of Nanoracks’ “Space Outpost Program,” which aims to address the future need for in-space orbital commercial platforms by also simultaneously making use of existing vehicles and materials designed specifically for space. Through use of the upper stages of spacecraft left behind in orbit, the company hopes to show how it one day might be able to greatly reduce the costs of setting up in-space stations and habitats, broadening the potential access of these kinds of facilities for commercial space companies.

This will be the first-ever demonstration of structural metal cutting in space, provided the demo goes as planned, and it could be a key technology not just for establishing more permanent research families in Earth’s orbit, but also for setting up infrastructure to help us get to, and stay at, other interstellar destinations like the Moon and Mars.

Caterpillar has been synonymous with big, heavy equipment — for farming, construction and mining — since Holt Manufacturing and C. L. Best Tractor merged in 1925 to form the Peoria, Illinois-based company. Over the years, tons of innovation have been built into the iconic yellow products, too, from the Model 20 Track-Type Tractor introduced in 1927 to the ginormous engines that helped power the Apollo 11 mission to the moon 50 years ago.

Coincidentally, one of Cat’s latest breakthroughs is self-driving, or autonomous, and remote-controlled mining equipment, which could very well find itself on the moon when NASA is scheduled to return to the lunar surface in 2024, with plans to build a permanent base near the orb’s south pole, part of the Artemis program.

Just as on terrestrial sites, Caterpillar fully or semi-autonomous bulldozers, graders, loaders and dump trucks could be utilized to build roads, housing and other infrastructure. Operator-less drilling and digging machines might mine water, oxygen-rich rocks and moon dust for use in 3D printing of various materials.

Inside the strange world of 3D printing Martian homes.

UPS Flight Forward recently was awarded their Part 135 certification from the Federal Aviation Administration, which allows them to make deliveries by drone throughout the U.S. This week, UPS in partnership with CVS made their first residential delivery by drone by dropping off prescription drugs from a CVS pharmacy directly to a consumer’s home.