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From the article: By the end of September 2014, Jason Budinoff, an aerospace engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (Greenbelt, MD), is expected to complete the first imaging telescopes ever assembled almost exclusively from 3D-manufactured components. The devices' optics and electronics will be fabricated using conventional methods. "As far as I know, we are the first to attempt to build an entire instrument with 3D printing," says Budinoff. He is building a fully functional 50 mm camera whose outer tube, baffles, and optical mounts are all printed as a single structure. The instrument is appropriately sized for a CubeSat (a small satellite made of individual units each about 100 mm on a side). 

How many shapes can be obtained by folding a paper and applying just one straight cut? You'll be surprised...

"The theorem is that every pattern (plane graph) of straight-line cuts can be made by folding and one complete straight cut. Thus it is possible to make single polygons (possibly nonconvex), multiple disjoint polygons, nested polygons, adjoining polygons, and even floating line segments and points." - So the you can cut any assembly of polygons but not a single curved edge (with a finite number of folds (points don't count)): useless. :-P

The Robobee takes off without guide wires! It is still powered via a wire, and the control is done with the help of a VICON system and on an external computer, but this still is an amazing feat!

The way they make this thing is just as impressive. The manufacturing technique is "pop-up book" folding, a method that has been developed by the same group and that allows a two dimensional monolithic MEMS structures to be easily assembled into a 3D structure. I actually put this as an item of the "Technology List 2020" on the wiki this morning.

I agree, manufacturing is the amazing thing here ..... as soon as the power-consumption/density problem is solved these things will really take off :)

asm.js: it's really fast, backwards compatible, and now in the release version of Firefox. "By doing this the result is highly optimized and can be converted directly from this Asm.js syntax directly into ASSEMBLY without having to interpret it, as one would normally have to do with JavaScript" Here is great introduction to asm.js and C++ to js compilation: http://ejohn.org/blog/asmjs-javascript-compile-target

In case you are interested in Martin's past project, this article covers his master thesis. Potential for space? One of the biggest challenges with swarms of robots is manufacturing and deploying the swarm itself. Even if the robots are relatively small and relatively simple, you're still dealing with a whole bunch of them, and every step in building the robots or letting them loose is multiplied over the entire number of bots in the swarm.

The San Francisco-based team, which beat out approximately 9,000 competitors, used "custom-coded, computer-vision algorithms to suggest fragment pairings to human assemblers for verification."

amusing team name

some biomimicry used in energy systems... maybe it sparks some ideas

not much new that has not been shared here before ... BUT: we have done relativley little on any of them. for good reasons?? don't know - maybe time to look into some of these again more closely Energy Efficiency( Termite mounds inspired regulated airflow for temperature control of large structures, preventing wasteful air conditioning and saving 10% energy.[1] Whale fins shapes informed the design of new-age wind turbine blades, with bumps/tubercles reducing drag by 30% and boosting power by 20%.[2][3][4] Stingray motion has motivated studies on this type of low-effort flapping glide, which takes advantage of the leading edge vortex, for new-age underwater robots and submarines.[5][6] Studies of microstructures found on shark skin that decrease drag and prevent accumulation of algae, barnacles, and mussels attached to their body have led to "anti-biofouling" technologies meant to address the 15% of marine vessel fuel use due to drag.[7][8][9][10] Energy Generation( Passive heliotropism exhibited by sunflowers has inspired research on a liquid crystalline elastomer and carbon nanotube system that improves the efficiency of solar panels by 10%, without using GPS and active repositioning panels to track the sun.[11][12][13] Mimicking the fluid dynamics principles utilized by schools of fish could help to optimize the arrangement of individual wind turbines in wind farms.[14] The nanoscale anti-reflection structures found on certain butterfly wings has led to a model to effectively harness solar energy.[15][16][17] Energy Storage( Inspired by the sunlight-to-energy conversion in plants, researchers are utilizing a protein in spinach to create a sort of photovoltaic cell that generates hydrogen from water (i.e. hydrogen fuel cell).[18][19] Utilizing a property of genetically-engineered viruses, specifically their ability to recognize and bind to certain materials (carbon nanotubes in this case), researchers have developed virus-based "scaffolds" that

After a discussion this morning on robust computing and possible implementations in biological systems I found this really nice result (from 2008) on molecular RNA computers that get assembled within cells and perform simple functions. Of course by having different types of computers within the same cell one could go on to process the output of the other and more complex computations could be executed... Food for thought. :-)

Very interesting advances in materials

nice summary overview

Assuming the worst, Obama always has its handy antispy kit with him http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/us/politics/obamas-portable-zone-of-secrecy-some-assembly-required.html?hp&_r=2&

Get well, Tom! We urgently need you back.

thanx it is strange, they keep saying they have this synthetic spider silk but there is absolutely no mention of the actual properties of the thing...for a few years now... And I remember we have tested some, way back and it was really bad.

Scientists inch closer to building a drug-delivering nanorobot

bacteria apparently specialised in space clean rooms ...

I'm trying to read the abstract, but I simply can't manage...

While most humans are right-handed, our proteins are made up of lefty molecules. In the same way your left and right hands mirror one another, molecules can assemble in two reflected structures. Life prefers the left-handed version, which is puzzling since both mirrored types form equally in the laboratory.

New 3D printed macro structure exhibits selective buckling open the way for custom shape-memory materials found our neighbor scientists from the Lorentz Institut of the Leiden University. Wonder if it can be applied for self-assembled deployment of structures.

Hehe... as far as I know the Russians, they won't miss a chance to "clean up" a few enemy satellites too...

For Dario: the PI computation record was established on a single desktop computer using a cache optimized algorithm. Previous record was obtained by a cluster of hundreds of computers. The cache optimized algorithm was 20 times faster.

"btw: we will very soon have the very same processor in the new iMac .... what record are you going to beat with it?" Fastest Linux install on an iMac :)

"Fastest Linux install on an iMac :)" that is going to be a though one but a worthy aim! ""The art of computer programming" is probably the closest thing to a bible for computer scientists :)" yep! Programming is art ;)

"What you do for a living is not be creative, what you do is ship," says bestselling author Seth Godin, arguing that we must quiet our fearful "lizard brains" to avoid sabotaging projects just before we finally finish them. ... or to me the importance of setting deadlines, objectives and planning to not sabotage your creative work!

scary guy ..... his 'shipping' philosophy and his 'everybody is creative' line is close to Marx description of alienation ... I share more Stroustrup point of view "The idea of software development as an assembly line manned by semi-skilled interchangeable workers is fundamentally flawed and wasteful."

I don't think that is what he says, I think he says that everybody _can_ be creative but to be so you have to actually create things!

Cilia are hairs driven by molecular motors. They are found in monocellular organisms, etc. If we can build such things artificially, we have micro-pumps etc. Any space usability?

carlo's distributed actuator study originally considered cilia as well as peristaltic motion if i remember right. i suppose you might still think about debris transport for digging applications. Originally there was an idea for thermal transport aswell which, it turns out, was bollocks.