Imagine an apartment where you could whiz down a 1,000-foot ski slope from the roof to the sidewalk.
This daredevil’s dream building might eventually be a reality. Called House Slalom, the 21-story residential complex with a ski slope could be built in Kazakhstan.
The design by Shokhan Mataibekov Architects was a finalist in the residential category at this year’s World Architecture Festival awards. If the proposal gets the green light, it would be the world’s first residential building with a ski slope.
After the acquisition of Phenix Systems, 3D Systems has been slow to roll out its metal 3D printing technology, an issue raised in a class action lawsuit against the company. Nevertheless, the company has been making progress and, today, 3D Systems announced the availability of their newest system, the ProX DMP 320.
The ProX DMP 320 is designed to be a high precision, high throughput laser sintering metal 3D printer capable of handling itanium, stainless steel, and nickel super alloy. Built with exchangeable manufacturing modules, the ProX DMP 320 is meant to allow for quick material change. To achieve the repeatability much sought after in mainstream manufacturing, the machine has preset build parameters based off of almost half-a-million builds. The ProX DMP 320 features a large build volume of 275mm x 275mm x 420mm with two configurations available, one meant for stainless steel and the other nickel super alloy. The machine offers centralized maintenance management, reduced argon gas use, and support for a serial manufacturing workflow.
Some people take the new year as an opportunity to contemplate their goals; Alan Lightman, writing in the January issue of Harper’s magazine, takes the opportunity to contemplate the creation of the universe.
It’s a topic too vast and unimaginable for most of us to wrap our brains around, but Lightman brings his considerable skills as both physicist (he teaches at MIT) and novelist (“Einstein’s Dreams”) to introduce us to a “small platoon of physicists” who focus on figuring out such things as what happened at the very first moment of the big bang, whether time or anything else existed before it, and exactly how we distinguish the future from the past.
And they expect, sometime in the next 50 years or so, to have some real answers.
Russian scientists from the Siberian Institute of Geology and Mineralogy have succeeded in growing modified diamonds, in what is a step closer to faster computers run on light, the head of the institute said Monday.
California-based Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) made the announcement in a Facebook post on his profile. He said building the AI ‘butler’ would be his personal challenge for 2016.
