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Shapeways Allows You to Materialize Any 3D Object, Star Trek Style Shapeways is a spin-off from Philips' Lifestyle Incubator. On one side, it's a website where you can upload your 3D models—which can even have joins—or use an online 3D creator with access to everyday models. The online 3D creator is extremely easy to use, so anyone can modify them without any technical or product design knowledge. With this, anyone can make a candle holder or a fruit bowl out of song lyrics or a personal message by just typing it. Advanced users to access to 3D packages can upload any model they can imagine in a 3D standard format, like STL, Collada or X3D. On the other side, there are different types of rapid prototyping machines that can create that model using a variety of materials, from nylon to plastic composites, each with different properties. For example, the nylon one results in a semi-flexible object, while a plastic called "Cream Robust" gives you an extremely hard finish....

You can use a webcam to sneak peeks at birds’ nests, active volcanoes, watch the Shuttle launch, and even to check traffic. But that’s just local stuff. What if you want more of a far look? Then you need to check out the most distant webcam (so far) in the solar system: the Mars Express Visual Monitoring Camera So go to their site and check out Mars. It just might be the most interesting heavenly body you’ll see on a web cam.

Researchers in Massachusetts are working on a technique to turn heat gathered by asphalt into useable energy via water pipes. Their paper, released this week at the International Symposium on Asphalt Pavements and Environment in Zurich, posits that asphalt roads could be better than solar panels in gathering energy. Read full article at EcoGeek

In a story straight out of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, three MIT undergraduates concocted a scheme to hack Boston's transit payment system, the Charlie Card (no relation). The students managed to reprogram the cards to increase their credit balance, thus allowance them to ride the subway for free. Read full article at Wired

Miniature devices of the future could be powered by tiny new batteries that are about half the size of a human cell. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have come up with an idea to leverage characteristics of viruses to built small power sources that one day could supply the smallest electronics with electricity. Finding enough space for batteries in shrinking consumer electronics devices are one of the big challenges of hardware designers. But while the available space in today’s consumer electronics still seems to be manageable and evolve over time, there are less convenient solutions available for tiny microdevices such as implantable medical sensors. In the past, we have seen futuristic announcements of entire nano-power plants that are imagined to be implanted within arteries to use the blood flow to generate electricity where it is needed, but these devices are still very much science fiction. Before these power plants arrive, micro batteries are mo...

An interesting article of hacking into bank account by using information posted on social networking websites. Read the article here

Researchers have developed a new immunization strategy that requires up to 50% fewer immunization doses compared with the current most efficient strategy. The new strategy could be used to prevent the spread of human epidemics and computer viruses, and it applies to a wide variety of networks. The new method, called the “equal graph partitioning” (EGP) immunization strategy, is being proposed by a team of scientists from Boston University, Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel, and Stockholm University. Their study is published in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters. In real life, the number of immunization doses is often limited or very expensive, so a strategy that requires the fewest doses could be very useful. As the researchers explain, the question of how to immunize a network with a minimum number of doses is mathematically equivalent to asking how to fragment a network with a minimum number of node removals. In this sense, the new EGP strategy works differently than t...