Cutting Edge

Till now, 3D printing has been used to create relatively small items -- everything from iPhone cases to prosthetic fingers to aircraft parts and alien shoes. But none of those projects are a match for the full-size house Dutch architects have begun building in Amsterdam using a 20-foot-tall 3D printer.

The project, known simply as the "3D Print Canal House," uses a super-sized version of the popular in-home 3D printer made by Ultimaker. Dutch architectural firm Dus commissioned the machine when it decided to take the scale-model rooms it was already 3D-printing and turn them into the real thing.… Read more

When scientists speak about space and the world out there, it's always worth a listen.

But they're scientists. They have a vested interest in being right. More interesting, perhaps, are the people who seem to have an unalienable instinct for the truths of existence.

William Shatner is surely one of these people. Not merely for his portrayals of Capt. James T. Kirk and the Priceline Negotiator, but for his extraterrestrial nose for truth when he played Denny Crane in "Boston Legal."

Shatner has now offered his definitive view on alien life.

In an interview with the Daily Mail, … Read more

Some robot fish we've seen wouldn't be able to escape a predator if their fins depended on it.

Enter the new fish-shaped "soft robot" developed by Andrew Marchese, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. It can execute an escape maneuver called a "C-turn" in about 100 milliseconds, matching the speed of fish in the wild. Such swiftness is one of the things that most sets this robofish apart.

Soft robots are machines that have gushy exteriors and move around through the use of fluids or gases pumping … Read more

We all have our rules.

For some, it's five seconds. For others, ten. And for students, it tends to be measured in days.

Every time we drop food on the floor, we know we're taking a risk by picking it up again and putting it in our mouths. But, well, it's food. And it wasn't there for that long.

A microbiologist took it upon himself to test just how dirty food gets when dropped on the floor.

Anthony Hilton of Aston University in Birmingham, UK, thought it might be instructive to try various surfaces to see if what goes down can come up again intact.

He and his students dropped toast, pasta, and sticky candies on various floors -- carpet, laminate and tiled surfaces -- for between 3 and 30 seconds. Then they ate them. No, wait. Then they examined them for bacteria.… Read more

Picture a 3D virtual representation of your living room, one you can fly over in a top-down view and even move through with the fluidity of a first-person video game. Now imagine having the ability to tinker with that space: Change the paint on your walls, drop in a new couch to see how it fits with the existing furniture, or perform accurate measurements of the room, all on a computer screen.

That's Matterport's vision for the future of 3D modeling, and it extends beyond home renovation. From architecture and construction to real estate and crime scene visualization, … Read more

While the general public appears to still be making up its mind about Google Glass and the idea of wearing a face computer, in some fields of work the wearable could be a helpful asset.

One such field is medicine. By using Glass, doctors won't have to use their hands to dig through files, search computers, or look up facts on a tablet. With a simple nod of the head or blink of the eye, they could get all of the real-time information they need without having to leave a patient.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston has … Read more

As the latest piece of technology to be enlisted in the search for missing Malaysian flight MH370, satellites have the eyes of the world watching them as they watch us.

On Monday, a crowdsourcing platform called Tomnod, along with parent company DigitalGlobe, launched a crowdsourcing campaign to enlist the help of citizens in scouring satellite images to search for the plane that disappeared on March 7.

China has followed that up by activating the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters to join the hunt on Tuesday. The goal of the charter is to enlist space data from 15 member organizations to provide assistance in the case of a "natural or technological disaster." The charter describes such a disaster as "a situation of great distress involving loss of human life or large-scale damage to property, caused by a natural phenomenon, such as a cyclone, tornado, earthquake, volcanic eruption, flood or forest fire, or by a technological accident, such as pollution by hydrocarbons, toxic or radioactive substances."… Read more

An intrepid great white shark nicknamed Lydia is off having the journey of a lifetime, and the public is getting to follow along on the unprecedented adventure. She's crossing the Atlantic ocean, but she's not alone. The 14-foot-long shark carries a satellite tracking tag and her movements are constantly updated on the Ocearch Shark Tracker site.

Lydia isn't the first shark to be tracked by Ocearch, a nonprofit ocean predator research organization, but she is the first tracked shark to go gallivanting all the way across the Atlantic on a personal cruise. The map of her movements is impressive. She has traveled around 20,000 miles since she was tagged about a year ago.… Read more

No job is sacred any more: Even the technology trade show booth babe's role has been taken over by robots. Lexy and Tess the robotic pole dancers drew a crowd Monday at the CeBit IT show in Hanover, Germany.

The pair were upgraded models for the Tobit Software booth, which has been displaying the dancers for a few years now. Designed by British artist Giles Walker, they're made from 12V motors found in cars (the kind that control the windshield wipers); have LED arrays instead of faces; and are controlled via PC, while their "male" counterpart, a DJ with a megaphone horn for a head, looks on. … Read more