Media Collective

A Boatload of Trouble? America’s Other Hidden Oil Reserves: Shipwrecks

Core77 — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:00:00 +0000

This is crazy—see those yellow dots on the map? Those are the locations of some 20,000 known shipwrecks off the coast of America, all mapped by the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration as part of their Remediation of Underwater Legacy Environmental Threats (RULET) project. Many of those yellow dots are older sailing ships or coal-fired vessels, and it's no big deal if those sit on the bottom of the ocean; others, however, are World-War-II-era oil tankers torpedoed by the freaking Nazis.

Those tankers, and some other non-wartime wrecks carrying large volumes of oil, are a problem. It's only a matter of time before corrosion starts to release thousands of tons of oil from those ships into the ocean. Some 87 wrecks have been added to a national risk assessment report, with 36 of them deemed "high priority for a Worst Case Discharge." And these are just the boats that NOAA knows about; they estimate "it is likely that local knowledge will bring forward other vessels that [also] meet the criteria...."

If these ships start to leak, it is not just the poor Gulf states that dealt with the Deepwater Horizon disaster that will be affected:

The majority of the 36 higher risk wrecks identified in RULET are located off the North Carolina and Florida coasts. They reflect the intensity of World War II casualties in the Battle of the Atlantic. For the 6 Most Probable Discharge (10%) scenario, the high priority wrecks are located off of New England and Florida.

As this report was just released two days ago, any potential solutions have yet to surface.

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Carve Out Your Own Niche with Goodbaby in Boston, Massachusetts

Core77 — Wed, 22 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

wants a Product Designer
in Boston, Massachusetts

Goodbaby, the #1 juvenile products manufacturer in the World, servicing customer brands throughout North America, Europe, and Asia, wants you to contribute contribute to their process with your own personality and unique skill set.

You'll be working in an open studio in Boston's South End with a relaxed atmosphere and a multidisciplinary environment where people are expected to take ownership of their projects with minimal management. You'll need to bring 5-7 years professional experience, preferably with experience in juvenile or automotive products and a great, easy going attitude and personality.

Apply Now

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Thinking Outside the Build Platform: MATAERIAL’s ‘Anti-Gravity Object Modeling’ 3D Printer

Core77 — Wed, 22 May 2013 08:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year, we came across the 3Doodler, a pen that allows the user to sketch far beyond the bounds a material substrate, namely paper. (Boston's WobbleWorks had more than quadrupled their $30,000 funding goal when we posted about the product at launch; by the time the campaign wrapped up a month later, they'd raised a whopping $2.3m)

Led by Petr Novikov and Saša Jokić, a team of researchers from the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) and Joris Laarman Studio in Amsterdam have developed a new, patent-pending additive manufacturing technology, known as MATAERIAL. (Pun lover though I may be, it took me a moment to get the name.) The machine is essentially an articulating arm that can create three-dimensional objects on any surface, independently of a build platform.

By using innovative extrusion technology we are now able to neutralize the effect of gravity during the course of the printing process. This method gives us a flexibility to create truly natural objects by making 3D curves instead of 2D layers. Unlike 2D layers that are ignorant to the structure of the object, the 3D curves can follow exact stress lines of a custom shape. Finally, our new out of the box printing method can help manufacture structures of almost any size and shape.

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Thinking Outside the Build Platform: MATAERIAL’s ‘Anti-Gravity Object Modeling’ 3D Printer

Core77 — Wed, 22 May 2013 08:00:00 +0000

By using innovative extrusion technology we are now able to neutralize the effect of gravity during the course of the printing process. This method gives us a flexibility to create truly natural objects by making 3D curves instead of 2D layers. Unlike 2D layers that are ignorant to the structure of the object, the 3D curves can follow exact stress lines of a custom shape. Finally, our new out of the box printing method can help manufacture structures of almost any size and shape.

(more...)

Product of the day: HI-MACS – Solid Alpine White, Reiffeisen Zurich

Stylepark — Wed, 22 May 2013 01:01:18 +0000

For product information please contact the manufacturer.