The Objet1000 (produced by Stratasys Ltd., the newly-minted entity produced by the merger of Israeli 3-D print outfit Objet and Minnesota’s own Stratasys) has a build volume of roughly 40 inches by 31 inches by 20 inches, far larger than the print area of even the most generous desktop 3-D printers. Then again, as you can see in the video above, the Objet1000 is no desktop printer. At $800,000, it doesn’t retail quite like a Makerbot either....

As the name suggests, the optical analog switches rely on light for their actions. “Digital switches only see zeroes and ones,” says Marquis Tan, a global product manager at Razer. “It’s either pressed or it’s not. An analog switch gives a more granular amount of information to the PC. Instead of zero to one, it’s zero to 255.” The stem of each switch has a triangular opening through which light travels to an optical sensor....

Polling rate simply counts the number of times per second that the mouse tells the computer information about its location or whether or not you’ve clicked. The more times the mouse sends this information, the smoother your cursor should move across the screen, whether you’re in the midst of intense game action or just moving around the menus. Even some gamers have never really considered this stat because, at 1,000 or 2,000 Hz, the tiny delay between your hand and the cursor is already nearly imperceptible....

Travel advisories are changing constantly, not to mention how several countries have also issued travel bans against Americans. It’s important to keep all that in mind to avoid being stranded in a foreign country, or being sent home before you even pass through customs. Even if you’re just hoping to hop state lines to visit family, certain states like Alaska and Rhode Island, among others, have issued domestic travel restrictions....

Research into all of these burning topics and more was honored yesterday at the 2022 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. Now in its 32nd year, the good-natured parody of the Nobel prize recognizes the most unique, silly, and downright bizarre research that “first make people laugh and then make them think.” The Annals of Improbable Research gives out the awards less than one month before the real Nobel prizes are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden....

Rolling Square, a Switzerland-based company with a passion for creating products that solve everyday problems, managed to rake in over $1 million in funding to come up with a solution to this perpetual dilemma. Their brainchild InCharge is an all-in-one cable that’s capable of connecting, transferring files, and charging any device that you own. You can score an InCharge Charging Cable for 24 percent off for a limited time. Touted as the Swiss Army knife of wires, InCharge is equipped with USB and USB-C ports for input and Lightning USB-C, and MicroUSB connectors for output, resulting in 6 different charging combinations....

You can listen in the player above, subscribe on iTunes, add us on Stitcher, follow us on Anchor, or even keep up via Spotify. Be sure to follow the Techathlon Twitter account for updates, too. This week’s episode is a short one. There’s only one game and it’s the Techathlon Decathlon, in which our host and producer, Jason Lederman, breaks down some of the biggest stories in the technology world into a battery of 10 tough trivia questions....

This week, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that we’ve now topped 1,000 cases in 2019. Elimination isn’t about case numbers, though, it’s about time—and just last week, the Director of the CDC warned that we could be in danger of losing our status as a measles-eliminated country. What does it mean to lose elimination status? The World Health Organization defines “elimination” as the absence of endemic measles—meaning continuing transmission of the disease within the country—for more than 12 months....

The V-280 Valor could do just that. Its tilt-rotor design allows the craft to take off and land vertically, like a helicopter, or pitch its rotors forward to fly horizontally, like a turboprop plane. It stands to be safer and more agile than its clunky cousin, the V-22 Osprey. And at twice the speed and combat range of the Army’s current workhorse, the Black Hawk helicopter, the V-280 could vastly extend the reach of U....

The Goblin—formally known as 2015 TG387—is the largest mass yet found at its distance from the Sun, and the farthest away. The survey that turned up The Goblin previously found two other objects near that range, Sedna and 2012 VP113. Although each of those objects has a perihelion (the point in their orbit where they’re closest to the Sun) more distant than The Goblin’s, the furthest point they travel away from the Sun is also nearer....

To better understand such complex structures within butterfly wings, researchers from Columbia and Harvard developed a new infrared imaging technique. The team removed the wing scales of more than 50 butterfly species to get a closer look at the interior neurons lurking underneath. Their custom thermal camera then recorded the wing’s cooling process, highlighting where heat dissipated from certain areas. Ultimately, as they showcase in their study published last week in Nature, they produced colorful maps of temperature distributions among butterfly wings....

Fact: Scientists are feeding poisoned toad butts to predators to save their lives. By Bethany Brookshire Cane toads hopped across Australia beginning in the 1930s. Scientists brought them in originally to try to combat the cane grub attacking sugar cane farms. Unfortunately, cane toads weren’t much for cane grub control. Instead, they bred really well and started hopping west. (For the best possible content on this, I recommend this iconic cane toad documentary on YouTube....

So if you’re looking to be the next Jeff Bezos, you should probably hire a professional photographer (and those vases probably won’t cut it, either), but if your ambitions are more along the lines of downsizing or making a buck off a hobby, you can definitely do the job yourself. Using things you already own, you can turn a corner of your house into a makeshift studio that will help you take the best photos you can of anything you can’t wait to get rid of....

Weight: 1 ounce A cardboard fuselage and ­hollow nose cone minimize the 29-inch missile’s weight to maxi­mize efficiency. Sanding down the laser-cut balsa fins creates smooth edges that reduce drag. Max height: 1 mile+ Choose a slow-burning motor to push the Apogee more than a mile high. A metallic ribbon attached with a Kevlar cord (which also secures the nose cone) makes it easy to track across the sky and recover after landing....

Most Americans probably associate Aston Martin with James Bond, given the brand’s appearances in the films, but the company doesn’t only make small sports cars and grand tourers anymore. Since 2020, Aston has built its DBX crossover SUV, and the income from this product alone has proven to be a lifesaver for the carmaker. Now, Aston is launching an all-new performance version: the DBX707. The all-new Aston Martin DBX707 is an upgraded version of Aston’s standard DBX, and at a passing glance, many might not notice what makes this particular model so impressive....

A team led by entomologist Paul Marek started collecting the creatures on a an expedition in 2005 and over the next three years found 17 specimens (12,750 legs maximum). At just 3 centimeters long, it’s not especially threatening–although it does have claws at the end of those legs. And 750 limbs is on the high-end: females have up to that many, while males have more than 550. Other cool/creepy things about Illacme plenipes, in no particular order:...

The device, about an inch long, looks similar to a stent, an apparatus placed around the heart to open up clogged blood vessels—in fact, the researchers named it a “stentrode.” To insert it, the researchers put a catheter into a vein in the neck, then snake it through the blood vessels into the head until the end is in the desired part of the brain, next to the motor cortex....

The deep water cycle has been difficult for scientists to fully understand, particularly because the deepest known borehole (a narrow human-made hole used to look for oil or water) can only reach just over 7 and a half miles deep. However, a new study published yesterday in the journal Nature Geoscience, suggests that a a watery environment exists in the Earth’s lower mantle further down than they previously believed. The team looked to the transition zone (TZ), which is about 254 to 410 miles below the Earth in the boundary that separates the upper mantle and the lower mantle....

A new credit card from Mastercard, as reported by the BBC, is going through those same growing pains. The card, first rolling out in Singapore before the rest of the world sees it, has a built-in greyscale LCD screen and a number pad. Mastercard will mostly use those features for security purposes, at first, though eventually they plan to roll out bonuses like loyalty rewards and coupons. Also today, Starbucks announced the rollout of Square Wallet to 7,000 of its shops nationwide....