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Media Advisory 14-013

Learn the latest on advanced manufacturing at a June 17 Capitol Hill briefing

NSF, DISCOVER Magazine and ASME present "Made to Order: Customization in Internet-enabled Manufacturing"

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metallic digital material

A metallic digital material is shown here. Digital materials are bulk composites from digital parts with programmable material characteristics. This method has produced the lightest, strongest materials in existence, as well as materials with tunable and exotic responses to external and internal loads. Fabrication efficiency of these materials scales with the development of assembler robots that use the geometry of the lattice for locomotion and error-correction.

Credit: The Center for Bits and Atoms, MIT.


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Mobile field fab lab.

A mobile field Fab lab provides access to modern means for invention. Fab labs began as an outreach project from MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA). <>CBA assembled millions of dollars in machines for research in digital fabrication, ultimately aiming at developing programmable molecular assemblers that will be able to make almost anything. Fab labs fall between these extremes, comprising roughly $50,000 in equipment and materials that can be used today to do what will be possible with tomorrow's personal fabricators.

Fab labs have spread from inner-city Boston to rural India, from South Africa to the North of Norway. Activities in fab labs range from technological empowerment to peer-to-peer project-based technical training to local problem-solving to small-scale high-tech business incubation to grass-roots research.

Projects being developed and produced in fab labs include solar and wind-powered turbines, thin-client computers and wireless data networks, analytical instrumentation for agriculture and healthcare, custom housing, and rapid-prototyping of rapid-prototyping machines. Visit http://www.fabfoundation.org/fab-labs for more information.

Credit: The Center for Bits and Atoms, MIT.


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