An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Solar cells can now be made so thin, light and flexible that they can rest on a soap bubble. The new cells, which efficiently capture energy from light, could offer an alternative way to power novel electronic devices, such as medical skin patches, where conventional energy sources are unsuitable. Until now, ultrathin organic solar cells were typically made by spin-coating or thermal evaporation, which are not scalable and which limit device geometry. This technique involved using a transparent and conductive, but brittle and inflexible, material called indium tin oxide (ITO) as an electrode. To overcome these limitations, the team applied inkjet printing. "We formulated functional inks for each the layer of the solar cell architecture," says Daniel Corzo, a Ph.D. student in Baran's team.

Instead of ITO, the team printed a transparent, flexible, conductive polymer called PEDOT:PSS, or poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate. The electrode layers sandwiched a light-capturing organic photovoltaic material. The whole device could be sealed within parylene, a flexible, waterproof, biocompatible protective coating. [...] After optimizing the ink composition for each layer of the device, the solar cells were printed onto glass to test their performance. They achieved a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 4.73 percent, beating the previous record of 4.1 percent for a fully printed cell. For the first time, the team also showed that they could print a cell onto an ultrathin flexible substrate, reaching a PCE of 3.6 percent. The research has been published in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies.

Scientists are conducting preliminary tests of COVID-19 drugs using 3D printed human organs, eliminating the need to perform tests on animals, or, of course, humans. The Week reports: For example, Anthony Atala, the director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and his team are using 3-D printers to create tiny replicas of human organs, including miniature lungs and colons, which are particularly affected by the coronavirus. They send them overnight for testing at a biosafety lab at George Mason University. The idea predated the coronavirus -- Atala said he never thought "we'd be considering this for a pandemic" -- but it could come in handy and help expedite the experimental drug process, especially since Atala said his Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based lab can churn out thousands of printed organs per hour. "The 3-D models can circumvent animal testing and make the pathway stronger from the lab to the clinic," said Akhilesh Gaharwar, who directs a lab in the biomedical engineering at Texas A&M University. Further reading: The New York Times

KFC announced that it will test chicken nuggets made with 3D bioprinting technology in Moscow, Russia, this fall. Business Insider reports: The chicken chain has partnered with 3D Bioprinting Solutions to create a chicken nugget made in a lab with chicken and plant cells using bioprinting. Bioprinting, which uses 3D-printing techniques to combine biological material, is used in medicine to create tissue and even organs. The 3D-printed chicken nuggets will closely mimic the taste and appearance of KFC's original chicken nuggets, according to the press release. KFC expects the production of 3D-printed nuggets to be more environmentally friendly than the production process of its traditional chicken nuggets. The fall release will mark the first debut of a lab-grown chicken nugget at a global fast-food chain like KFC.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: With select bucket seats from the 911 and 718 as well as various classic car parts -- including clutch release levers for the 959 -- already being produced using 3D printing, Porsche is more familiar with the technology than most. Now, the automaker is taking things even further, 3D printing entire pistons for its most powerful 991-gen 911, the GT2 RS. Although it doesn't sound like these 3D-printed pistons will actually be found in many production Porsches anytime soon, they represent a bit more than just an engineering flex. There are some very real mechanical benefits here. For starters, they weigh 10 percent less than their forged equivalents and feature an integrated and closed cooling duct in the piston crown that's apparently unable to be reproduced using traditional manufacturing methods. The decrease in weight and temperature results in an extra 30 horsepower on top of the GT2 RS's already mighty 700.

Produced in partnership with German auto part maker Mahle and industrial machine manufacturer Trumpf, the pistons are made out of a high-purity metal powder developed in-house by the former using the laser metal fusion process, essentially a laser beam that heats and melts the metal powder into the desired shape. The end result is then validated using measurement technology from Zeiss, the German optics company best known for camera lenses.

To many of its employees, WeWork was much more than a job. Adam Neumann, the co-founder and former chief executive officer, kept workers motivated by invoking a higher calling to community-building and promising a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. From a report: "None of us want to look back and say, 'I could have done more,'" Neumann said in a 2016 staff meeting, captured in hours of tape obtained by Bloomberg. "That's not acceptable. You do not get a chance like this again." In this episode of Foundering, a former WeWork executive assistant, Cody Quinn, describes the tumultuous experience working inside WeWork's New York headquarters. According to Quinn, most employees worked until near-burnout, then were rewarded with trips to Summer Camp and Summit, WeWork's famously raucous companywide parties. And she details the strange things she saw at the office: an executive smashing a printer on the floor, 2 a.m. meetings with Neumann and an elaborate technique designed to lure investors called "activating the space."

In 2021, Israeli startup Redefine Meat plans to launch a 3D printer that will allow customers to produce plant-based flank steak at home. Engadget reports: Redefine Meat says that through 3D printing, it's able to create plant-based meat with the same "appearance, texture and flavor of animal meat," according to its website. Texture specifically seems to be the 3D printer's hallmark achievement. "You need a 3D printer to mimic the structure of the muscle of the animal," Redefine Meat CEO Eshchar Ben-Shitrit told Reuters.

3D printing differs from other methods companies have used for reproducing meat taste and texture. Both Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat use combinations of plant-based proteins, oils and binders, like methylcellulose and potato starch, to achieve a realistic texture for their ground beef and patties -- though the texture of ground beef is arguably easier to achieve than that of steak. Atlast Food uses mushroom fibers to emulate animal tissue in its meatless bacon.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: In a report published earlier this month, security researchers from the Shadowserver Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on improving cyber-security practices across the world, have published a warning about companies that are leaving printers exposed online. More specifically, Shadowserver experts scanned all the four billion routable IPv4 addresses for printers that are exposing their IPP port. IPP stands for "Internet Printing Protocol" and, as the name suggests, is a protocol that allows users to manage internet-connected printers and send printing jobs to printers hosted online. The difference between IPP and the multiple other printer management protocols is that IPP is a secure protocol that supports advanced features such as access control lists, authentication, and encrypted communications. However, this doesn't mean that device owners are making use of any of these features.

Shadowserver experts said they specifically scanned the internet for IPP-capable printers that were left exposed without being protected by a firewall and allowed attackers to query for local details via the "Get-Printer-Attributes" function. In total, experts said they usually found an average of around 80,000 printers exposing themselves online via the IPP port on a daily basis. The number is about an eighth of all IPP-capable printers currently connected online. A normal scan with the BinaryEdge search engine reveals a daily count of between 650,000 and 700,000 devices with their IPP port (TCP/631) reachable via the internet. What are the issues with not securing the IPP port? Shadowserver experts say this port can be used for intelligence gathering, since many of the printers scanned returned additional info about themselves, such as printer names, locations, models, firmware, organization names, and even Wi-Fi network names.

"To configure IPP access control and IPP authentication features, users are advised to check their printers' manuals," adds ZDNet. "Most printers have an IPP configuration section in their administration panel from where users can enable authentication, encryption, and limit access to the device via access lists."

A new article on The Hustle tries to explain why sports stadiums are suddenly full of fans made out of cardboard: Back in March, a German filmmaker and soccer aficionado named Ingo Müller was sitting at home, complaining to his wife about not being able to attend the matches of his favorite club team, Borussia Mönchengladbach. "She said, 'If you're really pissed about not going to the stadium, just take a photo and send it there,'" Müller tells The Hustle. So Müller contacted a local printer and a team to build a portal where fans could upload photos of themselves. For a sum of €19 ($21 USD), he'd print out each photo on a cardboard cutout and install it in the stadium, with the permission of club owners. Originally, he anticipated between 500 and 2k orders. So far, 21k+ people have purchased a cutout.

All the proceeds go back to charities associated with the team, including a portion to fans impacted by the pandemic. Now, Müller has received inquiries from sports teams in "at least 15 countries," including Sweden, Colombia, China, Russia, Serbia, and Austria, about setting up their own cardboard fan project. He's even decided to apply for a Guinness World Record. And Müller isn't the only one tapping into the trend. Cardboard fans are lining the stands at baseball games in Taiwan and South Korea, and soccer matches all over Europe. Shaquille O'Neal's cardboard likeness even turned up for a soccer match in Northampton, England. At least 8 Premiere League teams have been in talks to fill their stands with cutouts. Turkish soccer clubs are trying a model with two price tiers: 123 liras ($18) for season ticket holders and 149 liras ($22) for regular fans...

For sports teams trying to recoup ticket revenue, cardboard fans aren't the only idea in the mix. Using AR, an Iceland-based company, OzSports, is trying to project avatars of fans into seats. In Denmark, one team brought 10k fans into its stadium with Zoom. In South Korea, a soccer team filled its fan seats with actual sex dolls — a move that earned them widespread criticism and an ~$81k fine.

Tenino, Washington (population: 1,884) has launched its own local currency, reports the Hustle: Mayor Wayne Fournier decided that Tenino would set aside $10k to give out to low-income residents hurt by the pandemic. But instead of using federal dollars, he'd print the money on thin sheets of wood designed exclusively for use in Tenino. His mint? A 130-year-old newspaper printer from a local museum...

Residents below the poverty line can apply to receive money from the $10k fund that Tenino has set aside. Fournier says they also have to prove that the pandemic has impacted them, but "we're pretty open to what that means." Once they're approved, they can pick up their stipends, printed in wooden notes worth $25 each. The city is capping the amount each resident can accrue at 12 wooden notes — or $300 — per month. According to Fournier, each note features a Latin inscription that means, basically, 'We've got this handled'...

By creating its own local currency, Tenino keeps the money in the community. As Fournier puts it, "Amazon will not be accepting wooden dollars."

"The money stays in the city. It doesn't go out to Walmart and Costco and all those places," says Joyce Worrell, who has run the antique shop Iron Works Boutiques for the past decade.
The article notes that during the 1930s hundreds of scrips were issued by American municipalities, worker co-ops, and business associations -- estimated to be worth as much as $1 billion.

And it adds that at least a few small towns in Italy and Mexico are now giving the idea another try.

Windows 10 received its monthly host of security patches earlier this week, and the latest cumulative updates are causing serious problems with printers -- particularly Ricoh devices, but also other models. TechRadar reports: The so-called 'Patch Tuesday' fixes released earlier in the week which are causing chaos are KB4557957 and KB4560960, which are for the May 2020 Update and the November 2019 Update. (Note that in one case, KB4561608, for the October 2018 Update, is also mentioned). As one Ricoh owner observed on Reddit: "Has anyone had issues today with printing and the latest Windows update [KB4560960]? We're seeing problems with Ricoh printers that were previously stable. Changing the print driver seems to help but that's going to be a pain if I have to roll it out to too many clients." Other folks with Ricoh printers have chimed in on that thread with similar issues in terms of breaking printer functionality completely, or elements of it, such as causing wireless printing to fail.

Further reports of printer failures include Brother and Canon devices, as well as some Kyocera, HP, Toshiba and Panasonic models. A network technician for a mainly Ricoh dealership also contributed to that Reddit thread, and noted: "After an abundance of service calls these last 2 days, I can confidently say PCL5 [driver] does not work at all, regardless of driver age. Installing the newest version of the PCL6 universal driver *does* seem to work. Not a realistic approach to servicing hundreds of clients, but at least new clients setup before the new patch should be okay." Another solution is to simply uninstall the cumulative update. Thankfully, Microsoft is already working on a fix.

Two security researchers have published today details about a vulnerability in the Windows printing service that they say impacts all Windows versions going back to Windows NT 4, released in 1996. From a report: The vulnerability, which they codenamed PrintDemon, is located in Windows Print Spooler, the primary Windows component responsible for managing print operations. The service can send data to be printed to a USB/parallel port for physically connected printers; to a TCP port for printers residing on a local network or the internet; or to a local file, in the rare event the user wants to save a print job for later. In a report published today, security researchers Alex Ionescu & Yarden Shafir said they found a bug in this old component that can be abused to hijack the Printer Spooler internal mechanism. The bug can't be used to break into a Windows client remotely over the internet, so it's not something that could be exploited to hack Windows systems at random over the internet.

"Sales of Raspberry Pi's single-board computers hit 640,000 in March, the second-biggest month for sales since they started selling," reports TechRepublic, "as consumers flocked to inexpensive ways to work and learn from home." But that's not all, Eben Upton tells them: With the pandemic having highlighted shortages in personal protective equipment (PPE), 3D-printing manufacturers and hobbyists have been building face shields printed on plastic acetate that can be quickly assembled and delivered to hospitals, for free. "A lot of that is Pi-driven," Upton explained, noting that OctoPrint, which is the most popular platform for managing 3D printers, runs on Raspberry Pi... "[M]aking face shields seems to be a community effort. You have people with a home printer, printing these things once a week and then going to a post office and sending them," he said.

"Then you'll have some people sat in a hack space receiving the parcels, cutting the acetate and the elastic, assembling them into face shields then sending them to the hospital. It's amazing." Upton suggested this effort could eventually be ramped up to a "massively distributed scale", with the benefit of open source being that, once you have a good design that works, it can be rapidly iterated. In the long term, this could even include the ventilators themselves, he said.

"One thing we're seeing with this is people finding a niche within which open hardware really works," he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Two dozen state attorneys general are asking the Trump administration to crack down on Defense Distributed's Defcad site for selling 3D-printed gun files. In a letter sent today, they urged the Justice Department and State Department to enforce rules against exporting weapons and making undetectable firearms. "If the federal government fails to act, these files will be distributed widely with potentially grave consequences for our national and domestic security," warns the letter. Attorneys general argue that Defcad is violating export control regulations and the Undetectable Firearms Act, which bans manufacturing, owning, and selling guns that don't trigger metal detectors. Anyone who downloads files could "automatically manufacture functional weapons that cannot be detected by a standard metal detector and, furthermore, are untraceable because they lack serial numbers," says the letter. "Continued dissemination of these files will increase the risk of terrorist attacks and gun violence across the United States." Defcad has well-established problems with ITAR, but the letter doesn't explain how it violates the Undetectable Firearms Act beyond asserting that files "enable the automatic manufacture of functional plastic weapons."

"From face-shields to respirator valves, 3-D printer owners pitch in to the efforts to provide PPE to Australian hospitals," writes davecb (Slashdot reader #6,526).

It's not only happening in Australia. But the Guardian talked to Mat Bowtell, a former Toyota engineer in Australia who's using fourteen 3D printers to manufacture thousands of face shields for healthcare workers. And citing 3D printing, the director of a not-for-profit working with the government says the country has an "incredible onshore capability" to respond to the pandemic: "The 3D printing capability onshore is a massive distinguisher for Australia to step up to the crisis," he said. When asked how else 3D printing might be deployed in practice, Goennemann points to the supply of ventilators, which are needed to assist breathing in the most seriously ill Covid-19 patients... Goennemann says Resmed, the main ventilator manufacturer, could struggle to get parts due to the disruption of global supply chains. That's where 3D printing can help. "I don't want to speak on behalf of Resmed, but that's an area where we have critical supply, and parts can be 3D printed onshore rather than being procured offshore," he said...

For Bowtell, the decision to shift his production to face shields had nothing to do with profit. It was about doing what he could in the most extraordinary of times. "It's about survival at the moment," Bowtell said. "Just helping people to get through this together."
Reuters also reported that one Italian company used its 3D printers to manufacture valves for respirators for its local hospital. And a paywalled article at Fortune also describes the team building an open source ventilator, while also noting that more than 4,800 people with 3D printers "have, via a public Google Doc, signed up to help print everything from face shields to ventilator parts for their local hospitals."

They also highlight Budmen Industries, an upstate New York company selling 3D printers that has now also printed 1,492 face shields for New York medical workers. And finally there's the CoVent-19 Challenge, "an open innovation 8-week Grand Challenge for engineers, innovators, designers, and makers" on the GrabCAD Challenges platform, to create "a rapidly deployable, minimum viable mechanical ventilator for patients with COVID-19 related ventilator-dependent lung injury."

Xeros is pulling the plug on its hostile bid to buy larger rival HP (Warning: paywalled; alternative source) after the coronavirus pandemic undermined the copier maker's ability to pull off the debt-laden merger. The Wall Street Journal reports: Xerox said Tuesday it is ending both its more than $30 billion tender offer and a proxy fight to replace the printer and PC maker's board. Xerox concluded it is no longer prudent to pursue the deal given the public health crisis and resulting market swoon. The move puts the kibosh on one of the biggest mergers in the works and underscores the blow that the coronavirus has dealt to the world of deal making.

It marks the end of a five-month-long offensive by Xerox, kicked off when its offer became public in early November after the two companies had earlier explored a combination quietly but failed to come to an agreement. HP has repeatedly rebuffed its rival since then, rejecting Xerox's latest cash-and-stock offer of $24 a share and an earlier one as insufficient and too risky given the amount of debt involved. Xerox's move to buy a company more than three times its size was always going to be a challenge, but at the outset the company was in a stronger position than it is today. It had cash coming in from the sale of its joint venture with Fujifilm and its stock had been rising as it continued to cut costs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In a great example of what can happen when smart, technically-oriented people come together in a time of need, an open-source hardware project started by a group including Irish entrepreneur Colin Keogh and Breeze Automation CEO and co-founder Gui Calavanti has produced a prototype ventilator using 3D-printed parts and readily available, inexpensive material. The ventilator prototype was designed and produced in just seven days, after the project spun up on Facebook and attracted participation from over 300 engineers, medical professionals and researchers.

The prototype will now enter into a validation process by the Irish Health Services Executive (HSE), the country's health regulatory body. This will technically only validate it for use in Ireland, which ironically looks relatively well-stocked for ventilator hardware, but it will be a key stamp of approval that could pave the way for its deployment across countries where there are shortages, including low-income nations. The group behind the ventilator also recently changed the focus of their Facebook community, renaming the group from the Open Source Ventilator Project to the Open Source COVID19 Medical Supplies community. They're looking at expanding their focus to finding ways to cheaply and effectively build and validate other needed equipment, including protective gear like masks, sanitizer and protective face guards for front-line healthcare workers.

A medical device manufacturer has threatened to sue a group of volunteers in Italy that 3D printed a valve used for life-saving coronavirus treatments. From a report: The valve typically costs about $11,000 from the medical device manufacturer, but the volunteers were able to print replicas for about $1. A hospital in Italy was in need of the valves after running out while treating patients for COVID-19. The hospital's usual supplier said they could not make the valves in time to treat the patients. That launched a search for a way to 3D print a replica part, and Cristian Fracassi and Alessandro Ramaioli, who work at Italian startup Isinnova, offered their company's printer for the job. However, when the pair asked the manufacturer of the valves for blueprints they could use to print replicas, the company declined and threatened to sue for patent infringement. Fracassi and Ramaioli moved ahead anyway by measuring the valves and 3D printing three different versions of them.

According to 9to5Google, Google is working on a native Chrome OS app for printing and scanning documents. From the report: While there are many ways to start printing on Chrome OS, there's no real way to see what you've currently got queued to print, when not using Cloud Print [which is shutting down at the end of the year]. This is particularly frustrating if you've accidentally printed a long document as there's no way to cancel. [...] Late last month, work began on a new "Print Management app," starting with a Chrome OS specific flag in chrome://flags. Print Management is still in the early stages of development but we know that, like many Chrome OS apps, it'll be a web-based System Web App (SWA), which you can launch from the printers section of the main Settings app. Inside, you'll see a list of your recent printing attempts, including useful information like the job's name, what time it started, whether it succeeded, and which printer it was sent to.

And then, of course, on the flip side of working with paper documents is scanning, which is by no means easy to do on Chrome OS. Thankfully, Print Management will also include a UI for scanning documents and photos. The Chromium team is already working on this behind yet another flag.

America's onetime innovation icons are wrestling over their biggest remaining piles of money. From a report: The HP 63 Tri-color ink cartridge retails for $28.99 at Staples. Stuffed with foam sponges drenched in a fraction of an ounce of cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes, this bestseller, model No. F6U61AN#140, can spray 36,000 drops per second in the Envy printers made by HP. The 63 Tri-color cartridge may not look like much, but that ink, which needs a refill every 165 pages, is ridiculously valuable. HP's printer supplies business garnered $12.9 billion in sales last year, and the printer division overall represented 63% of the company's profits. Here in the year 2020, proprietary ink cartridges remain important enough to spark a fight worth at least $35 billion.

With backing from Carl Icahn, Xerox has been trying to buy the much larger HP for what the target says is a laughable bid. On Monday, HP Chief Executive Officer Enrique Lores moved to protect his hold on F6U61AN#140 and its toner brethren. During his report on the company's latest quarterly earnings, which met Wall Street's expectations, Lores announced that HP would triple its share buyback program to $15 billion over three years as part of an effort to fend off the hostile takeover. While Lores said he was open to exploring new merger frameworks, he dismissed the size and technology of Xerox Holdings Corp. and stressed that HP already had a winning strategy. "I am pumped up," the CEO tells Bloomberg Businessweek in an interview shortly after the earnings call. "We have a great plan." Lores, who's spent three decades at HP, has survived his share of existential threats. Before he took over as CEO in November, he'd led the printer business to a streak of revenue gains after even his bosses had left it for dead. But last year also saw HP's share price fall by a third from a February high. The company announced thousands of employee layoffs as it struggled to compete with cheaper ink cartridges from Asia. That public floundering has left HP freshly vulnerable to activist investors such as Icahn, who owns 11% of Xerox and 4% of HP.

Icahn snarked in December that HP appears in danger of following "the road to the graveyard." For decades, HP and Xerox ranked among the most powerful forces of invention in Silicon Valley. Now they're arguing over who has the superior vision to acquire competitors, jettison workers, and jealously guard the tech specs of their aging intellectual property. It's unclear whether either company's leaders will be able to repeat the miracle Lores's team managed a few years back. Consumer and office printers still churn out an estimated 3.2 trillion pages a year, according to market researcher IDC, but Toni Sacconaghi, a tech analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, warned in a client note that the "traditional printing and copying business is slowly collapsing." Recalling the image that critics deployed in 2002, when HP tried to acquire its way out of trouble in the PC business by buying Compaq, Sacconaghi wondered if the company is facing another deal that looks an awful lot like "two garbage trucks colliding."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Professor Andre Simpson had a problem. The University of Toronto's Scarborough campus was paying through the nose for a crucial material for its 3D printer. Few would have guessed McDonald's would come to the rescue. Simpson is director of the school's Environmental NMR Center dedicated to environmental research. Central to this research is an analytical tool called the NMR spectrometer. NMR stands for nuclear magnetic resonance and is technically similar to how an MRI works for medical diagnostics. Simpson had bought a 3D printer for the lab in 2017. He hoped to use it to build custom parts that kept organisms alive inside of the NMR spectrometer for his research. But the commercial resin he needed for high-quality light projection 3D printing (where light is used to form a solid) of those parts was expensive.

The dominant material for light projection printing is liquid plastic, which can cost upward of $500 a liter, according to Simpson. Simpson closely analyzed the resin and spotted a connection. The molecules making up the commercial plastic resin were similar to fats found in ordinary cooking oil. What came next was the hardest part of the two-year experiment for Simpson and his team of 10 students -- getting a large sample batch of used cooking oil. "We reached out to all of the fast-food restaurants around us. They all said no," said Simpson. Except for McDonald's. After filtering out chunks of food particles and experimenting with the oil for several months, the team was able to successfully print a high-quality butterfly with details as minute as 100 micrometers in size.

"The experiment yielded a commercially viable resin that Simpson estimates could be sourced as cheaply as 30 cents a liter of waste oil," reports CNN. Another bonus: it is biodegradable.

Simpson and his team published their research in December 2019 in industry publication ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering.