On a steep road on the outskirts of Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico, a low buzz and plastic fumes emanate from a white house. A ribbed white paper tube snakes out of a window on the building, exhaling a light smoke which mixes with fumes from nearby open-air cooks and the sooty exhaust of rumbling, unmuffled bus engines. Inside, the tube is attached to a machine that’s gobbling plastic flakes—which can come from used drink bottles—through a funnel also made from a plastic drink bottle. At the other end of the machine, a spinning wheel draws out the fresh-melted polymer into a black filament just three millimeters wide and value hundreds of times what it was worth in in bottle form. Continue reading Building a New Economy on Soda Bottles and a 3D Printer
Category Archives: Features
How Self-Driving Cars Will Sneak Onto Our Roads
The car slammed to a halt on a sunny afternoon. A cloth and metal figure of a child wiggled back and forth following its sudden emergence into the car’s path. Inside, two sets of human eyes stared at the puppet kid’s eyes. The car was watching too.
A moment later, the car’s brake pedal lifted from the floor. The Bosch engineer riding in the car, who hadn’t even moved his foot as the vehicle brought itself to the abrupt stop, now stepped on the brake. Now that the car’s autonomous braking system—a chip that used images from a windshield camera—had concluded that the danger of an accident had passed, it was handing control back to the human driver.
Continue reading How Self-Driving Cars Will Sneak Onto Our Roads
Lab Management Courses: Becoming a Trainer
Hilde Janssens currently works as a lab manager in the laboratory of a junior principal investigator (PI) at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, Spain—except when she’s teaching other scientists how to manage their own laboratories. In 2009, Janssens participated in her first lab management course, offered by her institution through the Heidelberg, Germany-based training and coaching company hfp consulting. A year later, the company recruited her as a part-time instructor. Continue reading Lab Management Courses: Becoming a Trainer
Learning to Lead a Lab
Firing a member of your lab is difficult. Fortunately, it’s also rare. The first and only time cell biologist Samara Reck-Peterson had to do it, in her laboratory at Harvard University, she felt prepared. She had practiced the difficult conversation during a lab management course she’d taken in 2009, and she had a script ready. “Practicing is really the most important thing,” she says. Continue reading Learning to Lead a Lab