Hey there hi there ho there, Arduinos! Here we are on yet another beautiful summer day in August, with the breeze teasing the leaves where the birdies whistle in the trees and gorgeous sunshine everywhere.

I am telling you, the place is downright soggy with the stuff.

Sadly, the construction next door also continues apace, bringing all kinds of power tool noises, along with the occasional loud conversation in, I am guessing… Arabic? I really wish that real life construction jobs had progress bars, so I would have some idea of how close to being done they are.

And that would totally be the case if the houses were being printed instead of built!

Ctrl-P To Print House

Another player had entered the “some day you will print your house” game. Before, we have heard about Enrico Dini’s desire to print moon building out of lunar soil.

Well now Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis wants to print your entire house here on Earth, using a giant 3D printer taller than the final house that would print your house layer by layer, using various materials to add the plumbing and wiring as it went.

It is quite the heady concept, and the most amazing thing is that the whole thing would only take 20 hours. Imagine that, a whole house fabricated from scratch in less than a day.

To me, massive gizmo appeal aside, the most exciting thing about such a technology is that it could make houses much, much cheaper. There is not much you can do about the cost of the land, but that is only a small fraction of the cost of home ownership.

The real money comes from the cost of constructing the darn thing, and that cost in turn is mostly labour. Eliminate most of the labour costs, and we could create a future where the loan on your house is smaller than the one on your car.

And it could be a custom house, with everything exactly where and how you want it, all at no extra cost. They would just sit you down with a house building app with the limits of the printer built into it, and let you put together the house of your dreams.

Radically cheaper houses could have a massive ripple effect on the whole economy. Sure, construction workers would be out of a job… but whatever job they move to next, they will be able to afford a house. And imagine what the middle class would do without the yoke of a mortgage around their necks!

It could be a real game-changer.

Attack of the Drones

Drones, otherwise known as semi-autonomous aerial recon vehicles, otherwise known as the coolest RC plans ever with guns that really shoot and cameras that work and everything, have been making the news ever since drone strikes have started being very, very effective ways to kill people we don’t like.

But that is this morning’s news. The news of now is all about how the defense contractors at a recent drone convention are all talking about expanding these military drone technologies into civilian applications, like law enforcement and environmental monitoring.

Now obviously, this is getting a little creepy. First we start being able to kill someone in Afghanistan from the safety and comfort of some military base in the USA, then we have hordes of drones flying around at home waiting to catch us in a crime? Spooky!

The Panopticon lives!

But remember that the same technology could be used to catch corporations in the act of polluting, shredding documents, or whatever else those scumbags are getting away with right now.

Also, first responders like EMTs and firefighters could send in the drones first to see what they are up against before they even get to the scene, and have all the right materials and tools ready to go when they arrive and seconds could mean lives.

So, creepy or no, there could be a lot of benefits from a drone filled future.

Their Own Little World

And as usual, our last slot is reserved for whatever story has me the most excited right now, and in this case, it is a rather sad one.

Recently, in Kazan, a city in Russia, a tiny Islamist cult was discovered in an underground bunker where the group had been living for nearly a decade.

Around 70 people had been living in this bunker without running water or central heat, 20 of whom were children, some of whom had never seen sunlight or the outside world until the authorities discovered them and removed them for health checks on August 1 of this year.

One seventeen year old girl was found to be pregnant.

Now this is clearly a tragedy. I want to acknowledge that before I go off the deep end about the science and end up sounding like a psycho.

But I am dying to know more about these kids and this microcosm in which they have grown up.

I should point out, this is no spider hole. The bunker might have lacked modern amenities, but it was eight stories underground. Imagine an eight story apartment or office building, and you can see that their world was not as small as you might think.

Still, I really want to know about these kids. Has the lack of sunlight damaged them physically? Has growing up in a relative small environment caused parts of their brain to atrophy? What exactly did they know about the outside world before the authorities came for them?

The patriarchal leader(s) of this sect would have total information control within the bunker, so they could have told the people inside who were kept inside all the time anything they wanted about the horrible, evil, sinful outside world.

And they would have a very strong incentive to feed them a narrative that supports their isolation. So who knows? Maybe they told everybody that the infidels had destroyed the world, and if they left the bunker, the radiation would kill them.

So many questions! The scientist in me is dying to know.

The humanitarian in me is just glad those kids will get a chance at a normal life now.