Tag Archives: harvard

May 19, 2015 · 1:09 am

Custom Make-up From 3d Printer!

A Harvard Woman Figured Out How To 3D Print Makeup From Any Home Computer, And The Demo Is Mindblowing

  • MAY 6, 2014, 12:50 PM

Grace Choi MinkGrace ChoiGrace Choi

Grace Choi was at Harvard Business School when she decided to disrupt the beauty industry. She did a little research and realized that beauty brands create and then majorly mark up their products by mixing lots of colors.

“The makeup industry makes a whole lot of money on a whole lot of bulls—,” Choi said at TechCrunch Disrupt this week. “They charge a huge premium on something that tech provides for free. That one thing is color.”

By that, she means color printers are available to everyone, and the ink they have is the same as the ink that makeup companies use in their products. She says the ink is FDA-approved.

Choi created her own mini home 3D printer, Mink, that will retail for $300 and allow anyone to print makeup by ripping the color code off color photos on the internet. It hooks up to a computer, just like a normal printer.

She demonstrated how it works, then brushed some of the freshly printed makeup onto her hand. She answered a lot of the tough questions about how she’ll move beyond powders to creamier products and team up with traditional printing companies in the video below.

Here’s how Mink, Choi’s makeup-printing machine, works.

This is the Mink printer. It uses regular printer ink.

3d makeup printerScreenshot

First, find a color you want to print. Choi says her machine will print creamy lipsticks or powdery eye shadows.

Mink makeup demoTechCrunch Disrupt

Use the color picker to copy the hex code of the color you’ve chosen. In this demo, Choi chose pink.

Mink makeup demoTechCrunch Disrupt

Using Photoshop or Microsoft Paint, paste the hex code into a new document. You’ll see the color you want to print pop up.Mink makeup demoTechCrunch Disrupt

Print the color just as you’d print any other document on your computer.Mink makeup demoTechCrunch Disrupt

Here’s Choi printing the pink eye shadow.Mink makeup demoTechCrunch Disrupt

This is what the finished product looks like. It comes in a little Mink-provided container that looks just like eye shadow.Mink makeup demoTechCrunch Disrupt

Choi dips a makeup brush in the freshly printed powder to show it really is makeup.Mink makeup demoTechCrunch Disrupt

Then she brushes the pink on her hand. “Mink enables the web to become the biggest beauty store in the world,” says Choi. “We’re going to live in a world where you can take a picture of your friend’s lipstick and print it out.”Mink makeup demoTechCrunch Disrupt

Now check out the video demo and listen to Choi answer tough questions about how she’ll bring the printer to market below:

<div style=’text-align:center’><script type=’text/javascript’ src=’http://pshared.5min.com/Scripts/PlayerSeed.js?sid=281&width=480&height=401&playList=518220223′></script><br/><a href=’http://on.aol.com/video/print-your-own-makeup-with-mink-518220223&#8242; style=’font-family: Verdana;font-size: 10px;’ target=’_blank’>Print Your Own Makeup With Mink</a></div>

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/mink-3d-prints-makeup-2014-5#ixzz3aZNmrrmc

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October 3, 2013 · 3:56 pm

MIT, Harvard scientists accidentally create real-life lightsaber

MIT, Harvard scientists accidentally create real-life lightsaber

Published September 29, 2013

FoxNews.com
  • Star Wars Light Saber Fight

    Luke Skywalker engages in a perilous lightsaber duel with Darth Vader in ‘Star Wars: Episode V The Empire Strikes Back.’ (LUCAS FILMS/ZUMA PRESS)

The force is clearly with them.

In a reported first, researchers at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a newfangled technology that theoretically could be used to construct an actual lightsaber.

Until now, photons, or the mass-less particles that constitute light, were thought to not interact, but rather simply pass through each other, just two beams of luminescence during a laser-light show.

“The physics of what’s happening in these molecules is similar to what we see in the movies.”

– Mikhail Lukin, Harvard physics professor 

But according to the Harvard Gazette, scientists at the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms have improbably coaxed photons into hardened molecules you could, in fact, whack against each other in, say, a Bespin-based duel-to-the-death resulting in one person, sadly, losing a hand.

As a lightsaber-wielding Darth Vader once notably noted, “Don’t make me destroy you . . .”

“It’s not an inapt analogy to compare this to lightsabers,” Harvard professor of physics Mikhail Lukin told the Gazette.

“When these photons interact with each other, they’re pushing against and deflecting each other. The physics of what’s happening in these molecules is similar to what we see in the movies.”

Added MIT Professor of Physics Vladan Vuletic in an interview with WBZ-TV, “It has long been a dream to have photons of light beams interact with one another. . .We use laser beams and shine them in from six sides and these laser beams actually cool the atoms.

“Maybe a characteristic of a lightsaber is that you have these two light beams and they don’t go through each other as you might expect; they just kind of bounce off each other.”

However, don’t expect the new technology to soon result in a real-life, proverbial “elegant weapon for a more civilized age,” as exiled Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobe once put it.

Instead, the science behind the recent breakthrough will likely lead researchers to realizing the till-now coveted concept of quantum computing.

“What it will be useful for we don’t know yet,” Lukin reportedly said. “But it’s a new state of matter, so we are hopeful that new applications may emerge as we continue to investigate these photonic molecules’ properties.”

Now, if science would only allow the would-be smugglers out there to get their hands on a trusty blaster.

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