"Called Contour Crafting, the system spits out layers of concrete to build a structure from the bottom up. Caterpillar is sponsoring Khoshnevis's research. From the Contour Crafting page:
Contour Crafting technology has great potential for automating the construction of whole structures as well as sub-components. Using this process, a single house or a colony of houses, each with possibly a different design, may be automatically constructed in a single run, embedded in each house all the conduits for electrical, plumbing and air-conditioning. The potential applications of this technology are far reaching including but not limited to applications in emergency, low-income, and commercial housing."
Comments
Except for...
I thought we needed to be creating jobs; not rendering them obsolete.
Carbon-Negative Cement
Particularly interesting since a Stanford professor has just invented a new method of manufacturing cement that actually sequesters CO2. Now, cement manufacturing accounts for 5% of the world's CO2 emissions. With this technique, cement manufacturing would subtract 2.5% from the world's CO2 emissions.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/01/MNGD12936I.D...
Charles Siegel