Smart “Ink”, GoldieBlox and the STEM Girls, and Printing Human Organs – 3 Tech Tales You Can’t Miss

Welcome my friends, welcome to the machine! Well now that we got our Pink Floyd fix out of the way, it’s time to move on to the most fun post of the week, the TopCoder “weekender”! If this is your first visit to our weekend edition, here’s the very quick skinny. You’re busy, and you may have missed some really important tech and interesting innovation stories amid the hustle and bustle that is life. That’s where we come in. During the week, we are all business, putting out interesting and original content such as this “Minority Report” becomes real-life piece. Come the weekend, we let the rest of the bloggers and tech-authors do the creating and bring to you 3 top tech stories you just might have missed. So enjoy this musically inspired edition of the TopCoder “weekender”!

Tattoo You! Smart Ink is Coming

The progression is stunning. Sensors are everywhere and it’s still just the beginning. From our phones, to our tires, into our clothing and now, yes embedded in our very skin via tech-laden tattoos. How this will impact society is yet to be determined, but the change itself is underway and the movement to measure everything we possibly can is off the docks. Read the article on this smart ink and think about how the technology migrates out of healthcare and sports and then impacts whatever industry you are involved in.

Blinded Me with Science! 3-D Printing Human Organs Can Fix That

Additive Manufacturing aka 3D Printing is beginning to make the kinds of leaps that make you go hmmm. Linked below is a concise article from CNBC earlier this week, but it’s just an eye-opener when you start to think about the ways in which 3D printing can be applied. So it’s quite possible that Egon Spengler of Ghostbusters fame was quite wrong when he proclaimed; “Print is dead.” Read why here.

Another Brick in the STEM Wall

STEM Education, it’s a passion of ours at TopCoder. So much so that the TopCoder Community created a gaming community named NoNameSite.com with the purpose of shepherding students between the ages of 13-18 into STEM related fields via games that truly educate. So, when we see an initiative like this one on Kickstarter, we’re glad to share the good vibrations with our audience. In short, GoldieBlox is a doll-building kit, aimed at young girls, that helps introduce them to engineering principles and spatial conceptualization. It’s being crowdfunded, it’s an entrepreneurial endeavor and it’s focused on STEM Education, so we just had to share it with you.