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By Evan Garcia
GEORGETOWN, Texas (Reuters) – As with any desktop 3D printer, the Vulcan printer pipes layer by layer to build an object – except this printer is more than 45 feet (13.7 m) wide, weighs 4.75 tons and prints residential homes.
This summer, the robotic printer from ICON is finishing the last few of 100 3D-printed houses in Wolf Ranch, a community in Georgetown, Texas, about 30 miles from Austin.
ICON began printing the walls of what it says is the world’s largest 3D-printed community in November 2022. Compared to traditional construction, the company says that 3D printing homes is faster, less expensive, requires fewer workers, and minimizes construction material waste.
“It brings a lot of efficiency to the trade market,” said ICON senior project manager Conner Jenkins. “So, where there were maybe five different crews coming in to build a wall system, we now have one crew and one robot.”
After concrete powder, water, sand and other additives are mixed together and pumped into the printer, a nozzle squeezes out the concrete mixture like toothpaste onto a brush, building up layer by layer along a pre-programmed path that creates corduroy-effect walls.
The single-story three- to four-bedroom homes take about three weeks to finish printing, with the foundation and metal roofs installed traditionally.
Jenkins said the concrete walls are designed to be resistant to water, mold, termites and extreme weather.
Lawrence Nourzad, a 32-year-old business development director, and his girlfriend Angela Hontas, a 29-year-old creative strategist, purchased a Wolf Ranch home earlier this summer.
“It feels like a fortress,” Nourzad said, adding that he was confident it would be resilient to most tornados.
The walls also provide strong insulation from the Texas heat, the couple said, keeping the interior temperature cool even when the air conditioner wasn’t on full blast.
There was one other thing the 3D-printed walls seemed to protect against, however: a solid wireless internet connection.
“Obviously these are really strong, thick walls. And that’s what provides a lot of value for us as homeowners and keeps this thing really well-insulated in a Texas summer, but signal doesn’t transfer through these walls very well,” Nourzad said.
To alleviate this issue, an ICON spokeswoman said most Wolf Ranch homeowners use mesh internet routers, which broadcast a signal from multiple units placed throughout a home, versus a traditional router which sends a signal from one device.
The 3D-printed homes at Wolf Ranch, called the “Genesis Collection” by developers, range in price from around $450,000 to close to $600,000. Developers said a little more than one quarter of the 100 homes have been sold.
ICON, which 3D-printed its first home in Austin in 2018, hopes to one day take its technology to the Moon. NASA, as part of its Artemis Moon exploration program, has contracted ICON to develop a construction system capable of building landing pads, shelters, and other structures on the lunar surface.
(Reporting by Evan Garcia, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
Police in North Richland Hills are asking for help locating Ashley Moreno, the 31-year-old woman accused in a lawsuit of abusing a non-verbal autistic child at ABA Interactive behavioral therapy center.
Moreno is named in a lawsuit filed by the parents of the child. The suit says video shows Moreno picking up the 7-year-old boy and throwing him against a wall at ABA Interactive. Police have a warrant to arrest her on a charge of injury to a child.
Kiara Henry, 34, of North Richland Hills, is already in police custody on a charge of failure to report the abuse, a state jail felony under the Texas family code, according to police. Henry, owner of ABA Interactive, is named in the suit and accused of lying about the abuse and attempting to cover it up.
Investigators have not been able to locate Moreno, though, according to the release. In the suit, the family alleges Moreno was not fired following the abuse and was instead assigned to home therapy with children.
Tarrant County Crime Stoppers is offering a $1,000 reward for any information leading to Moreno’s arrest. The North Richland Hills Police Department said it encourages anyone with information related to this investigation to call 817-427-7030 or contact Crime Stoppers at 817-469-8477.
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The United States leads the world in semiconductor research, design and innovation. However, our abdication of electronics manufacturing preeminence over the past three decades is an example of the hollowing out of a critical strategic industry.
For this reason, we have high hopes for a $1.4 billion, five-year partnership between the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the University of Texas at Austin to establish the first U.S. hub for advanced microelectronics manufacturing. If successful, the partnership could accelerate the resurgence of a domestic semiconductor manufacturing industry.
The irony is that the nation and Texas have been here before, as recently as the 1980s when the federal government, the state and major American semiconductor companies set a goal of keeping the United States the world’s most dominant player in advanced technologies.
But since then, the U.S. semiconductor industry has been on the wrong side of semiconductor manufacturing, having shortsightedly traded its domestic manufacturing capacity for short-term offshore manufacturing cost advantages.
The United States, which gave birth to the microelectronics revolution and once controlled 100% of the semiconductor industry, has seen its market share plummet to roughly 10%, the result of decades of outsourcing, first to Japan and then to the rest of Asia.
Taiwan is now a global leader in the semiconductor industry, producing about two-thirds of the world’s semiconductors and over 90% of the most advanced chips found in smartphones, computers, cars and countless other products. Such concentration of vital electronics offshore, even in the hands of a close ally, poses national security and commercial vulnerabilities. China’s threats against Taiwan and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which threatens access to other critical materials used in semiconductor manufacturing, further adds to global risks.
DARPA, which develops advanced technologies for the military, has a long history as a trailblazer tracing back to the 1960s, when the organization paved the way for the modern internet. This time, DARPA is tasked with creating a next-generation domestic center and program to pioneer cutting-edge fabrication techniques.
This collaboration smartly builds from the passage of the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, which provided billions of dollars to bolster microelectronics research, development and manufacturing in the United States. Through DARPA, the Defense Department will invest $840 million and the state of Texas will invest $522 million into the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Institute for Electronics, which will house the center.
Texas already is reaping benefits from private and public investments. Samsung and Texas Instruments are investing billions of dollars in new semiconductor plants in Texas. Separately, Texas A&M Semiconductor Institute has a project to increase research and education and train semiconductor workers to support state and federal semiconductor initiatives. And across the country, the Biden administration has taken steps to help foreign manufacturers produce chips in the United States.
America invented the microchip, and Texas could help revive the industry on our shores.
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