Linden Lab, creator of animated world Second Life, which people explore using simulated figures, is announcing Tuesday that some of those avatars have successfully been transferred—or “teleported,” in the jargon of virtual-world fans—to a separate world operated by International Business Machines Corp.

Larry Sass, assistant professor of computation in the MIT Department of Architecture, is one of five architects featured in a major show this summer at the Museum of Modern Art titled "Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling," which focuses on the importance of prefabricated and sustainable housing.

Tesselion: Adaptive Quadrilateral Flat Panelization

From Wikipdedia:

A tessellation or tiling of the plane is a collection of plane figures that fills the plane with no overlaps and no gaps. One may also speak of tessellations of the parts of the plane or of other surfaces. Generalizations to higher dimensions are also possible. Tessellations frequently appeared in the art of M. C. Escher. Tessellations are seen throughout art history, from ancient architecture to modern art.

A team of Italian scientists is exploring a rapid prototyping laser-scanning technique to reproduce 5,000-year-old Iraqi cuneiform tablets.

Scientists with Pisa University's Assyriology Department and the Italian Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment conceived of the project dubbed "Duplication and Rebirth" to re-create replicas of the tablets dating from the Mesopotamian era.

from:: "High-Flying Ponoko takes off" - NZ Herald.

Ponoko, which launched at TechCrunch40, has introduced a revamped site that will bring e-commerce functionality to their marketplace, allowing users to buy, sell, and give away the designs they’ve created. The site allows designers to sell their products and have Ponoko ship them directly to customers, enabling them to create a virtual storefront with few (if any) upfront costs.

Fries and his his start-up, FigurePrints LLC in Kirkland, Wash., are using a process called 3-D printing that uses printer-like machines to build small models, parts and prototypes. The technology has been around for a while but is moving closer to the small shop and perhaps even the consumer space, some observers say.

Hackers have long been used to cranking out code in the morning and having a working prototype by the afternoon, but have been frustrated that they can't do the same with hardware. That's starting to change, and fast, driven in part by robotics enthusiasts and do-it-yourself types who are utilizing a new generation of open source hardware platforms and rapid fabrication tools.

Lawn & Landscape tells us about it.