Crypto News: The secret to 3D printing is so many lasers

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Photographer: Spencer Lowell for Bloomberg Businessweek

After a buzzy launch a few decades ago, 3D printers seemed to lose their appeal. Printing trinkets in your house just never took off as more than a novelty. But what if we've been using them wrong? What if the real problem isn't that they are too bulky, but simply too small?

For his latest article, Bloomberg reporter Ashlee Vance, fresh off his investigation into eternal youth, goes inside a new kind of 3D printing operation, one that hopes to turn entire buildings into printers. Meet Freeform Future Corp., helmed by the man in shades pictured above, co-founder and CEO Erik Palitsch.

Photographer: Spencer Lowell for Bloomberg Businessweek

Freeform has raised $45 million so far to turn large-scale 3D printing into a reality. Palitsch says his inspiration came from his days at SpaceX, where he and Elon Musk talked about the drawbacks of the 3D landscape. Famously, SpaceX has printed parts for its rockets, although perhaps not to the scale to which they had hoped. The solution to 3D printing woes, according to Palitsch and Freeform's Chief Scientific Officer Tasso Lappas, shown overseeing the process from the control room, lies in lasers.

Photographer: Spencer Lowell for Bloomberg Businessweek

Lasers! Like the ones that lead electrical engineer Dennis Ren is working with above. Freeform is focusing on making metal objects in its giant warehouse. Normally, for 3D printing metal, you have a device with two to four lasers going at once. At Freeform, they have 18 lasers firing.

Photographer: Spencer Lowell for Bloomberg Businessweek

The ability to shoot more lasers isn't the only innovation. Palitsch and his crew have also refined the manufacturing techniques to reduce downtime for the machines, a big limiting factor in previous 3D efforts. Please read the whole story to see more of these quite beautiful machines—and learn who used to store his own beautiful machines on what's now the factory floor. The first photo is a kind of clue. —Reyhan Harmanci, Bloomberg Businessweek

"There was a time not too long ago when traders were betting that the Federal Reserve could start cutting interest rates at its meeting today. This was back in the summer, when one of those periodic bouts of euphoria was sweeping across markets because, the cognoscenti had determined, inflation would quickly subside and pave the way for the central bank to shift its focus to shoring up growth."

Read: "Wall Street Is Making Same Fed Bet That's Burned It Repeatedly" by Katherine Greifeld and Liz McCormick

Photo illustration by 731; Penn: Chris Pizzello/AP Photo; Texture: Alamy (4)

Actor Sean Penn's CORE charity saved American lives during the pandemic. Employees say it also failed to shield them from alleged sexual harassment or address financial mismanagement.

Read: Sean Penn's Disaster-Relief Charity Ended Up a Money Mess by Sophie Alexander

Today, Neon Hum Media and Bloomberg are introducing an 8-part podcast, "Deadly Cure," based on the Businessweek feature by Thomas Buckley, about what happens when a group of people decide to make a "religion" out of drinking bleach. The operation was almost dead when then-President Donald Trump began having some strange press conferences. The first episode is out now!

$100,000

That's the amount of money you can make from a "side hustle" and still collect a salary from your "main hustle," if you are employed by major Japanese trading company, Mitsui & Co. Retaining young YouTubers is a priority, it seems.