It’s called the Dream Vendor and it’s a vending machine of sorts that houses four MakerBot Thing-O-Matic 3D printers. The students at Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering can use the machines to make any 3D printed model that their heart desires.

The process of creating models in the Dream Vendor is really simple. Students can upload a standard .s3g file into the system, and the 3D printers get to work creating the model. Once it’s done, the model is dropped into a retrieval bay for easy pick up.

Engineering schools usually have at least one 3D printer, but it’s usually very large and not everybody can use it. Virginia Tech is spearheading an effort to make 3D printers more accessible to all. It’s especially useful for the engineering student that needs a quick prototype of a project.

We may not be at The Jetsons level just yet, and we may never get there. The Dream Vendor is still really cool though, and I can see other machines like this popping up at engineering schools across the country.

[h/t: Fabbaloo]

“Until recently, our mobile app development was feature-driven. We’d decide on a bundle of features, furiously work on them, test them, and ship. Great updates we had already finished sometimes took longer to get into people’s hands because we often had to wait for additions and tweaks that threw us off schedule. As we started developing more and more for mobile, it became clear we needed a scalable process to manage the increased mobile engineering activity and ship quality updates to users fast,” says Facebook in an Engineering note.

Moving to this date-driven release process helps their engineers, as well as users according to Facebook.

“We now schedule predictable and explicit dates when we cut from mobile feature development to testing, stabilization, and polishing. This allows engineering to move fast, keeps the apps in a shippable state, and generally removes ambiguity about when code will ship. Moving to a date-driven model means that stability and performance updates , or user-ready features,don’t need to wait on another feature to ship.”

Of course, Facebook ships updates to Facebook.com every day – multiple ones at that. Why can’t they just do that for mobile apps as well?

“Shipping mobile software is inherently different than shipping web software — the stakes are higher. It’s easier for code to cause an app crash on mobile than bring down an entire site on the web. And with web software you can roll out gradually and make updates before you roll out to the majority of users. With mobile software we don’t have these luxuries,” they say.

Facebook promises these timely app updates for the main Facebook app, Facebook Camera, and Facebook Messenger. They shipped an update to their iOS app today in response to iOS 6, and also released a new version on Facebook Messenger for Android.

They also just released an update to Facebook Pages Manager which allows page admins to promote posts via mobile. They didn’t mention Pages Manager as an app that will be put on this new date-driven release schedule.

Google has reportedly increased its maternity leave for female employees. The company has also uploaded this video about its CodeF program for female computer scientists.

“Google, during my entire career, has always been very deeply committed to supporting female engineering,” says Engineering Director Alma Whitten, in the video.

Earlier this hear, Google also launched the WEOW program for women entrepreneurs.

Frank Gehry will be behind the new addition to Facebook’s Menlo Park campus. You may know Gehry as the guy who built the Guggenheim Museum in Bilboa, Spain and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in L.A.

Gehry, who is known for his ability to create beautiful yet functional spaces, will bring that talent to the new Engineering building. Facebook says that it will be able to house 3,400 employees when completed.

“It will be a large, one room building that somewhat resembles a warehouse. Just like we do now, everyone will sit out in the open with desks that can be quickly shuffled around as teams form and break apart around projects. There will be cafes and lots of micro-kitchens with snacks so that you never have to go hungry. And we’ll fill the building with break-away spaces with couches and whiteboards to make getting away from your desk easy,” says Everett Katigbak, Facebook’s Environmental Design Manager.

The outside will feature an eco-friendly space filled with trees and a rooftop garden on top of the structure.

Employees will be able to travel between the current campus and the expansion via underground tunnel (cool).

Facebook says they plan to break ground on the addition in early 2013.

Jay Parikh, Facebook’s VP of infrastructure engineering recently gave us a look into the massive amount of data that the company has to deal with on a daily basis. And it’s a metric sh*t-ton.

In total, Facebook “ingests” 500+ TB of new data daily.

This includes everything that makes Facebook function flawlessly (sometimes) for the user- likes, photos, comments, and even something like a friend request.

And get this: Facebook is now seeing 300 million photo uploads a day. Not only that, but users are clicking the “like” button 2.7 billion times each day as well as sharing some sort of content 2.5 billion times. This is roughly 3 likes per day, per user, and about 1 photo upload every three days per user.

Most of the data for Facebook is stored in one cluster of over 100 petabytes, Parikh explained.

Facebook is approaching 1 billion monthly active users, and all of those users are giving the engineering team at the company a lot of work to do. There are still more things about Facebook’s data intake that I’d like to know, but this is a good taste of everything that goes into the biggest social network in the world.

[via CNET]

If you’re not up to speed on Foursquare’s Connected Apps, here’s a quick refresher: Foursquare allows users to connect third party apps to their Foursquare accounts. These Connected Apps will then show users additional information based on their check-in, right on the check-in page. For instance, if I connected Untappd to my Foursquare account, it may tell me what beers my friends have tired at the bar I just checked into. Or if I connected Foodspotting, a small info box may show me what’s been spotted at the new sushi restaurant I just checked into.

After Credits let’s you know whether or not you need to stay in the theater, well, after the credits. With more and more films (like those associated with Marvel) adding extra scenes and teasers to the end of the reel, it would be incredibly nice to know ahead of time whether or not you need to stay an extra few minutes.

Now, when you check-in to a particular movie at a theater, the After Credits app will display this information right on your check-in screen, above the points section:

It’s a small little feature announcement coming from the Foursquare Engineering blog, but it’s a cool one. Off the top of my head, I can remember at like a half dozen times in the past year where this would have been handy.

That’s because the company has just announced that they are hiring a new engineering team to be based in London.

From a note on the Facebook Engineering page:

London is a perfect fit for Facebook engineering – it’s a global hub, and it has a vibrant local startup community with lots of great technical talent. Our team in London will start small, focusing on building a core of great engineers, and then grow over time and eventually focus on building products in key areas like mobile and platform.

If you’re serious about getting a job inside this new engineering office, you could always visit the London jobs page. There, we’re reminded that Facebook offers 25 yearly vacation days and 9 company holidays as well as paid baby leave and a free gym membership. Not bad.

“Despite the size of our service – 900 million users and growing – we still push new code to the site every day. We eliminate unnecessary process and give all our engineers the opportunity to work on the things that matter most,” said London engineering team leader Philip Su. “Our engineers in London – like those in Menlo Park, New York, and Seattle – will be able to pursue great ideas and ship products quickly.”

[Image via Engineering Like A Boss Facebook page]

Engineering Degree put together an inforgraphic that illustrates the disparity among the genders in the engineering field and highlights some of the more troubling aspects of this problem, such as how only 20% of women who obtain a degree in math and sciences actually have jobs in a related field. While some cultural gadflies bemoan that we’re not focusing as much on boys these days and are therefore leaving them behind in educational development, one need not really look much further than the information in this infographic to determine one of two things: that claim is false; or, if that claim is true, then our education system is failing in far worse, more perplexing ways than we can begin to imagine.

And no, it’s not because we pay teachers too much.

Created by: EngineeringDegree.net

Nowadays, if you want something built, you take wood or other materials and build or cut it out of that. But, what if you could have a computer model of what you want, and have that thing magically appear out of a box of sand?

That is the very vision the brains at the Distributed Robotics Laboratory (DRL) at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory are pursuing. It involves a lot of programming and seemingly-simple twiddling, but it could change the way things are made with the same kind of promise that 3-D printing has people so excited about. The development is called “smart sand”.

From the MITNews:

At the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in May — the world’s premier robotics conference — DRL researchers will present a paper describing algorithms that could enable such “smart sand.” They also describe experiments in which they tested the algorithms on somewhat larger particles — cubes about 10 millimeters to an edge, with rudimentary microprocessors inside and very unusual magnets on four of their sides.

Unlike many other approaches to reconfigurable robots, smart sand uses a subtractive method, akin to stone carving, rather than an additive method, akin to snapping LEGO blocks together. A heap of smart sand would be analogous to the rough block of stone that a sculptor begins with. The individual grains would pass messages back and forth and selectively attach to each other to form a three-dimensional object; the grains not necessary to build that object would simply fall away. When the object had served its purpose, it would be returned to the heap. Its constituent grains would detach from each other, becoming free to participate in the formation of a new shape.

Of course, ten-millimeter cubes is hardly what you would call “sand”, but the idea is to get the functionality and algorithms in place, then shrink the size of it over time.

“Take the core functionalities of their pebbles,” says [Robert] Wood, who directs Harvard’s Microrobotics Laboratory. “They have the ability to latch onto their neighbors; they have the ability to talk to their neighbors; they have the ability to do some computation. Those are all things that are certainly feasible to think about doing in smaller packages.”

“It would take quite a lot of engineering to do that, of course,” Wood cautions. “That’s a well-posed but very difficult set of engineering challenges that they could continue to address in the future.”

This video gives you an idea of the “subtractive” methods of building that the MIT folks are working on.

“Spearheaded by Intel President & CEO, Paul Otellini, who is also a member of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, the Stay With It campaign will provide mentors and other supports to increase the number of American engineering graduates which has fallen woefully behind other surging economies and has led to a shortage of skilled workers for American jobs,” Bolden said.

Bolden thinks that NASA and Intel’s participation is important because he sees aerospace and computer technology as the growth industries of the future.

In a rather interesting aside, Bolden says that NASA will need more skilled engineers to help with its plans to once again start up manned missions. “NASA is now embarking on ambitious agenda of deep space exploration that will carry our astronauts to places where we have never been, including an asteroid and eventually Mars.” This reiterates NASA’s goal of sending astronauts to an asteroid by 2025, as reported by space.com this time last year. This goal was originally outlined by President Obama in an April 2010 speech at Kennedy Space Center. In that same speech, the president said he believed humans could be sent into orbit around Mars by the mid-2030′s.

Fourteen other universities participated in the event through Facebook viewing parties. You can still watch the presentation, including a message from the president and a panel discussion with Bolden, Otellini, and Gary May, Dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering, below.