The Urban Institute projects that by 2040, each generation will have a homeownership rate lower than the preceding generation had at the same age. That means younger Americans could struggle to build household wealth compared with previous generations.

“It’s the hottest market I’ve ever seen,” said Sean Chandler, president of the central Texas division at home builder Chesmar Homes. “The buyers that come in are like, ‘I just want a home. I don’t care at this point what it costs.’ ”

Homebuying demand is so high that many builders are limiting the number of homes they sell at a time, to ensure they don’t sell more than they can build. They are also raising prices. The median new-home sales price was $346,400 in January, up 5.3% from a year earlier.

While housing starts rose in 2020, new-home construction per U.S. household in December was still more than 20% below its average level in the late 1990s, according to Jordan Rappaport, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

Unlike in the building boom of the mid-2000s, a deficit of homes for sale is playing a big role in the current spike in prices. New-home construction hasn’t kept up with demand in recent years, as builders took years to recover from the financial crisis and faced shortages of land and skilled labor. Those shortages and rising material costs continue to hinder builders as they increase production.

In 2020, lenders had more demand than they could handle. Homeowners rushed to refinance at lower interest rates and buyers flocked to the market. Mortgage originations rose to a record high in the fourth quarter, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. About seven out of every 10 of those mortgages went to borrowers with high credit scores above 760.

Business slowed during the housing crash and the Arvielos didn’t take a paycheck from mid-2007 until early 2009, but their higher underwriting standards during the boom helped them survive.

One of those is run by Rick Arvielo, chief executive of the Orange County, Calif.-based mortgage lender New American Funding. During the previous housing boom, he wondered if he was blowing a big opportunity. Competitors were getting rich making subprime mortgages, and he considered getting into the business. His wife and co-founder, Patty Arvielo, refused.

Firms lending on all these home purchases are thriving

For now, the pandemic looks likely to keep housing demand strong. In Sacramento, Calif., an influx of buyers from the San Francisco Bay Area helped push up the median sales price 21.3% in January from a year earlier, according to the California Association of Realtors.

The housing markets in New York City and San Francisco, two of the country’s priciest areas, slumped last year as some residents moved away and the pace of people moving into those cities slowed. New York City home prices in January fell 3.1% from a year earlier, according to listings website StreetEasy’s price index. In San Francisco, the median sale price in January declined 1.9% from a year earlier, according to Redfin.

Some of the home sales in the past year were likely sales that would have happened in the next few years but were accelerated due to Covid-19, real-estate agents say. That could augur a slight slowdown in demand going forward.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said this month that the central bank will maintain ultralow interest rates until its employment and inflation goals have been met, which he said were “still a long way” away.

The housing market’s biggest near-term concern is rising mortgage interest rates, which recently hit their highest level since July and cooled the market slightly. With bond yields rising as investors anticipate a post-Covid rebound, many economists expect mortgage rates to continue creeping upward this year.

“Housing has become a luxury good,” said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of real-estate brokerage Redfin Corp. “The economy seems to have officially split in two. There is so much hardship in one part, and then there’s just an absolute mad dash to buy houses in the other part.” The homeownership rate stood at 65.8% in the fourth quarter of 2020, up from 63.7% in the fourth quarter of 2016, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

First-time home buyers are struggling to afford down payments. For many renters who lost jobs in 2020, homeownership is even further out of reach.

Less-expensive homes became harder to find. Sales of homes priced at $250,000 and below declined in 2020 from a year earlier, according to NAR.

Those trying to break into the market for the first time have rarely found it more difficult. U.S. house prices soared 10.8% in the fourth quarter from a year earlier on a seasonally adjusted basis, the biggest annual increase in data going back to 1992, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The median home purchase price climbed above $300,000 last year for the first time. Nearly one in four home buyers between April and June bought houses priced at $500,000 or more.

Real-estate brokers, home builders and mortgage lenders are also riding the wave. The S&P Homebuilders Select Industry index is up 96% over the past year, outpacing the S&P 500’s 59% gain. Between July and December, eight of the 30 largest U.S. mortgage lenders announced plans to go public.

The biggest winners in today’s boom are people who already own homes, who gained a collective $1.5 trillion in equity in 2020 from a year earlier, according to CoreLogic. They have also saved money by refinancing their mortgages at record low rates. Many have started renovation projects or bought vacation homes.

Mortgage lenders, meanwhile, are maintaining tight standards—buyers are drawn to the market by historically low interest rates, not by easy access to credit. Rising home values also mean that even if homeowners can’t afford their mortgage payments, they can likely sell their homes for a profit rather than face foreclosure. Financial firms are still packaging mortgages as securities, but the vast majority of those mortgages today have government backing.

Millennials, the largest living adult generation, continue to age into their prime homebuying years and plunk down savings for homes. At the same time, the market is critically undersupplied. New-home construction hasn’t kept up with household demand, and homeowners are holding on to their houses longer. Buyers are competing fiercely for a limited number of homes.

Market watchers also say that a number of longer-term trends are at play that should keep the housing market hot, or at least steady, even after Covid-19-related demand fades.

“Covid has catalyzed a rethinking of where we live, and why we live there, and where we work, and how we work,” said Rich Barton, chief executive of online real-estate company Zillow Group Inc.

When lockdowns began lifting last year, home sales took off: June sales surged nearly 21% over the prior month, the biggest monthly increase on record going back to 1968. That milestone lasted only a month, when July sales rose almost 25% from June.

The current housing boom is far more stable than the last one and poses fewer systemic risks, economists say. A downside: There are more barriers to entry, and it’s more difficult for buyers who aren’t already homeowners to make that first purchase.

Many homeowners paid a big price. Between 2006 and 2014, about 9.3 million households went through foreclosure, gave up their home to a lender or sold in a distressed sale, according to a 2015 estimate from the National Association of Realtors.

In the mid-2000s, loose mortgage-lending standards enabled borrowers with poor credit histories to purchase homes beyond their means, sometimes with mortgages that required low payments in the early years of the loan. Too much new construction led to an oversupply of houses. Financial firms packaged these risky mortgages as securities and sold them to investors. When more homeowners started defaulting on their mortgages, lenders suffered large losses and the entire financial system froze up.

In 2020, sales of previously owned U.S. homes surged to their highest level in 14 years, and many economists forecast sales to rise again this year.

“On $1 million purchases, people are putting down $500,000,” he said. “You didn’t see that before.”

Now, he said, housing demand in the Boston suburbs is stronger than he has ever seen. Lamacchia Realty reached $1 billion in sales last year for the first time. Buyers have higher credit ratings these days. They are flusher and are putting down more cash up front.

Anthony Lamacchia, a broker and owner of a real-estate company near Boston, entered the industry in 2004. Home buyers were trading up to bigger, more expensive houses after barely a year, he said. Many buyers paid small down payments, or none at all. When housing prices stopped rising, the market collapsed. By 2009, Mr. Lamacchia was working with clients desperate to dump the homes he had just helped them buy.

The residential real-estate market is on its biggest tear since 2006, just before the housing bubble burst and set off a global recession. Yet in nearly every meaningful way, today’s market is the inverse of the previous boom.

The Teslasuit, the world’s first full-body haptic smart wearable, brings VR and AR to a new level

ne factor that might hamper Apple’s ambitions is that cars are, of course, significantly more expensive than phones, making the purchase decision very different. In addition, “the regulatory side of the auto business is brutal and takes years to get through,” Benchmark auto analyst Mike Ward tells Barron’s.

Apple car hopes aren’t affecting investors much yet. Since new reports of a possible Apple car surfaced in December, GM and Tesla shares are up about 26% and 10%, respectively. The S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average, for comparison, are up about 5% and 4%, respectively. Apple shares are down about 6%.

QuantumScape (QS) is pioneering solid-state lithium anode batteries that promise to improve electric-vehicle range and safety, while lowering costs and charge time

nother thing J.P. Morgan agrees on is outsourced manufacturing, meaning that Apple isn’t likely to assemble its car. That creates an opportunity for some existing car marker to build more volume. What company would win, however, is anyone’s guess.

he firm’s U.S. auto analyst Ryan Brinkman added that a new competitor the size and strength of Apple is a negative for existing auto makers, but, like Ward, he hasn’t heard about any collaboration in the auto-supply base.

.P. Morgan ‘s tech and car teams produced a joint report recently, and they don’t see an Apple car coming soon. They agreed if an Apple car is on the way, it will be delayed until full self-driving capability is more widely available. Robotaxi services, which can handle city driving, are planned in the next couple of years. But full self-driving capabilities are farther away—the cost of sensors needs to fall, and the software still needs to improve.

hat threat isn’t affecting his ratings on competitors yet. He rate Tesla stock Buy and calls General Motors (GM) a top pick.

e believes an Apple car can accelerate EV penetration. That could help existing auto makers with more progressive approaches to the EV market. But higher penetration isn’t a panacea for the car business. “At some point, today’s EV players must share the sandbox,” wrote the analyst in a recent report.

organ Stanley analyst Adam Jonas also covers cars mainly. He doesn’t appear certain an Apple car is on the way, but if one does show up, “don’t expect steering wheels.” That means full self-driving, which also means the Apple car is still years away.

ard says he isn’t hearing Apple buzz in the auto industry. It’s “pretty tough to keep that quiet in the auto industry—thousands of suppliers, [government] approvals, the size of the factory needed, etc.” He isn’t saying it can’t happen, but it is harder than many investors might expect.

e assumes Apple, down the road, will sell 100,000 cars in year one. That might be aggressive. NIO (NIO), Li Auto (LI), and XPeng (XPEV) are three EV startups that have been in business for years. They managed to sell about 100,000 vehicles on a combined basis in 2020. Kumar thinks Apple can be delivering 1 million cars by 2030.

pple has so far declined to comment about any car plans recently.

Piper tech analyst Harsh Kumar says the timing is right for an Apple (ticker: AAPL) car. “The company can enter the market at a time of peak technology disruption while avoiding the risk of forming the market,” wrote the analyst in a Wednesday research report. Electric vehicles are proliferating, and autonomous driving technology is advancing. Cars will drive and feel different in the future—an Apple car would likely be an all-electric vehicle with self-driving option

Implications of Apple’s entry into the car business continues to generate much speculation and many analyst reports from various stockbrokerage firms. Piper Sandler weighed into the debate Wednesday, saying an Apple car makes perfect sense. Investors, however, should remember that producing an automobile is very, very different from making a smartphone.

Wall Street Is Obsessed With an Apple Car. Why Tech Analysts Might Be Too Excited.

On Clubhouse, I often get alerts that the internet connection is weak. (Mine isn’t.) Rooms with over 5,000 people get closed out. (No Musk for you!) The company says it’s working to expand the size of rooms. There’s no way to react to what someone is saying when you’re in the audience, with an emoji or clapping, as you can in Twitter Spaces.

Every app is a work in progress, but these two, both still in beta testing, really feel like they’re being built in front of our eyes.

Clubhouse and Twitter both provide moderation tools that allow users and room moderators to block or report bad actors. Both have community guidelines, which include a zero-tolerance policy for racism, hate speech, abuse and more. The issue, like all other platforms, is enforcement.

And then there’s the issue of content moderation, which is much harder in live audio.

as I surprised to find that Clubhouse hoovered up my phone’s contacts? Nope. Granted I did give the app permission to access my contacts—it forces you if you want to see your friends on the app or invite others—but I didn’t realize they would be stored on its servers and used to notify me every time a random acquaintance signs up. Or worse, tell me that my therapist has two friends on the platform.

usicians turn up, too. Every night at midnight Eastern, hundreds of people show up to the Lullaby Club, where musicians such as Axel Mansoor whisper and play soothing music. If you download Clubhouse now, you’ll see Axel’s face on the app icon. Clubhouse periodically changes it to a different user.

omedian and voice actor Matthew Friend and some of his peers do hilarious character impersonations in comedy and improv rooms. (You’ve got to hear his John Oliver impression in my video.) Podcaster and comedian Alexis Gay, who has over a million followers on Clubhouse now, hosts a room with a cast of rotating guests every Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET called “Housin’ Around.”

Can Clubhouse often feel like “Shark Tank” meets speed networking? Sure, but there are also some pockets for fun.

eople with similar interests—bitcoin, music, comedy—are congregating in ‘clubs’ on Clubhouse. Join one and you get alerts about events they hold.

ne group called the Café Bitcoin has various rooms open seven days a week, up to 24 hours a day, to discuss… yes, bitcoin. Cory Klippsten, CEO of SwanBitcoin.com, founded the group and says he averages 30 hours a week on the app now.

ou can also start a room of your own. In Clubhouse, you can name rooms to signal your chosen topic. This allows for that virtual event feel. Many rooms are centered around different industries—tech, media, finance, crypto, entertainment, medicine, real estate, e

witter’s Spaces works similarly. If one of the people you follow has launched a space, it will appear in a purple bubble along the top row in the Twitter iPhone app. (Both Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces are due on Android soon.)

Think of the Clubhouse app like a big building full of different rooms with virtual stages. Walk—OK fine, scroll—down the main hallway and you see all the open rooms. They’re recommended based on whom you follow and what areas of interest you’ve identified. Tap into one and you automatically start hearing what’s going on in there. It’s all live, too. There’s no built-in recording or deferred playback.

Feed-based social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok demand your fingers to scroll and your eyes to read, look and watch. Social audio? It only takes your ears. And once you’re listening, you can tuck your phone away and get back to driving, walking your dog or unloading your dishwasher.

hen there’s Twitter’s Clubhouse clone, Spaces, which is in limited testing now and will launch to everyone before the end of the year. Another one called Fireside, backed by Mark Cuban, is due out later in the year. And, shocker, Facebook’s exploring the idea, too.

Drawing the most attention is Clubhouse, a live and ephemeral iPhone-only, invite-only app that launched last March. Downloads of the app have exceeded eight million since launch, with 2.6 million in the U.S, according to App Annie Intelligence.

hough you might have to dig—or at least plan ahead—there’s already something for most people. Think talk radio, podcasting, conferences, LinkedIn and Twitter all thrown in a NutriBullet at high speed. Beyond the monologues and dialogues featuring experts and well-known personalities (Elon! Oprah! Drake!), there are up-and-coming comedians and musicians performing sets and small gatherings of people who share common interests, from bitcoin to entrepreneurship.

he spoken-word social revolution has arrived at just the right time. And even if it turns out to be a pandemic-boosted fad, it’s one you should try out.

It’s a great, serendipitous connection tool. And at this point, after almost a year without business travel or in-person conferences, I’d be excited to network with a goldfish.

It’s all microphone; no camera, no worrying about your hair or color-coded bookshelf background.

It’s dead simple to join a conversation from... anywhere.

give you this glimpse into my thrilling life because it illustrates a few reasons live, audio-only social-media venues, particularly Clubhouse and Twitter TWTR 3.71% Spaces, have everyone talking right now:

otally normal for not-normal times, that is.

Look, it’s totally normal. Totally, absolutely normal to find yourself in the bathroom, an AirPod in one ear, listening to a live conversation on Clubhouse about the future of artificial intelligence.

Even if it’s a pandemic-boosted fad, there are real reasons chatty, audio-only social media makes sense

Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces: The New Way to Play, Network and Escape Video Calls

California is the largest market in the United States for electric vehicles and energy-storage batteries for power grids, “and now we’d like to do more manufacturing of the intermediate steps,” David Hochschild, chair of the California Energy Commission, said in an interview. “We have the end use of electric vehicles and energy storage, and we have the raw materials, so the vision of Lithium Valley is to get the full supply chain.”

he U.N. called the global boom in electric vehicles “great news” for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but said industry should invest in greener mining techniques and better ways to recycle materials from spent batteries.

he United Nations warned in a report last year that some battery-related mining has caused environmental damage. Much of the world’s current lithium supply comes from Latin America, where some mining has caused groundwater depletion, soil contamination and other forms of environmental degradation, the report said.

nd South Korea’s SK Innovation is building two lithium-ion battery factories in Commerce, Ga.

he Chinese company Envision Group gained control of a lithium-ion battery plant in Smyrna, Tenn., after acquiring the battery business of Japan’s Nissan in 2019. The factory makes batteries for a nearby Nissan Leaf plant.

General Motors and its partner, South Korea’s LG Chem, began building a battery-cell plant in Lordstown, Ohio, last summer that will eventually create 1,100 jobs. The factory is part of GM’s big push to stop selling gas-powered cars and switch to electric by 2035, which the automaker promoted with a Super Bowl ad starring Will Ferrell.

esla’s goal is to exert control over the whole battery supply chain, from base battery materials to the building of battery cells, to their installation directly into Tesla’s cars, Musk and other Tesla executives said at Battery Day.

Musk also said Tesla would begin extracting lithium from a deposit in Nevada to supply the new battery factory. He said the mining would involve using salt to extract lithium from heaps of dirt, and then returning the dirt to its original place, a process he called “environmentally friendly.”

esla and its Japanese partner, Panasonic, manufacture lithium-ion battery cells at a giant factory in Nevada. At Tesla’s “Battery Day” presentation in September, CEO Elon Musk said the company was preparing to build a new battery-cell factory that would dramatically increase output and cut costs.

he Pentagon is “very interested in electrifying” as a means to lower its fuel costs, said Sam Jaffe, a battery expert at Cairn Energy Research Advisors in Boulder, Colo. Drones and other electronic gear are already battery-powered, and in the future ships and aircraft may be, too, he said.

hey are also crucial for harnessing renewable energy, allowing power companies to store solar and wind energy for use when the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing. Cars, buses and power companies use large battery packs containing thousands of individual battery cells.

e added, “We can choose to step in and entice industry and growth, or we cannot and run the risk that we are ceding all of this overseas.” Solid Power so far has established a limited manufacturing line to produce thousands of cells a year, which automakers including Ford and BMW are testing.

“One thing we do great here is innovate,” said Campbell, whose company was spun out of the University of Colorado. “But where there is a chasm is when it gets to manufacturing scale. That is where other nations step in and provide some of that capital before a bank is willing to lean in.”

Doug Campbell, co-founder of battery start-up Solid Power in Louisville, Colo., said the United States should boost tax breaks and other financial support for companies building manufacturing plants.

Republicans have long expressed skepticism about government involvement in the economy and heaped criticism on the Obama administration when a solar-panel company failed after receiving a federal loan guarantee. But some have started to support more government intervention as necessary for competing with China.

In a meeting with senators Thursday to discuss infrastructure investment, Biden warned about the need to compete more effectively with China. “If we don’t get moving, they’re going to eat our lunch,” he said. Also Thursday, the Department of Energy announced up to $100 million of new funding for clean-energy research.

We’d better believe China is in this game. They are competing aggressively,” former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, Biden’s nominee for energy secretary, told a Senate hearing on Jan. 27. “Without a federal partner to make sure we can get these jobs in America then we will be losing globally.”

He took a first step by signing an executive order calling on government agencies, including the U.S. Postal Service, to start converting their fleets to electric vehicles. He’s also pledged to build 500,000 charging stations, revise and extend tax credits for buyers and tighten fuel economy standards for gas-powered vehicles, which the Trump administration relaxed.

President Biden has said he will “use all the levers of the federal government, from purchasing power, R&D, tax, trade, and investment policies” to “position America to be the global leader in the manufacture of electric vehicles and their input materials.”

Aside from California, which has adopted many incentives and regulations to boost electric vehicles and renewable energy, the United States has largely left the sector to the free market.

Some of this federal support dried up during the Trump administration, under withering criticism from conservatives, who dismissed clean energy as a liberal priority.

As the Biden administration promises to jump-start the clean-energy economy, it faces an uphill climb: The United States has fallen behind Asia and Europe in the race to produce the central technology — the high-tech batteries that power electric cars and store solar and wind energy.

Under the Obama administration, the United States offered federal loan guarantees to support clean-energy companies including Tesla, which is now one of the world’s most valuable auto companies. It also introduced a $7,500 tax credit for electric-car purchases, but the perk was limited to 200,000 cars per manufacturer, which Tesla and GM have already exhausted.

The European Union is also closely involved in supporting its battery sector, having established a European Battery Alliance in 2017 that set sweeping goals for manufacturing, charging infrastructure and electric-car uptake. Germany is requiring all gas stations to offer electric-car charging. And last month, the European Commission said it would spend $3.5 billion to subsidize Tesla, BMW and other companies to produce more batteries in Europe and help cut imports from China.

China is bolstering its battery and electric-vehicle companies with tens of billions of dollars of state support, including research and development funding, subsidies for manufacturers and financing for battery-charging stations. It has also driven demand by subsidizing consumer purchases of electric vehicles, and by making buyers of gasoline-fueled cars wait much longer for a license plate.

hanks to its federally funded universities and national labs, the United States has some of the best early-stage battery research in the world. It also has Tesla, an electric-car leader with big plans for domestic battery production. But other countries are doing far more to support their battery industries and ensure that production jobs stay local.

he calls are part of a renewed embrace of industrial policy to help the United States keep its technological edge in an increasingly competitive global economy. Backers of federal action say that without it, the United States risks losing out on another major technology boom — as it did with solar panels and 5G mobile network equipment.

We’re naive to pretend this will happen without government dynamism and action,” says Danny Kennedy, CEO of New Energy Nexus, a nonprofit in Oakland, Calif., that funds and advises start-ups.

hat will happen, say U.S. companies and clean-energy supporters, only if the federal government helps coordinate and finance an aggressive push to boost domestic manufacturing of batteries and their raw materials, as governments in China, South Korea and Europe are doing.

“This could be a game changer when it comes to jobs, but we have to find a way to ensure we keep the technology in the U.S. and incentivize companies to produce it in the U.S.,” said Venkat Srinivasan, a top battery expert at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Ill.

hat would leave the United States dependent on China and other trading partners for much of its battery supply, a risky proposition not just for the auto industry but for the military, which is planning to electrify more of its vehicles and gear. It would also mean missing out on much of the jobs boom the sector is expected to bring.

China dominates battery production today, with 93 “gigafactories” that manufacture lithium-ion battery cells, vs. only four in the United States, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a prominent data provider. If current trends continue, China is projected to have 140 gigafactories by 2030, while Europe will have 17 and the United States, just 10.

According to a Harvard Medical School study, one in 25 adults annually are affected by chewing and swallowing difficulties, a condition known as dysphagia. The condition, which is particularly common in the elderly, can lead to pulmonary aspiration, pneumonia, dehydration, and anxiety. A patient's health is often compounded further by wanting to avoid meals altogether, leading to malnutrition and weight loss.

yFlow's clients in the restaurants space so far include La Boscana in Barcelona, headed by Joel Castanye and Mateu Blanch. The restaurant uses both Focus and Natural Machines' Foodini, not only in the kitchens, but in front of the customers so they can see their dishes come to life.

I think you will see them at all mass food production facilities and in novel settings first," he told TechRepublic. "Then you may start to see them in restaurants and grocery stores. The final destination is in your kitchen as a domestic appliance. The purpose of this technology is to make lives easier. To achieve that, we will need to advance the technology, make food delivery easy and simple, and reduce costs. That may take quite a while."

Our big vision is that in 10 to 15 years, 3D food printers will become a common kitchen appliance like an oven or a stove is in today's kitchen, both professional and home kitchen use. We're pretty realistic about the fact that it does take time for technology to evolve in order to become mass market.

It took 30 years after microwaves went into the consumer market to get 90 percent market penetration. We see that being halved for a 3D food printer just because technology's advanced a lot, so we're a much more tech savvy audience, and plus we can build things out a lot faster.

There is an educational process that needs to happen, so that's why we're targeting also the B2B user. Once you start seeing 3D food printers in restaurants or eating 3D-printed food, and it is all fresh real food, and you get food manufacturers and food service providers engaged and you're seeing it out on the market, then it's not such a huge jump to say 'You know what? I actually want one of those in my home too so I can make my own fresh foods with it'."

Is 3D food printing the fastest way to get food? No, the fastest way to get food is get something that's pre-packaged, rip it open and eat it, or throw it in the microwave, heat it up and eat it. That's the fastest way. But again we're trying to get people away from those packaged types of food. 3D food printing is a faster proposition than doing it by hand or with any other kitchen appliance.

In a restaurant setting, this could mean a touchscreen on your table for you to place your order, which the software processes and sends to the machines in the kitchen. The 3D printers would then print, cook, and plate your meal.

With 3D food printing, once you start talking years out, it's not just about the pretty designs and the automation aspect -- it's about the customisation and nutrition aspect. So for example, you and I can go out to lunch today and order the same thing from a restaurant and we would get the same exact dish, the same potion sizes. But in the future they're looking at customising that, so maybe I get a little bit less and you get a little bit more, or maybe I want a breakfast bar this morning. [The 3D printer] knows from my wearable I went on a 5km run and I'm low on vitamin D and iron, and can pump up the nutrients in my breakfast bar.

ucsma mentioned Pinterest as an example of where people will head to for printable recipes.

hirdly, there'll be companies that specialise in pre-filled food capsules at regular supermarkets. Natural Machines is working with a number of large food manufacturers on pre-filled food capsules at supermarkets that have longer shelf life but don't include additives and preservatives.

econdly, fresh food retailers or even big supermarkets will have 3D-printable food freshly made on-site, just like when you go to a cheese counter or a deli counter today.

irstly, you'll be able to make your own ingredients and print them yourself. That will always be an option with Foodini, Kucsma said, as the device will always come with empty food capsules.

The current version of Foodini that's out on the market can heat the individual food capsule, so that's good for keeping chocolate at a good melting point, or printing warm mashed potatoes," Kucsma said. "But if you were printing raw fish or raw meat, you would have to take that out and cook it some other manner right now. So the next generation device -- which is real, it's not just an idea on paper, we have prototypes in our office -- when that generation device comes out, that's when we really know we can target home kitchen users as well."

atural Machines wants to upgrade Foodini with an additional piece of functionality before it starts targeting home kitchen users: The ability to cook. Coupled with artificial intelligence (AI) and big data, this will usher in a whole new level of autonomous cooking.

Performance also allows each meal to be customised for each patient, taking into account their condition, their favourite food, and their required vitamin intake. Any kind of supplement can be included in the ingredients -- proteins, vitamins, and minerals -- with the purpose of improving their condition.

etherlands-based ByFlow calls itself the "expert" in 3D food printing, having been specialised in 3D printing since 2009. Its portable "Focus" 3D food printer is currently sold as a B2B product, optimised for desserts, including chocolates and meringues. The company told TechRepublic that chefs and patissiers use Focus on a daily basis "to experiment with textures and shapes, save time and money, create new designs, and amaze their customers".

Everybody's fearful of robots taking over jobs and everything to that effect. At the end of the day we look at Foodini being a kitchen appliance, so I don't think anybody's fearful of their stove or oven taking over their jobs."

econdly, 3D printers are capable of more consistent prep work at a mass scale, freeing up the chef to do less menial tasks. Kucsma gave an example of a chef who uses Foodini for a quiche that involves printing circles on top of each other.

We eat with our eyes as much as our mouths," Kucsma has said. "Food presentation is very important."

ichelin-starred chefs such as Perez use Foodini for two main reasons, according to Kucsma. Firstly, there's the presentation factor: A 3D printer can construct intricate shapes and achieve a scale of precision that the human hand could not to wow the diner.

Users of the Foodini printer include La Enoteca in Barcelona, headed by Michelin-starred chef Paco Perez. For one particular dish he prints a seafood puree into an intricate, flower-like shape that resembles sea coral, topped with caviar, sea urchins, hollandaise sauce, and a carrot foam.

"I think we're going to have a lot of different things coming together to make sustainability work, but I do think 3D printing will be a big part of that," Kucsma said.

ith the global population set to reach 9 billion by 2050 -- at which point agricultural systems will be unable to supply food to everyone, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation -- combating food waste could help sustainability going forward. It could also cut down on plastic packaging if we were ever able to take our own reusable food capsules to a store, fill up, and take home to print.

ucsma said that there's a concept of "ugly" fruits and vegetables, meats, and fish that people don't want to eat because they look unconventional. This means that they often don't pass quality control and are thrown away, despite being perfectly good produce.

D printing could also reduce food waste, as it enables the reproduction of "ugly" food. Natural Machines showcased Foodini at September's World Seafood Congress in Reykjavik, Iceland, and its ability to reprocess cuts of fish into more appealing shapes. The company is working with Matís, an Icelandic food and biotech institute, to 3D-print nutritious cuts of fish that often get left on their bone and are thrown out during mass manufacturing.

She also thinks we are "at the mercy of what food manufacturers decide to produce for us," and that by opting for printed food over the processed food in the shops, we can be healthier. Manufacturers are also aware of how 3D food printers could affect their business, and could change their products accordingly.

Foodini will also enable home users to manufacture certain foods that are similar to those made by mass producers, but this time with ingredients with less salt, oil, and artificial additives. Kucsma has likened a 3D food printer to "a food factory shrunk down to the size of a box that sits on your food counter" or "a mini manufacturing plant in your kitchen".

Once Foodini reaches home kitchen users, it will be beneficial for people who don't enjoy cooking or otherwise cannot. Even for those who cook frequently, it will still be an attractive proposition for the times when they don't have the time.

Foodini is currently a B2B product being rolled out gradually to professional kitchens and other enterprises. Based on market feedback, Natural Machines will then adjust the product with the aim of targeting home users as well.

We actually use a lot of artificial intelligence and artificial vision to watch what's happening so we can adjust things as necessary and print as fast as possible," Kucsma said. "If you're talking about flat crackers, you can do that in 20 seconds, you can do a personalised pizza in five minutes."

"From day one we designed Foodini to work with food, and we've always designed it to work with fresh foods," Kucsma said. "So a lot of the systems we built in, a lot of the software we're using -- it's customised to work with food; we have food-grade food-safe materials. You can print whatever you want without adding anything -- you don't need gelling agents, we don't need any types of additives."

Up to five food capsules can be loaded into the printer at one time. It also has different nozzle sizes to accommodate different textures, Kucsma said, which means additives such as maltodextrin aren't needed in the food to hold its shape.

n 2014, Natural Machines launched Foodini, a 10kg, 4.7 inch high, Android-powered 3D food printer, which is currently in production and available for select customers. Foodini users just need a Wi-Fi connection to choose recipes from Natural Machines' community site, which they can also do remotely from a smartphone or tablet. They can choose from a library of shapes or create their own to print.

The company needed a solution that could enable mass manufacturing in several countries around the world, as well as something that could print a wider range of foods than just confectionery.

The expense was not the ingredients or the labour that went into those cakes, but it was the packaging and preserving, the freezing, the shipping, that made those cakes quite astronomical in terms of price," Kucsma told TechRepublic.

n discovering the concept of 3D food printing, Kucsma wanted to know why they couldn't use their own fresh, wholesome ingredients rather than a pre-filled food capsule for printing confections. Additionally, her co-founder owned a bakery and wanted to distribute her product around the world, but was held back because it was too expensive.

atural Machines is a 3D food printing and IoT company and the maker of the first 3D food printer to make both savoury and sweet foods with fresh ingredients. Established in November 2012, the company originally focused on 3D-printing sweets and snacks before shifting focus due to COO and co-founder Lynette Kucsma's healthy eating habits.

ntil 2014, 3D food printers focused predominantly on intricate, sugar-heavy confections. Then one Barcelona-based company made strides towards 3D-printing something you could actually eat for dinner.

ccording to 3D food printing company Natural Machines, this concept is not far from becoming a reality. Others, such as pizza printing specialist BeeHex, believe it is a matter of years before it becomes a common feature of not only the home, but in restaurant kitchens and commercial enterprises as well.

Imagine stepping into the kitchen of the great smart home of the future. Sitting between your connected stove and IoT-enabled toaster is a 3D food printer, able to print and cook your favourite meal with a single touch of a screen.

3D-printed food offers new possibilities such as intricate designs, automated cooking, mass manufacturing, and personalised meals. But will it ever replace the traditional methods we know today?

Here's how 3D food printers are changing what we eat

Everything was abbreviated,” said Alyson, 35, a business analyst at Florida State University. “Was it what I planned? Absolutely not. But it ended up being intimate and special.”

Weeks before their April nuptials, the couple uninvited just about everyone from their celebration. They still got married, but in front of a dozen guests in a friend’s backyard. Everybody else followed along on Facebook Live. They served champagne in disposable cups, along with mini pastries that Alyson picked up from the local Publix supermarket. In all, they saved more than $20,000 by downsizing.

The industry as a whole has turned into a monster, where you need to have this party and a bridal shower and you need to care about your napkin folds,” said Creidenberg, who is based in Denver. “The beauty of virtual weddings is that they strip away all of that extra stuff.”

he purchased a few dozen tripods, microphones and ring lights, and came up with a template for interactive online weddings. There are group dances (often to Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” and Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling”), virtual toasts and breakout rooms separated by “table,” so guests can interact as they would in person. Packages start at $1,200, with add-ons such as photo guest books ($100) and slide shows ($200).

t’s a much-needed shift for the industry, and it took a pandemic for things to finally change,” she said. “We saw our clients start freaking out in March and thought, okay, let’s do Zoom as a crutch to get through the pandemic. But pretty quickly the lightbulb went off in my head: This isn’t just something that’s going to get us through, but it’s going to create radical change in the industry.”

t paid off. Her company, Wedfuly, hosted 500 online weddings from March through December, with as many as 30 bookings on some weekends.

When traditional wedding bookings dried up at the beginning of the pandemic, Caroline Creidenberg took a chance on planning Zoom weddings instead.

Couples are saying, ‘Instead of 200 guests, we’re just going to have 20, so let’s go all out on the flowers,’ ” she said. “We’re doing more specialty arrangements and hanging installations than ever before. They’re costly and take a lot of labor hours, but more couples are saying, ‘Let’s build a boardwalk from grandma and grandpa’s cottage all the way out to the lake because we can.’ ”

ouples also are choosing larger and more elaborate floral arrangements, says Pamela Klein, a florist in the Chicago suburbs.

he typical engagement ring, he said, now comes with a 2.5-carat diamond (price tag: $6,000 to $9,000), compared with the 1-carat stones seen pre-pandemic. Signet Jewelers, the parent company of Kay, Zales and Peoples, also reports seeing higher demand for larger and more novel cuts of diamonds, including pear- and heart-shaped stones for both men and women, according to President Jamie Singleton.

ridal revenue has literally spiked” during the pandemic, said Amish Shah, president of ALTR, a New York-based company that specializes in lab-grown diamonds. “Those who could afford it are getting even larger diamonds.”

ther jewelers are reporting similar trends, including an uptick in diamond-encrusted wedding bands for men.

At diamond giant De Beers, fourth-quarter sales of engagement rings rose 12 percent from a year earlier, with much of that growth coming from larger stones, according to Stephen Lussier, the company’s executive vice president of consumer markets.

ow the 27-year-old teacher is doing her best to re-create the experience at home: She ordered a selection of wedding gowns and dusty blue bridesmaid dresses and invited her friends over. They sipped champagne from Costco while trying on their gowns.

There is definitely more demand for more low-key, simple bridal gowns for virtual weddings and elopements,” Chief Marketing Officer Ranu Coleman said, adding that sales rose 30 percent in January from a year earlier. “So many wedding plans were uncertain that we’ve had to make a lot of shifts and adjustments.”

The company also created a line of simpler, shorter wedding dresses, starting at $190, and lowered prices overall, with bridesmaid dresses starting near $70. Its line of masks, which come in satin, velvet, lace and beaded varieties, sells for as little as $2 apiece.

zazie, an online bridal boutique based in Silicon Valley, has doubled down on virtual showrooms where brides and their friends can select, share and vote for their favorite dresses. The company also expanded its at-home try-on program, which allows brides to select as many as three gowns at a time.

It’s not just the wedding that’s getting a makeover.Bridal gown shopping has become an event unto itself, often accompanied by bridesmaids and champagne, as popularized by television shows such as “Say Yes to the Dress.”It’s moving online, too.

t has been a runaway success: McIntosh facilitates as many as 10 Zoom and YouTube weddings — and a growing number of funerals — each month. Overall bookings are up 50 percent from a year ago.

n Baltimore, photographer Dave McIntosh recently added a live-streaming service, starting at $850, to his lineup of photo and video packages. He took a leap of faith, he says, early in the pandemic when he invested $10,000 on high-speed routers, modems and wireless radios to facilitate online weddings.

In 2019, the average wedding cost nearly $25,000, with most going toward the reception, according to the Wedding Report, a market research firm. But with nuptials increasingly taking place outdoors or online, the average couple now spend significantly less, forcing retailers and vendors to adapt. Hotels are offering elopement packages, bridal gown designers are creating simpler, shorter dresses, and bakers are churning out miniature cakes. And a growing contingent of videographers and wedding planners will produce and host Zoom nuptials, often with a price tag in the thousands.

s a result, couples are redirecting their wedding dollars — splurging on engagement rings, individually packed charcuterie plates and macarons, and moving away from multicourse dinners, traditional venues and tiered cakes. In states such as Colorado, where pandemic prohibitions include dance floors, couples are shunning live bands and DJs and turning to bingo and trivia games to keep guests entertained.

hile the pandemic has led to a flurry of engagements, it also has put in limbo much of the wedding industry — a $73 billion market, according to data research firm IBISWorld. Most couples — about 80 percent of them — postponed or canceled their ceremonies after the U.S. outbreak began nearly a year ago, said David Wood, president of the Association of Bridal Consultants. Those who haven’t are scaling back considerably, with backyard vows and online ceremonies to avoid large gatherings, Wood said.

We decided, what is there to lose? Let’s get married and we can have a big party next year,” said Vejar, 43, who co-owns a yarn shop and natural dye studio in Oakland, Calif., with Rodriguez. The shift not only allowed them to share their special day with 150 friends and family, but it also “means we’re not $10,000 in debt right now.”

When the pandemic upended their wedding plans in June, Kristine Vejar and Adrienne Rodriguez moved everything online: dress shopping, cake-cutting, even the vows.

hile some couples are postponing their wedding plans, others are downsizing to backyard vows and online ceremonies

Smaller cakes, shorter dresses, bigger diamonds: The pandemic is shaking up the $73 billion wedding industry

The services include charging sellers thousands of dollars to speak to account managers, as well as making it necessary to purchase ads to guarantee the top spot on a search page. Plus, Amazon is aggressively pushing its own brands — something that may be cheaper for consumers in the short run, but demonstrates its overall power over pricing and merchandise on the site. That gives it an advantage over rival products and sellers who rely on Amazon for their livelihood and have few alternatives if they want to thrive selling online.

Whether all this AI, software and automation will be used to ease the burden of its employees, or to force them to work harder to keep up, is a choice all companies face in the age of digitization, and none more so than Amazon. It’s possible Mr. Jassy will choose to manage this ongoing transition differently than the famously hard-charging Mr. Bezos has. It’s also possible that he may feel forced, by the attention of regulators, to manage things differently than Mr. Bezos.

Mr. Bezos, who has a talent for long-term thinking, seems to have chosen just the right moment to install an unflappable CEO who has the opportunity and possibly the temperament to burnish Amazon’s image. The biggest challenges in Amazon’s immediate future, aside from unionization, are what could be years of congressional hearings, as well as federal investigations, about whether Amazon is a monopoly that should be broken up, says Paul Armstrong, an industry analyst and creator of the “What Did Amazon Do This Week?” newsletter.

At present, Amazon needs all the workers it can get. But depending on whether unionization efforts at the company gain traction, the company may soon have yet another powerful incentive to replace workers with automation as fast as it can. The company has tried many tactics to prevent unionization at its facilities, arguing, among other things, that a unionized workforce would reduce the flexibility it needs to continue to adapt its systems.

Amazon invests heavily in supporting our sellers as we work together to serve customers and protect seller brands,” says an Amazon spokesperson. “It is in our economic interest to minimize any disruption of our selling partners’ sales, and we work hard to prevent mistaken enforcement. We call all low-risk or tenured sellers before suspension, and we provide a clear path for sellers to appeal enforcement decisions through our team.”

Their AI doesn’t get nuance sometimes,” he says. Sometimes it will take seller listings down with little warning, leaving small businesses scrambling to make payroll, he adds.

Software, too, has already replaced the humans who would usually handle the accounts of retail partners. Even big brands that decide to sell on Amazon are for the most part dealing with the company’s automated systems. AI almost entirely governs how sellers are treated on Amazon’s marketplace, and it isn’t always easy to work with, says Jason Boyce, who was for 17 years a top-200 seller on Amazon, and who subsequently founded Avenue7Media, which helps companies sell on Amazon’s marketplace.

n Amazon spokesperson objected to the characterization that anyone in its facilities is “managed by algorithm,” because all associates have a human manager who is responsible for them and who coaches them if they don’t meet performance expectations. “Our front-line workers are the heart and soul of Amazon,” and receive the same benefits as corporate employees from the day they start at the company, the spokesperson added. Amazon has in the past said only a small percentage of associates are fired or leave the company because of performance issues.

Throughout the supply chain of Amazon’s e-commerce operation, humans are onboarded rapidly into jobs that require almost no training. This is possible because of how directed and constrained by algorithms and automation these roles have become. In Amazon’s more advanced fulfillment centers, for example, employees who pick items for orders from robot shelves are surveilled by AI-enabled cameras. A cloud-connected scanning gun monitors the rate at which they pick items, the number and duration of their breaks and whether they’re grabbing the right items and putting them in the right places. Managers need only step in if software reports a problem, such as a worker falling behind.

David Risher was a senior vice president of retail at Amazon from 1997 to 2002, and he worked closely with Mr. Jassy. “If the past is prequel, he’ll lead from the heart as well as the head,” says Mr. Risher. “He leads with genuine empathy—the kind you can’t fake.” The two are still in touch; Mr. Jassy is a member of the advisory council for Mr. Risher’s Worldreader nonprofit, which gives underprivileged children access to digital books.

Next, will Mr. Jassy balance Amazon’s status as one of America’s largest employers with the company’s drive to automate as many roles as possible? And finally, how much of this will he be able to achieve in the face of mounting antitrust investigations and calls for a breakup of the company?

The same cloud infrastructure Amazon uses to manage and transact with millions of customers also supports systems that, by many accounts, drive its employees ever harder, and often leaves its third-party sellers at a loss as to how to navigate Amazon’s marketplace—fueling complaints and investigations into its labor and competitive practices. Will Amazon engineer its systems to instead improve workers’ quality of life and promote better and more transparent relations with its vendors?

For starters, there is a question that goes to the heart of what kind of corporation Amazon wants to be. Executives at the company are emphatic about their desire to preserve the health of employees, and give them opportunities to grow and develop, but the way Amazon manages both employees and seller-partners with algorithms is often at odds with those values. Should Mr. Jassy choose to make changes, can Amazon engineer its software and systems to be more empathetic to the needs of those they serve and rule over?

Mr. Jassy’s experience running a cloud operation might not qualify him to run a competitor like Walmart, which is still dominated by physical stores. But, along with his nearly 24 years at Amazon, it gives him an edge in overseeing Amazon’s e-commerce operations and the rest of its sprawling empire. (Cloud computing is remote computing power accessed through the internet, and it’s the key enabler of everything from the mobile revolution to scores of services we take for granted, from streaming to AI.)

Having built Amazon Web Services from a tiny startup he headed within Amazon, begun in the early 2000s, into the behemoth of the cloud market (and generator of half of Amazon’s profits), Mr. Jassy understands not only the internet plumbing for countless tech companies AWS supports, from Netflix to Slack, but also how it’s plugged into the myriad businesses owned by Amazon itself. Now 53 years old, Mr. Jassy joined Amazon in 1997, immediately after graduating from Harvard Business School.

While Mr. Jassy is often described by those who have worked for him as being a lot like Jeff Bezos, but perhaps warmer and fuzzier, there is arguably at present a sharp contrast between the way he treats his immediate reports and the way Amazon’s algorithms and artificial intelligence treat its millions of front-line workers and marketplace sellers. If Mr. Jassy can figure out how to use algorithms to manage workers and partners as humanely as he apparently manages the people he works with personally, that may prove to be his defining legacy as CEO.

Amazon uses software to manage in a way that’s unlike almost any other company, except maybe gig-economy giants Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and Instacart. Whether they’re driving a delivery van, picking items from shelves or trying to maintain their product inventory to avoid being delisted, Amazon’s employees, subcontractors and seller-partners are monitored, evaluated, rewarded and even flagged for reprimand or coaching by software.

But the incoming chief executive, Mr. Jassy—a loyal deputy and devoted student of founder Jeff Bezos—has at his disposal a powerful tool for managing such a vast ocean of workers and partners: an equally vast cloud-software infrastructure that he has overseen from its start.

Mr Charlie Hall, a Head and Neck Consultant at Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said: "This is an exciting project that has the potential to revolutionise our diagnostic approach to cancers occurring in the head and neck region. Early and accurate diagnosis is the key to better cancer treatment outcomes and will also have significant economic benefits to the wider NHS."

The ''smart needle" probe, is comprised of fibre-optics encased within a fine needle that can look for cancer under the skin's surface—for example, in neck glands. Dr. John Day of the University of Bristol, who built the first prototypes and continues to work on optimising the design, said, "If our probe is successful in clinical trials for lymphoma, then it opens the door to applying it to many other cancers in the body."

While early diagnosis can be a key factor in providing effective treatment, current methods can be both invasive and time-consuming, leaving patients anxiously awaiting results.

The team believe that the new technique could significantly improve the rate of detection and diagnosis of cancers, and particularly lymphoma (a cancer of the immune system) – the sixth most common cancer in the UK. Cancer affects around 50 percent of people in their lifetime, while one-in-two will succumb to the disease.

his optical biopsy uses a technique called Raman spectroscopy, which measures the light scattered by tissues when a low-power laser is shone onto it. Light is scattered differently from healthy or diseased tissues, meaning that health professionals are able to detect whether there are concerns within seconds. The results show it is possible to show a fingerprint of the disease that can be used to diagnose cancer within a few seconds, producing near instantaneous results for the clinician and reducing patient anxiety.