OpinionApril 10, 20256 min readBlack Communities Affected By Opioids Have Been Mostly Ignored in SettlementsThe settlements that have come out of opioid lawsuits should be going to communities affected most. This isn’t what’s happening for Black communitiesBy Jerel Ezell BackyardBest/Alamy Stock PhotoAfter a troubling spike that began in 2019, the total number of drug overdose deaths dropped in 2023, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most of these deaths were related to opioid use. Despite the drop, steep racial disparities in opioid deaths, particularly among Black people, remain. Why? In part, these disparities persist because of what I and others believe is big pharma’s heavy but subtle racialized influence on the opioid epidemic.Yet as these industry players continue to reach legal settlements with states and municipalities across the country, the courts have ignored their role in exacerbating the opioid epidemic in Black communities. To rectify this, money from the settlements should be used to help these deeply affected communities.One year ago, because of my experience as a sociologist who studies the racial aspects of substance use, I was approached by a prominent Manhattan law firm to be an expert witness in a trial that would potentially provide some answers on the exact scope and nature of the pharmaceutical industry’s influence on the opioid epidemic. The firm was representing a multibillion-dollar drug manufacturer that was being sued by the city of Baltimore for its role in the city’s staggering opioid crisis.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.During the past seven years in Baltimore, illicit use of drugs, namely opioids, has claimed more than 6,000 lives, with older Black men dying at the highest rates, via overdoses. This is the highest per capita figure for any large American city. The law firm was looking to argue, in part, that the epidemic in the predominantly Black city wasn’t connected to the pharmaceutical industry’s actions but rather to intricate, deep-seated issues such as limited economic opportunity and lack of health care access—outgrowths of systemic racism forged by the government and society writ large. In short, their argument was that the pharmaceutical industy was simply a bystander as the opioid crisis, stimulated by everyday people and their social and political systems, unfurled.I saw the proposed defense as dubious at best. Systemic issues have no doubt played a pronounced role in the U.S.’s opioid epidemic. But if you connect certain dots, you can see how opioid makers may have quietly seized upon these cracks in the system. Despite this, the epidemic’s effect on Black communities has been little more than a footnote in the national opioid settlement initiative, which has seen pharmaceutical titans cough up gargantuan amounts of money in settlements to state and local governments—money that should, in theory, be invested back into the most intimately affected communities.I ended up parting ways with the law firm several months before the case was set to go to court and without accepting any fees. Unsurprisingly, its client settled with the city of Baltimore, but—like most other opioid makers on trial—had denied any wrongdoing. The client likely backed out early to avoid a lengthy trial, as well as to prevent the public scrutiny that would assuredly come from big pharma’s purported actions—and inactions—in the low-income, minoritized city being shown at trial.In analyzing some of the national settlements, it’s evident that the funds often aren’t specifically earmarked for some of the hardest hit communities and groups, namely Black communities. Sometimes, these populations don’t even have a proportionate seat at the table to discuss where and how the funds should be used.Take for example Ohio, which is expected to receive up to $2 billion in settlement funds. Going back to 2017, Black men in Ohio have had the highest rate of drug overdose deaths of any demographic. Ohio officials established the OneOhio Recovery Foundation, a nonprofit composed of Ohian volunteers, to guide the disbursement of the settlement funds. According to a report from a local NPR affiliate in September 2024, only 2 of the board’s 29 members were Black.For much of the early 2000s, as the opioid epidemic grew, opioid marketing was overwhelmingly targeted to white, upper-middle class people, as well as rural white working-class communities. During this period, prescription opioid use and misuse were substantially higher in white populations compared with Black ones. By the mid-2010s, as consumer sales began to stagnate due to a federal crackdown, big pharma’s marketing practices dramatically shifted, becoming most common in racially mixed counties.Within several years, the gaps in prescription misuse rates between Black and white people had all but closed. This occurred even though, paradoxically, clinicians have historically been more likely to downplay and neglect Black patients’ pain and deny them opioid prescriptions, on a basis of unwarranted, racialized fears of the patient misusing or reselling them. When people can’t access these medications—either because of a lack of insurance or a prescriber’s resistance—they frequently turn to black-market painkillers and also heroin and fentanyl, cheaper fixes that are more potent and more likely to induce an overdose. Nearly 80 percent of heroin users first start with prescription opioids. On top of this, research consistently shows that opioid use treatments, such as buprenorphine, are less available to Black people than to white people as a result of costs and a lack of access to clinicians licensed to provide treatment.The government’s failure to prevent big pharma’s racial subversions mirrors past failures. During the 1970s, as the feds cracked down on the marketing and sale of tobacco in white communities, industry giants such as the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (maker of Camel and Newport) began more aggressively pushing their products, namely menthol cigarettes, to Black consumers. Today Black people have disproportionately high rates of smoking relative to white populations and higher rates of smoking-related cancers. A multibillion-dollar settlement was achieved in the 1990s to address the tobacco industry’s years of predatory advertising, but a recent report indicates that only a fraction of the funds have been used for prevention or cessation efforts.Of the roughly $50 billion currently earmarked from the nationwide opioid settlements in the past five years, states have only received roughly $4 billion, a result of the slow bureaucratic churn of the legal system and state and local governments’ consternation over how to allocate the funds. Unsurprisingly, the effects of the received funds so far appear negligible, given the general steadiness of overdose death rates and findings of persisting racial disparities. Early reports suggest an unevenness in spending is to blame. Funds have been spent on everything from essential resources like lifesaving overdose reversal medications to less essential, more extraneous things like police squad cars and surveillance technology, extensions of the failed, duly racist war on drugs. These initial trends point to more of the same, punctuating the need to better strategize on how we use the opioid settlement funds.Moving ahead, settlement agreements must robustly account for racial disparities and ensure the government allocates its accrued funds from big pharma lawsuits to more directly target risk factors that have stoked the Black opioid epidemic. Research consistently shows that a lack of access to treatment for mental illness, brought on in no small part by recurrent exposure to racial social stressors and discrimination, is a primary culprit for opioid misuse in Black communities, making this a vital starting point. Funds should also be devoted to increasing the cultural responsiveness of drug treatment programs, as well as prescription monitoring programs that help prescribers determine if a person is “shopping around” for opioids to misuse. This will improve the likelihood that Black people seeking pain relief can be counseled and supported through socially informed approaches before potentially leaping from prescription opioids to even more dangerous street options.Finally, there needs to be more settlement funding allocated to better supporting community prevention efforts, with an eye toward addressing the precursors to, and outgrowths of, the Black opioid epidemic—namely neighborhood crime, mass incarceration, commercial disinvestment and community blight. These factors alone increase the likelihood that Black adolescents will begin misusing opioids. The government should use settlement funds to specifically focus on expanding early childhood education programs and workforce development programs, subsidizing new developments in at-risk communities and improving neighborhood environments.You can’t put a price on the Black lives that the opioid epidemic has claimed and will continue to claim in places like Baltimore, but we can begin to put a price on the damage those deaths have done to countless Black communities. Addressing the previously conspicuous factors that exacerbated such damage, including the role of big pharma, and ensuring the government allocates the funding accrued from their legal settlements fairly and effectively will go a long way towards upending this thoroughly preventable crisis.This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Sandbox matchmaking sim Date Everything! has a final release date, after previously pushing back its earlier (and more romantic) 14th February launch plans. Read more

You can trust VideoGamer. Our team of gaming experts spend hours testing and reviewing the latest games, to ensure you're reading the most comprehensive guide possible. Rest assured, all imagery and advice is unique and original. Check out how we test and review games here Path to Menzoberranzan is, by far, the biggest custom campaign mod in the works for Baldur’s Gate 3. Set over 100 years after the end of Baldur’s Gate 2, the in-development campaign not only returns players to the City of Gold, Athkatla, but does so with a brand new story, six-to-eight custom companions and a whole host of side quests. Speaking to VideoGamer, the team behind the upcoming mod revealed one of the coolest returning areas in the game: Irenicus’ Dungeon. The opening area of the second game, players of BG2 will remember having to escape the dungeon at the start of the game. In Path to Menzoberranzan, players will be exploring the treacherous location, delving deep into its depths. “We are revisiting Irenicus’ Dungeon over a hundred years later,” project lead Thomas Loughlin told us. “And we will see that things are quite eerily the same, but also very, very different.” Every room in the BG3 mod has been carefully designed. (Also, worth noting: standard BG3 characters are being used as placeholders for new party members.) The original Baldur’s Gate 2 story saw players escaping the dungeon to enter Wukeen’s Promenade and begin the game’s story. This time, after arriving in Athkatla, you’ll be tasked with finding out why strange occurrences keep happening around the iconic marketplace. The first stop? The dungeon. “Irenicus’ Dungeon in Baldur’s Gate 2 is the, you know, the quintessential starting location for most,” Loughlin continued. “Most video games, you awake to find yourself in a dark room, and it was one of my favorite parts of the game. You awake as the Bhaalspawn and you’ve got to escape what we call Chateau Irenicus or Irenicus’ Dungeon itself.” While the Path to Menzoberranzan team is revisiting a lot of places from Baldur’s Gate 2, a lot of changes have occurred. Alongside the 100-year time-skip, the move from the isometric structure of the original to the 3D setup of BG3 means that a lot of design changes have to happen anyway. Streets will be redesigned, buildings are moving and dungeons have new layouts to make proper use of the game engine’s 3D movement and free-form combat. “Adventurer’s Mart, which, you know, if you walk around Baldur’s Gate 2, it’s a very stock standard isometric square box of a shop,” Loughlin used as an example. “We’ve reimagined that in a diffeent way. We’re taking all of the references and bringing them up to date.” The team is looking at everything in Baldur’s Gate 2 from both a lore perspective—is this area still here 120 years later—and a design perspective. The massive jump in gameplay freedom from Baldur’s Gate 2 to Baldur’s Gate 3 means that a 1-to-1 recreation could work, but it wouldn’t be as satisfying as a true reimagining. “We’ve reimagined this whole place to be more vibrant, more exciting.”PATH TO MENZOBERRANZAN PROJECT LEAD THOMAS LOUGHLIN Just for Wukeen’s Promenade, the giant mod team is doing some fantastic work. Concept artists are designing new areas and reimagined parts of Athkatla, modellers are then creating new assets for them, coders are working on new scripts and a huge team of writers is making sure the lore of the mod fits within The Forgotten Realms. But at the end of the day, the team just wants to make a fun new experience for Baldur’s Gate 3 players. “With Baldur’s Gate 3, you can look around anywhere. So like, we’ve reimagined this whole place to be more vibrant, more exciting. There’s more things in there, it’s a huge bazaar, it’s the central marketplace of one of the largest cities within Faerun. Athkatla is booming, it’s never been better, it’s called the City of Coin for a reason. It’s going to be wealthier, more vibrant. But just like real life, there’s are peaks of wealth… there are also dips and troughs of poverty and crime, and that’s the juxtaposition of being a great and wealthy city, or a great and wealthy place.” From my time sitting with the team, of which we will definitely have more to share, the Path to Menzoberranzan rivals that of many AAA studios I’ve talked to. The passion on display is limitless, and the team’s dedication mirrors the dedication of BG3’s brilliant community. With other modders creating unhinged mods to summon literally hundreds of creatures, or designing World of Warcraft-themed campaigns, Baldur’s Gate 3 has a long life ahead of it just from the passion of fans alone. Baldur’s Gate 3 Platform(s): macOS, PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series S/X, Xbox Series X Genre(s): Adventure, RPG, Strategy 10 VideoGamer Subscribe to our newsletters! By subscribing, you agree to our Privacy Policy and may receive occasional deal communications; you can unsubscribe anytime. Share

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Wii Problems Why isn't the Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour free? Former Ninty CEO Reggie Fils-Aimé isn't saying anything, aside from cheekily reminding us what happened with Wii Sports An early contender for discourse subtweet of the year here. Image credit: Nintendo News by Mark Warren Senior Staff Writer Published on April 10, 2025 Since Nintendo revealed its new console, the prices of both Switch 2 itself and Mario Kart World haven't exactly gone down well. It's also had a third price controversy horseman of the apocalypse to address too - why the Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour doesn't come bundled in with the console for free. To be fair, after a period of initial silence, Ninty has at least tried to explain to folks why it's opted to change the amounts it has for all of this stuff, whipping out phrases like "variable pricing" and in the case of the Welcome Tour, the at least pretty reasonable on paper explanation that the price came down to stuff like "the amount of care and work that the team put into it". To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Now, former Nintendo of America CEO Reggie Fils-Aimé has commented on the Welcome Tour bit of the discourse without explicitly saying much at all. Instead, all he's done is cheekily share a few very specific clips of him explaining the battle he had trying to convince Nintendo and Shigeru Miyamoto to be comfortable packing-in some games with consoles for free. The first tweet in the thread links to him telling IGN back in 2022 about this kind of fight with Wii Sports and the Wii, which ended up being bundled together everywhere but in Japan. The second's about bundling Wii Play with the Wii Remote, and then there's a final clip the exec's introduced in this thread by declaring "and the results". To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Basically, in both cases, the call to bundle these quite 'show off the hardware'-ish sorts of games paid off pretty well, at least in terms of helping the games gain traction and be put in front of a lot of players - the kind of thing you want with a bit of software that shows off all the bells and whistles of the new device they've just bought and are probably considering spending more cash on going forwards. So, it's not a stretch to see this as big Reggie suggesting that packing-in the Welcome Tour rather than charging for it might have had similarly positive results for big Ninty this time around. It's an interesting debate to have, if nothing else. Are you still scratching your head about the Switch 2 Welcome Tour not being delivered in the same way the likes of Astro's Playroom have been? Let us know below!

Will something good happen instead?After months of speculation, Nintendo finally lifted the lid last week on the information that people really wanted to hear: a new Mario Kart game, the Switch 2 release date, what the heck Switch 2's mysterious 'C' button does.As it turns out, clicking the right Joy-Con's new button opens up the GameChat service, so you can have a natter with your pals while you get to some online gaming. However, as you might expect, such a service requires you to have a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, so what happens if you click it without an active membership? Nothing too bad, it seems.Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Daniel Ruskin started his career when he was a mere 14 years old as an engineer for Coinbase. As he tells it, he was a teenager “who knew how to code and wanted to build cool things.” Obviously too young to get a bank account, Ruskin did freelance development work he found on reddit in exchange for bitcoin. There he saw that Coinbase was hiring, and boldly sent the head of operations a cold email asking if he could work for the crypto exchange. “Long story short, I ended up writing much of the early software that powered the Coinbase platform,” he tells TechCrunch. “I didn’t write the v0 codebase…but I did write a lot of software that brought us from 1 to 10.” After four years at Coinbase, Ruskin decided to go to college and then to law school. He started a few startups along the way, including an election security company where he drafted and won a patent on its technology.  Frustrated with how “opaque” the patent process was, Ruskin in December 2024 launched a new Salt Lake City-based company called Inventex. Ruskin, now 26, says Inventex wants to ease the process of “preparing and filing patent applications” by using a series of AI agents augmented by licensed attorneys. He believes that Inventex can help companies get patent-pending “10x faster” — in days, rather than months that a traditional firm might take.   The concept quickly attracted investors and after just one month, Ruskin had raised $2.4 million in a pre-seed round to grow Inventex. Conviction Capital, Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, and Cambrian Ventures co-led the financing, which also included participation from Boost and others. The money was raised via SAFEs at a $10 million valuation. Inventex intakes the necessary technical data provided by its customers such as code, design documents, and technical specifications. It then identifies what its customers have invented that meet the legal requirements for patentability. This includes searching for prior art or what has been done before in that particular customer’s technical field, as well as “how our customer is different,” Ruskin said.  The company then drafts and files patent applications on behalf of the company in the United States and abroad. Maksim Stepanenko, who worked with Ruskin at Coinbase, tells TechCrunch that Ruskin impressively started leading key payments infrastructure projects at the crypto company “soon” after he started while still a high school student. So when he heard about what Ruskin was doing with Inventex, he signed on as a small angel investor as part of the pre-seed financing. “He’s thoughtful, fast-moving, and unusually good at navigating complex systems,” said Stepanenko, who is the founder of a startup called Operator. “I’ve been following his work ever since [working with him at Coinbase] and was excited to support his new company. [He’s] one of the most quietly impressive people I’ve worked with.” ‘More inbound than we can handle’ Besides speed, Ruskin claims Inventex’s approach gets its customers higher-quality patents too. “We fine tune models specifically to each technical area, and our agents are true experts in each technical field our customers work in,” he said. Traditional patent attorneys, Ruskin believes, often do not understand the contours of the inventions they are protecting. The technical-expert agents are overseen, and refined, by licensed attorneys. Ruskin is confident that Inventex has the right model to be innovative in this complex subset of legal services. “Our competitors sell software as task-based automation to traditional law firms, and deployment is constrained by their incentives such as a billable-hour model, and the broader scheme of paying for expertise versus results,” he said. “We upend this by providing the end-to-end service.” Inventex’s model is also generalizable, Ruskin claims. For example, he said Inventex is currently using one of its tools to automate MSPB (U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board) complaints for the tens of thousands of federal employees that were recently laid off. “Traditional firms can’t support that kind of workload,” he said. It’s early days yet but Inventex has about $250,000 of annual recurring revenue in the pipeline, according to Ruskin, including two publicly traded companies and numerous startups. Dirac is one that has given permission to be named. “We have more inbound than we can handle,” Ruskin said. Building unicorns Ruskin also has expertise in the fintech space. He joined Checkr, a service for gig platforms to pay their workforce, in 2022. There, Ruskin says, he helped start Checkr Pay, “a startup within a startup.” During his time there, Ruskin hired a team of three engineers and “built and launched a neobank in about three to four months.” (Checkr raised $250 million at a $4.6 billion valuation in 2021.) Ruskin left that company in 2023 to finish law school at New York University, where he graduated in the top 10% of his class in 2024. It was during his time at Checkr Pay that Ruskin got to know Cambrian Ventures’ solo GP Rex Salisbury, who described the young entrepreneur as the company’s “highest velocity engineer.” “Ask the early Coinbase team and they’ll tell you the same thing, which is pretty remarkable given he was still in high school,” Salisbury told TechCrunch. “Daniel helped build two unicorns (Coinbase and Checkr) before graduating college and has since gone on to graduate law school and pass the patent bar. [He’s a] pretty rare combination of talent.” He added: “At this early stage, you don’t evaluate a company purely on what it is, but on what it can be. It’s already remarkable what Daniel has built, but given his velocity what really excites me is how quickly he’s executed to build more.” Making patents more accessible  Inventex has grown 2x per month since December primarily through word-of-mouth referrals and partnerships with VCs. The company charges customers a monthly fee to build a patent portfolio. The fee includes invention discovery, drafting, filing, and patent prosecution. Presently, it has three full-time employees (all engineers) and several contract patent attorneys. Inventex’s closest competitors are patent drafting tools like Edge and Solve, according to Ruskin.  Before Inventex, Ruskin founded Motif in July 2024, which had the same concept, but with a co-founder that “didn’t work out.” Looking ahead, Ruskin is considering offering Inventex’s drafting toolkit as a white-labeled product for law firms so they can license its tools “to get their clients better patents, faster.” “This aligns with our long-term vision for the field of patent law. Right now, 90% of the billable time for an initial patent filing is spent on drafting a disclosure; 10% is spent on strategy,” he said. “This will flip in five years — drafting will take 10% of the time, and strategy will be the differentiated service provided by firms. This ultimately brings the cost to file a patent down, and makes the system more accessible to innovators of any size.”

Breakdown & Showreels Sonic the Hedgehog 3: VFX Breakdown by Rising Sun Pictures By Vincent Frei - 10/04/2025 From a fully CG Shibuya Crossing with rain, fire, and glowing embers, to a high-stakes London heist featuring Big Ben and a CG Thames, Rising Sun Pictures delivered over 200 VFX shots for Sonic the Hedgehog 3, blending vibrant animation with photoreal action! WANT TO KNOW MORE?Rising Sun Pictures: Dedicated page about Sonic the Hedgehog 3 on Rising Sun Pictures website.Ged Wright: Here’s my interview of Production VFX Supervisor Ged Wright. © Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2025

At the 2025 AMUG Conference, industry leaders delivered a clear message: additive manufacturing is maturing beyond prototyping and hype, driven by real-world demands for localisation, sustainability, and production agility. Executives from Würth Additive Group, Stratasys, DMG MORI, GoEngineer, and SME converged around a shared theme—technology alone is no longer enough. Adoption hinges on quantifiable value, process integration, workforce readiness, and a shift away from proprietary ecosystems. With lifecycle analysis, decentralised production, and AI-powered design gaining traction, the additive manufacturing sector is recalibrating for scale and resilience across both industrial and consumer-facing applications. Würth Additive Group’s AJ Strandquist speaking at the 2025 AMUG Conference. Photo by Michael Petch. Key Takeaways from the Diamond Sponsor panel The Monday panel, moderated by Adam J. Penna, drew out insights from the conference’s Diamond sponsors, emphasizing a strategic commitment to additive manufacturing.  Additive’s future depends as much on integration and education as it does on technology: Training, software usability, and standards will be as decisive as 3D printer specs or material advances.Generative AI is lowering creative barriers, just as additive tech is becoming cheaper and more available. The intersection of AI and AM could trigger a new wave of decentralised, design-driven manufacturing. Sustainability is not a ‘nice to have’—it’s aligning with procurement logic, especially when it also delivers cost, speed, and operational continuity. Emergency logistics is a hidden emissions sink: while flying to deliver a missing bolt might be an extreme case there is a huge sustainability argument for distributed additive manufacturing. Additive Manufacturing Leaders Highlight AI, Automation and Productivity Gaps Representing a cross-section of stakeholders from machine OEMs to digital solutions providers, the panelists underscored the critical role of industrial AM in reshaping supply chains, national defense, and manufacturing resilience. Speaking on behalf of SME, a nonprofit that champions manufacturing innovation, Stacey Eeman, Director of Industry Strategy, made the organization’s mission clear, “We are here to help convene and educate… to build supplier resiliency and competitiveness for national security.” SME’s presence, she added, is tightly linked to its emphasis on defense-sector adoption and cross-sector knowledge transfer. Stratasys, a cornerstone of polymer additive manufacturing, is shifting its posture to align with more defined industrial outcomes. “We deal with some of the most challenging customers in the business; they’re coming up with the hardest problems,” said Foster Ferguson, VP of Industrial Business at Stratasys. Drawing from his two decades of service in the U.S. Marine Corps, Ferguson emphasized the importance of listening to end-users to align product development with mission-critical needs. AJ Strandquist, CEO of Würth Additive Group, highlighted the company’s strategic evolution from a distribution-focused enterprise into a digital manufacturing solutions provider. Initially embedding AM to support internal manufacturing, Würth quickly discovered the legal, IP, and compliance complexities of integrating AM at scale. This led to the development of a proprietary software platform designed to manage digital inventory and production workflows. “We learned internally what was required,” Strandquist noted, “and ended up bringing it to the show.” DMG MORI’s Additive Solutions General Manager Alex Richard framed additive as part of a broader transformation of industrial technology portfolios. His team, overseeing both sales and engineering across the U.S., is integrating additive into subtractive-heavy customer bases, with a view to offering hybrid production ecosystems. “The need for future manufacturing to include additive,” he said, “is now foundational.” Tyler Reid, VP of Digital Manufacturing at GoEngineer, delivered a grassroots perspective rooted in engineering enablement. “We convert dreamers into builders,” he said, referencing the firm’s emphasis on technical enablement. With nearly 20 technical staff on-site, GoEngineer—one of the largest value-added resellers —focuses on tool access, hands-on support, and vertical integration of design-to-print workflows.  “We’re starting to see just glimpses of [AI], but it’s a type of technology that as soon as it hits, it hits hard,” said Reid. “We need to figure out how to smartly implement AI into product workflows—trying to get to a point where additive solutions are ready for production.” He also projected a near-term surge in consumer-facing 3D printing, likening the effect of generative design and AI to a tipping point in visual inspiration. “The barrier to creation is about to collapse. Three years from now, consumer demand for personal printers will be on another level.” Ferguson of Stratasys reinforced that AI and automation are only part of the solution. “The real problem is framing the problem. What are we trying to solve?” he said, adding that strategic partnerships will be essential as no single OEM can cover the entire value chain. Stratasys, for example, increasingly works with partners across post-processing and validation technologies to deliver what Ferguson called “site-to-site repeatability and accuracy” at scale. He stressed that beyond the visible aspects of polymer 3D printing, the backend infrastructure—from materials logistics to field service—is what enables scale. For metal-focused manufacturing, DMG MORI’s Richard outlined a challenge rooted in long-term industrial productivity. He underscored that traditional subtractive machines are unlikely to be replaced one-for-one due to demographic and economic constraints. “There are 5 million machine tools out there now. Collectively, the industry will probably only build a million more over the next 30 years,” he said. “We don’t have the workforce to build or operate machines at that historic scale.” Richard emphasized that his team is addressing this productivity gap by engineering systems capable of producing five times more output than today’s standard machines. DMG MORI’s focus lies in the total process chain—design, build, and post-process—with additive playing an increasingly integral role. “It’s about how we support that process chain… how do we do it efficiently, how do we make individual machines more productive, and how do we build systems that can support more with fewer people?” Stacey Eeman of SME speaking at the 2025 AMUG Conference. Photo by Michael Petch. From Prototype to Production: Additive Manufacturing’s Push into Defense and Distributed Logistics AJ Strandquist, CEO of Würth Additive Group, emphasised the systemic challenges of scaling AM beyond prototyping. “People talk about serial production and think 50,000 pieces in one batch,” he said. “But the real trick is 50,000 prints in 50,000 locations—how do I collect the paperwork for that?” His team’s answer is a software platform built around legacy enterprise requirements. “They’re not going to change for us,” he added. “So the question becomes, how do you take their process and their framework and build around it?” Würth’s software, first unveiled at last year’s AMUG Conference, is designed to address the administrative bottlenecks of decentralized part production, ensuring traceability, certification, and quality documentation at scale. This infrastructure is essential for applications such as forward-positioned inventory and digital warehousing, particularly in military logistics. “You don’t want to be a loose thread,” Strandquist noted. “You want to be woven into the fabric of operations.” DMG MORI described how the company has evolved its additive machines into hybrid systems capable of both subtractive and additive processes. The military sector, long an early adopter of AM for prototyping and tooling, is now pushing for operational deployment. The Army integrated CAD models and digital engineering practices for the first time on the XM30 next-gen combat vehicle, explained SME’s Eeman. “That’s a huge milestone. It shows that digital engineering is finally connecting with real-world defense manufacturing.” Ferguson of Stratasys pointed to real traction in airframe and defense components. “We’ve had strong success with the U.S. Air Force and NAVSEA,” he said. The addressable market is substantial—he cited a $27 billion opportunity in aerospace part production—but winning it requires not just hardware, but qualified, repeatable, traceable workflows.  Strandquist added that usability and mission-readiness are crucial for frontline adoption. Drawing inspiration from the simple instructional cartoon once printed on Bazooka packaging, he underscored that additive systems must be intuitive enough to operate under pressure. “If you can train someone to fire a rocket, you can train them to run an FDM printer,” he said.  Yet not all voices supported the continued prioritisation of the defense sector. Tyler Reid, VP of Digital Manufacturing at GoEngineer, questioned whether the industry had grown too narrow. “Additive is still just 0.2% of global manufacturing,” he said. “Aerospace and defense are exciting, but heavily regulated and hard to scale. We need to expand into tooling and fixturing—accessible areas where production is realistic.” Tyler Reid, GoEngineer at AMUG Conference 2025. Photo by Michael Petch. Additive Manufacturing and the Supply Chain The CEO of Würth Additive Group, outlined how his company’s “Digital Inventory Services” software addresses the realities of additive supply chains. “The software is built to flex from very simple production parts to complex variants,” he said. It manages everything from ERP integration to quality control, tailoring compliance workflows to the nature of each component. “Most companies don’t want every part to go through the same QA as a turbine blade. That’s too much overhead.” Strandquist added that additive’s greatest operational advantage may lie in distributed manufacturing. Würth serves over 4 million customers, with 700,000 working in auto service centres globally, many of which require specialised service tools that are difficult to source due to trade barriers or long logistics chains. “By printing locally to standardised benchmarks, we’ve helped clients eliminate up to 30% of handling costs,” he said. “Instead of importing tools and dealing with customs classifications, they can produce and certify them in-country.” Stacey Eeman of SME added that additive’s most transformative impact may lie in its ability to respond to constraints—be it workforce shortages in welding or supply chain complexity in medical and defense logistics. “Point-of-use production in healthcare means more than it does even for sustainment commands,” she said. “This type of manufacturing gives us a way to act when traditional methods can’t.” Würth Additive Group demo at AMUG Conference 2025. Photo by Michael Petch. Additive Manufacturing Executives Link Sustainability to On-Demand Production and Process Simplification Sustainability is increasingly becoming a quantifiable differentiator for additive manufacturing leaders. The CEO of Würth Additive Group, argued that AM’s ability to localize production offers measurable environmental and operational advantages. “We replaced imported inventory with on-site additive manufacturing in a port city, using the same logistics network,” he said. “The result was a 20% decrease in total emissions. But the real impact shows up in emergency logistics. I’ve had customers put parts on planes—literally fly with them—because a $2 bolt missing can halt a $100,000 operation.” Stratasys is “working with OEMs like Airbus to align additive with long-term sustainability objectives,” said Foster Ferguson. “Localising manufacturing, particularly in depots and shipyards, is not just a green strategy—it’s a resilience strategy.” As Tyler Reid of GoEngineer put it, “Sustainability needs to be built into the ROI, not bolted on.” Stacey Eeman of SME highlighted how “Clean manufacturing is attracting young people with imaginative minds,” she said. “Now it’s up to us to provide the opportunities and pathways to bring them in.” Promising opportunities for additive manufacturing now lie in its ability to reduce emissions through distributed production, compress lead times via process consolidation, and unlock innovation by removing barriers to design and education. Sustainability, sometimes treated as a marketing differentiator, is becoming a measurable input to operational and procurement strategy. At the same time, the sector faces pressure to simplify adoption, standardise processes, and expand beyond its aerospace and defense comfort zone. As technologies like AI accelerate accessibility, the coming wave of adoption may be shaped less by machine specs and more by usability, interoperability, and the ability to serve a broader industrial base.Ready to discover who won the 2024 3D Printing Industry Awards? Subscribe to the 3D Printing Industry newsletter to stay updated with the latest news and insights. Featured image the AMUG Conference 2025, the view from the top. Photo by Michael Petch.

Brutalist Housing in Mexico City | © Jaime Navarro In a city where architectural interventions often contend with dense regulations and challenging topography, the ELEVATED BRUTALISM residence by Arroyo Solís Agraz emerges as a disciplined yet expressive response to these constraints. This 6365-square-foot stone-set house, completed in 2023 in Mexico City, offers more than a formal exercise in Brutalism—it embodies a dialogue between mass and void, geological anchoring and atmospheric lightness. Brutalist House Technical Information Architects1: Arroyo Solís Agraz Location: Mexico City, Mexico Area: 591 m2 | 6,365 Sq. Ft. Completion Year: 2023 Photographs: © Jaime Navarro This stone-set house boldly integrates the strength of concrete in a brutalist style, making full use of the terrain’s topography and subdivision regulations. – Arroyo Solís Agraz Architects Brutalist House Photographs Entrance | © Jaime Navarro Side View | © Jaime Navarro Entrance | © Jaime Navarro Stairs | © Jaime Navarro Rear Facade | © Jaime Navarro Side View | © Jaime Navarro Interior | © Jaime Navarro Stairs | © Jaime Navarro Garage | © Jaime Navarro Site Constraints and Design Intent Situated on a terrain defined by its natural undulations and strict subdivision guidelines, the design began with an apparent contradiction: how to assert a contemporary architectural presence without defying the site’s topographic and regulatory realities. Rather than resisting these forces, the solution engaged them as fundamental design parameters. Instead of leveling the land to fit a preconceived volume, the project strategically minimized excavation, respecting the site’s geological character. Urban height restrictions shaped the building’s massing, leading to a tripartite organization across three levels that cascade down the natural slope. This structural stratification became a necessity and an architectural opportunity, enabling a vertical narrative where the perception of space shifts dramatically from exterior to interior. The design’s intent is neither to camouflage nor aggressively contrast the site. Instead, it seeks a tectonic balance, embedding the building within the land’s existing contours while allowing its structural clarity to assert a presence. Spatial Experience and Perceptual Duality From the street, the building reads as a monolith: a concrete volume that resists interpretation at first glance. Its brutalist expression—rigid, solid, and abstracted—conveys a sense of permanence. Yet this initial encounter belies the complex spatial choreography that unfolds within. Once inside, the building disrupts its opacity. What appeared defensive becomes open, even porous. The internal spaces reveal a softened language, with careful proportions, filtered light, and tactile variation tempering the structural rigor. Vertical transitions—from the entrance down to the main living areas—are more than circulatory devices; they are experiential thresholds that reset scale and mood. Large openings and calculated voids reveal panoramic views of the city, elevating daily domestic rituals into scenic experiences. Brutalism is not an aesthetic end but a framework through which light, gravity, and orientation are meaningfully negotiated. Materiality as Architectural Argument Concrete, the project’s protagonist, is used not merely for its structural performance but as an expressive medium. Its application is not decorative but declarative—a surface that resists embellishment yet rewards close attention through its material honesty and subtle modulation. However, architecture does not remain loyal to one register. The interiors offer a material counterpoint: wood, stone, and glass introduce warmth and tactility, reframing the relationship between the body and the built environment. Where the exterior is about resisting time and context, the interior embraces changeability—of light, of seasons, of occupation. This material duality reinforces the project’s spatial narrative. Concrete walls frame and protect; wooden elements invite touch and soften acoustics. Glass mediates inside and out, allowing visual permeability while maintaining a sense of enclosure. Attention to detailing—from joint patterns to the transitions between materials—demonstrates a high level of technical and conceptual refinement. It is in these interstitial moments that the architecture speaks most clearly about its intentions: a choreography of weight and lightness, rawness and refinement. A Broader Architectural Reflection While Brutalism has often oscillated between revival and rejection, its appearance here is neither nostalgic nor ironic. It is recontextualized within the contemporary Latin American condition, where material honesty, climate responsiveness, and urban density converge in complex ways. The project aligns with a lineage of regional brutalism—one that includes figures such as Pedro Ramírez Vázquez and Teodoro González de León—but updates its language through an embrace of inhabitable softness and contextual nuance. This is not the heroic, institutional brutalism of the past, but a domestic reinterpretation: grounded, layered, and open to contradiction. Brutalist House Plans Floor Plan | © Arroyo Solis Agraz Floor Plan | © Arroyo Solis Agraz Floor Plan | © Arroyo Solis Agraz Section | © Arroyo Solis Agraz Brutalist House Image Gallery About Arroyo Solís Agraz ​Founded in 2014 in Mexico City by Salvador Arroyo, Alejandro Solís, and Rosa Agraz, Arroyo Solís Agraz is an architecture firm known for its diverse portfolio encompassing residential, commercial, and institutional projects. The firm’s design philosophy emphasizes contextual responsiveness and material expressiveness, as demonstrated in notable works like the Elevated Brutalism residence and the renovation of Bolerama Coyoacán. ​ Credits and Additional Notes Construction Budget: USD $1,250,000