Hernando Business Digest For June 29

University of Maine built a massive additive manufacturing device that can build houses, and a whole lot more. In a warehouse at the University of Maine, there’s a gigantic new additive manufacturing machine named Factory of the Future 1.0. And if its developers are right, it could become the new way that many things get built.

Brunt is on a mission to design a better work boot for America’s 23.5 million tradespeople. When we think of the shoe-obsessed consumer, our minds tend to go to women like Sex and the City‘s Carrie Bradshaw, who opted for Manolo Blahniks over a mortgage. But there’s a large segment of men who also obsess over shoes: specifically, the 23.5 million tradespeople—80% of whom are male—who work in construction, manufacturing, and warehousing.

In ‘Designed For Life’ designers describe their creative process and what makes a great product. A light fixture made of seaweed. A dreamy, psychedelic laundry machine. A hairy bench fashioned out of agave leaves. All of these objects appear in the new book Designed for Life: The World’s Best Product Designers, published by Phaidon Press.

One of the nation’s fastest-growing cities relies on a vulnerable population of workers to fuel its economic explosion. The first time Rosa saw snowflakes falling, she thought they were pieces of cotton. “I thought I was going to choke,” she told me.

Recent findings suggest, more than ever, that nonhuman animals are capable of suffering. Scientists are begging us to listen. Can animals suffer? It’s a question that has been floated around classrooms and dinner tables for centuries, at least since philosopher Jeremy Bentham posed it over 200 years ago.

Stress hormones spike in the weeks before a performance evaluation. This chief people officer says this doesn’t have to be the case. These days, performance reviews are getting a bad rap. They’re described as “awful,” “harmful,” and getting “more stressful.” This is understandable. No one wants to feel that their entire body of achievement at work across a year can be summarized in a few paragraphs, or with a handful of adjectives that might not do justice to all the effort they put in.