Kickstart: When the office is child's play

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What's it like at your office? Do you have a door you can close? Are you on the shop floor? Or maybe in an open office?

For 500 workers at Lego A/S, the new office comes with figures to stake out differnt "neighborhoods," and the entrance is made using facsimiles of the Lego brick. The company marked the opening of the first of two buildings at its new headquarters in Billund, Denmark, at the end of October. The inspiration for the buildings came from a painting of a boy holding up a building made of Legos. So the company leaned into the image of the iconic toys in designing the buildings. There's even what appears to be two giant bricks on the roof, hanging out at an 90 degree angle.

Our sister publication Plastics News Europe has more, or you can check out Plastics News Now when it's posted later today.

No one ever promised that owning a mold making business would be easy. It's even more complicated for those serving the auto industry. While some years are flush as automakers roll out new models, work ebbs and flows based on macro economic changes beyond your control.

Add to that the complications of getting paid quickly, competing with cheaper molds made in China, last-minute design changes and finding a new generation of workers, and the pressures only continue to build.

Now, as industry consultant Harbour Results Inc. notes in its forecast for automotive toolmakers, automakers are pulling back on spending for tooling for the next three to five years. That means that up to 75 mold and die shops serving the industry are expected to close during that period.

Bill Bregar has the full report.

But to close on a happier, and more colorful, note, Frank Esposito writes in his blog about the University of Akron's College of Polymer Science and Polymer Engineering producing a study which is using feathers from peacocks and other birds in research that could create more vivid colors.

Research by the college recently published in the journal Science Advances is looking at the way bird feathers use melanin particles to create more vivid structural colors.

If the Akron research team can control the way the particles come together on a surface, they can influence the vividness of the colors that are reflected, officials said.

"This understanding will guide us to construct more polymers with finer-tuned surface structures that lead to desired properties, like structure colors," said former student Ming Xiao.