In today’s Bulldog wrapup of technology and science news:

  • Segway, other manufacturers reboot hoverboards
  • ‘Jurassic Park’ paleontologist retiring from museum he built
  • Futuristic Dubai office showcases 3-D printing’s potential

Russia cracks down on social media

The details:

  • Forget the fires: Hoverboards just want a second chance

Don’t look now, but hoverboards are angling for a comeback.

Months ago, the powered scooters — which balance themselves but don’t actually “hover” — largely vanished from the U.S. market after they exhibited a distressing tendency to burst into flame. Now, though, Segway and other manufacturers want consumers to give hoverboards a second chance.

On Wednesday, Segway — which also makes the eponymous upright scooter beloved by mall cops and airport security — will begin taking Amazon pre-orders for a newhoverboard, the MiniPro. Although the boards won’t actually ship until July, it’s a significant step, given that Amazon, Walmart and other retailers dumped the products months ago after videos of burning hoverboards went viral.

The MiniPro and other new scooters have passed new safety standards designed to prevent fires. But that doesn’t mean they’re completely safe — nor that manufacturers like Segway can overcome their enormous image problems.

Few consumer products have zoomed in from nowhere, only to literally crash and burn, as quickly as hoverboards did. Produced by little-known companies, the scooters shot to prominence late last year after a host of celebrities from Justin Bieber to Jamie Foxx were seen riding on them. Small manufacturers in China, which can quickly clone popular products, flooded the market with lookalikes.

Then came the fires and embarrassing falls by the likes of Kendall Jenner and Mike Tyson . Florida congressman Carlos Curbelo tweeted a post-Christmas picture of his arm in a sling with the message, “#hoverboard is for kids. My daughter got it. I ended up in @BaptistHealthSF.”

Since last August, the Consumer Product Safety Commission counts at least 62 hoverboard-related fires and an estimated 7,200 falls that required emergency-room visits. It’s still investigating 13 hoverboard makers, including Chinese companies such as Yooliked and Keenford Ltd. Many municipalities, airports and college campuses still ban the gadgets.

Turning all that around will be a challenge. Brand consultants point to the incredibly damaging nature of safety issues: Chipotle is still recovering from a 40 percent drop in sales after federal investigators probed the chain’s E. coli outbreak last year.

On the other hand, hoverboards’ earlier problems were mostly associated with no-name brands, making it possible for more reputable manufacturers to establish a better safety record, says Laura Ries, an Atlanta-based brand consultant.

That’s what Segway, now a subsidiary of Beijing-based Ninebot , is counting on. Its solution starts with safety certification by UL (formerly Underwriters Laboratories), a venerable Northbrook, Illinois, firm that tests everything from toasters to outlet extenders. Among other tests, UL submerged the MiniPro in water, dropped it on concrete from a height of three feet and disassembled it to ensure its wiring wouldn’t cause a short.

Several other manufacturers, including Razor USA, a private California company known for its kick scooters, have also received UL certification, and plan to relaunchhoverboards in the U.S. market soon.

The next step for Segway: making hoverboards easier to ride. Your typical board is little more than a skateboard turned sideways, with a large wheel on each end. Leaning forward causes you to accelerate; leaning back slows you down or starts a backward roll. (Gyroscopes and electronics keep the board upright.)

Segway’s MiniPro adds a steering stick — a vertical padded bar in the middle of the board. Pushing one way or the other with the inside of your legs turns the board. If you’re a skier, it’s like carving around a mogul. Getting on isn’t any more difficult than jumping on a skateboard.

Segway says the stick makes its board more of a “personal transporter” similar to its classic upright, handlebar-equipped Segway. It plans to lobby local governments to reclassify the MiniPro in order to sidestep existing hoverboard bans in some subways, universities and airports, says Brian Bucella, Segway’s vice president of marketing and business development.

  • ‘Jurassic Park’ paleontologist retiring from museum he built

Jack Horner, the paleontologist who discovered the world’s first dinosaur embryos and found that dinosaurs had nests and cared for their young, is leaving the Montana museum he spent decades filling with fossils from across the globe.

Horner, 69, Is one of the best known dinosaur researchers in the world. Michael Crichton based the character Alan Grant on Horner in the 1990 book “Jurassic Park,” and Steven Spielberg brought Horner on as a technical adviser on all of the “Jurassic Park” movies — and Horner did it without a college degree and with dyslexia.

From his base at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, and before that with Princeton University, Horner discovered a dozen dinosaur species, the first dinosaur eggs in the Western Hemisphere, and provided proof of the theory of their close relation to birds. Hebuilt the Museum of the Rockies from eight dinosaur specimens when he started working there 34 years ago to more than 35,000 today.

As he ponders a state of semi-retirement, he plans to turn his attention back to education by teaching a class on imagination and creative thinking at Chapman University in California.

His struggles with dyslexia caused him to flunk out of college multiple times and initially hindered his ability to raise money for research because the grant applications had to be signed by an advanced-degree holder. He still reads at a third-grade level, and claims to have written more books than he’s read.

  • Futuristic Dubai office showcases 3-D printing’s potential

There are office printers that spit out documents and others that always seem to jam. And then there those that make the office itself.

A small group of employees in Dubai is starting to move into a new workspace that the emirate says is the world’s first functional office building made using three-dimensional printer technology.

Dubai’s ruler quietly inaugurated the whitewashed buildings last week, not far from the site of a planned “Museum of the Future ” that is due to open in 2018.

Looking like a mashup of a “Jetsons” abode and an Apple Store, the compact office was printed out layer by layer over 17 days at a cost of $140,000, said Saif al-Aleeli, the CEO of a government initiative called the Dubai Future Foundation that is behind the project. Features include a tree-shaded outdoor garden deck and LED lights that automatically adjust to the brightness outside.

“Why 3-D printing? Because it makes sense in terms of cost, in terms of time-saving, in terms of efficiency,” the 29-year-old al-Aleeli said. “We really believe that this technology will revolutionize the construction, the development sector as well as other sectors, (including) the medical sector (and) consumable products.”

Products made using 3-D printing are first designed on a computer and then printed out using a variety of materials, including metal, plastic and concrete.

Developers are finding a growing number of uses for the technology as it evolves.

European aeronautics giant Airbus just unveiled a lightweight electric printed motorcycle made from aluminum alloy particles, while a Wisconsin schoolteacher recently fashioned prosthetic feet for a duck who lost his due to frostbite.

The technology has been used in other construction projects too, including a Dutch canal house being raised in Amsterdam. But the foundation says its Dubai office is the first “fully functional 3-D printed building,” constructed with full services and meant for daily use.

The Chinese company WinSun Global used a 20-foot tall printer squirting out cement and other materials to produce the 17 building modules for the new Dubai office, according to the foundation. The pieces were then shipped from China to the Gulf port city, where it took workers two days to piece them together.

Further work, including the installment of the interiors and landscaping, took another three months. Designers left open part of the finishing in the foyer so visitors can see how the 3-D printed layers came together, row after squiggly row.

The building occupies prime real-estate between the city’s iconic twin Emirates Towers and the Dubai International Financial Center, which is a stand-in for a futuristic city in the forthcoming “Star Trek Beyond” film.

The site will serve as the temporary offices for between 12 and 20 foundation staff members for now. Dubai hopes it will kick-start its plans to transform the sheikhdom into an incubator for emerging technologies. It has an ambitious goal of using 3-D printing in a quarter of all buildings by 2030.

“The future will be 3-D printed,” al-Aleeli predicted. “I won’t be surprised if in 20 years down the road whole cities will be 3-D printed.”

  • Dozens in Russia imprisoned for social media likes, reposts

Anastasia Bubeyeva shows a screenshot on her computer of a picture of a toothpaste tube with the words: “Squeeze Russia out of yourself!” For sharing this picture on a social media site with his 12 friends, her husband was sentenced this month to more than two years in prison.

As the Kremlin claims unequivocal support among Russians for its policies both at home and abroad, a crackdown is underway against ordinary social media users who post things that run against the official narrative. Here the Kremlin’s interests coincide with those of investigators, who are anxious to report high conviction rates for extremism. The Kremlin didn’t immediately comment on the issue.

At least 54 people were sent to prison for hate speech last year, most of them for sharing and posting things online, which is almost five times as many as five years ago, according to the Moscow-based Sova group, which studies human rights, nationalism and xenophobia in Russia. The overall number of convictions for hate speech in Russiaincreased to 233 last year from 92 in 2010.

A 2002 Russian law defines extremism as activities that aim to undermine the nation’s security or constitutional order, or glorify terrorism or racism, as well as calling for others to do so. The vagueness of the phrasing and the scope of offenses that fall under the extremism clause allow for the prosecution of a wide range of people, from those who set up an extremist cell or display Nazi symbols to anyone who writes something online that could be deemed a danger to the state. In the end, it’s up to the court to decide whether a social media post poses a danger to the nation or not.