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Last week, I visited Solingen, Germany's "city of blades," where knives, swords, and the like have been made for centuries. In between sipping beers and munching wursts, I paid a visit to the factory of Zwilling J.A. Henckels, at their kind invitation, to peer at the semi-roboticized lines where they produce their knives.

The raw material comes into the factory on huge spools of sheet steel, each sheet the thickness of a knife. The steel is cut into individual blanks, destined to become individual knives. About three weeks elapse between when a blank comes off the spool and when it emerges, a finished knife, at the other end.

In my breathless tour of the factory, I watched as a giant press cut and stacked the blanks, which are made of the company's secret blend of stainless "special formula steel." The blank is transported to another building, where the first of the factory's 90-odd industrial robot arms takes it in hand.

In the classic design, the knife has a thickening where the blade meets the handle (aka the bolster). This is formed first, by heating the middle of the blank, and then pressing the metal's two ends together so the molten middle bulges and widens, in a process that my contact specifies is called upset forging. Next, a drop forge shapes the bolster, before the blank is quickly cropped into the rough shape of the knife it's going to be.

After that, it proceeds through a series of cooling, supercooling, and heat-tempering steps that give it its corrosion resistance and toughness. This is one of the benefits of the special steel, I'm told -- it heats and cools in very predictable ways, allowing the factory to use more precise temperatures rather than temperature ranges.

After the tempering, any distortions or warpings that the heat has created in the blade are hammered out by a highly skilled human, who picks up and eyes each knife, one at a time, and flattens any that need flattening with precise strokes of a little hammer.

The knife passes into the hands of another series of robots, which use grinding wheels to narrow down the thickish blank into the tapered contour of a blade. Only roughly, though -- the fine grinding and sharpening, as well as putting on the handles, is left to the factory's humans, who wear puffy gray overalls and exude the confidence that comes with being extremely good at your job, and quite possibly coming from a line of knifemakers generations old. Wooden handles are glued onto the tang of the knife and then riveted in place; plastic handles are simply melted on by heating the tang and inserting it in a ready handle. The edges of the handles are smoothed by robots.

Finally the knife is cleaned and passes onward to the scrutiny of the quality assurance women. If it has no flaws -- there's a big photo-book of possible flaws -- it gets packed up and winds up in someone's kitchen.

Check out the step-by-step gallery of pictures from the knifemaking process.

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My enduring dream of being able to watch The African Queen with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Hepburn role just got a step closer!

As NASA promised last week, and only slightly delayed by weather, the GRAIL mission to the moon has launched. The twin probes will arrive just as 2012 dawns, and map the gravitational field and the interior characteristics of our nearest neighbor.

In new photographs taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, we can see the landing sites of some lunar craft, as well as the tracks left by those who flew in them. What creatures left these prints? A semi-dormant species known as the Earth astronaut; to be precise, Alan Bean and Pete Conrad, the crew of the Apollo 12 mission in 1969.

Earlier this week, we rejoiced at some promising news about the future of creating tasty meat without killing animals. Today, New Scientist is reporting from a workshop in Göteborg, Sweden, where Maastricht University meat scientist Mark Post relates his intention to grill up an in-vitro hamburger within a year.

In 2009, we heard the wonderful news that scientists at Holland's Eindhoven University of Technology had successfully grown pork in a petri dish: a giant step toward the dream of eating a pork chop without slaughtering a pig for it. Unfortunately, the lab-grown meat was floppy, "soggy," and structureless, not at all what you'd like to toss on your grill and tuck into.