A ranking of Illinois’ best cities for jobs shows that historical manufacturing cities are still struggling to create work.

Earlier in August, U.S. drillers this week added oil rigs for an eighth consecutive week, the longest recovery streak in the rig count in over two years, as crude prices rebounded toward the key $50-a-barrel mark that makes the return to the well pad viable.

Exports from Mexican factories have jumped 13 percent since 2012. The country already ranks as the seventh-largest producer of cars in the world, and Chrysler, Honda and Volkswagen have major operations there. Over the next five years, another wave of big automakers, including Ford, Audi and Toyota, plan to bring new plants online.

Two NASA astronauts left the International Space Station on Friday for a 6-1/2-hour spacewalk to install a parking spot for upcoming commercial space taxis, which will end U.S. reliance on Russia for rides to the orbiting outpost.

Register for the FTM by this Wednesday, to save $100. This is an outstanding meeting with presentations in five sessions: Manufacturing, Inspection and Quality Control; Materials & Heat Treatment; Application and Design & Rating; Efficiency, Lubrication, Noise and Vibration; and Gear Wear & Failure. Complete information here.

General Motors hopes to weather the U.K.'s departure from the European Union in part by cutting hours for workers at factories in Germany.

The former head of the Norfolk Southern freight railroad, Charles "Wick" Moorman, has been tapped to be president and CEO of Amtrak, the nation's passenger railroad, Amtrak officials said last week.

Kato Manufacturing, based in the blue-collar enclave of Gifu Prefecture, in central Japan, is a microcosm of the country’s industrial evolution. The family-run metal shop, which was started 128 years ago, originally made simple farming tools for what was then a largely agrarian society. When Japan morphed into a manufacturing giant, churning out automobiles and electronics for the world, Kato supplied the metallic equivalent of skeletons: sculpted frames and housings that gave products their shape.

Around the world, Michigan is known as a state that makes things. And the way we make things is about to undergo a massive shift – so massive, in fact, that experts are calling it the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or Industry 4.0.

The New York Times reports that completion of the Block Island Wind Farm off the coast of Rhode Island "will mark the start of a new American industry." Thousands of offshore wind turbines have already been installed in Europe, but American wind power projects "ran into roadblocks, including high costs, murky rules ... and stiff opposition from people who did not want their ocean views marred by machinery." However, the Administration has been using a 2005 law to clarify wind-power regulations and lease out large patches of ocean floor for wind-power development. 

Reducing taxes is always a topic of interest among U.S. businesses. If you’re a manufacturing company, make sure you take advantage of the Internal Revenue Code Section 199 Domestic Production Activities Deduction (DPAD.)  DPAD’s generous tax deductions make it an appealing option for American manufacturers looking to maximize their income.

Industrial machines generate billions of data points every year. Somewhere, hidden in all that noise are the critical signals that pinpoint the possibility of partial or complete machine failure.

Technavio recently published a report detailing the top three emerging trends impacting the Global RTLS Market for industrial applications to 2020, and found that Ubisense is behind smart factories for many of the globe’s leading manufacturers. Jay Cadman at Ubisense talks about the history of smart factories and the new products today that are enabling many more businesses to realize the benefits of RTLS. 

As a manufacturer, you need visibility and control to keep quality high and costs low. Mobile and wearable technology offers the potential for more insight into what is happening on the plant floor, and provide your employees untethered access to important, job-critical data. But is the investment worth it? Or are mobile and wearable devices just another technology fad?

Researchers from ExxonMobil and the Georgia Institute of Technology created a new technology that possibly reduces energy use and emissions in plastics manufacturing, the company announced earlier this month.

3D printing, now available to anyone who is able save up at least a few hundred bucks and enjoy a minor learning curve, has indeed begun to infiltrate the mainstream. And while printing from the desktop can engage us all for hours, allowing us to make any number of items, from basic jewelry to complex car transmissions and even jet engines, for those using the technology in serious lab and industrial settings, all that magic is sometimes accompanied by incredible challenge and plenty of time given over to trial and error—especially in manufacturing with metal to produce complex parts. 

Rp+m, a service provider of rapid prototyping and manufacturing services selected Concept Laser’s M2 cusing metal additive machine to strengthen their research & development competencies. The M2 cusing will be a critical technology that will allow rp+m to develop innovative applications for their clients, due to its open architecture which enables alloy development and parameter editing.

Manufacturing equipment maker ATC Automation is expanding its operations in Cookeville, Tenn., and adding 110 new jobs.

The company says most of the new positions will be engineering jobs to help ATC meet growing demand for its assembly lines and test equipment for the automotive, medical, energy and consumer products markets.

From neural dust to chicken-hating mosquitoes and moon landings, these are some of the coolest news and discoveries of the week.

Bloomberg

Exxon is "teaming up with" Chevron and Hess "to bid on crude oil rights in Mexico’s deepwater areas," according to new reports. The three massive companies "reached a joint operating agreement – which becomes null and void if any of the three companies backs out – that would allow the group to bid on 10 areas in Mexico’s first-ever deepwater drilling rights sale on Dec. 5." According to Bloomberg, Mexico is expected to make around $44 billion from the sale.