Chinese worker builds "egg" house to beat high cost of living. BEIJING, Dec. 3, 2010 (Xinhua) -- An egg-shaped small cabin made of bamboo bars, bags of grass seeds and wood crumbs appeared in the yard of a residential area in Beijing recently, arousing curiosity of many passers-by. Its owner, Dai Haifei, 24, coming from the countryside of central China's Hunan Province, is one of the "bei piao" group, a nickname for young dream hunters migrating to Beijing without a registered residence. Upon college graduation, Dai came to Beijing alone and worked in an architecture design company. Inspired by a concept creation dubbed "eggs laid by city" displayed in his company's design show, he built the "egg cabin" with 6,427 yuan RMB (about 965 US dollars) in two months.
By living in this cabin next to his office building, the young man was quite pleased with the money he saved from house rent. With an area of 6 square meters and a height of 2 meters, the "egg" can accommodate one single bed and a small bedstand. Aquaponics greenhouse for - DIY. We’re here to tell you it is possible – but don’t take our word for it: ask Aquaponics Steve. Aquaponics is defined as “sustainable food production system that combines plant-growing with a traditional aquaculture (raising aquatic animals such as snails, fish). It was Steve’s years working in a pet shop that gave him the know-how. The secret is in breeding the bacteria from fish waste – sounds yucky but it works – with no need to use creepy chemicals. He shows you how to make a tiny greenhouse and stock it full of plants for just $50. However if you want to spring for a solar panel, car battery and pump then you can go the whole way to a full aquaponics set up.
The greenhouse is made from found lumber to create the structure which can be any shape and size depending on the dimensions of your balcony or yard. By running the water through black tubing (IV tubing from from a medical supplies store), he can tru the water temperature from cold to tepid – which is what crayfish need. Exploring and designing our future robot companions | Lirec * Scientists Invent Particles That Will Let You Live Without Breathing. World's first GM babies born. Published: 05 May 2001 The world's first geneticallymodified humans have been created, it was revealed last night. The disclosure that 30 healthy babies were born after a series of experiments in the United States provoked another furious debate about ethics.
So far, two of the babies have been tested and have been found to contain genes from three 'parents'. Fifteen of the children were born in the past three years as a result of one experimental programme at the Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Science of St Barnabas in New Jersey. The babies were born to women who had problems conceiving. Genetic fingerprint tests on two one-year- old children confirm that they have inherited DNA from three adults --two women and one man.
The fact that the children have inherited the extra genes and incorporated them into their 'germline' means that they will, in turn, be able to pass them on to their own offspring. Some experts severely criticised the experiments. The Tesla Gun | dɸ/dt. The year was 1889. The War of the Currents was well underway. At stake: the future of electrical power distribution on planet Earth. With the financial backing of George Westinghouse, Tesla’s AC polyphase system competed for market dominance with Edison’s established (but less efficient) DC system, in one of the ugliest and most epic tales of technological competition of the modern age.
More than a hundred years after the dust settled, Matt Fraction and Steven Sanders published The Five Fists of Science: a rollicking graphical retelling of what really happened at the turn of the last century. (Get yourself a copy and read it immediately, unless you’re allergic to AWESOME). See that dapper fellow in front? Yep. As I read this fantastic story, gentle reader, certain irrevocable processes were set in motion. The Tesla Gun is a hand-held, battery powered lightning machine. [flickr id="7004633580" thumbnail="medium_640" align="center"] Aim away from face. Real sparks! Save your soda cans. Novriki. How Engineering the Human Body Could Combat Climate Change - Ross Andersen - Technology. Some of the proposed modifications are simple and noninvasive. For instance, many people wish to give up meat for ecological reasons, but lack the willpower to do so on their own.
The paper suggests that such individuals could take a pill that would trigger mild nausea upon the ingestion of meat, which would then lead to a lasting aversion to meat-eating. Other techniques are bound to be more controversial. For instance, the paper suggests that parents could make use of genetic engineering or hormone therapy in order to birth smaller, less resource-intensive children.
The lead author of the paper, S. Matthew Liao, is a professor of philosophy and bioethics at New York University. Judging from your paper, you seem skeptical about current efforts to mitigate climate change, including market based solutions like carbon pricing or even more radical solutions like geoengineering. One human engineering strategy you mention is a kind of pharmacologically induced meat intolerance.
S. Robot Prostitutes, the Future of Sex Tourism. Let's cut to the chase. Would you pay to have sex with a robot prostitute? Ian Yeoman and Michelle Mars think someone will. Yeoman is a futurist with an interest in tourism, and Mars is a sexologist at the University of Wellington's Victoria Management School in New Zealand. The duo just co-authored a paper entitled "Robots, Men and Sex Tourism" for the current issue of Futures. BLOG: Bar-coded Condoms Track Where You Have Sex In their paper, they envision a future where robotic prostitutes are the solution to the sex industry's most glaring problems, such as human trafficking, human degradation and the spread of sexually transmitted infections.
Playing off the "Yab-Yum," once one of Amsterdam's most exclusive brothels before its closure in 2008, Yeoman and Mars imagine what the red-light district will look like in the year 2050: The Yub-Yum is Amsterdam's top sex club for business travelers located beside a 17th century canal house on the Singel. What's your opinion? Via io9. Corporation: Robots that Make a Difference. MIT researchers seek to create robotic 'self-sculpting sand' By Doug Gross, CNN It could be something out of "Harry Potter," or a scene from "Terminator 2" if you want to take it to a creepier place. Take a box full of sand and tell it what you need - say a hammer, a ladder or a replacement for a busted car part. Bury a tiny model of what you need in the sand, give it a few seconds and - voila!
- the grains of sand have assembled themselves into a full-size version of the model. MIT robotics researchers say such a magical sandbox could be no more than a decade away. A team from the school's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory says they've developed algorithms that could enable "smart sand" - essentially miniscule, simple robots that would communicate with each other about how to align together properly once they've been given a model to copy.
The team has already done limited testing with larger cubes - 10 millimeters wide with rudimentary microprocessors inside and magnets on four of their sides. Heart Stop Beating | Jeremiah Zagar. Evacuated Tube Transport Technologies : et3 Network : Space Travel on Earth™ Humans And Machines: Beyond Touch : All Tech Considered. A demonstration of Oblong's g‑speak SOE (spatial operating environment), technology that was featured in the film Minority Report.
(Vimeo) Computer chips and technology are invading all sorts of previously dumb devices. Phones are now smart. Cars are becoming connected computers on wheels. Call it the computerization of everything. But how we interact with these machines is bound to evolve. At this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, touch pads are everywhere — in phones, in tablets and laptop screens. "The whole idea that it is socially acceptable or functionally acceptable to have a whole mass of humanity that is staring down at a piece of glass and pounding on it with their thumbs is kind of absurd," says Feld, a venture capitalist at the Foundry Group. "Twenty years from now the way we interact with computing will be unrecognizable to us today," he says. Ethan Miller/Getty Images But judging from the displays at CES, the touch pad craze hasn't crested — yet. Nest. Artificially Intelligent Being Designs Videogame for Humans.
Writers such as Ray Kurzweil defined the so called "Singularity" as the moment in time when an artificial intelligence becomes powerful enough to design another intelligence that surpasses, and ultimately renders powerless, human intelligence. The new game designed from scratch by a freaking computer, may not be enough to push mankind over the Singularity hump once and for all, but I do know one thing: We're a hell of a lot closer now that an artificially intelligent robot has personally developed a game in which other artificially intelligent robots try to hunt and kill human beings. Now, before you try to arm yourselves with makeshift mobile EMPs and struggle to remember the correct pronunciation of "Klaatu barada nikto," perhaps a more detailed explanation is in order.
A few years ago, mad scientist Michael Cook began work on what (who?) Source: NewScientist. No Pulse: How Doctors Reinvented The Human Heart. Meeko the calf stood nuzzling a pile of hay. He didn't seem to have much appetite, and he looked a little bored. Every now and then, he glanced up, as though wondering why so many people with clipboards were standing around watching him. Fourteen hours earlier, I'd watched doctors lift Meeko's heart from his body and place it, still beating, in a plastic dish. He looked no worse for the experience, whisking away a fly with his tail as he nibbled, demonstrably alive—though above his head, a monitor showed a flatlined pulse. I held a stethoscope to his warm, fragrant flank and heard, instead of the deep lub-dub of a heartbeat, what sounded like a dentist's drill or the underwater whine of an outboard motor.
Something was keeping Meeko alive, but it was nothing like a heart. As many as five million Americans suffer some form of heart failure, but only about 2,000 hearts a year become available for transplant. The problem is the "beating" part. What If Your Ovaries Could Live Forever? I, for one, can't imagine running after a toddler all day at the age of 48. I had a conversation with my mother about potentially having children a few years ago, specifically in terms of the help I'd need from her, and she told me that she honestly didn't know if she had the physical strength and stamina to raise a kid at her age (she was 50 then).
Well, I had my kid at 40. OK, pregnant at 40 and gave birth at 41. Would earlier have been better? Yeah, even beyond the medical and health issues for both parent and child, raising a kid into your 60's isn't fair for either of you, but that's just my opinion. Yeah, I don't think that's an issue for either me or for my friend — as we are both first-time parents. Ask Nature - the Biomimicry Design Portal: biomimetics, architecture, biology, innovation inspired by nature, industrial design - Ask Nature - the Biomimicry Design Portal: biomimetics, architecture, biology, innovation inspired by nature, industrial desi.
Rapid self-healing hydrogels. Author Affiliations Contributed by Raghunath A. Mashelkar, January 23, 2012 (sent for review December 2, 2011) Abstract Synthetic materials that are capable of autonomous healing upon damage are being developed at a rapid pace because of their many potential applications. Despite these advancements, achieving self-healing in permanently cross-linked hydrogels has remained elusive because of the presence of water and irreversible cross-links.
Footnotes Author contributions: A.P., G.A., and S.V. designed research; A.P., C.Z., B.A., C. Flying Swarm Of Robots Gives Protesters And Activists Free Wi-Fi, On The Go. During the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the government unplugged the Internet. Protesters were left without Internet, and thereby the ability to communicate even locally, instantly. Electronic Countermeasures is a project by Liam Young of think tank Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today and Unknown Fields Division, with assistance from Eleanor Saitta, Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu, and Superflux. The project is essentially an autonomous, roaming Internet swarm, constructed from repurposed UAVs. “These drones would fly off and hover above the city, and create ad hoc connections and networks in a new form of nomadic territorial infrastructure,” Young tells Co.Design, “a flock of interactive autonomous drones that form their own place specific, temporary, local, Wi-Fi community--a pirate Internet.”
“Architecture is typically such a slow medium and we wanted to develop alternative strategies for how an architect may operate and alternative forms of projects that could play out with much more immediacy,” he writes. Farming the Unconscious. The Architecture Department at the Royal College of Art had some thought-provoking projects at the work in progress show. Architectural Design Studio 1's exhibition was looking at how a dense and vertical architecture can bring back food production and consumption in the city. Image courtesy André Ford One of the students of the course, André Ford, looked at the intensification of the broiler chicken industry.
Each year, the UK raises and kills 800 million chickens or 'broilers' for their meat. Broiler chickens spend their 6-7week lives in windowless sheds, each containing around 40,000 birds. Philosopher Paul Thompson, of Purdue University is a proponent of The Blind Chicken Solution. Sadly, the demand for chicken is rising and methods of production will need to intensify in order to meet this increase. As long as their brain stem is intact, the homeostatic functions of the chicken will continue to operate.
Questions to the architect: How have people reacted to your idea so far? Futurefarmers. A Former Chicago Meatpacking Plant Becomes a Self-Sustaining Vertical Farm - Design. Launch Slideshow The Plant occupies a former meatpacking plant and slaughterhouse in the Union Stock Yards, transforming a huge brick building that once specialized in bringing red meat to the masses into a green space all about urban farming without waste. The interior looks like something straight out of a scientific-environmental fantasy. Tenants include aquaponic farms (think vegetables on water beds flourishing under colored UV lights), a tilapia fish farm, beer and Kombucha tea breweries, a mushroom garden, and a host of independent bakers and caterers that will work together in a communal kitchen space.
Future plans include living walls and rooftop gardens. But the most ambitious part of the building is its focus on producing "net-zero waste" in its 93,500-square-foot space. “Industrial ecology—the concept of using other people’s waste as input—is fascinating. The building, which was purchased in July 2010, is currently undergoing renovations by a team of volunteers. Solar-Powered Supertrees Sprout at Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay – New Photos! Gardens by the Bay-Grant Associates. The Power of PixelSense™ Reimagining City Life: One Startup's Vision of the Future. Product-The Table. Sony Nextep Computer Concept for 2020 by Hiromi Kiriki.
Envisioning the future of technology — by Michell Zappa. Scientists Create ‘Star Trek’ Visor, Helps Blind See. Welcome to the Cassiopeia Project.