Landscape, Redacted. [Image: "Looking east over unbuilt Ascaya lots, Black Mountain beyond, Henderson, Nevada," 2010; from Black Mountain by Michael Light].
Photographer Michael Light has a new book coming out this fall, published by Radius Books, with work documenting the construction and large-scale terrestrial formatting of two housing developments in the American southwest, one unfinished, one gaudily over the top. They are known as Ascaya and Lake Las Vegas. [Image: "Unbuilt Ascaya lots and cul-de-sac looking west, Henderson, Nevada," 2011; from Black Mountain by Michael Light]. We Can Terraform It For You Wholesale. [Image: Real estate development or avant-garde earthwork?
The future streets of Ascaya; courtesy of Ascaya]. The website for the stalled Las Vegas development known as Ascaya—which we saw in the previous post through the aerial photographs of Michael Light—is itself quite remarkable and worth a quick visit. At first glance, the site could actually be mistaken for some kind of strange new media art project, a near-future ad for an interplanetary terraforming corporation dedicated to selling huge geometric shapes directly to consumers. New Artificial Materials Open Possibilities for Manned Space Exploration. Space exploration has many challenges, but one inconvenient fact in particular – the lack of oxygen in much of the universe – poses a real challenge to making offworld exploration and living a reality.
Here on earth, we have a well-developed natural system for sustaining human life: the atmosphere and biomes. Futuristic Chinese Megastructure Would Include Soaring Towers, Massive Skyways, Urban Farms. Many of the world’s cities are hundreds, even thousands of years old.
They evolved from the bottom up as populations changed and demanded change. SeaOrbiter: Futuristic Underwater Space Station. Neal Stephenson on tall towers and NSA cyber-spies. 17 September 2013Last updated at 19:00 ET By Leo Kelion Technology reporter Neal Stephenson says a super-sized tower would make it easier to travel to space (illustration by Utkarsh Kumar, Violet Whitney and Vineet Bhosle) Neal Stephenson is thinking big - 20km (12.4 miles) big, to be precise.
Mercedes Is Testing Google Glass Integration, and It Actually Works. Mercedes North American R&D head Johann Jungwirth snaps a photo of our reporter testing out the automaker’s Google Glass integration.
I put the car in park, unplug the phone, and put Google Glass on my face. Within seconds, I’ve got step-by-step directions to a coffee shop down the street beamed directly to my eyeballs. Redesigned Window Stops Sound But Not Air, Say Materials Scientists. Elephant butte reservoir. A Satellite View of City Growth, in GIFs - Nate Berg. NASA's Landsat satellite system has been orbiting and taking pictures of the earth since 1972.
In honor of its 40th birthday, NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey have released a cool set of images showing how 11 world cities have changed over that time. How will our future cities look? Imagine a city of the future.
Do you see clean streets, flying cars and robots doing all the work? Or perhaps your vision is more dystopian, with a Big Brother-style authoritarian regime, dark alleys full of crime, and people forced to live in hermetically sealed pods because war or some other disaster has rendered whole swathes of the city unliveable. No-one really knows what the future holds, but the reality now is that our urban spaces are overcrowded and polluted. Almost half of the world's population currently lives in cities, and by 2050 that is projected to increase to 75%, but what kind of city will they be living in? The time is ripe, say experts, to start designing smarter urban environments, both new cities needed to sustain an ever-growing population, and retro-fits on the ones that we have lived in for centuries. Chapati Mystery. [What precisely is a response to the drones?
Recently Teju Cole introduced drones in first lines of well-known fiction works and got more tweets than any of the current drone strikes. Almost simultaneously, Himanshu Suri (aka HEEMS) released the video of his "Soup Boys" single which feature drones. Hyperloop. Artist's impression of a Hyperloop capsule: Air compressor on the front, passenger compartment in the middle, battery compartment at the back and air bearing skis at the bottom.
A 3D sketch of the Hyperloop infrastructure. Note that the steel tubes are rendered transparent in this image. The Hyperloop is a conceptual high-speed transportation system envisioned by entrepreneur Elon Musk,[1][2] incorporating reduced-pressure tubes in which pressurized capsules ride on a cushion of air, driven by a combination of linear induction motors and air compressors.[3] The conceptual route runs from the Los Angeles region to the San Francisco Bay Area, paralleling the Interstate 5 corridor for most of its length, with an expected journey time of 35 minutes, meaning that passengers would traverse the 354-mile (570 km) route at an average speed of around 598 mph (962 km/h), with a top speed of 760 mph (1,220 km/h).
History[edit] Theory and operation[edit] Initial design[edit] Computer simulation[edit]