Kent Larson: Brilliant designs to fit more people in every city. The Greenest Office Building In The World Is About To Open In Seattle. ShapeShift. Responsive Cities: Kent Larson at TEDxBoston. Don Tapscott: Four principles for the open world. Folding Concrete?! Flat-Pack Building Blocks of the Future. This may be the biggest invention since that long-standing, still-universal staple of the construction industry: the red clay brick.
A single identical unit, multiplied by four, forms a rigid structural element – stack these and set them side by side, and you have nothing short of a material revolution. Watch the videos to fully see how these function! Created by Dror Benshetrit after years of toying with related geometries and building methods, this super-simple, gravity-driven block system has as many applications as one can imagine.
Poniendo en duda la dureza de la ciudad. Joshua Klein on the intelligence of crows. Científicos encuentran los agujeros negros más grandes en la historia - Tecnología. (CNN) — Los agujeros negros son los monstruos más destructivos en el universo, y sabemos que pueden ser enormemente poderosos.
Ahora un grupo de científicos encontró los más grandes hasta el momento, según una publicación en la revista Nature. ¿Qué tan grandes? : La masa de cada uno de ellos es 10,000 millones de veces la masa de nuestro Sol. El agujero negro más grande que se registró anteriormente se midió por primera vez en 1977 y tiene una masa de aproximadamente 6,000 millones de soles. Para cada agujero negro, el “horizonte de sucesos” —que básicamente son las áreas en donde nada puede escapar a su gravedad— es de aproximadamente cinco veces la distancia entre el Sol y Plutón. “Iniciamos esta investigación hace varios años”, dice la cazadora de agujeros negros, Cung-Pei Ma, de la Universidad de California, Berkley.
Algunos expertos creen que los agujeros negros pueden ser puertas que conducen a otras galaxias o incluso universos alternativos, aunque eso todavía no se comprueba. Boarding a moving train: The way to speed up rail travel? The 'Moving Platforms' concept envisions city-wide tram networks that are integrated with a high-speed rail service.
When a tram runs next to a high-speed train, the tram speeds up and train slows down. The moving tram "docks" with the moving train, allowing passengers to cross between tram and train without either vehicle stopping. Moving Platforms. Janine Benyus: Biomimicry in action. Michael Pawlyn: Using nature's genius in architecture. Jarvis Cocker - Running The World. The Astounding Design Of Eixample, Barcelona. Constructed in the early 20th century, Eixample is a district of the Spanish city of Barcelona known for the urban planning that divided the district into octagonal blocks.
Influenced by a range of schools of architecture, Eixample Barcelona was designed in a grid pattern with long streets, wide avenues, and rounded street corners. Throwable Ball Camera Takes Full Spherical Panoramas. Quantum locking. STRANDBEEST. Kempf. I've been spending time over the last month getting to grips with Petra Kempf's remarkable publication You are the City.
Subtitled "Observation, organization, and transformation of urban settings", the main element of this publication are 22 sheets of clear acetate, onto which are printed different conceptual layers and frameworks of a city. T-shirt charges your phone by absorbing ambient sound. First there were tie-dyes, then there were hypercolors.
Could piezoelectric fabrics that charge your mobile phone while you wear them be the next big T-shirt fad? That's what the French telecom company, Orange, is counting on, reports the Telegraph. The shirts utilize ambient sound as a catalyst to produce electric voltage, and are being rolled out just in time for the Glastonbury Music Festival in Britain. Developers hope that the shirts will offer a convenient, eco-friendly way for festival goers to charge their phones while they're rocking out away from the grid. The material used in the shirts is made from a product called piezoelectric film, which is capable of transforming sound waves into an electric charge via the compression of interlaced quartz crystals.
Matt Ridley: When ideas have sex. Alex Steffen: The shareable future of cities. Seven Deadly Monkeys @ PechaKucha Puebla. Ground-breaking ideas & strategies in business, economics & sustainability for innovative leaders. Design Matters: Doing Better with Less. Plastic-Bottle Bulbs Shed Some Light on the Situation - Design. For the millions who live in the shantytowns of the developing world, there are better things to spend money on than electricity.
But many corrugated-iron-roofed shacks, like the ones seen throughout the poorer neighborhoods of Manila, Philippines, lack windows to let in natural light, leaving residents the choice of complete darkness or running expensive electric bulbs all day. However, a new development project called Liter of Light aims to solve that predicament through an unexpected and highly affordable technology: old soda bottles. When filled with water (with some bleach to keep out the algae) and snugly inserted into custom-cut holes in a roof, plastic bottles refract the sun's rays, scattering about 55 watts of light across a would-be pitch black room. The new lighting source can be rigged up in less than an hour, and it lasts for five years. Introduction to Manhattan Timeformations.