Texcoco Lake Ecological Park: Mexico City to Build the World's Largest Urban Park
Echeverria hopes that the area of the central Mexico City valley once covered by Lake Texcoco can be reclaimed to create a new urban landscape that combines nature with infrastructure. The area of the planned park was historically covered by Lake Texcoco and other small bodies of water. In fact, the Texcoco region has been engineered by humans for centuries as dikes and canals were built to channel Mexico City’s water and lakes as early as the 1400s under Aztec Emperor Montezuma. In keeping with these goals, the urban engineering project proposed by Echeverria and his team draws upon a long history of landscape engineering in Mexico City. Also noteworthy is that one of the unique environmentally-friendly aspects of the plan is its waterscape. + Iñaki Echeverria
Turning bacteria into butanol biofuel factories
Graduate student Brooks Bond-Watts and post-doctoral fellow Jeff Hanson examine cultured E. coli used to produce the biofuel n-butanol. (Photo by Michael Barnes) University of California, Berkeley, chemists have engineered bacteria to churn out a gasoline-like biofuel at about 10 times the rate of competing microbes, a breakthrough that could soon provide an affordable and “green” transportation fuel. The advance is reported in this week’s issue of the journal Nature Chemical Biology by Michelle C. Various species of the Clostridium bacteria naturally produce a chemical called n-butanol (normal butanol) that has been proposed as a substitute for diesel oil and gasoline. While these techniques have produced promising genetically altered E. coli bacteria and yeast, n-butanol production has been limited to little more than half a gram per liter, far below the amounts needed for affordable production. “We were excited to break through the multi-gram barrier, which was challenging,” she added.
The cities we need | Grattan Institute
The cities we need by Jane-Frances Kelly The most important characteristic of a city is whether it meets the needs of its residents, both material and psychological. The report does not propose a set of solutions or prescriptions. Download Report
Windows 8 convertible laptops are pushing up prices on the humble hinge
Last week, the Wall Street Journal ran a story pointing out that some of the success of Microsoft's new Windows 8 operating system will be dependent upon a piece of hardware no one is paying attention to: a hinge. That's because the part is what puts the "convert" into convertible laptops, letting users switch between tablet and notebook modes. It's even being used in all-in-one desktops like the Sony Vaio Tap 20, which folds into a massive tablet. But it turns out that not everyone has ignored the hinge. While the WSJ article points out how important the hinge has become to system designers, at least it's still a relatively inexpensive part, costing about $10.
It's Werribee but not as you know it - high-tech city for 100,000 proposed
Fountains and boulevards are part of the plans. In one aspect it would be like nothing Melbourne has seen before: a shining city of 100,000 people, housed in soaring 50-level skyscrapers, employed in high-tech industries, and learning from the world's top universities. But in another aspect – a lack of public transport to get there – it would be a quintessential major Melbourne residential project. Welcome to Australian Education City, a plan for Melbourne's west that has emerged as one of the bidders for 775 hectares of paddocks and old research laboratories outside Werribee that the Andrews government is selling. An imagined aerial view of the precinct. The consortium behind the plan, Investors Direct, is one of five bidders to have lodged expressions of interest in the project. Investors Direct is remaining tight-lipped about plans for the 1.5 million-square-metre city it wants to build on the site. An imagined aerial view of the precinct. Map Data Map
Laptop buying guide
While our laptop and mobile PC buying guide will give you the tools to go out and research, shop for, and buy the perfect laptop, hybrid, or Windows tablet, there's no harm in starting off with a few favorite picks for 2013. It's hard to go wrong with the latest version of Apple's MacBook Air. Both the 13-inch and 11-inch models have updated Intel Core i5 processors and excellent battery life. For a Windows version of something similar, check out Samsung's expensive 13-inch Ativ Book 9 Plus , which has a better-than HD screen. The Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 2 Pro has a similar higher-res display and a flexible hinge that converts into a tablet, for less than $1,000. A very inexpensive option that's still usable for online surfing and sharing is the 14-inch HP Chromebook 14 , which runs the Chrome OS from Google. Since the 2012 version of our buying guide, a couple of big-picture things have changed. Three rules for buying a laptop 1. 2. 3. That's where design comes in. The categories
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WHILE residents of Melbourne enjoy another year in the world’s most liveable city, according to the 2015 Global Liveability Ranking from our corporate cousin the Economist Intelligence Unit, spare a thought for those who live in the 57 cities that have steadily deteriorated over the last five years. The ranking, which considers 30 factors related to things like safety, healthcare, educational resources, infrastructure and environment in 140 cities, shows that since 2010 average liveability across the world has fallen by 1%, led by a 2.2% fall in the score for stability and safety. Ongoing conflicts in Syria, Ukraine and Libya have been compounded by terrorist shootings in France and Tunisia as well as civil unrest in America. In Athens, austerity rather than unrest has weighed on the provision of public services, while Kiev saw the sharpest fall over the last 12 months and is now among the ten least liveable cities ranked.
Tough gel stretches to 21 times its length, recoils, and heals itself
CONTACT: Caroline Perry, (617) 496-1351 Cambridge, Mass. - September 5, 2012 - A team of experts in mechanics, materials science, and tissue engineering at Harvard have created an extremely stretchy and tough gel that may pave the way to replacing damaged cartilage in human joints. Called a hydrogel, because its main ingredient is water, the new material is a hybrid of two weak gels that combine to create something much stronger. Not only can this new gel stretch to 21 times its original length, but it is also exceptionally tough, self-healing, and biocompatible—a valuable collection of attributes that opens up new opportunities in medicine and tissue engineering. The material, its properties, and a simple method of synthesis are described in the September 6 issue of Nature. The researchers pinned both ends of the new gel in clamps and stretched it to 21 times its initial length before it broke. Sun and his coauthors were led by three faculty members: Zhigang Suo, Allen E. and Marilyn M.
