by: Designboom - Weblog, 2011-03-21 15:29:00 UTC the dwelling is obtained by using the height difference between the terraces.
the roof acquires the profile of a terrace, thus creating a natural, grassy cover for the house
which aids in improving the structure's overall micro-climate, reducing energy costs
and regulating rainwater storage. read more
by: Designboom - Weblog, 2011-03-22 09:00:00 UTC created from water hyacinth, hemp and cotton, most ayodhya designs are based on handicraft,
natural fibers,
sourced from network of grassroots and hill tribes. read more
If you were my boss at an animal design firm and I submitted you this proposal sketch for a climbing animal, you'd probably think about firing me. There's nothing in the structure of this animal that suggests it would be good at scaling things.
Those are Alpine Ibex goats scaling a dam in Italy to lick the salt off of the rocks. Question is, how the hell do those guys get up there and stay up there? Why isn't the bottom of the dam covered in shattered goat carcasses?
Singapore-based design studio Kult3D creates an installation for Newton Circus, a sustainable-solutions consultancy based in Singapore. The installation is located in the window of the Newton Circus office, located in the heart of Singapore's Central Business District (CBD).
To complement Newton Circus' philosophy, Kult3D's critique on consumerism takes the form of Couture Jam, faux luxury life preservers inspired by some of the biggest names in fashion, complete with branded flotation devices. The concept of the life jackets is a satirical look into the future of consumption: fashion in a post-apocalyptic era, an age of excess where you can, quite literally, be branded to death.
This is totally disgusting. Remember the "continent" made out of garbage, double the size of the United States' landmass, floating around in the Pacific? Well, there are five of them scattered around the world, and you need to see this. Here's a sea turtle of the type found off the coast of Argentina:
[Image: Damien du Toit, Flickr]
One was accidentally captured (in a fishing net we're guessing), here's what was in its stomach:
How would you like to have a cellphone that never needed to be charged? That’s the promise of French company Wysips, which wants to turn your phone’s screen into a solar charger.
It works like this: a transparent photovoltaic film covers the screen of your device, and provides 250mW of power to trickle-charge the battery. The film is thin — just 100 microns or 0.1mm — and won’t dim the screen when incorporated into the LCD panel. Wysips says the film will typically add just a dollar to the cost of a phone, and hopes to have shipping units within a year.
The beauty of the design is that it scales. The bigger the screen of a device, the bigger the solar panel. A typical phone will be fully charged in six hours, and the second-gen version will give you a half-hour’s worth of power with just one hour of charging.
The real winner here will be ebooks. These typically sip power anyway, and have pretty big screens. While you may still have to plug in an iPad to charge it at night, a Kindle with Wysips’ tech in its screen would likely never, ever need to be charged, especially as you can only read it when there’s enough light to do so.
Left: diagram of a lithium-ion battery constructed using a nanostructured bicontinuous cathode. Right: scanning electron microscope image of the nanostructure, a three-dimensional metal foam current collector coated with a thin layer of active material. Image courtesy of Paul Braun, University of Illinois.
by John Timmer, Ars Technica
Batteries are an essential part of most modern gadgets, and their role is expected to expand as they’re incorporated into vehicles and the electric grid itself. But batteries can’t move charge as quickly as some competing devices like supercapacitors, and their performance tends to degrade significantly with time. That has sent lots of materials science types into the lab, trying to find ways to push back these limits, sometimes with notable success. Over the weekend, there was another report on a technology that enables fast battery charging. The good news is that it uses a completely different approach and technology than the previous effort, and can work with both lithium- and nickel-based batteries.
The previous work was lithium-specific, and focused on one limit to a battery’s recharge rate: how quickly the lithium ions could move within the battery material. By providing greater access to the electrodes, the authors allowed more ions to quickly exchange charge, resulting in a battery with a prodigious capacity. The researchers increased lithium’s transport within the battery by changing the structure of the battery’s primary material, LiFePO4.
The new work is quite different. The authors, from the University of Illinois, don’t focus on the speed of the lithium ions in the battery; instead, they attempt to reduce the distance the ions have to travel before reaching an electrode. As they point out, the time involved in lithium diffusion increases with the square of the distance traveled, so cutting that down can have a very dramatic effect. To reduce this distance, they focus on creating a carefully structured cathode.
The process by which they do this is fairly simple, and lends itself to mass production. They started with a collection of spherical polystyrene pellets. By adjusting the size of these pellets (they used 1.8µm and 466nm pellets), they could adjust the spacing of the electrode features. Once the spheres were packed in place, a layer of opal (a form of silica) was formed on top of them, locking the pattern in place with a more robust material. After that, a layer of nickel was electrodeposited on the opal, which was then etched away. The porosity of the nickel layer was then increased using electropolishing.
When the process was done, the porosity — a measure of the empty space in the structure — was about 94 percent, just below the theoretical limit of 96 percent. The authors were left with a nickel wire mesh that was mostly empty space.
Into these voids went the battery material, either nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) or a lithium-treated manganese dioxide. The arrangement provides three major advantages, according to the authors: an electrolyte pore network that enables rapid ion transport, a short diffusion distance for the ions to meet the electrodes, and an electrode with high electron conductivity. All of these make for a battery that acts a lot like a supercapacitor when it comes to charge/discharge rates.
With the NiMH battery material, the electrodes could deliver 75 percent of the normal capacity of the battery in 2.7 seconds; it only took 20 seconds to recharge it to 90 percent of its capacity, and these values were stable for 100 charge/discharge cycles. The lithium material didn’t work quite as well, but was still impressive. At high rates of discharge, it could handle 75 percent of its normal capacity, and still stored a third of its regular capacity when discharged at over a thousand times the normal rate.
A full-scale lithium battery made with the electrode could be charged to 75 percent within a minute, and hit 90 percent within two minutes.
There are a few nice features of this work. As the authors noted, the electrodes are created using techniques that can scale to mass production, and the electrodes themselves could work with a variety of battery materials, such as the lithium and nickel used here. It may also be possible to merge them with the LiFePO4used in the earlier work. A fully integrated system, with materials designed to work specifically with these electrodes, could increase their performance even further.
Of course, that ultimately pushes us up against the issue of supplying sufficient current in the short time frames needed to charge the battery this fast. It might work great for a small battery, like a cell phone, but could create challenges if we’re looking to create a fast-charge electric car.
Right now, 8% of the world’s oil is used to make plastics — and oil has to be extracted from the belly of the earth using extremely energy and cost-intensive processes. At the same time, the world’s cities are constantly growing and producing more waste, which is usually dehydrated and trucked off to be dumped. In a planet-positive double-whammy, Micromidas has figured out how to transform raw sewage into a versatile form of plastic that biodegrades in 6-12 months. The new company (they’ve only been around since mid-2008) accomplished the feat by harnessing microbes — specifically, bacteria — to produce a bioplastic resin, which can be processed into a malleable plastic.
Fingernail-sized, gemstone-shaped, it's the first device of its kind.
Researchers at Ohio State University have a made a lens that simultaneously takes pictures of an object from nine angles, images which are then combined to make a 3-D one. The lens, informs The Engineer, "is claimed to be the first single, stationery lens to create microscopic 3D images by itself."
The lens, roughly the size of a fingernail, is currently in prototype, and looks like a gemstone with eight facets. Lei Li, an OSU postdoc, wrote a program to cut a tiny piece of acrylic glass using an ultraprecision milling device. The facets vary in size and angle, in such a way that an object placed underneath is viewed from multiple angles at once. It's "basically like putting several microscopes into one," said Li in a release.
Using the device, the scientists took 3-D pictures of the tip of a ballpoint pen and a miniature drill bit (shown up top), each of which had a diameter of a millimeter or less. True to nerdy scientist form, Li and his fellow researchers are most excited about what this means for their own research: "For us, the most attractive part of this project is that we will be able to see the real shape of micro-samples instead of just a 2-D projection." But there are multiple applications--it might help the medical industry, for instance, to shrink devices to analyze fluids. More generally, "we hope to help manufacturers reduce the number and sizes of equipment they need to miniaturize products," Allen Yi, another of the researchers, has said.
Viewing objects from multiple viewpoints at once: it gave our predecessors a robust art movement, cubism. Nowadays, it just gives us 3-D.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technique that captures carbon emissions from industrial and coal-fired plants and buries them underground, is understandably controversial. Researchers have in the past shown that the ultra-expensive technique could leak carbon into groundwater aquifers, making the water undrinkable. And there is the ever-present problem of what happens if all the pressurized carbon stored underground is disturbed and, say, gets released back into the air. But now scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory claim that large-scale underground storage is safer than previously thought.
According to researchers, underground pressure from injected CO2 won't be a problem at most storage sites. ScienceDaily explains:
Dr. Zhou and fellow researcher Dr. Jens Birkholzer considered three
different types of storage reservoirs: closed, partially closed and
open. They indicate that the storage of carbon dioxide deep underground
will occur mainly in partially closed or open formations, where pressure
build-up is relieved naturally by movement of native saline waters into
regions far away from where carbon dioxide injection occurs.
This can partially ensure that pressure build-up is relieved--but the researchers admit that other pressure management strategies will also be needed. In any case, pressure management probably won't be an issue for a long time to come, at least in the U.S. The $1.3 billion FutureGen CCS project has been in the works for years, and has already been scaled down from a new CCS-equipped power plant to a smaller retrofitted one in Illinois. CCS, in other words, isn't even close to becoming a large-scale solution for anything.
Follow Fast Company on Twitter. Ariel Schwartz can be reached by email.
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2011-03-29 08:38:10 UTC
The World Community Grid, powered by IBM, is designed to harness the unused computing power of the world's PCs and laptops for research on critical ...
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2011-03-25 02:29:30 UTC
Shortlisted for the James Dyson Award
Safe and accessible drinking water is one of the rarest resources on the planet. 1-in-8 people in our world ...
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2011-03-25 01:36:32 UTC
Chief Financial Officers typical expect energy saving projects to have an average internal rate of return of investment of about 20%. A recent research ...
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2011-03-21 01:01:36 UTC
Energy AWARE Clock is wirelessly connected to an energy meter.Energy AWARE Clock is an electricity meter that resembles an ordinary kitchen clock. ...
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2011-03-17 01:08:57 UTC
The Zeno Lamp brings natural sunlight indoors through a system of light collectors and fiber-optic cables. The beauty of the Zeno lamp lies in its ...
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2011-03-14 00:58:14 UTC
*How has the brand developed since 1975 when it was first created?*
Camper has moved one step at a time, which is the only way to do things properly. ...
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2011-03-12 01:03:16 UTC
While crossing the African continent, twin brothers Arjan and Alfred Koop, became aware of the true meaning of sanitation or the lack thereof in especially ...
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2011-03-10 11:08:43 UTC
The Environ biocomposite® product line is made from recycled newsprint, a soy-based resin and color additives. Environ biocomposite® is sold in 3'x6 ...
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2011-03-09 11:34:47 UTC
The c,mm,nity is a growing community, with over 800 people involved at present and about 80 of those making active contributions.
latest developments ...
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2011-03-09 06:04:42 UTC
Named after a Danish candy – colourful, sugarcoated licorice balls – Pinocchio is a carpet that makes you smile. Pinocchio is handmade in Nepal where ...
The lens, roughly the size of a fingernail, is currently in prototype, and looks like a gemstone with eight facets. Lei Li, an OSU postdoc, wrote a program to cut a tiny piece of acrylic glass using an ultraprecision milling device. The facets vary in size and angle, in such a way that an object placed underneath is viewed from multiple angles at once. It's "basically like putting several microscopes into one," 
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