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“What if we could have altered the track of Katrina?”
http://www.vimeo.com/10035505
“Owning the Weather” is a documentary about geo-engineering by Robert Greene. It’s about whether or not we should engineer the weather and the different impacts that this has. And not only because we can, but also because actually we are already doing so.
Words and video via Next Nature.
See also:
From daily tonic:
In South America the slums are attached to the outskirts of mega-cities such as Caracas and Mexico City like wasps’ nests on a cliff face. In a hilly island city like Hong Kong, however, living space is limited. Here you only see the laboriously constructed huts made of corrugated iron and planks of wood in which the poorest of the poor live if you look upwards – they occupy, to put it in cynical terms, a penthouse location.
Some of these rooftop shacks, which in the year 2006 after the government’s first slum clearance programme still housed 3962 people in 1554 households, are up to three storeys high. Improvised structures made of ladders and bits of furniture create connections between the individual parts of the buildings and join these impoverished dwellings into complete rooftop settlements – sociologists even talk of a “self-organising niche architecture” and point to the utopian aspects of this urban way of life.
This brings to mind the excellent post on the Kowloon Walled City by David Forbes, over on Coilhouse.
thanks for the tip-off Vertigo Jones!
HP has just unveiled an incredibly ambitious project to create a “Central Nervous System for the Earth” (CeNSE) composed of billions of super sensitive, cheap, and tough sensors. The project involves distributing these sensors throughout the world and using them to gather data that could be used to detect everything from infrastructure collapse to environmental pollutants to climate change and impending earthquakes. From there, the “Internet of Things” and smarter cities are right around the corner.
HP is currently developing its first sensor to be deployed, which is an accelerometer 1,000 times more sensitive than those used in the Wii or the iPhone – it’s capable of detecting motion and vibrations as subtle as a heartbeat. The company also has plans to use nanomaterials to create chemical and biological sensors that are 100 million times more sensitive than current models. Their overall goal is to use advances in sensitivity and nanotech to shrink the size of these devices so that they are small enough to clip onto a mobile telephone.
Once HP has created an array of sensors, the next step is distributing them and making sense of all the data they generate. That’s no easy task, granted that a network of one million sensors running 24 hours a day would create 20 petabytes of data in just six months. HP is taking all that number crunching to task however, and will be harnessing its in-house networking expertise, consulting, and data storage technologies for the project.
Link via inhabitat.com.
From nextnature.net.
Designed by Fabio Novembre, the trees act as an oasis in the middle of the city Milan:
Link and photo via mocoloco.com.
A green form of graff. This I like.
Ingredients:
Wash/tease as much of the dirt from the moss as you can. Throw it, the yoghurt, beer and sugar into a blender and blend until a lovely smooth consistency. if it looks like it’s going to drip when you paint it, add the corn syrup to the mix.
When finding somewhere to paint, look for something porous (most older or rough concrete walls are perfect). Once you’ve painted your design, its suggested that you come back every week or to spray it with water, to help the moss along.
Check out Anna Garforth (her site is here), a dedicated moss artist.
Deep in the mountains of coal country lies this rusting hulk. Once the largest coal breaker in the world it could process raw coal through the entire facility in an amazing 12 minutes. Some information states it opened around 1932 and closed in either 1964 or 1978.
Just two of many awesome pix in Hoodwatch’s fantastic flickr set.
The following speech by Karl Schroeder is an excellent summation of the future we’ve been documenting here, the world that lies just around the corner:
His thoughts on, well I guess you have to call it Nature 2.0, are a nice progression on some of Kevin Kelly’s ideas in his book Out of Control.
via BoingBoing | Futurismic
Norbert Eisenreich, a senior researcher and deputy of directors at the Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology (ICT) in Pfinztal, Germany, said his team of scientists have come up with a substance that could replace plastic: Arboform — basically, liquid wood.
It is derived from wood pulp-based lignin and can be mixed with a number of other materials to create a strong, non-toxic alternative to petroleum-based plastics, Eisenreich said, as reported by DPA news agency.
Car parts and other durable items made of this bio-plastic already exist, but the chemical hadn’t been suitable for household use until now, due to the high content of sulphurous substances used in separating the lignin from the cell fibers.
The German researchers were able to reduce the sulphur content in Arborform by about 90 percent, making it much safer for use in everyday items.
Bolstering Arboform’s environmental credentials, Eisenreich’s team also discovered that the substance was highly recyclable.
“To find that out, we produced components, broke them up into small pieces, and re-processed the broken pieces — 10 times in all. We did not detect any change in the material properties of the low-sulphur bio-plastic, so that means it can be recycled,” said Inone-Kauffmann.
From dw-world.de, via core77.com.
From pinktentacle.com:
The video — shot on the Rokko Liner in Kobe, Japan — shows how paperclips stand on end when the train accelerates and brakes. The magnetism, which is produced by the electric current that drives the motors located under the floor, apparently poses no harm to the human body, though it could damage credit cards, mobile phones, or other electronic devices if left on the floor. The Kobe New Transit Company, which operates the Rokko Liner (as well as the Port Liner, which uses similar trains), says extra shielding is being installed just in case.
Ever wondered where your trash goes to die? New Scientist is collaborating with Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a ground-breaking experiment to electronically tag and follow ordinary trash as travels from ordinary garbage cans to landfills, recycling plants, and possibly some extraordinary destinations.
The team behind the experiment, MIT’s Senseable City lab, led by Carlo Ratti, have made a device that is about the size of a small matchbox and that works like a cell phone – without the phone bit. A SIM card inside the chip blips out its location every 15 minutes, the signal is picked up by local cell phone antennae and the chip’s location is relayed back to MIT.
Ratti’s team and New Scientist have already deployed a test run of 50 tracked items of trash ranging from paper cups to computers in Seattle. Several thousand more will be released in Seattle and New York garbage cans later this summer and we’ll chuck a batch into the London trash for good measure.
From newscientist.com.
Created by Tim Noble and Sue Webster, visual proof that junk can still be useful:
Photos and link via environmentalgraffiti.com.
Thanks to Cat Vincents’ Wife-the-artist, for providing the names to the creators of the pieces.
Pitched to be this year’s most talked-about climate change film, The Age of Stupid is a new movie from director Franny Armstrong (of McLibel) and producer John Battsek (of One Day In September). In this epic tale, Pete Postlethwaite stars as a man living alone in the devastated future world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?
Link and words via inhabitat.com.
From National Geographic, it’s hard to be a bee keeper in New York:
Keeping bees in New York City is illegal, so for years beekeepers have flown below the radar of the health code. They keep their hives on roof tops or in community gardens.
If a neighbor makes a complaint, the owners must disassemble their hives or face steep fines and exterminator fees. Flouting the law seems to have not dissuaded these would be beekeepers.
The New York City health department maintains that bees are a threat due to the possibility of swarming and that stings for some can be fatal.
A city council bill has been introduced to legalize beekeeping in the city.
Not designed to be built, but interesting to look at:
Intentionally or not, it’s a fitting name–”Refusion”–for a winning example of a futuristic homesteading concept based on refusal: refusal to be constrained by established governments or social mores or even by the fundamental desire for solid ground underfoot.
People’s-choice award winner in a design competition for “seasteads”–oil rig-like, sovereign settlements in international waters–this proposed research facility by a group of Las Vegas-based 3-D artists includes “a number of environmental systems, such as greenhouses and renewable energy sources, which would enable absolute independence,” according to a Team 3DA statement. “The aesthetic that emerged from this realization became influenced by a mixture of organic and mechanical systems operating in a symbiotic relationship.”
Photo and words via nationalgeographic.com.
From zimbio:
A recently constructed section of the controversial US-Mexico border fence expansion project crosses previously pristine desert sands at sunrise on March 14, 2009 between Yuma, Arizona and Calexico, California
via William Gibson
A new study has found the air in Madrid and Barcelona is also laced with at least five drugs – most prominently cocaine.
The Superior Council of Scientific Investigations, a government institute, said on its website that in addition to cocaine, it found trace amounts of amphetamines, opiates, cannabinoids and lysergic acid -a relative of LSD – in air-quality control stations in the cities.
But it said there was no reason for alarm.
“Not even if we lived for a thousand years would we consume the equivalent of a dose of cocaine by breathing this air,” said one of its scientists, Miren Lopez de Alda, in the statement.
The scientific group added that “in no case should these levels be considered representative of the air in the two cities”.
In Madrid the test site was close to a ruined building believed to be frequented by drug dealers. And in both Madrid and Barcelona, the studies were carried out close to universities
Quote via telegraph.co.uk.
Thanks to LBA for the tip-off!
