green – Page 15 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

World’s first 3D-printed office opens in Dubai

The world’s first 3D-printed office building opened this week in Dubai , Reuters reports. The 2, 700-square-foot, single-story building was built in just 17 days using a gigantic, 20-foot tall 3D printer and a special mix of concrete, fiber reinforced plastic and glass fiber reinforced gypsum. Although the “printer” was massive at about two stories tall, 120 feet long and 40 feet wide, it only needed one staffer to make sure it was functioning properly. The rest of the 18-person construction crew consisted of installers, electricians and mechanical engineers who completed the job for a mere $140, 000 in construction and labor costs — or about half the price of a comparable structure built with conventional methods. Of course, the building is more than just another gold star in the UAE’s ultramodern playland — it will also serve, appropriately enough, as the temporary headquarters for the Dubai Future Foundation. Next year, the structure is scheduled to become the home of Dubai’s Museum of the Future . “This is the first 3D-printed building in the world, and it’s not just a building, it has fully functional offices and staff, ” the UAE Minister of Cabinet Affairs, Mohamed Al Gergawi said. According to Gergawi, Dubai plans to have 25 percent of the buildings in the emirate built via 3D printing by the year 2030.

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World’s first 3D-printed office opens in Dubai

World’s largest solar power plant experiences minor meltdown

A small fire temporarily shut down the generator at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System near the California-Nevada border Thursday. According to the Associated Press , some wires at the power plant melted and caught fire after a misaligned mirror zapped them with concentrated sunbeams. When it is operating correctly, the array of over 173, 500 heliostats reflect and focus sunlight onto boiler towers that create supercritical steam to drive turbines and create electricity — enough to power some 140, 000 homes in California. It’s an efficient system that also has the unfortunate side effect of incinerating birds in mid-flight, but now we can also add “solar meltdown” to the list of potential power plant disasters. According to San Bernardino County fire Captain Mike McClintock, those misaligned mirrors were reflecting the sun’s rays onto electrical wires about 300 feet up one of the boiler towers. While images from the blaze show some damage to steam ducts and water pipes, no one was injured and workers at the plant reportedly had things under control in less than 20 minutes. One of the boilers was shut down for repairs, but the plant itself remained online.

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World’s largest solar power plant experiences minor meltdown

Scientists made see-through wood that’s stronger than glass

Researchers at the University of Maryland were able pull away color and chemicals from a block of wood to leave it impressively see-through. The result is a material that is both stronger and more insulating than glass, with better biodegradability than plastic. “We were very surprised by how transparent it could go, ” said Liangbing Hu, who wrote about the project in Advanced Materials . Hu’s team isn’t the only group that’s developed a technique for transparent wood — Swedish researchers have also been able to clear out that pesky visible pulp, replacing it with a transparent polymer. The treatment techniques appear pretty similar: it’s a two-stage process. The researchers first boiled the wood in water, sodium hydroxide and other chemicals for roughly two hours. This flushes out lignin, the molecule responsible for giving wood its color. The team then poured epoxy over the block which makes the wood four to five times stronger, although it makes it all a little less environmentally-friendly in the process. One of the great properties of the treated wood is how it retains the structure and natural channels from when it was a tree. These micro-channels can then deliver light similarly to how it moved nutrients around as part of a plant. “In traditional material the light gets scattered, ” said Hu. “If you have this waveguide effect with wood, more light comes into your house.” So what’s stopping us living in see-through wood houses, aside from privacy issues? Size limitations. Five by five-inch wood blocks are as large as they’ve been able to make it work, ranging in thickness from paper thin to about a centimeter thick — far more substantial than what Swedish researchers have shown off so far. Dr. Hu and the University of Maryland scientists are is still working to scale it up further. If the team can accomplish that there’s no shortage of applications, ranging from windows, building materials and furniture to smaller, precise, optical equipment that’s normally made from glass or plastic. Source: New York Times

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Scientists made see-through wood that’s stronger than glass

307-million-year-old “monster” fossil identified at last

Sean McMahon Reconstruction of the Tully Monster as it would have looked 300 million years ago, swimming in the Carboniferous seas. Notice the jointed proboscis, the multiple rows of teeth, and the dorsal eye bar. 4 more images in gallery The “Tully monster,” a mysterious animal that swam in the inland oceans of Illinois more than 300 million years ago, left behind a tantalizingly detailed map of its body in a well-preserved package of fossils. Unfortunately, nobody could figure out what the creature was for half a century—until now. Francis Tully found the remains of the tiny beast (it’s only about 10 centimeters long) in Illinois in 1958 and gave it the whimsical scientific name Tullimonstrum (nickname: Tully monster). A long stalk extends from the front of its body, which ends in a toothy orifice called a buccal apparatus. Its body is covered in gills and narrows down into a powerful tail that it probably used for propulsion. Its eyes peer out from either end of a long, rigid bar attached to the animal’s back. The Tully monster lived during the Carboniferous period, when the North American Great Basin was an enormous inland sea. Trees were colonizing the land for the first time, transforming the soil and filling the atmosphere with higher levels of oxygen than Earth had known before or since. Giant arthropods, like the 8-foot-long millipede known as Arthropleura , crawled through the new forests. It was a good time to be a weird animal, and the Tully monster probably fit right in. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Quantum computer revolves around just 5 atoms

It’s no mean feat to find the factors of a very large number — even a supercomputer can take years to find all the multipliers. However, MIT researchers have found a way to clear this massive hurdle. They’ve built a quantum computer that discovers number factors using just five atoms. Four of the atoms are turned into logic gates using laser pulses that put them into superpositions (where they maintain two different energy states at once), while the fifth atom stores and delivers answers. The result is a computer that not only calculates solutions much more efficiently than existing quantum systems, but scales relatively easily. Need to get the factors for a larger number? Introduce more atoms. It’s a one-trick pony at the moment (it can only get factors for the number 15), and a truly complex computer would require “thousands” of simultaneous laser blasts to work. However, it could have big ramifications for the security world. A sufficiently powerful machine could end the use of any encryption that depends on factoring — a government agency or hacking team could easily crack codes that are otherwise near-impenetrable. On a basic level, this quantum factoring could also help solve math problems involving extremely large numbers (say, universe-scale calculations) that would normally be too daunting. Source: MIT News

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Quantum computer revolves around just 5 atoms

Business card with built-in ECG is perfect for cardiologists

Some people can make business cards that stand out and show off their skills. Take for example, that one engineer who created a card that lights up and that programmer who designed one that can play Tetris . But what if you’re a medical professional, specifically a cardiologist? A company called MobilECG has created a business card that’s directly connected to your field: it has a built-in ECG that actually works. According to its blog post , the device has sensors that measure “the real ECG signal between the users’ hands, ” so long as their thumbs are touching the finger pads. Of course, you’ll have to explain to patients that while it works, MobilECG created it as a toy. The Hungarian startup clearly states that it’s “not suitable for diagnostic purposes, ” so they can’t abstain from getting an actual ECG done. The company is gauging people’s interest in the card at the moment and is planning to sell it for a rather hefty price of $29 per if it ever decides to release it. If you have the skills to make small electronic devices from scratch, though, you can try to create your own version. The card is open source, and MobilECG posted all its codes and schematics (PDF) online. Via: Gizmodo , Damn Geeky Source: mobilecg

MIT mapped where Boston’s biggest energy hogs reside

Boston might be best known for the longstanding baseball rivalry between its Red Sox and the New York Yankees, but maybe the nerdier folks among us will think of it beyond Fallout 4 and PAX East now. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a model for estimating gas and electricity demand for every building in the city. Some 100, 000 edifices are included and the model is even being used to aid in making decisions regarding energy policy, according to PhysOrg . The idea here is to use the model as a way of making Beantown more energy efficient across the board. “Every city has long-term goals, but nobody knows exactly how to plan for and measure them, ” MIT’s Carlos Cerezo says. “With this model, the city has a map to help them target and reach those goals.” One example of that is looking a building that’s consuming lots of energy (and thus giving off a sizable amount of heat waste) and positioning others around it that’d use the otherwise wasted heat, Cerezo says. Another is developing autonomous power grids, “microgrids, ” that can withstand extreme weather conditions on their own if disconnected from the larger power network. Once a city can see how energy ebbs and flows via the big data , this sort of stuff should become easier. “Nobody has ever modeled a city the size of Boston at this level of detail, ” Christoph Reinhart, also of MIT, says. But the above model’s projections need to be validated against hard, real-world data before the team can reach its ultimate goal of energy-use models for every city on the globe. Source: PhysOrg

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MIT mapped where Boston’s biggest energy hogs reside

Wikipedia fund gives the site a long-term future

Wikipedia just turned 15 years old, but you wouldn’t know it from the nigh-on inescapable donation drives — the crowdsourced encyclopedia often seems as if it’s months away from extinction. The Wikimedia Foundation (its parent organization) may have a way to keep the site around for the long haul, however. It’s launching the Wikimedia Endowment , a “perpetual” support fund for Wikipedia and other Foundation efforts. The goal is to raise $100 million over the next 10 years, or enough to both improve its independence and give it room to grow. The Endowment may well be necessary. Wikipedia revolves around its free, no-ads approach to information, and there’s no guarantee that it’ll find enough people to chip in. This prevents it from having to turn to ads and otherwise compromise its relatively impartial stance. Moreover, the team is eager to add more videos and continue adapting to the mobile world — those expansions will cost money. The organization still has to be frugal (it’s not about to beat YouTube), but it shouldn’t be at risk of falling behind. [Image credit: Lionel Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images] Via: The Guardian Source: Wikimedia Endowment

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Wikipedia fund gives the site a long-term future

Amazon is selling its own processors now, too

Amazon’s come a long way since its humble beginnings as an online book store. It sells everything from groceries to its own Kindle and tablet hardware , runs streaming services complete with original shows , and has a huge cloud-computing business among other interests . And now Amazon’s started pushing its own line of processors, plunging its finger into yet another pie. You won’t find its ARM-based “Alpine” chips among the T-shirts and homeware on Amazon’s online store, of course. They are being sold directly to manufacturers and service providers through subsidiary Annapurna Labs , a chip designer Amazon acquired early last year. The Alpine chip range is intended for products like WiFi routers, storage devices and connected home products (internet of things things), with companies including ASUS, Netgear and Synology already counted as customers. As Bloomberg notes, the chips are also a good fit for data centers, but are more suited to storage and networking tasks, not high-performance servers where Intel reigns king. Apart from being an interesting milestone in Amazon’s campaign for world domination, it getting into the processor business will resonate little with us everyday consumers. But, when you finally commit to buying a smart home hub after comparing numerous Amazon reviews, that hardware may well turn up with an Amazon brain inside, too. Via: Bloomberg , The Verge Source: Annapurna Labs

A Totally Feasible Plan to Turn Manhattan’s Busiest Street Into a 40-Block Park

New York City has plenty of parks that revamp aging transit infrastructure: The High Line transforms a decrepit elevated rail route , the Lowline reclaims forgotten tunnels . But neither of those is as ambitious as the Green Line, a concept that would turn a major street into a linear park. Read more…

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A Totally Feasible Plan to Turn Manhattan’s Busiest Street Into a 40-Block Park