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Architecture, Design, Computation, Interaction Design, Technology, Ecology, Social Innovation

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"Lycopodium powder is a highly flammable substance, "a yellow-tan dust-like powder historically used as a flash powder. It is composed of the dry spores of clubmoss plants, various fern relatives principally in the genera Lycopodium and Diphasiastrum."

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Richard Rogers, multi-story, flat-packed house, Homeshell, at the Royal Academy

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http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/by-design-josef-alberss-interaction-of-color-goes-interactive/?hpw

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The chemical secrets of a concrete Roman breakwater that has spent the last 2,000 years submerged in the Mediterranean Sea have been uncovered by an international team of researchers led by Paulo Monteiro of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

Analysis of samples provided by team member Marie Jackson pinpointed why the best Roman concrete was superior to most modern concrete in durability, why its manufacture was less environmentally damaging – and how these improvements could be adopted in the modern world.

“It’s not that modern concrete isn’t good – it’s so good we use 19 billion tons of it a year,” says Monteiro. “The problem is that manufacturing Portland cement accounts for seven percent of the carbon dioxide that industry puts into the air.”

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From 2009. What's the hold-up here...

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Your Smartphone, Made of Cement

"The process may not be limited to glass, however. There could be other materials capable of transforming themselves into semiconductors through magic finely honed scientific techniques."

Scientists just discovered a way to turn masonry into metal. Using lasers.

"Network topology for the formation of solvated electrons in binary CaO–Al2O3 composition glasses"

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/30/1300908110

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The Future of Interaction Design. Explanatory and insightful. Brilliant future-thinking on current topics in a tight little documentary.

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Imagining the commute just to get out of this thing. Future of architecture, construction, cities?

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Forms in Nature, Hilden & Diaz

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I mean, what would it really take to put a swimming pool on the floor above a server farm...

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CubeSensor

In the race to quantify everything--our bodies, our carbon footprint, the weather, the nutrients in our food-- there’s one massive arena that we know next to nothing about, says Ales Spetic: the indoor environment.His new product, the CubeSensor, is a simple and elegant-looking way to change that. The battery-powered device, when placed in different rooms of the house or office, “continuously measures light, noise, humidity, barometric pressure, air quality, temperature and vibrations,” he says.

Quantified self, quantified space.

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Out of context, too good not to share...

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Ultrabroadband Photonic Structures To Achieve High-Performance Daytime Radiative Cooling

A Stanford team has designed an entirely new form of cooling panel that works even when the sun is shining. Such a panel could vastly improve the daylight cooling of buildings, cars and other structures by radiating sunlight back into the chilly vacuum of space.

Primary importance of load reduction vs potentially high embodied energy of nanomaterials comprising the panel notwithstanding, THIS IS AWESOME.

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