Lifeboat Foundation

It is intended to be scalable and adaptable to a variety of settings, such as on the rooftops of inner-city buildings. The aim was to design and build a system that could be replicated in both rural areas and on roofs of urban building spaces.

The 130-square-foot structure is constructed from Aleppo Pine (Pinus halepensis) that was milled, dried, processed, and pressed into laminated wooden elements on-site at Valldaura. The glass roof, carefully arranged in a heliomorphic ‘diamond’ shape, allows for full solar capture both by the plants inside and the semi-transparent solar panels integrated within the glass to power the entire structure. The greenhouse only uses about 50% of the energy it produces, leaving the other half for the nearby Valldura Labs facility.

The solar-powered greenhouse also features a fully functional nutrient delivery system consisting of storage tanks, nutrient inflows, tubing to feed the plants directly, and a matrix of LED strip lights to facilitate longer growth cycles. The ground floor will be used for germinating the seedlings that will be planted in the gardens, while the upper level will generate a sizable harvest using advanced hydroponic techniques. All planting beds will use a sawdust substrate, a former waste product of the Green Fab Lab at Valldaura put to imaginative reuse.

Robot Maid: The child-sized robot can mop, pick up stuff off the floor, put dishes away, and even move furniture. It can even make and bring you coffee.

Remember the Jetsons? As kids, we hoped someday we’d have flying cars or those jetpacks Elroy used to zip around with. As we become older, the thing we really want most from the Jetsons is their lovable maid Rosie. Because let’s be honest, we all despise cleaning. Whether it’s vacuuming the living room, mopping up the kitchen or picking up our kid’s toys, nobody cleans with a smile on their face. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a robot maid like Rosie to clean up while we focused on other stuff?

Well having a “Rosie” might be closer than you think thanks to a company called Aeolus Robotics. They unveiled their as of yet unnamed “maid” robot earlier this year. The child-sized robot can mop, pick up stuff off the floor, put dishes away, and even move furniture.

Continue reading “This Robot Maid Can Clean Your House and then Get You Coffee” »

Raspberries are the ultimate summer fruit. Famous for their eye-catching scarlet color and distinctive structure, they consist of dozens of fleshy drupelets with a sweet yet slightly acidic pulp. But this delicate structure is also their primary weakness, as it leaves them vulnerable to even the slightest scratch or bruise. Farmers know all too well that raspberries are a difficult fruit to harvest—and that’s reflected in their price tag. But what if robots, equipped with advanced actuators and sensors, could lend a helping hand? Engineers at EPFL’s Computational Robot Design & Fabrication (CREATE) lab have set out to tackle this very challenge.

Sky-high labor costs and shortages of workers cause farmers to lose millions of dollars’ worth of produce each year—and the problem is even more acute when it comes to delicate crops such as raspberries. But for now, there’s no viable alternative to harvesting the fruit by hand. “It’s an exciting dilemma for us as robotics engineers,” says Josie Hughes, a professor at CREATE. “The raspberry harvesting season is so short, and the fruit is so valuable, that wasting them simply isn’t an option. What’s more, the cost and logistical challenges of testing different options out in the field are prohibitive. That’s why we decided to run our tests in the lab and develop a replica raspberry for training harvesting robots.”

Project Harbour Club, by Levs Architecten, is an interesting new development in Amsterdam that involved renovating and extending a shipping terminal originally constructed in 1901. Most notably, the project transformed former industrial wine silos that were located on the site into unique rooftop homes.

Project Harbour Club is located in Amsterdam’s Cruquiuseiland, in the city’s eastern docklands. It’s made up of the original dock terminal building, a new entrance, a six-story L-shaped residential building that slots neatly into the site, and the three silo homes.

The silos were originally used to store bulk wine for the Dutch market. To make them safe for people to live in, they were first carefully cleared of any traces of harmful residues, had insulation fitted, generous glazing cut into place, and a comfortable and light-filled interior installed. This is spread over three floors and contains a dining area, kitchen, living room, bedroom, and bathroom.

Computer scientists at the University of California San Diego are showing how soil microbes can be harnessed to fuel low-power sensors. This opens new possibilities for microbial fuel cells (MFCs), which can power soil hydration sensors and other devices.

Led by Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Assistant Professor Pat Pannuto and Gabriel Marcano, a Ph.D. student working with Pannuto, this research was presented today at the first Association for Computer Machinery (ACM) Workshop on No Power and Low Power Internet of Things.

Continue reading “Computer scientists show how bacteria can fuel low-power sensors” »

A follow-up to his series focused on the glow of LED-lit greenhouses, Tom Hegen’s new collection peers down on the landscape of Spain’s Almería peninsula. The German photographer is broadly interested in our impact on the earth and gears his practice toward the aerial, offering perspectives that illuminate the immense scale of human activity.

In The Greenhouse Series II, Hegen captures the abstract topographies of the world’s largest agricultural production center of its kind, which stretches across 360-square kilometers of rugged, mountainous terrain in the southern part of the country. The sun-trapping structures house plants like tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and watermelons that provide fresh produce to much of Europe year-round.

While 30 times more productive than typical farmland in the region, the facilities also function at a cost to the local ecosystems. “Groundwater is being polluted with fertilisers and pesticides. Some 30,000 tons of plastic waste are created each year,” Hegen tells Colossal, noting that the greenhouses are made almost entirely of plastic foil, which is shredded and discarded nearby once it’s no longer useful. “From there, wind and erosion transport it to the (Mediterranean Sea).”

An Evansville man spent his 27th birthday building a hydroponic farm at Tepe Park to help feed the community.

Ernesto Di Maio is severely allergic to the yeast in leavened foods. “I have to go somewhere and hide because I will be fully covered with bumps and bubbles on the whole body,” he says. “It’s really brutal.”

Di Maio is a materials scientist at the University of Naples Federico II where he studies the formation of bubbles in polymers like polyurethane. He’s had to swear off bread and pizza, which can make outings in Italy a touch awkward. “It’s quite hard in Naples not to eat pizza,” he explains. “People would say, ‘Don’t you like pizza? Why are you having pasta? That’s strange.’”

So Di Maio put Iaccarino and another graduate student, Pietro Avallone, to work on a project to make pizza dough without yeast. The results of this scientific and culinary experiment are published in Tuesday’s edition of Physics of Fluids. Di Maio pulled in another colleague: chemical engineer Rossana Pasquino who studies the flow of materials, everything from toothpaste to ketchup to plastics. “Pizza [dough] is a funny material,” she explains, “because it flows, but it has to be also like rubber. It has to be elastic enough [when it’s cooked] to be perfect when you eat it.” — I had to post this because I love Pizza.

Continue reading “Italian scientists hacked pizza physics to make dough without yeast” »

Li and his colleagues found that the animals’ social ranking in the group was closely linked to the results of competition, and by examining recordings from neurons in the brains of mice in real time, the team discovered that neurons in the anterior cingulate region of the brain store this social ranking information to inform upcoming decisions.

“Collectively, these neurons held remarkably detailed representations of the group’s behavior and their dynamics as the animals competed together for food, in addition to information about the resources available and the outcome of their past interactions,” explains senior author Ziv M. Williams, MD, a neurosurgical oncologist at MGH. “Together, these neurons could even predict the animal’s own future success well before competition onset, meaning that they likely drove the animals’ competitive behavior based on whom they interacted with.”

Manipulating the activity of these neurons, on the other hand, could artificially increase or decrease an animal’s competitive effort and therefore control their ability to successfully compete against others. “In other words, we could tune up and down the animal’s competitive drive and do so selectively without affecting other aspects of their behavior such as simple speed or motivation,” says Williams.