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Category: habitats – Page 116

From pine cones to an adaptive shading system

An adjustable shading system that adapts itself independently over the course of the day, without sensors or motors and largely maintenance-free? It really is possible: an ETH doctoral student at the Institute for Building Materials has developed an alternative to motor-driven sunshades.

It gets hot in the city in summer, and buildings in direct sunlight get particularly warm. At night, it can then be difficult to get rid of that accumulated heat. These days, many people dream of efficient air conditioning. Chiara Vailati had a different dream: after completing her studies in Italy, the pursued the idea of creating an adjustable and autonomous sunshade for houses, to reduce the amount of heat that enters a building and therefore the need for cooling. She had high requirements: “I wanted the system to be made of environmentally friendly materials, use very little energy and have low installation and maintenance costs,” remembers Vailati.

Vailati has since been able to realise her idea: during her doctoral project with Professor Ingo Burgert at ETH Zurich’s Institute for Building Materials, she designed an innovative shading system. Anyone who is now picturing a fully automatic high-tech shading with sensors, actuators and complex controls is a long way off the mark. Vailati’s prototype may be high-tech, but it is still refreshingly modest. The system uses shade-producing wooden planks and requires no sensors or motors – or even electricity. However, it does still change to suit to the weather conditions: the planks move autonomously. Multiple pairs of planks aligned in parallel create a kind of roof that opens and closes itself. The construction can be placed, for example, horizontally over a window on a building’s façade.

Indonesia earthquake—how scrap tyres could stop buildings collapsing

At the time of writing, 436 people have died following an earthquake in the Indonesian island of Lombok. A further 2,500 people have been hospitalised with serious injuries and over 270,000 people have been displaced.

Earthquakes are one of the deadliest natural disasters, accounting for just 7.5% of such events between 1994 and 2013 but causing 37% of deaths. And, as with all , it isn’t the countries that suffer the most earthquakes that see the biggest losses. Instead, the number of people who die in an earthquake is related to how developed the country is.

In Lombok, as in Nepal in 2015, many deaths were caused by the widespread collapse of local rickety houses incapable of withstanding the numerous aftershocks. More generally, low quality buildings and inadequate town planning are the two main reasons why seismic events are more destructive in developing countries.

How to conserve half the planet without going hungry

‚Every day there are roughly 386,000 new mouths to feed, and in that same 24 hours, scientists estimate between one and 100 species will go extinct. That’s it. Lost forever.

To deal with the biodiversity crisis we need to find a way to give nature more space—habitat loss is a key factor driving these extinctions. But how would this affect our food supplies?

New research, published in Nature Sustainability, found it could mean we lose a lot of food —but exactly how much really depends on how we choose to give nature that space. Doing it right could mean rethinking how we do agriculture and altogether.

From office windows to Mars: Scientists debut super-insulating gel

A new, super-insulating gel developed by researchers at CU Boulder could dramatically increase the energy efficiency of skyscrapers and other buildings, and might one day help scientists build greenhouse-like habitats for colonists on Mars.

The “aerogel,” which looks like a flattened plastic contact lens, is so resistant to heat that you could put a strip of it on your hand and a fire on top without feeling a thing. But unlike similar products on the market, the material is mostly see-through.

“Transparency is an enabling feature because you can use this gel in windows, and you could use it in extraterrestrial habitats,” said Ivan Smalyukh, a professor in the Department of Physics. “You could harvest sunlight through that thermally-insulating material and store the energy inside, protecting yourself from those big oscillations in temperature that you have on Mars or on the moon.”

Flat-pack homes and profit-sharing retrofits are making sustainable housing affordable

Wealth-generating, flat-pack solar houses and a profit-sharing scheme that incentivises retrofitting are bringing sustainable living to people who would otherwise not be able to afford it.

“One of the biggest problems that we see right now is (the creation of) a big gap between the lower and the middle classes. Everyone is talking about this growing inequality gap,” said Bart Glowacki, co-founder of SOLACE, a start-up based in Warsaw, Poland, set up with the aim of making sustainable housing widely affordable.

Tighter mortgage controls, job insecurity and high student debts in Europe has meant that it is increasingly difficult for young people to buy their own homes.

A Chance Encounter in a Graveyard – Part 1

This is a fictional story about a man realizing for the first time, under rather unusual circumstances, that he has a deep desire not to age and die.

It’s been a few months already, yet that day still feels like yesterday. I am still not convinced that I didn’t lose my mind that day, and even if I didn’t, it’s changed my thinking quite a bit.

I was in a green grove in the local cemetery, sitting on a bench. As it is the piece of nature closest to home, I used to go there quite often. A small group of men, all at least in their 40s and wearing black suits and ties, had passed by just as the bells in the nearby church began ringing.

Building the backbone of a smarter smart home

The state of artificial intelligence (AI) in smart homes nowadays might be likened to a smart but moody teenager: It’s starting to hit its stride and discover its talents, but it doesn’t really feel like answering any questions about what it’s up to and would really rather be left alone, OK?

William Yeoh, assistant professor of computer science and engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, is working to help smart-home AI to grow up.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded Yeoh a $300,000 grant to assist in developing smart-home AI algorithms that can determine what a user wants by both asking questions and making smart guesses, and then plan and schedule accordingly. Beyond being smart, the system needs to be able to communicate and to explain why it is proposing the schedule it proposed to the user.

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