Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: habitats – Page 98

  • After years of development, the housing startup Arkup has debuted a floating home that can withstand rising sea levels and Category 4 hurricanes.
  • The home contains a hydraulic system that lifts it above water and anchors it during heavy winds.
  • Arkup envisions a future where entire communities in Miami and other major cities are designed to float.

When the housing startup Arkup revealed its plan to build a floating, hurricane-proof yacht in 2017, South Florida had just witnessed the devastating effects of Hurricane Irma, a Category 4 storm that destroyed hundreds of residences.

The company’s models were designed to weather a storm of that magnitude, but it would be another two years before they became a reality.

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There’s a four-bedroom Edinburgh unit with “original wood floors,” listed by Christine. And there’s a two-bathroom apartment in Gainesville with a double sofa bed and open kitchen plan, listed by Michel. A “beautiful apartment” in Berlin has a “floral feeling.” A three-bedroom in Rome includes “utilities and toiletries.”

There’s just one problem with these Airbnb listings: they don’t exist.

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Building a culture of quality and integrity requires conversations across the scientific enterprise. Science is a complex ecosystem of funders, journals, academic administrators, scientific societies and researchers — the latter group including principal investigators, staff scientists, postdocs and graduate students. The interests of each group conflict as often as they overlap, and interactions tend to be stratified and constrained. Institutional presidents sit on working groups with each other but not with research-integrity officers. These officers attend conferences with each other, but not with faculty advisers and bench scientists. Journal editors meet scientists and other editors, but not institutional officers, on whom they rely for investigation when concerns about manuscripts arise.

Research needs an authoritative forum to hash out collective problems, argue C. K. Gunsalus, Marcia K. McNutt and colleagues. Research needs an authoritative forum to hash out collective problems, argue C. K. Gunsalus, Marcia K. McNutt and colleagues.

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Space architecture startup AI SpaceFactory achieved second place in the latest phase of a NASA-led competition, pitting several groups against each other in pursuit of designing a 3D-printed Mars habitat and physically demonstrating some of the technologies needed to build them.

With a focus on ease of scalable 3D-printing and inhabitants’ quality of life, as well as the use of modular imported goods like windows and airlocks, MARSHA lends itself impeccably well to SpaceX’s goal of developing a sustainable human presence on Mars as quickly, safely, and affordably as possible with the support of its Starship/Super Heavy launch vehicle.

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In contrast, 3D-printed clothes can simply be dumped into blenderlike machines that turn the plastics into powder that can then be used to print out something new. And since 3D printing easily allows for custom sizing, the process is inherently frugal with materials.

But there are plenty of challenges that must be overcome before 3D-printed apparel goes mainstream.

One is cost. Even the smallest home 3D printers run several hundred dollars. A printer capable of printing human-sized apparel is beyond the reach of individual consumers. And it takes far longer to print an article of clothing than to produce a similar article via weaving or knitting. Peleg’s jacket, for example, takes about 100 hours to print.

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No, this isn’t the work of some gigantic bird. The living art you see before you was actually done by man — more specifically, artist and branchbender extraordinaire Patrick Dougherty. Crafting human-sized nest houses made by actually weaving growing trees into the shapes of houses, cocoons, pagodas, huts, giant water pitchers and even people, Dougherty has traveled the world with his truly extraordinary sculptures. Click through our photo gallery for images of some of his coolest work.

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Hands are old news. VR navigation, control and selection is best done with the eyes—at least that’s what HTC Vive is banking on with the upcoming HTC Vive Pro Eye, a VR headset with integrated Tobii eye tracking initially targeting businesses. I tried out a beta version of the feature myself on MLB Home Run Derby VR. It’s still in development and, thus, was a little wonky, but I can’t deny its cool factor.

HTC announced the new headset Tuesday at the CES tech show in Las Vegas. The idea is that by having eye tracking built into the headset, better use cases, such as enhanced training programs, can be introduced. The VR player also says users can expect faster VR interactions and better efficiency in terms of tapping your PC’s CPU and GPU.

Of course, before my peepers could be tracked I needed to calibrate the headset for my special eyes. It was quite simple, after adjusting the interpupillary distance appropriately, the headset had me stare at a blue dot that bounced around my field of view (FOV). The whole thing took less than a minute.

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Interesting concept.

Architectural students working with the European Space Agency (ESA) have created a new concept for a sustainable lunar habitat.

The ESA’s astronaut center in Cologne, Germany, partners with universities and research institutions to study moon-related concepts in preparation for future missions. Angelus Chrysovalantis Alfatzis is one of the researchers who has contributed to the development of a promising concept for a moon base, according to a statement from ESA.

“I always strive to find material and structural solutions in accordance with the resources available on site,” Alfatzis, who is in his final year of the architectural engineering program at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, said in the statement. “At the moment, my focus is on using unprocessed lunar soil for construction and the architectural applications of this [technique].” [Moon Base Visions: How to Build a Lunar Colony (Photos)].

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Smart building materials are altering the fabric of the housebuilding industry. Housebuilders are already looking ahead to the days when homes will fix themselves, serve their residents and tell us how we can build them better.

SMART CONCRETE

While housebuilders gaze into the future, researchers have been turning to the past for inspiration. Over the last few years, the DNA of concrete has been decoded and rewritten by scientists to make the material that built the Roman Empire fit for the future.

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