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City planners and designers can help make spaces safer in many ways. One strategy is known as Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED, pronounced “sep-ted”). This approach is based on the idea that specific built and social environmental features can deter criminal behaviour.

Strategies can be as simple as good maintenance, like rapidly removing graffiti, which can deter some offenders.

Another method is to build houses, streets, transport hubs and retail settings in a way that promotes visibility. This can include making windows and entrances of buildings face each other and clever use of lighting. The enhanced visibility this creates is known as “passive surveillance”, which can deter some offenders.

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In July 2018, The Engineer examined how modular fabrication techniques are reshaping the construction industry, enabling clean builds that are cost-effective and time efficient. But while off-site assembly brings many advantages, it can also be restrictive. This has prompted a new wave of engineers to bring the latest technology on-site, elevating the pre-fab to the fabulous.

According to Andrew Watts, CEO of engineering technology firm Newtecnic, this trend is part of a new era of digital construction where robots and drones will become commonplace on site. Digitalisation has penetrated virtually every aspect of design and engineering, but in many ways physical construction itself has remained a stubbornly analogue process, centuries of accumulated human expertise resisting the allure of ones and zeroes, and human hands still doing much of the heavy lifting. Newtecnic’s Construction Labs concept is aiming to change that, merging modular building with on-site construction to deliver perfect finishes on major public buildings.

“We’re using Construction Labs to realise complex projects,” Watts told The Engineer. “Its specific use is in the construction of facades and applications and connections for primary structures.”

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Scientific progress, and Internet and mobile coverage proliferation in the last 8 years alone might have decreased the numbers dramatically. Still not as much as to liquidate the spiritual beliefs of the vast majority of the world’s population.


Does God exist? If She does, this is how we got our sacred soul. If She does not, we will soon be able to recreate the soul in machines!

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This article is part of a series about how OS Fund (OSF) companies are radically redefining our future by rewriting the operating systems of life. Or as we prefer to think about it: Step 1: Put a dent into the universe. And Step 2: Rewrite the universe. You can see the full OSF collection here and read more about Building a Biological Immune System.

In contemplating the future, I love imagining how our daily lives today will be thought of in the future. What appears sci-fi to us today but will be “normal” 50 years from now? What inefficient and boneheaded things do we do today that future generations will look back and laugh at?

Seeing beyond what’s possible is a rare skill. Being able to design and build beyond what’s possible is even more rare. Put together, this is the unique set of skills and abilities that OSF founders all have in common. Most importantly, they’ve chosen to focus their abilities to tackling the biggest problems humanity faces.

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This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Space X and Tesla founder Elon Musk has a vision for colonising Mars, based on a big rocket, nuclear explosions and an infrastructure to transport millions of people there. This was seen as highly ambitious but technically challenging in several ways. Planetary protection rules and the difficulties of terraforming (making the planet hospitable by, for example, warming it up) and dealing with the harsh radiation were quoted as severe obstacles.

Undeterred, Musk took a first step towards his aim in February this year with the launch of a Tesla roadster car into an orbit travelling beyond Mars on the first Falcon Heavy rocket. This dramatically illustrated the increasing launch capability for future missions made available by partnerships between commercial and government agencies.

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