News: the world’s first building to be powered entirely by algae is being piloted in Hamburg, Germany, by engineering firm Arup.
The “bio-adaptive facade”, which Arup says is the first of its kind, uses live microalgae growing in glass louvres to generate renewable energy and provide shade at the same time.
Installed in the BIQ building as part of the International Building Exhibition, the algae are continuously supplied with liquid nutrients and carbon dioxide via a water circuit running through the facade.
Teams of mobile robots could be highly effective in helping humans to complete straining manual tasks, such as manufacturing processes or the transportation of heavy objects. In recent years, some of these robots have already been tested and introduced in real-world settings, attaining very promising results.
Researchers at Northwestern University’s Center for Robotics and Biosystems have recently developed new collaborative mobile robots, dubbed Omnid Mocobots. These robots, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, are designed to cooperate with each other and with humans to safely pick up, handle, and transport delicate and flexible payloads.
“The Center for Robotics and Biosystems has a long history building robots that collaborate physically with humans,” Matthew Elwin, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “In fact, the term ‘cobots’ was coined here. The inspiration for the current work was manufacturing, warehouse, and construction tasks involving manipulating large, articulated, or flexible objects, where it is helpful to have several robots supporting the object.”
The U.S. Space Command’s proposed move to Huntsville passed a big test July 13 when the Pentagon released a draft environmental assessment finding “no significant impacts on the human or natural environment” if the headquarters is built on the Redstone Arsenal site.
Although there remain four steps ahead of the move, Republican U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama said the environmental assessment should be the last major hurdle for the plan to move the command from startup headquarters in Colorado to a permanent site. The move would bring 1,800 headquarters staff and their families to north Alabama.
“The Redstone Arsenal site is the (Department of the Air Force’s) Preferred Alternative for implementation of the Proposed Action,” the environmental assessment said. The proposed action is a permanent headquarters.
International scientists disocvered a tertiary, or triple, star system with a third star orbiting a binary of two stars. The stars are massive in size.
