This group is making history.
But not to space.
In the second video of our Design for Life collaboration with Dassault Systèmes, Exploration Architecture founder Michael Pawlyn explains how computational design tools allow architects to mimic the natural world.
Pawlyn is the second designer to feature in the Design for Life collaboration between Dezeen and Dassault Systèmes, which highlights designers who are using technology and research to build a better world.
“Biomimicry is innovation inspired by nature,” explained Pawlyn in the video, which was filmed by Dezeen at the founder of biomimicry-focussed practice Exploration Architecture’s home studio in London.
When NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover starts its quest for Martian rocks it will have quite the to-do list:
🕵️ Locate
⛏ Drill
🧰 Collect
📦 Stash
The robotic caching system that’ll get the job done is 𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘥 𝘢𝘴 𝘢 𝘳𝘰𝘤𝘬 thanks to NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer Eric Aguilar: mars.nasa.gov/mars2020
The human eye does not work like a camera, contrary to common belief. Consider the following key factors:
1) Both the cornea and the lens COMBINE to give the focusing effect. Thus it is TWO lenses, not one that allow human vision. In fact the cornea is responsible for two-thirds or more of the focusing effect. The lens compounds that focusing, projecting it from past the pupil onto the curved retina at the back of the eye.
2) The eye corrects for CHROMATIC ABERATION by having a central pit, the FOVEA, where the blue cells are concentrated along the outer rim and the red cells concentrated in the center. Blue light focusses slightly closer to an objective lens and red light slightly further. Thus the red cells are concentrated further back, at the base of the pit, so that the human eye has a natural color correction without the need for complex color corrected lenses.
3) The retina is a curved “screen” at the back of the eye, allowing human vision to encompass an entire hemisphere of 180 degrees in the forwards direction. The retina is mostly rod cells except for at the central fovea, for seeing light but not color and detail, which is why it is easier to see faint objects through a telescope by using what astronomers call “averted vision,” not looking straight at it.
There are thus several factors in trying to use metamaterial lenses to create retinal projection, including:
1) Since the cornea is curved, a tailored curved contact metalens, instead of a flat metalens is ideal.
Windows are great for letting in light, but in summer months that comes with an unwanted side order of heat, causing many people to run the air conditioning non-stop. Now, researchers have developed windows that can change color automatically when heated by sunlight, to keep buildings cool – and to top it off, they’re solar panels as well.
Color-changing glass has been around for a long time, most commonly as transition lenses for eyeglasses that tint automatically under bright light. More recent developments have made it electronic and switchable on demand, and scaled it up to window size. At the same time, transparent (or semi-transparent) solar cells are getting more efficient, to the point where they can be fitted into windows.
In the new study, researchers at the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has combined the two technologies into one window. The “thermochromic photovoltaic” tech, as they call it, can switch colors when heated up by sunlight to block glare and reduce the need for cooling, and when it does it also starts harvesting energy from that light.
Rooftop solar, Covid and more large scale renewables push Australia’s main grid to record low levels of demand and emissions intensity, and the lowest prices in years.
The combined impact of growing rooftop solar and the Covid-19 pandemic – along with the continued influx of large scale wind and solar – has create a suite of new records in Australia’s electricity grids in the September quarter, sending demand, emissions and prices to new lows.
The latest Quarterly Energy Dynamics for the September quarter, compiled by the Australian Energy Market Operator, also noted record highs for wind and solar output, which along with falling gas prices and cut-price bidding by coal generators trying to stay competitive led to the lowest wholesale prices in more than five years, and in some cases, record low prices.
Importantly, the emissions intensity of Australia’s main grid also fell to a record low of 0.7 tonnes of Co2 equivalent – thanks to the big reduction in black coal output and the increase in renewables, and despite a rise in the dirtiest fuel source, brown coal.
So now, there are AI doctors.
Machine learning is taking medical diagnosis by storm. From eye disease, breast and other cancers, to more amorphous neurological disorders, AI is routinely matching physician performance, if not beating them outright.
Yet how much can we take those results at face value? When it comes to life and death decisions, when can we put our full trust in enigmatic algorithms—“black boxes” that even their creators cannot fully explain or understand? The problem gets more complex as medical AI crosses multiple disciplines and developers, including both academic and industry powerhouses such as Google, Amazon, or Apple, with disparate incentives.
This week, the two sides battled it out in a heated duel in one of the most prestigious science journals, Nature. On one side are prominent AI researchers at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University of Toronto, Stanford University, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, MIT, and others. On the other side is the titan Google Health.
Chinese spies are different from those of most other wealthy and developed countries where the majority of spies are highly trained, with some serving under diplomatic cover and others operating under what the US Intelligence Community calls Non Official Cover (NOC).
Chinese intelligence operations are the first in modern times to use, as a foundation, the whole of society. Because of this, China’s espionage tactics are sometimes artless, operating with little in the way of standard spy-fare, (encrypted communication, dead drops, etc.) instead relying on an overwhelming volume of espionage operations conducted by all manner of citizen and a sort of impunity inherent in the lack of substantive penalty for when a Chinese agent is discovered, a study I recently published analyzing 595 cases of intelligence collection efforts sanctioned and abetted by the Chinese Communist Party.
“The mobile gravity suit is a small, untethered, and flexible intravehicular activity (IVA) suit,” the researchers wrote in their paper published in the Frontiers in Physiology journal.
The idea is to give astronauts maximum flexibility while on board a spacecraft, without reducing crew time. “With the gravity suit, astronauts will be able to float freely around the space station while adhering to their every day tasks,” the paper reads.
“The negative pressure is generated by its own portable vacuum system, ensuring full mobility, and user-control,” the paper reads.