Swiss engineers have built little robots that fly and communicate with one another and build stuff without human intervention.
Hang on. What?
The installation, called “Flight Assembled Architecture”, was conceived and built by teams led by my colleagues Fabio Gramazio & Matthias Kohler as well as Raffaello D’Andrea at the ETH Zurich. It illustrates a radically new way of thinking about materializing architecture: Use a multitude of mobile flying agents working in parallel and acting together as a scalable production means. As you can see in the video, the quadrocopters are programmed to interact, lift, transport and assemble small modules in order to erect a building.
The tower is actually a 1:100 model of a “vertical village” with a height of 600 meters and housing 30’000 inhabitants. [via]
And when those quadrocopters become self-aware, we’re screwed.
I’m a sucker for all things science and, particularly, all things Space. And something that I can watch over and over is space shuttle launches.
Here is a great video of exactly that. However, the point is to capture the deafening popcorn sound (with some spectacular visuals thrown in) of Discovery as it finds its way to the ISS.
Turn up your speakers. Especially the bass.
Oh, and see if you can spot the moment where the shuttle breaks the sound barrier.
Around 90% of South Africa’s electricity comes from coal power stations which are directly related to large amounts of deaths and illnesses and pollution. And we’re building more, baby.
Yet, ironically, the loudest protests are heard emanating from the anti-nuclear lobby who, evidently, don’t seem to mind the world’s deadliest fossil fuel. Which is not nuclear.
Have a look at the following infographic which compares levels of pollution and illnesses from various energy sources.
According to a Lancet Study in 2007, compared with nuclear power, coal is responsible for five times as many worker deaths from accidents, 470 times as many deaths due to air pollution among members of the public, and more than 1,000 times as many cases of serious illness, according to a study of the health effects of electricity generation in Europe. [via]
But let’s not allow the facts get in the way of alarmism.
Conventionally, “continents are understood to be large, continuous, discrete masses of land, ideally separated by expanses of water.” Many of the seven most commonly recognized continents identified by convention are not discrete landmasses separated by water. The criterion “large” leads to arbitrary classification: Greenland, with a surface area of 2,166,086 square kilometres (836,330 sq mi) is considered the world’s largest island, while Australia, at 7,617,930 square kilometres (2,941,300 sq mi) is deemed to be a continent. Likewise, the ideal criterion that each be a continuous landmass is often disregarded by the inclusion of the continental shelf and oceanic islands, and contradicted by classifying North and South America as one continent; and/or Asia, Europe and Africa as one continent, with no natural separation by water. This anomaly reaches its extreme if the continuous land mass of Europe and Asia is considered to constitute two continents. [Wikipedia]
