Installation view of LaunchPad, the micro-unit on display at the Museum of the City of New York, designed by Pierluigi Colombo and Amie Gross Architects. Photo: John Halpern/courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York

If you’ve ever walked into a New York apartment and thought to yourself, Well, there is just TOO much space in here! get over to the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) and experience your shortest pace-through ever in the dollhouse/storage locker/”apartment” of the future. With its pert fuchsia couch and sliding TV, the 325-square-foot unit from Pierluigi Colombo and Amie Gross Architects anchors the exhibition “Making Room: New Models for Housing New Yorkers,” which opens tomorrow and will be on view through September 15.

Earlier today, Mayor Bloomberg visited the museum to announce the winner of the city’s adAPT NYC competition, which asked architects and developers to propose designs for New York’s first micro-unit apartment building. Noting the city’s changing demographics—just about half of the population is single, and one-third of households are occupied by adults living alone—Bloomberg called upon New York’s unmarrieds to put themselves in storage until they pair up. Actually, the mayor put it much more mildly: “The growth rate for one- and two-person households greatly exceeds that of households with three or more people, and addressing that housing challenge requires us to think creatively and beyond our current regulations.” If only he still permitted 32-ounce soda cups—we could just live in those! See more from the show, plus the winning adAPT NYC design, after the jump.

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In what looks like the summer science camps of your youth, researchers at Cambridge University have outfitted their laboratory with two units of LEGO Mindstorms robots, using the micro-structures to automate procedural work. University lecturer Michelle Oyen and PhD student Daniel Strange are exploring ways to create artificial bones, which could have far-reaching applications from use as bone grafts and implants to large-scale building materials. Collecting samples of the bone-like substance, however, can be a tedious task, with the test material needing to be repeatedly dipped in several solutions and then washed in water as layers of faux bone gradually accumulate.

Strange was seeking an effective yet low-cost, off-the-shelf unit to automate the drudge work when he came across the Mindstorms line. Using a couple of the kits, he constructed two cranes which he positioned over a sink filled with petri dishes and programmed them to raise and lower the samples into each of the solutions. The robot arms toil away throughout the day and even overnight, freeing up the researchers to focus their energies elsewhere in the lab. LEGO, making science, and Friday afternoon blog posts, possible since 1947.

[via The Verge]

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