The British artist, inventor, and general wonderment-maker Luke Jerram unveiled a new kinetic sculpture today at the U.K. research and lab hub Bristol and Bath Science Park. Jerram has been serenading city dwellers the world over through his public art projects, from the traveling Play Me, I’m Yours pianos planted in public squares to the floating Sky Orchestra, which performs from hot-air balloons tricked out with speakers.

The artist’s new sculpture is more meditative than his public-art pieces, but it’s still musical. Measuring just over 16 feet tall, the work—the latest entry in Jerram’s chandelier series—consists of hundreds of glass bulbs that sparkle and flicker, speeding up and slowing down according to the presence of sunlight. So how does it work? Read more.

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Swiss studio Bernhard Burkard‘s clever design for a deck chair with no back legs might at first seem precarious, but the physics behind it is actually quite sturdy. The Curt deck chair consists of a fabric seat slung between a frame made of local ash and beech woods. The legs are also outfitted with anti-slip feet so that the chair can lean upon adjacent walls like a ladder. The frame is constructed by people with mental or physical disabilities at the Altra workshop in Schaffhausen, Switzerland.

With it’s practical simplicity, the chair is designed to harmonize with its environment. To find the most secure position, the frame should be leaned against walls or rails at a flat angle. The anti-slip legs allow for dependable utility on varying surfaces. Both comfortable and functional, the Curt deck chair provides an inventive seating solution that can be carried and deployed wherever desired.

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The pending “burst” of the Chinese real estate bubble has only begun to slow the seemingly perpetual production and subsequent desertification of new housing properties and projects. Some sixty million apartments are estimated to lay empty within Chinese borders, forming entire “ghost cities” of sprawling geometric configurations, untouched infrastructure, and generic signature buildings stranded in China’s hinterlands. The projects were largely government endeavors, public works meant to boost output, with the matter of their actual use and habitation being almost secondary. So while the ghost cities were not designed and built for immediate vacancy and obsolescence, the possibility (eventuality?) of these vacant high-rise blocs being filled someday seems unlikely and somehow beside the point.

Scientists in New Mexico have drawn up plans for a different kind of ghost town, one that will never be inhabited, but has, instead, been purposefully designed to be empty of human occupants. The billion-dollar city, to be built in Lea County, will function as a vast testing site for new technologies and their integration within a (semi)urban environment. Planners have christened the city the Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation, which sounds a lot like the Stepford-like towns constructed after the midcentury to test nuclear blasts. Yet, the project is on a wholly different scale than these precedents, with an area of nearly 15 square miles, all gridded with city streets, housing, a church (?), and even a couple of towers. Self-driving cars will patrol the avenues, while parks will be wired with “next-generation” wireless networks. Construction is set to begin on June 30. Ghosts, plan accordingly.

[via DVice]

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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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Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral; All images: Vienna University of Technology

Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna) have created the first complex works of nanoarchitecture. Using their own custom made high-precision 3-D printer, the team recreated models of Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral and London’s Tower Bridge at the scale of a dust mite. The feat was made possible through two-photon lithography, whereby a laser is guided by a chain of controllable mirrors through a liquid resin to form a solid polymer line only several hundred nanometers wide. The resin solidifies only when the initiator molecules within in have absorbed two photons of the spent laser beam at once, or when the polymer molecules fall directly under the laser’s central focal point.

The experiment’s achievement, however, lay in the rapid rate at which the printer laid down material lines. Whereas “the printing speed [of similar printers] used to be measured in millimeters per second,” says Professor Jürgen Stampfl of TU Vienna, ”our device can do five meters in one second.” The machine can produce 100 layers, each comprised of 200 lines, in only four minutes (see video below)–a high wire act of incredible precision involving the perfect synchronization of the constantly moving mirrors. University scientists hope to develop and introduce bio-compatible resins into the process for medical applications, wherein infinitesimal infrastructures could be printed to buttress cells leading to the creation of biological tissues.

London’s Tower Bridge

[via Geek.com]

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The metaphorical link between the home and the laboratory has grown quite thin, eroded by perpetual use, perhaps even abuse. “Experimental” architects, such as Peter Eisenman circa 1975, designed private homes that through their formal complexity and spatial syntax recast domesticity as erratic, destabilizing zones of inquiry and confrontation, much to the dismay of his clients. Yet, what of a house actually constructed within the hermetic confines of a laboratory? A team of architects have done exactly that, building a three-story terrace house inside a sealed climactic chamber at Salford University in Manchester which will provide researchers there with a large-scale testing ground for energy-efficient technologies.

As Green Futures writes, the structure, nicknamed the Energy House, is a faithful replica of a pre-1920s “two-up, two-down” complete with original brickwork and finishes comprised of reclaimed materials. It is is fully furnished and, with functioning plumbing and electricity, could accommodate a couple or small family. Verisimilitude of the details and niceties of English domestic life was essential to the project; the terrace home model represents nearly 21% of the UK’s house, with more than 2 million houses standing at present and each with average rates of energy emissions and consumption levels that can be exactly reproduced in the research center.

Inside the chamber, entire seasonal cycles can be recreated to produce temperatures ranging from -2ºC to +30ºC. Torrential downpours fall from the ceiling corners, while light winds waft throughout the room. Each of the house’s rooms is wired with sensors which monitors atmospheric changes in temperature, humidity and pressure, while cameras and other apparatuses measure rises in heat loss and water and gas consumption. The researchers behind the £1 million project ($1,567,500) hope to generate the “hard data” necessary to develop the technology that will drive the UK towards achieving its carbon emission reduction goals.

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Yesterday we learned that the Japanese have a proverbial ace up their sleeve in the planet-wide race for the tallest megastructure: plans for a 22,370-mile high space elevator made of a material 20 times stronger than steel, to be complete by 2050. What, pray tell, might this look like? These far-out renderings from Obayashi Corp. can give you an idea. Is that a capsule hotel up there?

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Remember when you discovered that your toothpaste is partially made of seaweed? Well, not too long from now, there’s a chance your iPad could be made of crab shells. According to Ars Technica, biologists in Kyoto University in Japan have turned the shell of a (dead) crab completely transparent, treating the natural object in a brew of acids and chemicals to strip the body of minerals, proteins, lipids, fats, and pigments. After immersing the treated specimen in an acrylic resin monomer, what remains is a ghostly shell form made entirely out of chitin, a translucent long-chain polymer found in abundance in the exoskeletons of crustaceans, as well as in insects, mollusks, and even fungi (but don’t take the hermit crabs’ homes!).

Not only might these intricate, transparent animal shells inspire new sculptural works from artists like Damien Hirst, but the research also introduces exciting new prospects for technology. The material is incredibly heat-resistant, able to withstand high temperatures without expanding or losing stability, and it also boasts high light transmittance. Thus, if crab shells are crushed into powder and reshaped into a composite sheet, or any form for that matter, they can be stripped of their organic substances, made transparent, and function as clear screens and solar cells. The transparent substrate holds promise for next-generation electronics such as flexible, bending displays. Who knows, maybe the iPhone 6 will be in the shape of a clam.

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Preliminary plans have been released for a structure that will soar taller than the Burj Khalifa and lay claim to being the second-largest structure ever built in the history of mankind, right on the heels of the Great Wall of China. According to PopSci, European scientists are planning to construct a massive neutrino detector called the KM3NeT (choose your own pronunciation) upon the seafloor 3,200 feet beneath the surface of the Mediterranean. Ironically, if built, this mammoth structure will likely never be inhabited or even directly seen, given its submerged location. And to add to the irony, the preliminary purpose of this enormous detector is to sense out tiny subatomic particles called neutrinos. Continue.

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Scientists at University of Notre Dame have found that memory is affected by space, by asking a group of students to do memory tasks while walking through a doorway. They found that subjects were statistically more likely to forget what they were thinking about, once they moved over a door’s threshold - a finding that backs up the old “what did I come in here for?” trope.

It’s a process called “compartmentalizing,” in which your brain categorizes thoughts and tasks according to the spaces they’re processed in. These so-called “event boundaries” link ideas to spaces – a fascinating insight, particularly for architects, who are fond of expounding on “the threshold” without particularly empirical evidence.

The study was published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Via.

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