This week we can't get the old school Billy Preston song Will It Go Round in Circles out of our heads. From hydroponic wheel gardens to advanced helicopter rotors to closed loop micro algae farms, everything seems to be spinning.
1. Hi Lights!
A new exhibition devoted to light just opened up at the Technische Sammlungen Museum in Dresden, Germany. "Hi Lights! News From the Light" is devoted to the phenomenon of light and its importance for science. Here, an interactive display highlights the technology and beauty of fibre optics.
2. Hydroponic Wheel
The Garden Wheel from DesignLibero is a rotary hydroponic garden inspired by one developed by NASA to grow food for astronauts on long missions. This microgarden lets users grow herbs and microgreens in a small space.
3. Humidity Drives Wheel
This week, bioengineers from Columbia University demonstrated a way to use humidity to power devices. It relies on spores that expand and contract depending on how much water vapour is in the air. That expansion and contraction is captured and used like an artificial muscle to power a range of devices. See the video here.
4. Airbus H160 Helicopter
Airbus showed off its advanced H160 helicopter this week at the 51st International Paris Air Show. The lightweight full-composite airframe makes the medium-lift model aircraft lighter, quieter and more efficient than other similar copters.
5. Machine Dreams
Google showed off the capabilities of its advanced image detection software, which is built around several stacks of synthetic neurons - think: artificial brain. To train the brain, researchers fed images into the first stack, which then communicated with the next stack and so on and so forth between 10 and 30 stacks. The images here represent the end results and they are pretty trippy.
6. Pepper Robot
At a press conference in Tokyo this week, Masayoshi Son, chairman & CEO of Japanese internet and telecommunications giant SoftBank Corp., presented Pepper the robot, which Son claims can feel and understand people's emotions and also express them as well.
7. Micro-algae
A pilot miro-algae plant in Germany is up and running. Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute are experimenting with growing concentrations of micro-algae in a closed-loop system. The algae is versatile and can be grown to make everything from biofuel to food.
8. Nano Accordion
This tiny accordion doesn't play music, but it does conduct electricity. Researchers at North Carolina State University developed a method for creating a transparent, flexible, and stretchable energy generator that could eventually be used to power wearable electronics.
9. Air Scrubber
At the Milan Expo 2015, the Palazzo Italia building demonstrated that buildings can be both beautiful and environmentally friendly. This net-zero building is extremely energy efficient and its surface uses sunlight to deactivate and neutralize pollutants in the air.
10. Glamping
The inflatable prefabricated structure, Casa Bubble, puts a little glamour into camping. The UV-reflecting dome is made from recyclable materials and rests lightly on a wooden base. Fresh air is pumped inside, giving "glampers" a 360-degree view of nature from inside a dry, bug-free environment.
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