Scientists have discovered that scorpions design their burrows to include both hot and cold spots. A long platform provides a sunny place to warm up before they hunt, whilst a humid chamber acts as a cool refuge during the heat of the day. — Science Daily

The city of Jericho sits in the hot, flat Jordan Valley down the hill from Jerusalem. Jericho has bragging rights as one of the oldest towns on Earth. But one of its newest homes looks like it might have arrived from outer space.

Ahmad Daoud hired a firm of young Palestinian architects to build this house. Like Jericho's original homes, it is built of dirt. This one has a contemporary twist, though: It's constructed with earth compacted in bags that are then stacked and plastered over. — npr.org

Aiming to avoid a humanitarian crisis, Kiribati recently purchased land in Fiji — about 1,200 miles away — where its residents would be relocated in the event that sea-level rise drowns the Pacific island nation and displaces its population of just over 100,000 people [...]

Contributing very little to the greenhouse gases that most scientists agree fuel climate change, Kiribati is among the least responsible for the present climate crisis. — Al Jazeera

"[...] In this project, we're using a living organism as a factory. So the living organism of mycellium, or hyphae, which is basically a mushroom root, basically makes our bricks for us. It grows our bricks in about five days with no energy required, almost no carbon emissions, and it's using basically waste— agricultural byproducts, chopped up cornstalks. This mushroom root fuses together this biomass and makes solid bricks which we can kind of tune to be different properties." — The Creators Project

U.S. disaster rebuilding has traditionally focused on merely replacing what has been lost. But a little-noticed federal design competition, Rebuild by Design, has done something different: engage communities to develop a more porous relationship between land and water that recognizes the dynamism of rising seas and more violent storms... — Al Jazeera

A team of researchers from Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia are working on another solution: A swarm of tiny robots that could cover the construction site of the future, quickly and cheaply building greener buildings of any size. [...]

"The robots can work simultaneously while performing different tasks, and having a fixed size they can create objects of virtually any scale, as far as material properties permit” — fastcoexist.com

"...just as planning for response to an industrial accident doesn’t make an industrial accident more likely, so too planning for relocations should not make them more likely... It is .... likely that the slow-onset effects of climate change will lead many to voluntarily migrate in anticipation that conditions will worsen. Those who are left behind – and who will need government assistance to relocate – thus may be particularly vulnerable." — Brookings Institute

You can’t build your way out of congestion. It’s the roads themselves that cause traffic. The concept is called induced demand, which is economist-speak for when increasing the supply of something (like roads) makes people want that thing even more. [...]

What [economists] Turner and Duranton (and many others who’d like to see more rational transportation policy) actually advocate is known as congestion pricing. This means raising the price of driving on a road when demand is high. — wired.com

The Wall Street Journal calls this "Fighting Urban Blight With Art". Liz Thomas, the curator of the project, calls it "an experience that asks people to think about this space that they hurtle through every day".

The project is not actually fighting blight, of course - only the ability of Amtrak customers to see it. — Al Jazeera

Some people might mentally retch that the United Nations, believing the world's population could hit 9 billion by 2050, thinks we should prepare to eat bugs.

Not the folks at Sweden's Belatchew Arkitekter, though: They want to fast-track the insect-munching. Thus they've whipped up plans to build "vermin farms" upon Stockholm's major intersections, so that by 2018 everybody in the city will be guaranteed plentiful rations of six-legged foodstuffs. — citylab.com

In land-scarce Singapore greenery too is going sky-ward, with a 24-storey condominium earning a Guinness record for boasting the world’s largest vertical garden.

Tree House condominium, completed in 2013 by property firm City Developments Limited, has covered its façade in nearly 2,300 square meters of greenery. [...]

The condo uses the plants as natural insulation to help filter pollution, absorb heat and reduce the amount of energy needed to cool individual units. — blogs.wsj.com