By the end of this year, some 20 million households in the U.S. will have some form of smart-home device, double the number in 2012 [...]

But some homeowners find themselves frustrated by the proliferation of smart-home technology. They complain of complex systems for once-simple tasks like turning on the light, “learning algorithms” that get their preferences wrong and systems that simply go on the fritz too often. — wsj.com

Kakutani is the main farmer behind "Tokyo Salad," the Metro’s new farming enterprise, farming that takes place underneath the Tozai Line. [...]

Tokyo Metro started hydroponic farming this past January. They’re currently selling the lettuce varieties to a local Italian restaurant and The Sheraton Grande Tokyo Bay Hotel. Over the next couple years, they’re hoping to expand. Maybe they’ll start selling to grocery stores, and maybe Kakutani says, "we’ll make salads or smoothies.” — pri.org

The recent debate between Uber and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio over whether the ride-for-hire company was exacerbating Manhattan congestion was fueled by incomplete, misleading data. There was no way of knowing exactly where Uber cars and taxis pick up passengers, and so the city agreed to a study of Uber’s effects last month as part of its detente with the company.

Now, thanks in part to a Freedom of Information Law request, we have data. A lot of data... — FiveThirtyEight

[On August 10], the Los Angeles Shade Ball Cover Project rolled to a halt, rounding off years of work. With a shout of "shade balls away!" Los Angeles city officials overturned a row of sacks and sent 20,000 of the jet black objects cascading down into the Los Angeles Reservoir. [...]

Together, the ball shroud prevents damage from sunlight, dust, and errant birds, and keeps 300 million gallons of surface water from evaporating each year. — atlasobscura.com

Like all supertall skyscrapers, Tapei 101 has a mechanism inside to help stabilize itself in high winds. [...]

At 6:59 am, in the winds of Typhoon Soudelor, the damper moved by a full meter from its center position, farther than it has ever moved in the building's decade history. [...]

Soudelor brought sustained winds of 100 mph, with at least one confirmed gust of 145 mph . — popularmechanics.com

Museum displays are typically meant to be seen and not touched, but a recent wave of exhibitions is upending those rules. Take DELQA, an interactive music and light installation opening in the New Museum's NEW INC space on August 6. Showcasing the music of Matthew Dear combined with Microsoft's Kinect technology, the project allows participants to touch, push and poke suspended mesh walls to manipulate a musical composition, creating their own unique experience of the space. — core77

[Apple Inc.] reached an agreement to rent about 76,000 square feet of office space in the South of Market neighborhood’s 235 Second St. [...]

the area has some of the highest monthly asking rents in the city at about $66 a square foot. [...]

Apple and Facebook have been notable holdouts as Silicon Valley giants like Google and Linkedin gradually expanded their footprints in San Francisco. — bizjournals.com

Inspired by the human body, Jonkers, who works at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, created self-healing concrete. He embeds the concrete with capsules of limestone-producing bacteria, either Bacillus pseudofirmus or Sporosarcina pasteurii, along with calcium lactate. When the concrete cracks, air and moisture trigger the bacteria to begin munching on the calcium lactate. They convert the calcium lactate to calcite, an ingredient in limestone, thus sealing off the cracks.  — smithsonianmag.com

Simply look up into the sky at a single cloud, on average that white pouf holds 8 million gallons of water — enough to sustain 100,000 people for a day. Yet the water we harvest has become so scarce, its cost is greater than the devices invented to catch and deliver it. [...]

How might we imagine new ways to collect water? How do we get it off my socks and into my coffee cup?

The Digital Junkyard is an experiment in virtual salvage. It is a repository of donated digital information that is used to generate real physical and spatial objects...This project is an embodiment of the growing collective intelligence that technology affords us; and an experiment in ideas about digital ecology. It also honours the time and energy that designers put into testing and making mistakes. — digital junkyard

Santa Barbara City Council members on Tuesday unanimously approved spending $55 million to reactivate a mothballed desalination plant that could provide the city with nearly a third of its drinking water. [...]

“Desalination has been a last resort,” Mayor Helene Schneider told The Times Tuesday night after the vote. “The way the drought has continued these last four years, we are really getting at that last resort.”