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two-dimensional materials will be the linchpin of the internet of everything. They will be “painted” on bridges and form the sensors to watch for strain and cracks. They will cover windows with transparent layers that become visible only when information is displayed. And if his team’s radio wave-absorber succeeds, it will power those ever-present electronics. Increasingly, the future looks flat. — The New York Times
Amos Zeeberg of The New York Times takes a look at the wide world of super-thin materials, a growing class of substances that have the potential to reshape humanity's technological capabilities. The materials include graphene, an incredibly strong and conductive "2-D form of carbon"... View full entry
Little by little, new biometric technologies are making inroads into the domestic sphere. The Wall Street Journal reports that digital fingerprint lock and facial-recognition systems have become a fact of life for some of the wealthiest homeowners and now come standard for many high-end... View full entry
Today you can have a fully connected home complete with sensors to monitor temperature, humidity, air quality, energy usage, and more, and check in on almost any appliance from anywhere in the world with just a smartphone. But even with all of the various connected appliances, virtual assistants, and copious sensors that can be installed in a modern smart home, the “smart” side of things is still rather lacking. — The Verge
The Verge senior editor Dan Seifert asks: Wouldn't it be cool if my home could figure everything out on its own? View full entry
Bouygues Construction subsidiary Bouygues Bâtiment Ile-de-France has secured a contract worth €146m from Emerige to renovate 17 Boulevard Morland in the 4th arrondissement of Paris.
‘Morland Mixité Capitale’ is one of the first projects launched under the ‘Reinventing Paris’ programme.
Designed by David Chipperfield Architects and CALQ Architecture, the 44,000m² floor space complex will consist of a 161-room hotel, a youth hostel, shops, a nursery, a cultural amenity and 199 homes.
— World Construction Network
After being diagnosed with ALS, a disease of the nervous system that gradually takes away motor control, breathing, and speech, 38-year-old landscape architect Steve Saling decided to invent a home that he could control with eye movements. As CNN.com explains:With a grant of $500,000 from Berman... View full entry
Thanks to Big Data, it is now next to impossible to reside anonymously in a modern city.
Why?
Because data anonymization itself is almost impossible without using advanced cryptography. Our every transaction leaves a digital marker that can be mined by anyone with the right tools or enough determination.
— Cities of the Future
In the arid plains of the southern New Mexico desert, between the site of the first atomic bomb test and the U.S.-Mexico border, a new city is rising from the sand.
Planned for a population of 35,000, the city will showcase a modern business district downtown, and neat rows of terraced housing in the suburbs. It will be supplied with pristine streets, parks, malls and a church.
But no one will ever call it home.
— CNN
Planned by the telecommunications and tech firm Pegasus Global Holdings, the CITE (Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation) is a $1 billion plan to build a model city to test out and develop new technologies.With specialized zones for agriculture, energy, and water treatment, the city would... View full entry
Architecture has entered into a new engagement with digital culture and capital—which amounts to the most radical change within the discipline since the confluence of modernism and industrial production in the early twentieth century. Yet this shift has gone largely unnoticed, because it has not taken the form of a visible upheaval or wholesale transformation. To the contrary: It is a stealthy infiltration of architecture via its constituent elements. — Art Forum
In this brief but sweeping consideration of the place of architecture under today's "digital regime," Koolhaas displays (again) his unique insightfulness.Here are some highlights:"For thousands of years, the elements of architecture were deaf and mute—they could be trusted. Now, many of them are... View full entry
The push is on to incorporate brain science into design and architecture...
Hopefully, the days of windowless classrooms to prevent vandalism and distraction are over.
— Al Jazeera
Science once agains confirms what we already know, and architects turn it into a marketing tool. View full entry
A hacker with a smartphone can unlock your front door [...] Criminals and intelligence agencies grab data from your home thermostat to plan robberies or track your movements. According to computer-security researchers, this is the troubling future of the Internet of Things, the term for an all-connected world where appliances like thermostats, health-tracking wristbands, smart cars and medical devices communicate with people and each other through the Internet. — Al Jazeera
Microsoft researchers have enabled elevators in a company building to detect the likelihood that a person walking by will want to board it. The camera in a Microsoft Kinect — positioned in the ceiling — tracked for months the behaviors of people who got on the elevators vs. those who bypassed the elevators on their way to a nearby cafeteria. That data fed an artificial intelligence system, which taught itself to identify the behaviors indicating who wanted to board an elevator and who didn’t. — washingtonpost.com
