The Living Building Standard--which requires buildings to create all their own energy and recycle all their own water--is so hard to meet that only three buildings are "living buildings." Two, in the Pacific Northwest, are vying for the title of world's most sustainable.
When city services can autonomously go online and digest information from the cloud, they can reach a level of performance never before seen. First up, water systems that automatically know when it will rain and react accordingly.
The sun is the greatest source of energy on the planet. Instead of spending money trying to fight its power in the summer (and supplement it in the winter), revolving homes maximize solar heat and electricity.
Bones have amazing electrical conductivity properties and, as one artist recently found out, can vibrate at the right frequencies to make a lovely macabre speaker set.
Looking to nature for innovation is not a new concept--Leonardo Da Vinci studied birds and bats to design his flying machines. However, with today’s advancements in fields such as nanotechnology, we can now study nature on an incredibly small scale, and it offers a rich source of inspiration.
Imagine a bill covered with microscopic holes that make it glow slightly in the light. It's tech borrowed from a butterfly, and it may soon be foiling counterfeiters around the world.
By imitating natural expressions and even human cognition, David Hanson's robots--made using a unique rubber substance that mimics human facial tissue--are making it easier to interact with robots by giving them a human face.
