I recently came across an article in the NY TImes Magazine .  The article describes the architectural organization of the airport and raises some key ideas pertaining to the efficiency’s of an airport.  What is interesting is how one day, we may be able to fly without much delay……maybe, but I will still not fly Delta.

For most of the 20th century, airports were designed to connect two modes of transport: the automobile and the aircraft. But as global air travel expanded, that seemingly simple function resulted in ever-larger and more complex airports. Most hub airports are now plagued by air-traffic congestion, inconvenient parking, crowded check-in halls and undignified security procedures.

The Next Generation Airport is a superhub constructed offshore on a man-made island. All check-in and ticketing is carried out online. Smart-bag tags embedded with radio-frequency identification chips allow luggage to be conveyed directly from bag drops to the plane with no manual handling, lowering the risk of lost baggage. At city rail stations, passengers will go through a security portal before boarding an undersea high-speed train to the airport. The airport is designed like a wheel: at the center is the control tower, rising above a central hub encircled by airport and airline offices and topped by gardens; the outside rim houses the terminals, which are connected to the central hub by spokes — thin, glazed concourses with moving walkways. The trains from the city circle the outside rim, making stops at each terminal; a monorail links passengers to different terminals to meet connecting flights. Because the airport is on the water, runways with various orientations allow for takeoffs and landings to be adjusted according to flight paths and prevailing winds. And with no adjacent residential areas to be disturbed, the airport can comfortably operate 24 hours a day.
Sign in to Recommend Next Article in Magazine (17 of 21) » A version of this article appeared in print on June 14, 2009, on page MM35 of the New York edition.

Architects: Grimshaw Architects

What is D-Shape?

d_shape is a new robotic building system using new materials to create superior stone-like structures.

This new machinery enables full-size sandstone buildings to be made without human intervention, using a stereolithography 3-D printing process that requires only sand and our special inorganic binder to operate. d_shape is a new building technology which will revolutionize the way architectural design is planned, and building constructions are executed. By simply pressing the “enter” key on the keypad we intend to give the architect the possibility to make buildings directly, without intermediaries who can add interpretation and realization mistakes.

Today’s Construction technology lags behind the available Computer Design Technology. The new 3D CAD software allow architects to conceive and design constructions easily, but existing building methods do not allow the full potential of the new design software to be achieved.

Despite the availability of construction machinery such as cranes, pumps, concrete mixers, moulds and form works, the building industry is currently reliant on the manual interventions of professional builders who are the hands which operate the machinery.

Existing materials such as reinforced concrete and masonry is expensive and inflexible. To build a complex concave-convex surface, for example, would require the pre-fabrication of expensive formworks and cages, the mounting of complicate scaffolding and then the manual casting. Furthermore, existing techniques require skilled personnel to continually refer to plans/blue-prints. This is very expensive.

The Industry needs to resolve this problem and we believe that d_shape is the innovative solution. d_shape enable architects to directly make the buildings they design, using a robotic building machine that uses CAD-CAE-CAM Design Technology.

This technology allows a level of precision and freedom of design unheard of in the past. The human limitations of master builders and bricklayers will no longer hamper architects’ visions. d_shape competes with the traditional construction industry which uses cement, reinforced concrete, bricks and stones.

d_shape has been designed to make the Construction Industry more environmentally friendly as well as providing low-cost access to building for people in need around the world. The system uses environmentally friendly materials and very low levels of energy.

This picture shows how “Radiolaria” ap­peared just after breaking the self-built shell at the end of the two week building process and after one week finishing by hand. It is a two meter tall monolithic sandstone structure printed using ap­proximately 200 -10 mm thick layers of sandstone rejects, aggregated by a new revolutionary inorganic binder.

It is the first ever example of classic stereolithography being applied to the building industry and it is a huge innova­tion of both product and process.
This Gazebo was designed by London architect Andrea Morgante based on a small micro-organism called ‘Radiolaria’ and was printed (scaled 1:4 in respect of final dimension) with a 3D Printer devel­oped by the Italian Engineer Enrico Dini.

Technolgy

The d_shape building process is similar to the “printing” process because the system operates by straining a binder on a sand layer (more on materials in the next section). This is similar to what an ink-jet printer does on a sheet of paper. This principle allows the architect to design fantastically complex architectural structures.
product Overview

Seen from the outside, d_shape appears like a big aluminium structure inside of which the building will be constructed. CAD-CAM software drives the machinery during the building process. This structure holds the printer head, which of course is the real core of the new technology. Despite its large size, the structure is a very light and it can be easily transported, assembled and dismantled in a few hours by two workmen.

The process begins with the architect designing his project using CAD 3D Computer technology. The Computer design obtained is downloaded into a STL file and is imported into the Computer program that controls d_shape’s printer head. The process takes place in a non-stop work session, starting from the foundation level and ending on the top of the roof, including stairs, external and internal partition walls, concave and convex surfaces, bas-reliefs, columns, statues, wiring, cabling and piping cavities. During the printing of each section a ‘structural ink’ is deposited by the printer’s nozzles on the sand. The solidification process takes 24 hours to complete. The printing starts from the bottom of the construction and rises up in sections of 5-10mm. Upon contact the solidification process starts and a new layer is added.

Surplus sand that has not been embedded within the structure acts as a buttressing support while the solidification process takes place. This surplus sand then can be reused on future buildings.
The new material

The new material has been submitted to traction, compression and bending tests. The results have been extraordinary! The artificial sandstone created has excellent resistance properties.

Effectively, the new process returns any type of sand, dust or gravel back to its original Compact Stone state. The Stone is very similar to Marble.

The binder transforms any kind of sand into a marble-like material (i.e. a mineral with microcrystalline characteristics) and with a resistance and traction much superior to Portland Cement, so much so that there is no need to use iron to reinforce the structure. This artificial marble is indistinguishable from real marble and chemically it is one hundred percent environmentally friendly.
Advantages of d_shape technology Vs traditional methods
d_shape offers absolute advantages in terms of:

Quality: d_shape allows more advanced design and construction. The actual building will correspond to the CAD design to within planned tolerances of 5-10 millimeters. The type and complexity of the architectural styles (be it rationalist, neo-classical, organic, etc.) will not impact on building cost. In fact, as the system does not require moulds for concrete casting, any feature conceived by the designer can be easily printed.

Quantity/Time: The system is estimated to be four times faster than traditional building methods. Furthermore, the required operating time is known in advance allowing accurate planning for the machinery and for resources. The annual production capacity of the first (smaller) model of d_shape will be of 2500 m², which is equivalent to twelve two floor buildings.

Costs: despite the higher cost of the binder compared to Portland cement, the realization costs of d_shape structures are 30%-50% lower than manual methods.

Safety: no human intervention means substantially reduced risk of accidents. The building industry is affected by a higher incidence of injures and mortal accidents than many other industries. Severe and expensive safety measures must be constantly applied on the yard during building construction. d_shape would lower the costs in terms of both human lives and financially.

Uses

d_shape can print any feature that can be enveloped into a cube 6×6 meters side. The applications by Monolite are endless.

1. Public/Urban.
Bus stops; park benches/seats; kiosks; coloured marble effect pavements; fountains.

2. Private.
Gazebos; swimming pool furnishings (dummy rocks, fountains, small bridges,
chairs, pavements); artistic staircases; fountains; flower boxes; home stone furnishing: basins, kitchens, sofas, tables.

3. Playgrounds and kindergarten.
Fantasy buildings, tunnels, caves, mountains.

4. Religious.
Temples, bell towers, altars, statues, arches, columns.

5. Natural Parks / Zoo – Recreational.
Nearly zero environment impact architecture, bungalows, aquariums, caves.

6. Studios/Artistic.
Reproduction of buildings, fantasy/futurist shapes, caves for movies.
Any artistic feature: horses, heads, etc.

7. Archaeology.
Missing parts of columns, etc.

8. Large scale rapid prototyping.
Half scale or 1/4 scale models of buildings, copies of any existing building; cave spheres, ellipsoids, pyramids.

9. Civil engineering / Complex industrial plant parts.
Bridge portions, road portions, tube sections, pillars portions, stone floating, harbor sections, marina furnishing, variable section beams and columns, Water depuration, insulation plates

10. Stone machines.
Stone doors, stone bearings, articulated stone structures.

11. Cemeteries.

d_shape appeals to two different kind of costumers:
Building industry:

- Building contractors to make one to two floor buildings.
- Architectural Firms that need to make scaled models of buildings.
- All generic sandstone product manufacturers.
- Building equipment suppliers.
Media and Arts industry:

- Studios that make dummy rocks for aquariums, swimming pools and wellness centres.
- Fantasy structures for recreational/adventure/ parks and the sandstone sculptors.
- Museums and Foundations that need to replicate monuments and temples.

Contact

Dini Ltd

Registered Office:
101 Wardour Street London W1F 0UN
Registered in England and Wales No. 6030577

phone: +44(0) 207 4398222 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              +44(0) 207 4398222      end_of_the_skype_highlighting     +39 0789 6842828 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              +39 0789 6842828      end_of_the_skype_highlighting
info@dinitech.com
nigel.wood@dinitech.com

Enrico Dini, inventor
phone: +44(0) 789 9720264 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              +44(0) 789 9720264      end_of_the_skype_highlighting    +39 348 6004369 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              +39 348 6004369      end_of_the_skype_highlighting
enrico.dini@dinitech.com

Artists from Rodin to Warhol to Mark Kostabi have outsourced the construction of their work. Hilary Berseth goes them one better: He constructs basic frameworks of wire and wax, then lets teams of tiny yellow-and-black art fabricators finish the job. “I knew they were ordered and regimented,” the Pennsylvania artist says about his honeybees, which built the three otherworldly sculptures on view at Eleven Rivington. “I had an intuition that I’d be able to organize that, architecturally.”

Berseth’s armatures each go into a closed box in the spring, and then the respective colonies take over, filling out his templates with wax cells, then stuffing them with honey. “The last two seasons, I’ve been working with a beekeeper whose name is Jim Bobb,” he says, explaining where he turns for expertise. “He has a graduate degree in mathematics from Berkeley—he’s a minor beekeeping celebrity.”

The mysterious pinwheel shown here is, he says, the most refined result of his unpredictable process. But Berseth’s breakthrough came from an earlier hive, where the bees built him a remarkable spiral. “I was really happy with that one when I got it open. That was when I realized, Wow, you can sort of break the behavior”—that is, manipulate the bees’ instincts about proportion and form. “You can plan out a certain amount of what’s going to happen, and then that design will sort of ripple through, and then they’ll begin to draw out combs and riff off that design.” Does he suffer for his art? Yes. “I have been stung a couple of times. And I swell up like a son of a bitch.” Berseth’s joint show with Kevin Zucker, “Reverse Turing Tests,” is at Eleven Rivington through November 9.

via http://nymag.com

Photograph by Hannah Whitaker/New York Magazine

I have been researching and collecting information on airports recently and came across an interesting project by Foster + Partners.  The project is for the Spaceport America and is located in New Mexico.  It’s 110,000-plus square facility was designed using cost effective, energy-efficient green building practices.   In accordance with New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson’s executive order 2006-001 for state buildings, Spaceport America’s terminal hangar facility will be built to the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED rating system.

Extensive use of sustainable and clean energy technology throughout the design will ensure that the spaceport will set the standard for environmentally sound design for similar structures in the future. From earth-tubes that will pre-condition the air to reduce HVAC costs by 50-70% to solar thermal panels on the roof for hot water to the embedded in-floor loop system, Spaceport America is both unique and iconic in terms of visual and environmental design.

Foster + Partners’ project description:

‘The Spaceport lies low within the desert-like landscape of the site in New Mexico and seen from the historic El Camino Real trail, the organic form of the terminal resembles a rise in the landscape. Using local materials and regional construction techniques, it is both sustainable and sensitive to its surroundings.

Organized into a highly efficient and rational plan, the Spaceport has been designed to relate to the dimensions of the spacecraft. There is also a careful balance between accessibility and privacy. The astronauts’ areas and visitor spaces are fully integrated with the rest of the building to convey the thrill of space travel. The more sensitive zones – such as the control room – are visible, but have limited access.

Visitors and astronauts enter the building via a deep channel cut into the landscape. The retaining walls form an exhibition space that documents the history of the region and its settlers, alongside a history of space exploration. The strong linear axis continues on a galleried level to the ‘superhangar’ – which houses the spacecraft and the simulation room – through to the terminal building.

Designed to have minimal embodied carbon and few additional energy requirements, the scheme has been designed to achieve the prestigious LEED Platinum accreditation. The low-lying form is dug into the landscape to exploit the thermal mass, which buffers the building from the extremes of the New Mexico climate as well as catching the westerly winds for ventilation. Natural light enters via skylights, with a glazed façade reserved for the terminal building, establishing a platform for the coveted views onto the runway.’

Client: New Mexico Spaceport Authority (NMSA), Virgin Galactic (tenant)

I have been recently studying for the LEED exam and I was looking at as many different sources to get familar with the material.  A colleague referred me to LEED Visual.  Its a great site for learning more about LEED NC.  The creators of the site took the time to graphically represent all of the LEED points.  For those that are studying, the site synthesizes the information about LEED NC credits into a understandable -diagrammatic format.  The site allows  for the reader to quickly understand the basic overview of each credit and its requirements, strategies, standards, and submitting processes.  I highly recommend that you take the time to review the site.

A great deal of the studying requires you to memorize the credits; the connection of images with the credits makes it easier to remember them, at least I found this to be helpful.   The site is not about replacing the study guides that USGBC offers, but rather a support system.  I have posted some more screen shots for your review.

http://leedvisual.com/

Cosmic Vision >Via NatGeo
A new generation of giant telescopes will carry the eye to the edge of the universe.

By Timothy Ferris
Photograph by Joe McNally

When you start stargazing with a telescope, two experiences typically ensue. First, you are astonished by the view—Saturn’s golden rings, star clusters glittering like jewelry on black velvet, galaxies aglow with gentle starlight older than the human species—and by the realization that we and our world are part of this gigantic system. Second, you soon want a bigger telescope.

Galileo, who first trained a telescope on the night sky 400 years ago this fall, pioneered this two-step program. First, he marveled at what he could see. Galileo’s telescope revealed so many previously invisible stars that when he tried to map all of them in just one constellation, Orion, he gave up, confessing that he was “overwhelmed by the vast quantity of stars.” He saw mountains on the moon—in contradiction to the prevailing orthodoxy, which declared that all celestial objects were made of an unearthly “ether.” He charted four bright satellites as they bustled around Jupiter like planets in a miniature solar system, something that critics of the Copernican sun-centered cosmology had dismissed as physically impossible. Evidently the Earth was a small part of a big universe, not a big part of a small one.

And soon, sure enough, Galileo went to work making bigger and better telescopes. Large light-gathering lenses were not yet available, so he concentrated on making longer telescopes, which produced higher magnifying powers and reduced the halos of spurious colors that afflicted glass lenses in those days. Subsequent observers took the design of glass-lensed, refracting telescopes to great lengths, sometimes literally so. In Danzig, Johannes Hevelius deployed a telescope 150 feet long; hung by ropes from a pole, it undulated in the slightest breeze. In the Netherlands, the Huygens brothers unveiled lanky telescopes that had no tubes at all: The objective lens was perched on a high platform in a field, while an observer up to 200 feet away aligned a magnifying eyepiece and peered through it. Such instruments proffered fleeting glimpses of planets and stars that, like the dance of the seven veils, only aroused a burning desire to see more.

The reflecting telescope, pioneered by Isaac Newton, made it practical to gratify such desires: Mirrors required that only one surface be ground to gather and reflect starlight to a focal point, and since the mirror was supported from behind, it could be quite large without sagging under its own weight, as large lenses tended to do. William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus with a handmade reflecting telescope—he cast his metal mirrors in his garden and basement, and once had to flee from a coursing river of molten metal after the horse-dung mold fractured. Spiral-armed galaxies were first glimpsed through a massive reflecting telescope, with a six-foot diameter primary mirror, that Lord Rosse constructed on his estate in Ireland.

The two 8.4-meter mirrors of the Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham, northeast of Tucson, Arizona, can be turned to the horizontal, facing straight up into space through the observatory’s open roof. They can also be moved to the vertical, looking out from the mountain toward the horizon, and turn 360 degrees, so the telescope can look anywhere in the sky. Together, the mirrors will produce images with a resolution of a 22.8-meter telescope.

Today’s largest telescopes have mirrors up to some ten meters (33 feet) in diameter, with quadruple the light-gathering power of the legendary five-meter Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory in southern California. Looming large as office buildings, some of these giants are so highly automated that they can dust off their optics at sundown, open the dome, sequence and carry out observations throughout the night, and shut down come threatening weather, all with little or no human intervention. Yet humans, being human, still intervene a lot, if only to make sure nothing goes awry: To lose just one night’s work at a big telescope these days is to squander as much as $100,000 in operating costs.

Three of today’s largest telescopes—Gemini North, Subaru, and Keck—stand within hailing distance of one another atop the nearly 14,000-foot peak of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, an inactive volcano. The altitude puts them above 40 percent of Earth’s atmosphere—and most of its water vapor, which is opaque to the infrared wavelengths the astronomers like to study—but also makes it difficult for the astronomers and engineers who work there to breathe and think. Many wear clear-plastic oxygen tubes in their nostrils as routinely as we might wear eyeglasses. Others rely on the body’s ability to adapt but worry about making what they call a CLM, or “career-limiting mistake.” “At altitude, we don’t improvise; that would be a disaster,” says Gemini astronomer Scott Fisher. “We’re kind of trained monkeys up here. The real thinking goes on at sea level.”

The two 8.4-meter mirrors of the Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham, northeast of Tucson, Arizona, can be turned to the horizontal, facing straight up into space through the observatory’s open roof. They can also be moved to the vertical, looking out from the mountain toward the horizon, and turn 360 degrees, so the telescope can look anywhere in the sky. Together, the mirrors will produce images with a resolution of a 22.8-meter telescope.

These big Mauna Kea observatories are comparably smart and costly, yet each exudes a distinct personality. The 8.1-meter Gemini telescope is housed in an onion-shaped silver dome ringed by a set of shutters that, when closed during the day, make the observatory look as ungainly as a fat man in an inner tube. But the shutters open at dusk to create an enormous set of windows, three stories tall and stretching nearly three-quarters of the way around the observatory, that let in the night air and happen to afford a panorama of the blue Pacific all the way to Maui and beyond. Gemini’s four main digital detectors—cameras and spectrometers, heavy as cars and costing around five million dollars each—are attached to a carousel surrounding the telescope’s focal point, where they can be rotated into place in minutes. Computers run the telescope by night, shuffling requested observations to make the most of every minute. “We’re all about nighttime efficiency,” says Fisher.

The Subaru telescope’s instruments are housed in alcoves like jeroboams of champagne in a heavenly wine cellar. (The comparison is not entirely fanciful; one leading Japanese astronomer propitiates the gods at the start of each Subaru observing run by pouring vintage sake on the ground outside the dome at the four points of the compass.) When a particular instrument is required, a robotic yellow trolley makes its way to the alcove, picks up the detector, ferries it to the bottom of the massive telescope, and locks it in place, attaching the data cables and the plumbing for the detector’s refrigeration system. Subaru happens to be one of the few giant telescopes that anybody has ever actually looked through. For its inauguration in 1999, an eyepiece was attached so that Princess Sayako of Japan could have a look through the scope, and for several nights thereafter eager Subaru staffers did the same. “Everything you can see in the Hubble Space Telescope photos—the colors, the knots in the clouds—I could see with my own eyes, in stunning Technicolor,” one recalled.

Four hundred years ago Galileo gave birth to modern astronomy with the humblest of instruments, now preserved at a history of science museum in Florence, Italy. A one-and-a-half-inch lens displayed in an ornate frame (at bottom) was ground in 1609. Others followed. Fitted into simple wooden tubes just a few feet long, Galileo’s lenses magnified the heavens, bringing Earth’s moon, sunspots, and nearby planets into focus.

Keck consists of two identical telescopes. Both have ten-meter mirrors made of 36 segments; with its support structure, each segment weighs close to a thousand pounds, costs close to a million dollars, and would suffice to create a fine, university-grade telescope on its own. The telescopes’ “tubes” are spindly steel skeletons that look as delicate as spiders’ webs but are more precisely configured than a racing sloop’s rigging. “We use the telescope’s mission to motivate ourselves,” one Keck astronomer told me. “If a little wire or something is found intruding into the optical path, we think, If the light has been traveling through space for 90 percent of the history of the universe, and it got this close to the telescope, we’d better make sure it gets the rest of the way.”

Beneath the University of Arizona football stadium, a technician pores over the surface of the 8.4-meter Large Synoptic Survey Telescope mirror, looking for major flaws. Over a period of months the glass will be polished to within one millionth of an inch of the precise concave shape required. A thin coating of aluminum will create the reflective surface.

Few of the astronomers awarded time on the big telescopes actually go there to observe anymore. Most submit their requests electronically—on a recent night at Gemini, the scheduled projects ranged from “Primordial Solar System Masses” to “Magnetic Activity in Ultracool Dwarfs”—and the results are sent back to them. Geoff Marcy, a modern-day Prince Henry the Navigator whose team has discovered more than 150 planets orbiting stars other than our sun, gets more observing time than most at Keck but has not been there for years. Instead, his extrasolar planet team observes from a remote operating facility at UC Berkeley. During observing runs, Marcy reports, “we settle into a routine of working all night. We have all our books and other resources here at hand, plus enough normal life so our spouses don’t forget us.”

Ten-pound glass chunks are loaded into a honeycombed mold at the University of Arizona. Hollow chambers reduce mass and help produce a lightweight mirror that adjusts more quickly to ambient temperature changes.

In addition to their unprecedented light-gathering power, today’s big telescopes benefit from their adaptive optics (AO) systems, which compensate for atmospheric turbulence. The turbulence is what makes stars glitter; telescopes magnify every twinkle. A typical AO system fires a laser beam into a thin layer of sodium atoms 56 miles high in the atmosphere, causing them to glow. By monitoring this artificial star, the system determines how the air is churning and adjusts the telescope’s optics more than a thousand times each second to compensate. Gemini pays a pair of students ten dollars an hour to sit outside the dome all night, walkie-talkies in hand, ready to warn the astronomers to turn off the laser should an airplane approach. “It’s incredible to see in practice,” says Scott Fisher. “When the AO system is off, you see a nice, pretty star that looks a little fuzzy. Turn the AO on, and the star just goes phonk! and collapses to a tiny point.”

Objects in the night sky are measured in degrees, the full moon spanning about one half of a degree. Without AO, a powerful telescope on a fine night can perceive objects separated from each other by as little as one 3,600th of a degree, or one arc second. Thanks to Keck’s AO system, UCLA astronomer Andrea Ghez was able to make a motion picture of seven bright stars whirling around the invisible black hole at the center of our galaxy over a period of 14 years: The entire movie takes place inside a box measuring only one arc second on a side. Based on the frenzy of the stars in the grip of the black hole, Ghez calculated that it has a mass of four million suns, generating enough gravitational force to slingshot some stars that pass too close right out of our galaxy. Several such hypervelocity stars have been located, speeding off toward the depths of intergalactic space like party crashers ejected from an exclusive nightclub.

What’s next? Even bigger telescopes, of course, with the capability to shoot cosmic pictures faster, wider, and in even greater detail. Among the behemoths due to come on line within a decade are the Giant Magellan Telescope, the Thirty Meter Telescope, and the 42-meter European Extremely Large Telescope—a scaled-down version of the 100-meter Overwhelmingly Large Telescope, which was tabled at the planning stage when its projected budget turned out to be overwhelming too.

As the glass melts, the mold spins to create a concave surface that gathers distant light and refocuses it inside a telescope.

Particularly innovative is the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST, whose 8.4-meter primary mirror was cast last August in a spinning furnace under the stands of the University of Arizona Wildcats’ football stadium in Tucson. (The rotation technique produces a mirror blank that is already concave, reducing the amount of glass that must be ground away to bring the mirror to a proper figure.) Conventional telescopes have narrow fields of view, typically spanning no more than half a degree on a side—much too narrow to take in the enormous patterns that grew out of the big bang. The LSST will have a field of view covering ten square degrees, the area of 50 full moons. From its site in the Chilean Andes, it will be able to image galaxies far across the universe in exposures of just 15 seconds each, capturing fleeting events to distances of over ten billion light-years, 70 percent of the way across the observable universe. “Since we’ll have a big field of view, we can take a whole lot of short exposures and—bang, bang, bang, bang—cover the entire visible sky every several nights, and then repeat,” says LSST Director Tony Tyson. “If you keep doing that for ten years, you have a movie—the first movie of the universe.”

The LSST’s fast, wide-angle imaging could help answer two of the biggest questions confronting astronomers today: the nature of dark matter and of dark energy. Dark matter makes its presence known by its gravitational attraction—it explains the rotation speed of galaxies—but it emits no light, and its constitution is unknown. Dark energy is the name given to the mysterious phenomenon that, for the past five billion years, has been accelerating the rate at which the universe expands. “It’s a little bit scary,” says Tyson, “as if you were flying an airplane and suddenly something unknown took over the controls.”

Beneath the University of Arizona football stadium, a technician pores over the surface of the 8.4-meter Large Synoptic Survey Telescope mirror, looking for major flaws. Over a period of months the glass will be polished to within one millionth of an inch of the precise concave shape required. A thin coating of aluminum will create the reflective surface.

The LSST could help solve these immense riddles thanks in part, oddly enough, to the science of acoustics. The big bang was noisy. Although sound cannot propagate through the vacuum of today’s space—as pedants are fond of reminding the directors of science-fiction films—the early universe was a thick plasma and as alive with sound as a drummers convention. Certain tones resonated in the primordial plasma, like the tones of struck wine glasses, and these harmonies, etched into sheets of galaxies that today shamble across billions of light-years, contain precise information about the nature of dark matter and dark energy. If astronomers can map these large-scale structures accurately, they should be able to identify the signatures of dark matter and dark energy in the big bang’s harmonics. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a pioneering wide-angle study, captured some of this information when it mapped the sky from 1999 through 2008. The LSST is designed to go much deeper into cosmic space. It may not resolve the mysteries, but, predicts Tyson, “it will go a long way toward showing what dark energy and dark matter aren’t.”

Wide Receivers:Massive trucks will drive 66 12- and 7-meter antennas into the Chilean desert to form a single huge radio telescope spanning miles.

The LSST’s photographic “speed” will also give astronomers a better look at events too short-lived to be readily studied today. Most astronomers, even amateurs using backyard telescopes and off-the-shelf digital cameras, regularly record fleeting events of unknown origin. You take a series of digital exposures, and in one of them a spot of light appears where none was before or after. It may have been a cosmic ray hitting the light-detection chip, a high-velocity asteroid hurtling through the field of view, or a blue flare on the surface of a dim red star. You just don’t know, so you shrug and move on. Because the LSST will take so many repeat exposures of the entire sky, it could resolve many such riddles.

Tomorrow’s enormous telescopes will do as much in one night as today’s do in a year, but that will not necessarily render the older telescopes obsolete. When the giants come on line, says Scott Fisher, “the Geminis of today will become the telescopes that get to go out and do the surveys,” finding interesting phenomena for the largest scopes to investigate in detail. “It’s like a pyramid, and it feeds both ways: When a really big telescope finds something exciting that we can’t spend every night observing, the astronomers can apply for time on a smaller telescope to, say, check it out every clear night for a year and see how it changes over time.”

The Atacama array, seen here in a rendering, will collect data from within the clouds of dust and gas that gave rise to stars, planets, and galaxies. “It will enable us finally to penetrate cold, dark regions of the universe,” says project scientist Richard Hills.

Orbiting space telescopes are opening up another dimension. NASA’s Kepler satellite, which launched in March 2009, is methodically imaging the constellation Cygnus, looking for the slight dimming of light caused when planets—some perhaps Earthlike—transit in front of their stars; Geoff Marcy’s team will then use Keck to scrutinize stars flagged by Kep­ler to confirm that they have planets. In the future, pairs of mirrors deployed in orbit and linked by laser-ranging systems could attain the resolving power of telescopes measuring thousands of meters across. One day, observatories sitting in craters on the far side of the moon may probe the universe from surroundings ideally quiet, dark, and cold. The coming combination of smart satellites talking to big, increasingly automated ground telescopes, themselves linked together by fiber-optic networks and employing artificial intelligence systems to search out patterns in the torrents of data, suggests a process as much biological as mechanical, akin to the evolution of global eyes, optic nerves, and brains.

The Atacama array, seen here in a rendering, will collect data from within the clouds of dust and gas that gave rise to stars, planets, and galaxies. “It will enable us finally to penetrate cold, dark regions of the universe,” says project scientist Richard Hills.
Film directors like to say that each movie is really two movies—the one you make, and the one you say you’re going to make while raising the money. The point is that nobody can accurately predict the outcome of any genuinely creative venture. The same is true of scientific discovery: Scientists can explain what they expect to accomplish with bigger and better telescopes, but such predictions are mostly just extrapolations from the past. “If you’re going to Washington to seek funding for a new telescope and you make a list of what you’ll see through this new window on the universe, you know that the most interesting thing it will discover is probably not on your list,” says Tyson. “It’s likely to be something totally new, some out-of-the-box physics that’s going to blow our minds.”

A laser beam fired from the Hale Telescope, northeast of San Diego, California, excites sodium atoms 56 miles above the Earth, creating an “artificial star” reference point that is used to correct for distortions caused by turbulence in the atmosphere. Based on readings of light from this artificial star, a six-inch deformable mirror is adjusted as many as 2,000 times a second to eliminate blur. Only a handful of other telescopes now in operation employ this laser-guide star technology, which can enable ground-based instruments to collect images as clear as their space-based counterparts, even in some areas of the sky difficult to examine before.

The marvelous model of the big-bang universe pieced together in the 20th century arose largely from just such unanticipated discoveries. Edwin Hubble discovered the expansion of the universe accidentally, at the telescope: Cosmic expansion had been implied by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, but Hubble knew nothing of the prediction, and not even Einstein had taken it seriously. Dark matter was discovered accidentally; so was dark energy. A telescope doesn’t just show you what’s out there; it impresses upon you how little you know, opening your imagination to wonders as big as all outdoors. “The spyglass is very truthful,” said Galileo.

Crowded in prime territory, the Subaru, Keck I and II, and NASA Infrared telescopes (left to right) sit atop Hawaii’s 13,796-foot Mauna Kea. Set above 40 percent of the atmosphere, they offer one of Earth’s clearest views into space.

Willem van der Sluis’ Sportdomes DJI  are prison recreation spaces created from a Boolean Union of Bucky Domes. Not only are they elegant crystalline skinned structures but also open up new options in the games themselves. Below are more poetic musings on creating spaces for detention.

How does one design a space for a user who does not really want to be there? This is one of the fundamental questions that Willem van der Sluis asked himself when commissioned to create an art application for the enclosed exercise yards of detention ships (floating prisons). A design process arose that led to a completely new form for the enclosed yards and an essentially different experience for the users. The carefully considered design not only produced exquisite results, but also illustrated how the designer-artist’s freedom and an extensive list of requirements can merge together, even in specific circumstances as with this commission, which at first glance appear to leave little room for artistic expression. Finding a balance elevates it to art or design application at its ultimate.

Significantly, Willem van de Sluis calls them sport domes, not enclosed exercise yards. They stand ashore – outside – one beside each of the two detention ships moored here in Zaandam. Several times a week, the prison ship ‘residents’ – minor criminals and aliens who have exhausted all legal procedures – can exercise or play games here for an hour or two: volleyball, badminton, soccer or running on the dirt track. Before they arrive at the sport domes, they have already travelled a fair distance, down the stairs, through the gates, over the bridge, ashore in the open air enclosed with Heras fencing, into the lock and out of the lock. They suddenly find themselves in the middle of a playing field that has no vertical fences, but is spanned by two domes joined together, covered with a decorative, finely-woven pattern, which make this space both indoors and outdoors. The outside light is different here than elsewhere, grey skies acquire a glittering brilliance. In addition to the bright, blue-green of the domes, the pattern of the roof sets an intriguing play of light and darkness in motion, as if a magical filter is directing the light. At the bottom, the pattern is closed. Moving upwards, it swirls over the dome towards an increasingly open form. The domes wrap the playing fields in an atmosphere, even evenings and nights with the light filtering in, in which they do not disguise their presence, but rather claim it and form a landmark.

Van der Sluis was particularly inspired by the unique spatial experience of a dome. A dome causes one to experience the space inside as imposing and overwhelming, an experience that people from many cultures all over the world have already explored and applied to places of worship and other buildings that want to express a feeling of heavenly greatness: ancient temples such as the Pantheon in Rome, churches such as the Saint Peter’s in Rome and mosques (built like a cathedral) such as the Aya Sophia in Istanbul. All of these make use of the same principle that utilizes a dome to represent the celestial and the divine.

Van der Sluis also makes ironic reference to the domed prisons such as in Haarlem and Breda, which are based on the panoptical principle by British lawyer and philosopher, Jeremy Bentham. Where Van der Sluis uses the spatial experience of the dome to provide a positive experience for the user, the spatial effect in the panopticons works to serve the guards. The essence of the panoptical principle enables the guards to continuously keep an eye on the prisoners from the middle of the circular complex.

Van der Sluis gives the fields’ users, who deep in their hearts would rather be elsewhere, a space with a friendly ambience where it feels good to be, a place that has been worked on diligently, a place that, in that sense, provides a bit of freedom because associations can be evoked through their form and use of light. The attention is evidenced in many details. Between the lines on the ground that indicate the boundaries of the playing fields, arrows point in the four directions of the compass. This is one of the few orientation points in and around the detention ships.

Besides wanting to offer a positive experience, the shape of the dome and design of the recreational yards in Zaandam, remarkably, also result for a large part from the restrictions given with the commission: the nature of detention housing. Detention ships can be set up in a relatively short time and, thus, can quickly relieve the cell shortage in the Netherlands. The ships lie temporarily in a certain spot for a period of about five years, and afterwards are moved somewhere else. In order to be able to easily remove the enclosures from shore and carry them back onto the ships, they needed to be easily disassembled and, not insignificantly, one had to be able to screw everything back together again, so that it remained solid.

This quick approach, however, brought criticism at both local and national levels. Surrounding businesses in the Zaandam industrial zone suddenly had to deal with extraordinary neighbors. The design and its implementation touched on deeper social sensitivities because of the controversial policy concerning aliens who may or may not have exhausted all legal possibilities. Their residence on prison ships is one of their last accommodations in the Netherlands, and their stay there is, in fact, the physical embodiment of the policy that holds huge consequences for the people concerned.

What does a commission like this add? Not another world, an escape from the given circumstances, not an eighteen-carat gold stone, nor the prospect of a fairytale that has no future for the persons involved. In Willem van der Sluis’ hands, the commission for the enclosed exercise yards has not only initiated an elementary thought process on spaces for prisoners, recreational or otherwise. It illustrates wonderfully how art in the (semi)public space, which has received a good deal of deserved and undeserved criticism, can generate multi layered meanings. Nicoline Wijnja

Date of completion: 2007
Artwork: Sport domes
Artist: Willem van der Sluis (b. 1972)
Location: Detention boats – 103, Zaandam: Isaak Baarthaven, Rijshoutweg 14, 1505 HL Zaandam
Budget: € 365,000.
Visual arts advisor: Hans van den Ban (Atelier Rijksbouwmeester)Project manager: A.M.J. Bruggeling, S. Stabij, EGM architecten

Source:
PRESENT. Percentage for Art in the Netherlands 2004-2006 (Rotterdam: episode publishers 2007) 440 – 442, ISBN 978-90-5973-060-1, www.episode-publishers.nl

via coolhunting

Developed by Deeplocal and StandardRobot, Chalkbot is a key element in Nike’s LIVESTRONG campaign for the 2009 Tour de France. via deeplocal

It would of been nice to see the whole device pulled as a chariot w/ a fleet of bikes from the front.

You can find more images and info below.

Supporters in the U.S. and France can text inspirational messages for bicyclists that will be printed in yellow chalk by Chalkbot on the roads of the Tour de France.

DeepLocal and StandardRobot worked with Nike’s agency, W+K, to design and develop the pneumatic robot and software system. The system includes a text message interface, web based queue and approval system for tour officials, onboard machine and nozzle control, spray mechanism, camera and GPS capture system, and Twitter integration.

Chalkbot on Nike.com
Chalkbot on Twitter
Chalkbot Photo Gallery
Chalkbot Nike Press Release
Chalkbot in the News
Follow DeepLocal CTO David Evans in France

http://www.nike.com/nikeos/p/livestrong/en_US/chalk_messages

This is an image of a formative technology coming out of RoboFold. It is a new formative computer aided manufacturing technology currently under development and could be promising considering that when a human hand enters into the production process it = $$$$$.

RoboFold is currently developing manufacturing processes utilizing industrial robots to directly create sheet metal forms. The system requires no tooling thus enabling the creation of new forms unavailable with current methods.

Please follow below for more info and videos–>>

The patent pending technology utilizes standard industrial robots to directly manipulate sheet material into complex surfaces by folding along curved lines. The RoboFold system will be controlled by a simple software plug-in to enable design, engineering and production planning in a familiar CAD environment.

text and images via RoboFold

Here are some images of Dekochari, it is typical Japanese phenomenon, deko is short for decoration and chari is slang for bike. Dekochari are actually the kids version of dekotora, which are decorated trucks. Satoshi Minakawa made these photos of these awesome vehicles. via Today and Tomorrow +  wikipedia