Check out LinkedIn today’s series The Biggest Ideas of 2013 for a variety of thoughtful posts on living happily and productively, work-life balance, business, technology, how we think and a host of other topics. They’re short and worth a look when you need a bit of inspiration or encouragement.
Oscar Niemeyer died last week at the age of 104, a Brazilian master of modernist architecture famous for his inventive use of concrete and for the architecture of Brasilia. Type his name into Google these days and you’ll get pages of appreciations of his work. Here’s a selection – …
A Never-Before-Seen Satellite View of Earth’s Cities at Night – 2:10-min video clip showing light coming from the Earth, as seen from Space via the satellite Suomi NPP. You’ll see city lights certainly, but also wildfires and gas flares from oil fields. More here, from NASA.
Spying On Our Walking Habits With Kinects, To Create Smarter Spaces – research at MIT’s Senseable City Lab (led by Carlo Ratti) uses the X-box add-on Kinect to track pedestrian behavior. By understanding how people walking through a long corridor react to objects in their path and to oncoming foot …
A Treehouse Made From The Trunk Of A 100-Foot Tree – park structure in Indiana uses every part of one huge tree trunk, assembled puzzle-like by Visiondivision. The shingles are maintenance free for 80 years.
How Places Like Columbus, Indiana, Outrank Silicon Valley – everyone knows that Silicon Valley is a hotbed of start-up activity. But there are smaller American cities “where recessions have been remarkably absent, where manufacturing thrives, where populations continue to rise” and people are finding jobs. A recent survey, Leading Locations for …
Living Architecture Monitor magazine – if you’re into green roofs and walls, take a look at the quarterly publication Living Architecture Monitor. It works with the organization Green Roofs for Healthy Cities (GRHC), and is focused on North America. Scroll down on the home page to see past digital editions. …
The World’s Leading Cities for Start-Ups – top five are Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York. The post includes a list of runner up cities as well as the chart (shown here) of cities around the world that are best at nurturing high-tech start-ups. A new report from the Startup …
Australian Energy: Greening ‘Oz’ Infographic – Australia has punched above its weight in the global energy sector for years, with its huge natural resources providing a platform for the country’s economy that allowed it to outperform much of the world throughout the lingering post-crisis recessions in the developed world.
Venticool | The European platform for ventilative cooling – This is a just-launched website. See articles on the energy-saving potential of ventilative cooling at the end of the FAQ section.
Henry Ford Hospital West Bloomfield greenhouse producing food – and wellness – about hospital’s new $1 million hydroponic greenhouse. Dozens of kinds of vegetables and herbs — five types of kale, 23 kinds of tomatoes, five varieties of basil, eggplants, squash, hot and sweet peppers, fresh herbs, microgreens and …
A Little Bit of Data, A Lot of Building Energy Saved – new software uses utility bills to measure building energy performance and displays it in clear, well-designed graphics. Here’s WegoWise’s website. WegoWise can compare how individual buildings compare to benchmarks they’ve created with data from over 10,000 …
New fluorescent lighting won’t flicker, shatter, or burn out – It’s called FIPEL technology (stands for Field-Induced Polymer ElectroLuminescent). Scientists at Wake Forest University have developed “an entirely new light bulb” that’s quiet, won’t shatter, is efficient, and lasts a very long time. The device is made of three …
New technology is piping sunlight into windowless rooms – South Korean and British scientists have developed patented technology that delivers “natural daylight to windowless spaces … without heat gain or loss.” A mirror tracks the sun throughout the day, reflecting its rays onto a parabolic dish, which then focuses …