Eideard

Launched in 2009, MIT’s “1K House” project challenges designers to come up with affordable, sustainable housing solutions that can improve conditions for the billions of people in the world living on less than $1 per day. The “Pinwheel House” designed by MIT graduate student Ying chee Chui is the first prototype.

The 1K House concept was initiated by Tony Ciochetti, the Thomas G. Eastman Chairman at MIT’s Center for Real Estate, after seeing a family of four emerge from a tiny mud hut while he was traveling through rural India. “There is a huge proportion of the world’s population that has pressing housing needs,” says Ciochetti. “Can you build affordable, sustainable shelter for such a large population?”

Ying chee Chui’s “Pinwheel House” is the first prototype to be constructed and is located in Mianyang, in the Sichuan Province, China. The design incorporates a modular layout with hollow brick walls, steel bars for reinforcement, wooden box beams, a central courtyard space and it’s also built to withstand a magnitude 8.0 earthquake.

“The construction is easy enough, because if you know how to build a single module, you can build the whole house,” says Chui.

Chui came out a little over the long-term goal of building a $1000 house, with the total cost coming to $5,925. Not bad considering it’s tough to buy a good second hand car for that price! A larger building than was originally designed was a factor in the cost – the whole house came to about 800 square feet, rather than 500 square feet. Chui is confident that the smaller module could easily be built for US$4000 or even cheaper if a large number of houses were built at the same time.

There are a number of individual and production processes that could lower the cost of construction significantly. Economies of scale really kick in if producing a modular design like this off-site – to be trucked in and assembled on-site. Wooden box beams can be replaced with several less expensive construction techniques, wood, composite or steel. IMHO, steel being the best choice – recycled and recyclable, easy to train installers/framers, fire rating reduces insurance requirements.

No doubt – even in China – the cost of land is probably higher than the cost of the house erected. At least in urban China.

Here’s a new way of looking at oil spill clean-up: Forget the big ships, massive work crews and hefty price tags.

Instead, just deploy an army of autonomous, oil-scrubbing robots. They can find the oil on their own. And when they reach the site of an oil spill, they talk to their robot friends to figure out the best way to get the whole thing mopped up.

That’s the vision the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put forward on Wednesday as the school announced the development of a prototypical robot called Seaswarm. The $20,000 robots will be unveiled officially to the public on Saturday at an event in Venice, Italy, and will be ready to deal with oil spills in about a year, said Assaf Biderman, who oversaw MIT’s research team on the project.

The Seaswarm robots…look like a treadmill conveyor belt that’s been attached to an ice cooler. The conveyor belt piece of the system floats on the surface of the ocean. As it turns, the belt propels the robot forward and lifts oil off the water with the help of a nanomaterial that’s engineered to attract oil and repel water…

The material on the robot’s conveyer belt, which MIT calls a “paper towel for oil spills,” can absorb up to 20 times its weight in oil.

Once it has absorbed the crude from the surface of the ocean, the robot can either burn off the oil on the spot, using a heater on the “ice cooler” part of its body, or it can bag the oil and leave it on the surface of the water for a later pick-up, Biderman said. That oil could be reused or recycled…

The Seaswarm robots operate on solar energy and require only 100 watts of power, or about that of a bright light bulb. They could stay at sea for months, Biderman said, and could operate around the clock.

The science silver lining rolls out, once again. Too bad it took a disaster to prompt research along this and other lines, research to deal with oil spills.

Consider what could have been if the ever-greedy oil corporations spent a fraction of one percent of their profits on remediation and prevention of environmental disasters? Instead of turning their tame Congressional pimps to churning out taxpayer-paid subsidies to exploration schemes?

Perhaps TSA will be a thing of the past by then – and I’ll resume flying.

The Ministry of Defence has unveiled its prototype unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV)…

Defence Minister Gerald Howarth said it was a “truly trailblazing project” and featured “the best of our nation’s advanced design and technology”. The aircraft is due to begin flight trials early next year.

Named after the Celtic god of thunder, Taranis is the first step in the development of unmanned strike aircraft, capable of penetrating enemy territory. Unmanned aircraft carrying weapons are already used in service, such as the MQ-1 Predator which carries Hellfire missiles, although these are only suitable for use where the airspace is under allied control.

“This is the next generation of combat aircraft and flight trials will begin next year,” Sqn Ldr Bruno Wood told BBC News. “It’s a technology demonstrator that could be used as a testbed which may form further potential solutions to the RAF,” he added.

The issue of “writing the pilot” out of the aircraft equation has long been a controversial topic, more so since the first unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) went into active service…

Peter Felstead, editor of Jane’s Defence Weekly, told BBC News that the development of UAVs paralleled the development of the first manned aircraft during World War I.

“First they were used for reconnaissance, then they were armed for bombing and ground attack missions and they eventually became air-to-air combat craft,” he said.

“This is the first step for the UK. This isn’t an aircraft that will go into service, it’s a tech demo, but it will prove technologies, demonstrate capabilities and inform the direction we [the UK] are going in.”

They might have called it the Terminator, eh? We know how they turned out.

Wonder what DARPA is doing down this alley?

There’s a “Wizard of Oz” joke to be made here: The city of Topeka, Kansas has unofficially changed its name to “Google” in an attempt to get on the Mountain View tech giant’s radar as a test bed for new fiber-optic technology that would bring it Internet connections at top speed.

The Topeka Capital-Journal wrote that Mayor Bill Bunten signed a proclamation Monday that designates the town as “Google” for the duration of March, in an attempt to make it a more palatable choice for a test market than some of the other cities in the running–like Grand Rapids, Mich., and Baton Rouge, La. It’s not intended to be as permanent as the Oregon town that actually renamed itself Half.com in exchange for some cash, free stuff, and mockery.

The town can’t legally change its name if it intends to change it back, and then there’s the fact that Google owns all sorts of intellectual property pertaining to its brand name. But the Capital-Journal says that there is technically no legal barrier to the issuance of a proclamation gently encouraging people to refer to Topeka as “Google.” You know, it’s sort of like when you’re a little kid and you wish your name were cooler so you start telling everyone to call you by a new one of your choice, and the blitheness of childhood prevents you from noticing the smirks that ensue every time you politely ask an adult to start referring to you as “Jethro Skywalker…”

But hey, if this campaign actually gets the city a super-fast Internet connection, I’ll stop laughing.

Folks outside New Mexico may not know about it; but, the fashion of changing a town’s name for fun and profit got it’s first real boost here.

Next time you’re driving south from Albuquerque down to the new SpacePort outside Las Cruces, stop and have lunch in the town that was called Hot Springs up till it won Ralph Edwards’ 1950 radio contest. When it became Truth or Consequences, NM.