The magnetic maelstrom of matter

Close-ups, animations and a lot more on the Sun's surface: mesmerizing.

And I have always wanted to write a tabloid-type title.

Homing

"In yet other words: bees are projectiles, and humans, cruise missiles."
Friedrich Kittler, in "Gramophone, Film ,Typewriter", 1986 - Stanford Univ. Press, 1999

More Kittler here.

The elegance of a 13 ton digger

This lovely pair has been performing recently around several places in London. Check here to see whether they might be heading somewhere near you.

aesthetics of turbulence

Magnetic Movie


Alyson Shotz

What do these different manifestations have in common? Have to come up with something better than the title sometime. Infosthetics has more on the first.

shape shifting

More conventional than it looks, but seductive nonetheless:
http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/06/bmw-builds-a-ca.html

BigDog

http://www.bostondynamics.com/

Threading lightly

More AA related stuff. This time, a pedestrian bridge whose foundations are the trees existing on site. An informal yet precise structural network is woven with a minimum impact on its setting.
From BDOnline.

Prototype instances

Pictured: the [C] Space pavillion, under construction as the DRL exhibition on its ten years of existence was inaugurated.
(By the way: rembember this other pavillion, also at Bedford Square?)

Meanwhile, other AA graduates are working on the Fibrous Room project/ prototype (also depicted here).

Related: Brett Steele's new domain.

Making in China

A fascinating report of what is actually happening in the world of industrial production, focusing on China's evolving role and connections: "China Makes, The World Takes".

Well worth reading.
Some bits: "Supply chain is intellectual property" and "People think China is cheap, but really, it’s fast."

Sustainable turbulence

Fish gather together in shoals for more than safety in numbers: their bodies are able to extract kinetic energy from vortices and eddies created by objects in water or other fish.

This has led some researchers to investigate how these same processes could be reproduced in devices capable of generating electricity from turbulence in liquid flows (unlike in conventional turbines, for which turbulence is a hindrance), as described in this article.

An example: this project from Princeton.

This is interesting, beyond the issues of efficiency and renewable energy production – architectural skins could be reworked so as to use wind forces productively, instead of merely resisting them.