Another nice video from BIG as well.

via BoingBoing

Bathsheba Grossman is a sculptor who uses cutting-edge technology to render math- and science-inspired shapes in three dimensions. You can buy 3D-printed laser-cut metal ones, or order them in plastic at lower costs from ShapeWays. That sound you hear is my jaw scraping my keyboard.

Borromean Rings

120 Cell

Along these same lines – check out the renderings on the Minimal Surface Archive, and for some background on what it means to project a 4-d dodecahedron into 3 dimensions, this video explains how to think in 10 dimensions.  If you really want to blow your mind, try parsing this article on the Lie Group E8, which has been proposed as a fundamental model of physical existence.

Go here, turn on HD, full screen it and sit back.  Nothing in the video is real.

This little project really gives me a new appreciation for MAD. It’s too easy to misconstrue most of the office’s larger work as more Hadid inspired shape-making. But reading MAD’s description of this small intervention communicates the issues that they are struggling with working in China. There is clearly a tension between doing the flash-and-glam work that China seems to hunger for and yet to engage the history and context of this profoundly ancient place.

Designboom, which regularly has short interviews with leading designers, recently interviewed Ma.

CleanTechnica has a post about PV panels made from a holographic film which is able to capture light from any direction:

Prism Solar Technologies in Highland, NY has innovated a breakthrough holographic thin-film (Holographic Planar Concentrator™) that makes possible a very parsimonious use of crystalline PV cells to counteract that problem for Northern regions.

This brings the cost down to $1 a watt.

Each of their solar modules is actually made up of both crystalline PV and their unique holographic thin-film. The thin-film strips diffract both direct and reflected energy to the PV cell strips integrated between strips of thin-film. Solar modules made in this way are cheaper because they use 50-72% less silicon to make the same energy. Read more…

Wired has a great piece about the possibility of using Thorium to produce nuclear power.  Turns out Thorium is more abundant than either Uranium or Plutonium, is more efficient for energy production, can be used in smaller, safer plant designs, and the byproducts can’t be used for weapons (which explains why we don’t use it).

Named for the Norse god of thunder, thorium is a lustrous silvery-white metal. It’s only slightly radioactive; you could carry a lump of it in your pocket without harm. On the periodic table of elements, it’s found in the bottom row, along with other dense, radioactive substances — including uranium and plutonium — known as actinides.

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When he took over as head of Oak Ridge in 1955, Alvin Weinberg realized that thorium by itself could start to solve these problems. It’s abundant — the US has at least 175,000 tons of the stuff — and doesn’t require costly processing. It is also extraordinarily efficient as a nuclear fuel. As it decays in a reactor core, its byproducts produce more neutrons per collision than conventional fuel. The more neutrons per collision, the more energy generated, the less total fuel consumed, and the less radioactive nastiness left behind.

Even better, Weinberg realized that you could use thorium in an entirely new kind of reactor, one that would have zero risk of meltdown. The design is based on the lab’s finding that thorium dissolves in hot liquid fluoride salts. This fission soup is poured into tubes in the core of the reactor, where the nuclear chain reaction — the billiard balls colliding — happens. The system makes the reactor self-regulating: When the soup gets too hot it expands and flows out of the tubes — slowing fission and eliminating the possibility of another Chernobyl. Any actinide can work in this method, but thorium is particularly well suited because it is so efficient at the high temperatures at which fission occurs in the soup.

In 1965, Weinberg and his team built a working reactor, one that suspended the byproducts of thorium in a molten salt bath, and he spent the rest of his 18-year tenure trying to make thorium the heart of the nation’s atomic power effort. He failed. Uranium reactors had already been established, and Hyman Rickover, de facto head of the US nuclear program, wanted the plutonium from uranium-powered nuclear plants to make bombs. Increasingly shunted aside, Weinberg was finally forced out in 1973.

Mark Lynas writes for the Guardian that despite the general consensus that Obama screwed up Copenhagen, it was in fact China who killed the process

Here’s what actually went on late last Friday night, as heads of state from two dozen countries met behind closed doors. Obama was at the table for several hours, sitting between Gordon Brown and the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi. The Danish prime minister chaired, and on his right sat Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the UN. Probably only about 50 or 60 people, including the heads of state, were in the room. I was attached to one of the delegations, whose head of state was also present for most of the time.

What I saw was profoundly shocking. The Chinese premier, Wen Jinbao, did not deign to attend the meetings personally, instead sending a second-tier official in the country’s foreign ministry to sit opposite Obama himself. The diplomatic snub was obvious and brutal, as was the practical implication: several times during the session, the world’s most powerful heads of state were forced to wait around as the Chinese delegate went off to make telephone calls to his “superiors”.

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To those who would blame Obama and rich countries in general, know this: it was China’s representative who insisted that industrialised country targets, previously agreed as an 80% cut by 2050, be taken out of the deal. “Why can’t we even mention our own targets?” demanded a furious Angela Merkel. Australia’s prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was annoyed enough to bang his microphone. Brazil’s representative too pointed out the illogicality of China’s position. Why should rich countries not announce even this unilateral cut? The Chinese delegate said no, and I watched, aghast, as Merkel threw up her hands in despair and conceded the point. Now we know why – because China bet, correctly, that Obama would get the blame for the Copenhagen accord’s lack of ambition.

China, backed at times by India, then proceeded to take out all the numbers that mattered. A 2020 peaking year in global emissions, essential to restrain temperatures to 2C, was removed and replaced by woolly language suggesting that emissions should peak “as soon as possible”. The long-term target, of global 50% cuts by 2050, was also excised. No one else, perhaps with the exceptions of India and Saudi Arabia, wanted this to happen. I am certain that had the Chinese not been in the room, we would have left Copenhagen with a deal that had environmentalists popping champagne corks popping in every corner of the world.

I’m sure this isn’t the last word on what happend, but it’s an interesting bit of data.  Mark’s conclusion is that China doesn’t want to bother with dealing with climate change because its economy is primarily coal-fired, and any cuts in emissions will necessarily lead to a diminishment in its ability to expand.

In an interesting example of desperate times calling for desperate measures, the local trade union is looking to become the key investor in The Chicago spire:

North America’s tallest tower was stopped dead in its foundations last year as the recession bells clanged and key players argued over alleged non-payment of millions of dollars in fees. But now the fate of Calatrava’s Chicago Spire looks much brighter as union boss Tom Villanova, president of the Chicago and Cook County Building and Construction Trades Council (CBTC), has entered talks to loan $170million to the project’s Irish developer, Shelbourne Development Group in a bid to create work for 1000 workers. More…

This one’s of people fire-breathing, shot in super-slow motion. Unfortunately it’s also not embeddable, so you’ll have to click this link. (you want to click the link)