Noise levels, fine particulate matter, traffic volumes – these data are of interest to urban planners and residents alike. A three-dimensional presentation will soon make it easier to handle them: as the user virtually moves through his city, the corresponding data are displayed as green, yellow or red dots.

Maximum load capacity with minimal consumption of materials ­– this is how supporting structures in construction should be today. Researchers from the University of Stuttgart together with Bosch Rexroth have now come a great deal closer to achieving this goal. They have constructed a wooden shell which is much thinner than anything deemed possible up to now. With a mere four centimetre thickness the shell spans a surface of over 100 square metres. The structure stands on Vaihingen Campus of the University of Stuttgart and was presented to the public for the first time today. The extreme slimness of the shell becomes possible through the use of an adaptive structure.

IKEA has expanded its brand from products to homes and now to a whole neighborhood, with plans to start construction on 11 hectares of land in London next year, which will feature 1,200 houses and apartments fully owned by the Swedish furniture company.

The Tokyo Institute of Technology recently unveiled a shiny new shell made of 4,500 solar panels that allow it to use half of the energy of a similarly-sized building. The panels — which line the structure’s facade and rooftop — have a total capacity of 650 kilowatts, and the building also generates another 100 kilowatts using fuel cells. Custom designed for the university’s Environment and Energy Innovation Building in Tokyo’s Meguro area, this innovative idea makes great use of the sun’s abundant rays.

Natcore Technology scientists have created a black silicon solar cell with an average reflectance of 0.3%, making it the “blackest” solar cell ever designed. Compared to the most efficient solar cells currently on the market, Natcore’s development offers a tenfold decrease in reflectance over the solar spectrum. The result is an increase in energy efficiency that could help solar power compete even more effectively with traditional fossil fuels.

Lisbon’s main cycling route has been transformed with this brilliant typography that makes the city’s 7,362-meter bike path along the river Tagus all that more fun and easy! A collaboration between Lisbon-based communication and environmental graphics studio P-06 Atelier and Global Landscape Architects, the Bikeway Belém is awash with symbols and text painted directly onto the street.

One construction technology that has great potential for low-cost, customized buildings is “contour crafting — a form of 3D printing that uses robotic arms and nozzles to squeeze out layers of concrete or other materials, moving back and forth over a set path to fabricate a large component.

Structures would be quicker to make, reducing energy and emissions. Using a quick-setting, concrete-like material, contour crafting forms the house’s walls layer by layer until topped off by floors and ceilings that are set into place by the crane.

Increasing the reflectance – commonly known as albedo – of every urban area by 0.1 will give a CO2 offset between 130 and 150 billion tonnes. This is equivalent to taking every car in the world off the road for 50 years, assuming a single car gives off around 4 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

Forty years after its initial publication, a study called The Limits to Growth is looking depressingly prescient. Commissioned by an international think tank called the Club of Rome, the 1972 report found that if civilization continued on its path toward increasing consumption, the global economy would collapse by 2030. Population losses would ensue, and things would generally fall apart.

It sounds like something out of a fantasy film: a vat of sand into which you plunge a small object only to watch the sand bind together to form larger copies of the same object. Such “smart sand” isn’t exactly a reality just yet, but a team at MIT’s Distributed Robotics Laboratory (DRL) has a vision for tiny granules--“smart pebbles”--imbued with a small amount of computing power and covered in magnets on the outside. Piled together in a heap, the small amount of computing power in each grain would become a single distributed computing platform capable of shaping itself into objects, with the unneeded grains falling away to leave behind the finished product.

Site specific traffic counting: sensors that collect information about vehicle and pedestrian movement in real time.

Neighborland is an online urban planning platform that aims to promote organic conversations that can build momentum and facilitate connections around improvement projects.

For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that an LED can emit more optical power than the electrical power it consumes. Although scientifically intriguing, the results won’t immediately result in ultra-efficient commercial LEDs since the demonstration works only for LEDs with very low input power that produce very small amounts of light.

The Z-Man programs aims to develop biologically inspired climbing aids to enable warfighters to scale vertical walls constructed from typical building materials, while carrying a full combat load, and without the use of ropes or ladders.

The greatest problem related to an electric vehicle is its limited range. A team of researchers at the Stanford University recently made an important discovery in wireless charging technology. This technology can effectively solve the problem of limited range and increase the use of electric vehicles when in full bloom.

In today’s world there is need of building homes, which are tough and sturdy. Shipping containers can be reliably used as the foundation for such houses. Moreover, the best thing about shipping container houses is their portability and inexpensiveness. Recently, an architect named, Patrick Partouche came up with an idea of making a house with eight shipping containers within the countryside of Lille, France. The house is designed for single family use.

A dwelling as a personal design element certainly belongs to the pantheon of very private spaces, where we can retire psychologically as well as safely. But, when we consider contemporary housing as a major part of construction industry, it does contribute to significant levels of carbon emission. In regard to this, there have been a slew of futuristic ideas that combine the high points of flexibility, accessibility and sustainability. More importantly, most of them are conceived along credible lines for optimized user comfort and privacy.

The green march is in its springs now days. Every entity, starting from an individual to a corporation, is striving in its own unique way to contribute a step in this march. The biggies among the corporate houses are planning huge financial roll outs to aid the environmental cause in some way or the other. IKEA is one such company and its 2011 Sustainability Report affirms its green status. It also throws light on the company’s commitment to eventually use 100 percent renewable energy.

Have you ever imagined a world where all our food produce is cultivated on 'indoor' farms, situated atop high rise buildings within an urban scope? The idea may certainly seem ludicrously bold to some. However, with the instigation of gradual loss of land and soil and the power hungry modes of conventional farming, the notion does have the potential to cater to our future needs. In this regard, the Vertical Farm has been conceptualized as a possible solution to food production, where the dictum of sustainability is maintained within a new and advanced economic eco system.

reen technologies and electric cars have already been promoted a lot and now it’s time for New Delhi to see solar powered rickshaws on the road. Named ‘Soleckshaws’, the rickshaws are designed and developed by the Central Mechanical Engineering Research Institute (CMERI) with the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). Six manufacturers have been selected by the government and the designs are already being finalized. The rickshaws will be of three variants and capable of reaching a maximum speed of 25 km/hr. The three variants will be 85,000 (for plastic frame with an enhanced battery), 75,000 (for plastic frame only) and 45,000 (for metal frame body).

The 10 global sustainability megaforces that may impact business over the next two decades

Hurricane Irene struck the east-cost of the U.S., Canada and the Caribbean last summer, and brought winds up to 85 mph (120 km/h) that caused mortalities and extensive damages among various communities. The tropical storm was called the ’100-year event’, but scientists from MIT and Princeton University hypothesize that similar storms like Hurricane Irene could occur as often as every 3 to 20 years.

The number of people living in China's cities, which last year for the first time surpassed 50 percent of the national population, is considered a boon for the consumer goods market. That is based on the assumption that there will be more families with more disposable income when poor farmers from China's countryside move to cities and become middle-class industrial and office workers.

Major cities around the world are constantly looking for innovative ways of repurposing and redesigning everyday necessities, aiming to make them more attractive and functional. The most recent example we’ve spotted is London’s Renew, with their network of London recycling points featuring built-in screens to alert City workers with up-to-date information ranging from weather reports to the latest stock market results.

Swedish furniture company IKEA, has collaborated with Oregon architectural firm Ideabox, to launch its first line of prefabricated houses in the U.S., named the “Aktiv.” The IKEA-themed dwelling is a one-bedroom home centered around space-saving furniture and products. The hip and modern house was outfitted taking into consideration the demands from Pacific-Northwest homeowners, and is designed to be eco-friendly

Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Massachusetts have proposed a “repair-and-go” approach for fixing cracks on digital devices such as cell phones. This interesting development in technology uses microcapsules filled with a solution of nanoparticles that repair damaged surfaces and could extend the lifetime of a device.

At the Summit on the Global Agenda 2011 in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies asked some of the world’s leading minds within the entire GAC Network which technology trends would have the greatest impact on the state of the world in the near future.

Yale Locks, a 150 year old company known for experimenting with new technologies has recently developed an affordable door locking application for Blackberry phones. This further un-clutters our pockets of keys, relegating all locks to a single device.

Scientists have developed the world’s first magnetic soap for the expressed purpose of cleaning up oil spills. The soap is composed of iron rich salts dissolved in water, bromide ions and chloride. These ions form a magnetic core within the soap particles and can be controlled by magnetic fields when applied to water.

The “Augmented Structures v1.1: Acoustic Formations / İstiklâl Caddesi” exhibition by Salon2 in Istanbul, Turkey, plays with sound, music, light, video, mathematics, visual arts and architecture for a new type of building and streetscape experience. Each of these disciplines is transformed into another, creating a multi-sensory experience on the “living canvas.” This interdisciplinary design provides a glimpse into what buildings might look like in the future.

Marco Bernardi and pals at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge say there is a simple fix that could dramatically increase the performance of photovoltaics. Instead of two dimensional flat panels, Bernadi and co suggest using three dimensional structures.

The United Nations projects that the current world population of close to 7 billion will reach 10.1 billion in the next ninety years, reaching 9.3 billion by the middle of this century, according to the medium variant of the 2010 Revision of World Population Prospects, the official United Nations population projections.

Monthly images of futuristic cities artworks and impressions.

What the future might hold has long been a topic of speculation for artists and creative types. Trying to imagine what the world around us might look like in twenty, fifty, hundred years, or even end of the world can provide hours of entertainment. And it’s obvious that those artists and designers who take the time to create concepts of what they think the future might hold for us put a lot of time and consideration into their pieces.

The "internet of things" is viewed as the next big thing, but when will it allow people to create their own stuff, asks Russell M Davies.

The concept of the smart city is one that holds a lot of promise and potential in terms of how computerized, networked public infrastructure might improve energy efficiency, resource management, and the overall quality of life in cities. Given the impact that computers and smart phones have had on our personal and professional lives, it seems that the application of computer technology to the infrastructure of cities has even greater potential to change the way we live. Despite this potential, and with only a few exceptions, smart city technologies have yet to be adopted in most places.

But, according to Cisco, this all may be about to change

Last week Chinese authorities announced that for the first time more than half of the country's population were living in cities, 690.79 million, an increase of 21 million, compared to 656.56 million rural dwellers. The new urban-rural balance was a benchmark attained by the UK in the late 19th century and the US in the first decades of the last century – in 1800, only 3% of the world's people lived in cities. But the scale and speed of urbanisation across the developing world today are unprecedented – throwing up a string of megacities, from Jakarta to Istanbul, São Paulo to Cairo. Poor rural families flooding into the world's urban population centres bring challenges that have never before been seen – nor met.

GM’s new Windows of Opportunity project was begun to explore innovative ways to use interactive technologies to create a more interesting driving experience. The project, which was inspired by psychological studies that show passengers typically feel disconnected from their environments, uses smart glass to generate augmented reality digital layers over passing landscapes.

In China — where larger cities have populations of multi-millions — authorities are concerned that increasing car ownership will cause extreme congestion and paralyze road networks. Now the solution may come in the form of the Youngman JNP6250G, a bus believed to be the largest in the world, capable of transporting up to 300 passengers.

Manned surveillance missions are critical to obtaining useful intelligence. But sending a soldier into sensitive areas can often be too dangerous. Scientists are developing robots that could do the job. Last spring, the Advanced Technologies Laboratory at Lockheed Martin unveiled a prototype that uses sensors to model its environment, detect potential threats, calculate lines of sight, and locate good hiding places.

It is not usual for a home design blog to feature an automobile. But I guess it depends on what your definition of an automobile really is. Ever wondered about a day when your entire home is nothing but an evolved version of the ‘automobile’ itself?

Researchers in California have produced a cheap plastic capable of removing large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air. Down the road, the new material could enable the development of large-scale batteries and even form the basis of "artificial trees" that lower atmospheric concentrations of CO2 in an effort to stave off catastrophic climate change.

IBM could be on the verge of achieving a breakthrough in battery technology that could give electric cars a 500 mile range, overcoming the range anxiety barrier to the adoption of electric cars. The air breathing battery has a lithium anode and a carbon matrix cathode. When the battery is delivering power or discharging, the carbon cathode absorbs oxygen from the air that reacts with lithium ions from the anode to deposit lithium peroxide in the matrix structure. When the battery is recharged, the oxygen is expelled back into the atmosphere and the lithium ions are deposited back into the anode. A prototype is expected to be ready in 2013 and the technology could get commercialized by 2020.

Olfactory training of bees has been used to locate mines and weapons of mass destruction. The Hybrid Insect Micro Electromechanical Systems (HI-MEMS) program is aimed at developing technology to provide control over insect locomotion, just as reins are needed for effective control over horse locomotion.

China Broad Group built a 30 story building in 15 days and will mass factory mass produce skyscrapers. A factory has been built to produce 10 million square meters of mass produced skyscrapers (about 100 million square feet) each year. The 30 story building is 183000 square feet so the factory can produce about 500 of the 30 story building each year and many more factories will be built. There goal is to have the production of two factories for 2012. They are trimming their costs to 7,000 yuan ($1100 per square meter) to 8,000 yuan per square meter.

On Tuesday, China's National Bureau of Statistics announced that China has, for the first time ever, more urban than rural dwellers.

Writing for the NY Times Sunday Review, Sarah Williams Goldhagen opines on the attraction of architects and urban designers to the design language of trees and other embodied metaphors.

The technology is made possible by commercially available sensors for recording electroencephalograms (EEGs), which are basically the electrical outputs your brain produces while it thinks. Scientists then trained a computer program to distinguish the particular electrical patterns that are produced when a person thinks certain commands, such as "left," "right," "accelerate" or "brake."

The project, masterminded by the Ministry of Agriculture, will involve unmanned tractors working the fields of the farm on a disaster zone site spanning 600 acres.

Robots will then box produce grown on the farm, including rice, wheat, soybeans, fruit and vegetables as part of the “Dream Project” scheme, according to the Nikkei.

One Pew study has found that text messaging is growing more quickly than anyone has imagined, while a new Brookings paper is predicting cheap and total monitoring of all electronic communications by authoritarian governments in the next few years.

The City of Austin, Texas may enact one of the toughest bag bans in the country come 2016. The city council is set to vote on the ban next month that would require retailers to only offer reusable bags.

The ban would include a three-year adjustment period starting in 2013 for retailers and consumers to get prepared where single-use bags could still be purchased at 25 cents each. Once 2016 hits though, only reusable bags would be allowed and that would include City of Austin facilities and all city events.

Norwegian company WindFlip is developing an alternative method for offshore wind turbine deployment that can accommodate shallow water, while allowing for relatively high transport speeds and a minimum amount of time spent putting the turbines in place.

A swarm of robots working flawlessly in tandem have successfully built a beautiful undulating tower in a warehouse outside of Paris. The world’s first building built by flying robots was designed by architects Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler of Gramazio & Kohler, and it was assembled in a matter of days by levitating robots engineered and built by ETH Zurich

Experts are making predictions for 2012 in a wide variety of technology, business, and economics areas.

The International Telecommunications Union estimates that at the end of 2011 there were 2.42 billion internet users in the world (an increase from 2.04 billion internet users at the end of 2010)

The Economist magazine forecasts that China economy at market rates will pass the US economy in 2018

They also predict
2020 for China stock markets to exceed the valuation of US stock markets
2023 for China consumer spending to pass the US
2025 for China defense spending to pass the US

nvisibility cloaks. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence. A Facebook for genes. These were just a few of the startling topics IFTF explored at our recent Technology Horizons Program conference on the "Future of Science." More than a dozen scientists from UC Berkeley, Stanford, UC Santa Cruz, Scripps Research Institute, SETI, and private industry shared their edgiest research driving transformations in science. MythBusters' Adam Savage weighed in on the future of science education.

Megacities are the future of our planet. Author James Canton offers several visions and strategies to begin planning for them.

Five years after Gilberto Kassab, the mayor of São Paulo, Brazil passed the "Clean City Law", banning all visual pollution around the city, both citizens and businesses are thankful.

In the age of food trucks, pop-up stores, and the Burning Man city, is it time to rethink the notion of "temporary" architecture?