All things future

[Open Futures on Vimeo]

(click to view full size in new window)

The map above was created by Lee Byron by scraping some data from Walk Score. It would be nice to have these for every city!

[map by Lee Byron | Walk Score]

“MADRID (AFP) — US automaker General Motors said Tuesday it will equip the roof of its factory in Zaragoza in northeastern Spain with solar panels to create the world’s largest rooftop source of power from the sun.

The electricity produced by the 10 megawatt installation will be used by the plant, GM’s biggest in Europe, and also be sold to the local power grid, a company spokesman said.

“GM’s Zaragoza plant will become home to the biggest roof-top solar power station worldwide. This has significant potential to reduce costs at the plant,” GM Europe President Carl-Peter Forster said in a statement.

The company may install similar projects at GM Europe’s 11 other assembly and eight component plants depending on the results in Zaragoza, he added.

The installation will generate enough power annually to supply 4,600 households when it is completed at the end of September, the statement said.

It will comprise about 85,000 solar panels and cover about 2,000,000 square feet (183,000 square metres) of roof at the plant which assembles more than 480,000 vehicles a year for the European market.

GM currently has two of the largest solar power installations in the United States on the roofs of its Rancho Cucamonga and Fontana, California parts warehouses.

The company is due to install solar panels on its factory in Saint Petersburg, Russia next.

US firm Clairvoyant Energy and France’s Veolia Environment will build, own and operate the rooftop solar installation at Zaragoza.”

[AFP | photo by trochej | via physorg]

[videos and descriptions here]

[Read em here]

A Bug and a Mechanism.

A Gear Chain with a Mite Approaching.

Mirror Mechanism with a Spider Mite. Spider mite with legs on a mirror drive assembly.

Drive Mechanism Dwarfed by Mite! The tiny gears are dwarfed by a spider mite.

Spider Mite on Mirror Assembly.

These images came from Sandia National Laboratories. According to their site this is what they’re all about:

Sandia is a world leader in the technology required for development, fabrication, and production of microelectronic, photonic, micromachine and microsensor devices and products.

Sandia also has the ability to integrate these devices into complete microsystems. Microsystems that sense, think, act, communicate and self-power will make our nation more secure, revolutionize our industries, and will make the revolution in biology a reality.

Distinguishing strengths include materials growth and development, device and product design, fabrication technologies for silicon and compound semiconductor devices, advanced packaging technologies, reliability, failure analysis and product delivery for extreme environments.

[Sandia National Laboratories]

[New Scientist]

[via next nature]

Watch as these autonomous copters take some beach ball abuse and keep flying.

“The Stanford Testbed of Autonomous Rotorcraft for Multi-Agent Control (STARMAC) is a multi vehicle test bed used to demonstrate new concepts in multi-agent control on a real-world platform. STARMAC consists of six quadrotor vehicles that autonomously track a given waypoint trajectory, and perform higher level optimal control strategies online. In order to make such a testbed easy to use, we focused on a small and light, lowcost design, which presented numerous opportunities for innovative work.”

“The resulting vehicles can fly safely in both indoor and outdoor environments, can carry computing and sensing resources sufficient for autonomous operation and perception, and have simple, reconfigurable construction with low maintenance requirements.”

[via diydrones | Starmac Stanford]

Because putting your hand under the faucet was too hard.

[via dvice]