Posts Tagged ‘cities’
New Mexico Building a 20-Square-Mile Empty City in Which to Test Renewable Energy
New Mexico will soon be home to a 20-square-mile mock city, complete with highways, houses and commercial buildings. Structures will be erected to model various styles, old and new, to make it more realistic. Its Stephen King-esque name, The Center, seems fitting of a city that will be home to no one.
The $200 million city will be used to test new renewable energy infrastructure, smart grids, traffic systems, wireless networks and more, according to Washington, D.C.-based tech firm Pegasus Global Holdings. The company announced plans Tuesday to build the ghost town on state-owned land somewhere in New Mexico, according to the . It would be located either in the Albuquerque-Santa Fe corridor or near Las Cruces, near the borders with Mexico and Texas.
The project, which the company says will be the first of its kind in the U.S., will let research institutions and private companies test new technologies in a real-world setting. Although there will be no human occupants, buildings could be tested just as they would if people were using them — different thermostat settings among neighbors would impact how a smart grid modulates energy, for instance. This would be more useful than simply using computer simulations in a lab.
The Center’s presence in New Mexico ensures it will be close (at least fairly close, it's the West) to the state’s lineup of federal labs and research centers, from Los Alamos to Sandia to White Sands Missile Range.
The Center would make money by charging researchers to use the facilities, according to CEO Bob Brumley. It would also sublease some of its state land for the development of a non-ghost town at its perimeter, where living humans visiting The Center could come to stay and eat.
New Mexico state leaders have been working with Pegasus for 18 months, the AP reported. Brumley is in the process of selecting a site for the ghost town, but it will be a few months before everything is final.
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IBM Data Analysis Platform to Plan a More Efficient Future, Coming to a City Near You
The Intelligent Operations Center is designed to aggregate data from multiple government IT systems, which could help city planners spot trends and connections among various types of data. As we reported previously, IBM began rolling out the porject in Rio de Janeiro, where algorithms are helping and coordinate emergency responses. IBM has also been working with smaller locales like Dubuque, Iowa, to study anything from public safety to water use.
The platform could integrate public transportation information with traffic management, for instance, letting cities plan better bus routes or traffic signal patterns based on congestion at various times of day. Or it could monitor maintenance logs on city infrastructure, deploying utility crews to fix water pipes or other assets before they break. It could even help planners devise better emergency responses, analyzing cameras and crime databases to catch criminals or even prevent crime, IBM says.
It will all be cloud-based, so cities won’t have to hire teams of on-the-ground IT consultants to sift through competing types of data. This will be cheaper for cities, but also easier for IBM, which can easily customize code for any municipality.
The plug-and-play system will have several modules based on various themes, like public safety or water management. None of the modules are available yet, but IBM will roll them out over the next year, explains. IBM engineers noticed several common threads in its previous Smarter Cities projects, like how to deal with congestion, and decided to turn them into code.
IBM plans to offer the software starting June 17. Cities will be able to contract with Big Blue itself or various vendors, the company says. No word yet on price, but IBM says the system's ability to spot inefficiencies will save cities money in the long run. For instance, Alameda County, Calif., used a software system to coordinate its social services, which saved $25 million a year, IBM tells PC World.
This could be a promising proposition for cash-strapped municipalities still reeling from the recession. And that sounds pretty smart.
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2011 Skyscraper Contest: Energy Harvesters, Domes With Holes, and Other Buildings of the Future
Click here to see the winning designs and some other interesting entries.
Hosted by the architecture magazine eVolo, the competition is meant to stimulate discussion, development and promotion of new concepts for vertical density. Participants are asked to examine the relationships among the skyscraper and the natural world, the community and the city.
The top three awards went to designs that focus on the environment, whether it’s through cleaning polluted air or re-imagining one of the marvels of the modern world, the Hoover Dam. A host of honorable mentions include environmental cleanup facilities, sustainable communities and even subterranean communities for the living and the dead.
Click through to the for some of the highlights from this year's competition.
Citizens Push To Erect A Statue of RoboCop in Detroit
What started out as a joke on the social media site has mushroomed into a nationwide effort to in the beleaguered city of Detroit. Earlier this week, someone in Massachusetts sent a tweet to Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, suggesting RoboCop would be a great mascot for the city. Philadelphia has a Rocky statue, and RoboCop would "kick Rocky's butt," he pointed out.
Bing actually wrote back, responding, “There are not any plans to erect a statue to Robocop. Thank you for the suggestion.”
The Internet was listening. Not long after Bing’s tweet, a group of Detroit residents started a Facebook event page, which quickly grew to 4,600 supporters and counting. As of Friday morning, supporters have already raised $8,300 toward their $50,000 goal, using the .
, a nonprofit center aimed at cleaning up blighted neighborhoods, is offering space on its campus for the RoboCop statue. The Kickstarter campaign explains how metal artists might build the statue: “We can take a relatively small figure of RoboCop (conceivably even an action figure), have it 3D scanned by lasers (cool!) and scale its form to create a light-weight model of any size we'd like, which can then be used to pour and cast liquid metal.”
While Bing rejected the idea of a city-funded effort, his office seemed willing to accept RoboCop, in case his likeness is bestowed upon them.
“Should the opportunity present itself to receive a donation of this, or any other works of public art, we will consider acceptance and appropriate placement,” said Karen Dumas, a spokeswoman for the mayor’s office.
points out that not everyone loves the idea: “Sorry, I think this idea is horrid,” Carl Henry of Plymouth posted on the Facebook page. “If you wanna build a statue, build one to represent an unemployed autoworker, homeless person or something deserving of recognition.”
Others have argued statues of Motown legends like Diana Ross or Michael Jackson should take precedent over a nerd-tastic sci-fi icon.
The fundraising campaign has until March 26 to reach its goal.
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Future Robots Could Use Manhole Covers To Navigate Through Cities
The ubiquitous round metallic covers each have different shapes and sizes, occasionally for the sake of aesthetics and certainly when you account for wear and tear. In Japan, manhole covers are frequently works of art reflecting something about their cities. And every city has them — they’re one of the more permanent, reliable fixtures of the built environment, as New Scientist points out.
Hajime Fujii and colleagues from Shibaura Institute of Technology in Tokyo say robots could and use the covers to estimate their positions. All you would need is a basic metal detector attached to a robot’s foot.
Other robot-navigation methods use GPS, laser-range scans and even CCD cameras that compare a robot’s view to maps or even Google Street View. But environmental factors can skew the data from these sources, Fujii writes — GPS isn’t always reliable in cities, and Street View may not be so not helpful at night. Maps are helpful, but robots would still need to check their position against some kind of environmental landmark.
In Fujii’s system, it's as simple as manhole covers. Every cover would be scanned and its shape would be entered into a database for each city. Robots would be able to find the covers using a metal detector, and swipe some kind of scanner across the covers to cross-check the database and figure out where they are.
Of course, this would require robots stepping into traffic to check their whereabouts. But when we all have flying cars, that won't matter!
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FYI: Can Skyscrapers Prevent Tornadoes?
The reason Tornado Alley, the area stretching from Texas to South Dakota and from the Rocky Mountains to Kansas, is the most active tornado spot in the U.S.—it sees hundreds a year—is not because it’s flat farmland. It’s because tornadoes form when two opposite weather systems collide under certain conditions, and this occurs with great regularity in Tornado Alley. During springtime in that region, a constant stream of cool, dry air blowing southeast from Canada runs into a similarly steady stream of warm, moist air moving northwest from the Gulf of Mexico. As these weather fronts interact, they build high-intensity thunderstorms that, if they’re strong enough, can create a powerful updraft of air. Low pressure at the ground and in the middle or upper atmosphere interacts with the rising air to create a swirling vortex that can eventually extend a tornado funnel to the ground.
It just so happens that most cities with a lot of skyscrapers are situated in places where tornado-feeding conditions evolve less frequently. But tornadoes do in fact sometimes hit cities, says Gary Conte, a warning coordination meteorologist at the Upton, New York, outpost of the National Weather Service, citing recent touchdowns in Dallas, Memphis, Miami and four of New York City’s five boroughs (Manhattan has been spared, so far). Skyscrapers and topography don’t matter. “Tornadoes form thousands of feet above building tops,” Conte says. “Skyscrapers won’t prevent the funnel from coming down, but they might influence its shape so that it doesn’t look as nice and neat as it does on a flat surface like the plains. That doesn’t make it any less of a tornado, though.”
Have a science question you've always wondered about? Send a tweet to or email to fyi@popsci.com
Shigeru Komatsuzaki’s Beautiful 1960s Visions of the Future Pulled From Japanese Model Kits
So we get really excited about artists like , a prolific Japanese illustrator who spent 50 years drawing his own unique vision of the future. In magazines, model packages and even films, he imagined a world filled with things like rocket-launching robots, car boats and solar cities. If only things turned out like Komatsuzaki dreamed.
Click to launch the photo gallery
has a treasure trove of Komatsuzaki's work in a post today. Check out a sampling of some of our favorite illustrations here, then head over to for the rest--well worth it.
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