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Stormproofing Cities

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Pruned 2013-03-06 08:37:00
(New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.) Terreform ONE has released the brief for this year's ONE Prize Competition, challenging entrants to envision urban design strategies for coping with present and future ?severe climate dynamism.? How can cities adapt to the future challenges of extreme weather? The ONE Prize is a call to deploy sophisticated design to alleviate storm impact through various urban interventions such …

The Bismuth Stepwell

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Pruned 2013-03-03 23:42:00
(Via Beautiful Crystals.) One of the Marvelous detritus that Tumblr occasionally spits out is this large bismuth crystal. As with most things on Tumblr, no other information is given, especially whether this sample was found naturally occurring or artificially grown. It's most likely the latter, which would explain the highly pronounced stair-step lattice distinctive to hopper crystals like bismuth. This characteristic structure …

The Interactive Anthrozoo

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Pruned 2013-03-01 01:06:00
(Smart rat. Photo courtesy of Anna Flagg. Source [pdf].) ?Scientists have connected the brains of a pair of animals and allowed them to share sensory information,? reports The Guardian today. This is a ?major step towards what the researchers call the world's first 'organic computer.'? The US team fitted two rats with devices called brain-to-brain interfaces that let the animals collaborate on …

Airspace

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Pruned 2013-02-27 21:43:00
With winter weather wreaking havoc in the airspace above Pruned HQ, Chicago, I thought I'd post a small portion of a VFR map that someone digitized and then overlaid on Google Maps. The map covers the continental United States plus Alaska and Hawaii, parts of Canada and Mexico, and a good chunk of the Caribbean. (Visual flight rules for the Chicago area.) Quoting …

The Interactive Garden

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Pruned 2013-02-26 03:59:00
(Browsing with plants. Video by Disney Reasearch.) It was only a matter of time before someone turned household plants into a multi-touch interactive device, because now we have the Botanicus Interacticus. Based on the sophisticated Touch� sensing technology Botanicus Interacticus creates a magical experience through the non-invasive instrumentation of living plants. Aurora like particles are emitted around different plants, triggered and transformed by …

New Meteorwrongs

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Pruned 2013-02-24 20:48:00
(Ryan Thompson, Dark Flight: Meteorwrongs, 2011. Photo courtesy of the artist. Source.) With the search for fragments of the meteor that streaked over Chelyabinsk continuing, I thought I'd point readers out to a project, titled Dark Flight: Meteorwrongs, by Ryan Thompson, whose Glacial Erratic Monuments project was previously featured here on Pruned. Quoting the artist's brief statement in full: Within one of the most …

A Cemetery for Floating Cities

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Pruned 2013-02-14 16:00:00
(Top image: Mathilde Roussel, Lives of Grass, 2010; photo by Matthieu Raffard. Bottom image: Sasha Cisar, An Urban Canopy, 2008.) A marvelous splicing courtesy of Tumblr, pairing together Mathilde Roussel's Lives of Grass and Sasha Cisar's An Urban Canopy from which a parallel world city could be concocted. It's a floating city whose inhabitants, after centuries in their stratospheric exile, have developed a …

The (Soviet) Supersurface of Architectural Diaspora

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Pruned 2013-02-13 21:33:00
(Administrative building in Rapla, Estonia, completed 1977. Roomas Rein, architect. Photographer unknown.) A quick note to say that Pruned has a Tumblr twin, which has recently been ticking up in activity to complement a reanimated blog, though, to my surprise, it seems to be complementing it with priapic, mammary, death and feral imagery. Hope this isn't some ongoing psychosexual self-portrait with the …

Urban Moonlight

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Pruned 2013-02-11 16:00:00
(?11th St. & Lydia St.,? from Andy Mattern, Moonlight Towers, 2008. Used with permission. Source.) A meme self-organized itself in my bookmarks recently, clustering together internet detritus around the subject of city lights. Included is a satellite image, published on NASA's Earth Observatory, of North America and its constellations of urban brightnesses at night. It's a classic image that most have probably seen …

Gut Farm

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Pruned 2013-02-11 05:40:00
(Video courtesy of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan.) I was very intrigued by a crowdfunded, citizen-scientist project to ?characterize the microbial diversity of the Global Gut.? Those that have donated will receive a sampling kit and instructions on how to collect stool samples. Once sent back to the lab, the samples are then genetically sequenced to create …

The Super-Shelterbelt City

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Pruned 2013-02-08 05:59:00
(Tarim Desert Highway. Photo courtesy of China Petroleum Engineering Co. Source.) Yesterday's post about the global importation of aerosol reminded me of the Tarim Desert Highway, which crosses the great expanse of the Taklimakan (or Taklamakan) Desert in western China, the region I referred to as a Hell Mouth. I've blogged about it several times over the years, first briefly appearing as …

Defense Aerosol Research Projects Agency

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Pruned 2013-02-06 16:00:00
(The global aerosol trade. Animation courtesy of NASA.) Last year, NASA and university scientists released a study revealing that half of the airborne particles, or aerosols, in the skies above Canada and the United States come from foreign sources. (?That's a huge number — half.?) Indeed, analysis of satellite data showed that ?64 million tons of dust, pollutants, and other particles cross …

Gardens as Crypto-Water-Computers Redux

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Pruned 2013-02-04 16:00:00
(A ?fluid circuit.? Photo by William Vandivert.) The above image appeared in an article published by Scientific American in 1964. It's actually a photograph, believe or not, of a block of plastic ?chemically etched? with ?fluid control devices,? which are basically an arrangement of channels. Streams of fluids are pumped through these micro-canals, and applying the principles of fluid dynamics, one could …

Forests as Paleoastronomical Observatories

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Pruned 2013-02-03 22:11:00
(An artist rendering of a gamma-ray burst. Image by NASA/Dana Berry/Skyworks Digital. Source.) Scientists have theorized that a gamma-ray burst may be responsible for ?an unusual level of a radioactive type of carbon known as carbon-14? found in ancient cedar trees in Japan. ?These enormous emissions of energy,? explains BBC News, ?occur when black holes, neutron stars or white dwarfs collide - the …

Robot-Readable Gardens

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Pruned 2013-01-31 22:42:00
If you enjoyed yesterday's mini film series on topiary robotics, you might also be interested in another line-up on garden machinery presented by Tuinbouw Technisch Atelier BV, a Dutch company (obviously) that advertises itself as ?a leading supplier of equipment for handling and selection of young plants and other equipment for growers and industries.? At least for their most recent uploads, …

Applied Topiary

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Pruned 2013-01-30 16:00:00
(Photo courtesy of Gebroeders Ezendam B.V. Source.) The other night, while inescapably mired in a seemingly endless video stream of manhole explosions (something which I recently learned are ?[e]ventualities in subterranean chambers? to which ?few large cities are immune?) and in an even more extended playlist of landslides and debris flows (in the hope of siting Fred Astaire and Shelley Winters), I …

Monstrous Geographies

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Pruned 2013-01-28 22:19:00
(?A male monster with four arms and two wings standing naked in the landscape,? from Giovanni Battista de' Cavalieri's Monsters from all parts of the ancient and modern world, 1585.) Apologies for posting this Call for Papers months after the deadline has passed. I myself found out about this conference a bit too late as well. Nevertheless, I thought I'd post the …

Glacier National Park

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Pruned 2013-01-28 04:59:00
(A prototype Glacier National Park. Image courtesy of !melk.) In what seems like a natural reaction to the extreme weather events in Australia, from wildfires to off-the-color temperatures to ?agonized dryness,? the northern latitudes produced their own antipodean freak shows. One of the more hyperborean images is arguably that of a Chicago building encased in ice. Firefighters were called to put out …

Liberate the Horizontal and Integrate the Vertical Super-Surface

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Pruned 2012-11-01 04:28:46
(?Stratosphere Giant? Coast Redwood, Humboldt Redwoods State Park, CA. Photo(s) by James Balog.) A very quick reminder that today is the last Sunday of March. That means it's International Tree Climbing Day! Go out and find yourself a nice tree, or any tree for that matter, and shimmy on up. Go survey your city anew, replay forgotten moments from your youth, domicile …

Welcome to the Coldscape

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Pruned 2012-03-15 07:54:20
(Kraft's cheese cave in Springfield, Missouri. Photo by Christoph Morlinghaus.) Previewing an upcoming exhibition co-organized with The Center for Land-Use Interpretation (CLUI), Nicola Twilley, of Edible Geography, takes us on an abbreviated tour of North America's coldscape, the ?vast and immeasurable volume of thermally controlled space? that ?is as ubiquitous as it is varied.? Exactly how varied? According to her undoubtedly incomplete …

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