The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge connecting Staten Island and Brooklyn is the U.S.’s longest suspension bridge, surpassing even the Golden Gate Bridge. Since 1976, it’s served as the starting point of the New York City Marathon, which hosted over 50,000 competitors on November 3rd. Watch them all in this gorgeous time-lapse.
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Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week’s most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us — it’s the Week in Green.
Apple’s new headquarters is perhaps the most hotly anticipated building in the country, and the company just released a new set of images of the spaceship-shaped building. The new renderings provide a detailed look inside the ring-shaped building. Another ambitious proposal could be coming to life: The folks behind a futuristic marine-research vessel known as the SeaOrbiter just launched a crowdfunding campaign. Construction on the knife-shaped vessel is expected to begin next spring. On the gadget front, a pair of engineering students at Duke University has discovered a new way to charge smartphones with WiFi — and they say the power-harvesting device is even more efficient than a USB charger.
Check out this pedestrian bridge that China wants to build over the Dragon King Harbor River in Changsha, China. It’s all wavy and crazy and I don’t know about you, but this lazy American is getting winded just looking at it.
This bridge was designed by Amsterdam based NEXT Architects and construction is scheduled to begin next year. I’m kind of saddened though. This was the perfect opportunity for them to build a dragon bridge. I mean, they already have the wavy body. They just need a giant dragon’s head at both ends. But nope. No dragon. Vietnam has one, why not China?
The design of the nearly 500-foot-long bridge is supposed to resemble traditional Chinese knots and/or a Möbius strip. Booo! I just want a dragon. Failing that, a roller coaster ride to the other side would have been cool too. Seriously though, it’s pretty cool.
[via designboom via Laughing Squid]
Artist-engineer Thomas Heatherwick’s "Garden Bridge" proposal is open for public feedback in the UK. A heavily forested pathway stretching across the Thames, Heatherwick’s bridge would be the second pedestrian-only bridge constructed in London in less than two decades, succeeding Norman Foster’s initially infamous—but now enormously popular—Millennium Bridge, built in 2000.
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The problem with building man made structures in natural wonders like mountain ranges is that they can sore your eyes pretty quickly. Some parts of the world should be left untouched! But imagine a bridge like this one, designed to look like a cloud, on top of a few mountains. The views would be absolutely breathtaking and just walking the bridge would be thrilling.
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Because China lives in a world where they can build anything by yesterday, we often get to see a lot of architectural miscues
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Oh, to be a cyclist in the Netherlands. This steel tensioned deck lets cyclists ride high above a busy multi-lane highway in Eindhoven—one of the most bike-friendly areas in the world.
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Earlier this year, a design competition was announced for a new pedestrian bridge in Salford, England. Called the Salford Meadows Bridge competition, and sponsored by the Royal Institute of British Architects, the actual winning design will be announced at the of November.
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When something particularly bad or painful happens, some people just withdraw and never come out of their cocoons. They can recover slowly or they can get worse and one day decide that they want nothing more than to end it all.
So many of the latter go to the Mapo Bridge in South Korea to do just that. Between the years 2007 and 2012, more than a hundred people jumped from the bridge in attempts to end their lives. They might not have gotten the help they needed previously, but you can at least convince them otherwise at the last minute. That’s what the Seoul City government is trying to do in collaboration with Samsung Life Insurance.
Instead of constructing high fences or a suicide barrier on the bridge, they added interactive handrails that address passersby directly. They’re embedded with motion sensors to detect the presence of anyone near them, so when someone passes by, the handrail lights up with an inspiring quote or message that were written with the help of psychologists and suicide prevention specialists.
A sample message is as follows: “How have you been? Have you eaten? If you need to talk, why don’t you talk to us?” This is then followed by a number for a suicide hotline.
Since launching the project, the Seoul City government claims suicide rates from the Mapo Bridge have dropped 77%. This potential lifesaver is just ingenious, and while it won’t solve the underlying problems of potential jumpers, it could convince them to get the help they need before taking their lives.
[via CRAVE Australia via C|NET]
Sharing files between devices using the cloud is fine, but California firm Leef Technology believes it has a more direct approach: a USB key. Aptly named Bridge, the flash drive lets you copy files from any Android 4.0 or higher device with a micro-USB connector, then transfer them to your Mac or PC by popping out the larger end. It’s similar to the micro-USB OTG dongles we’ve seen at Computex earlier this year, despite the difference in design. You can nab the double-ended peripheral in either 16GB ($18) or 32GB ($28) from Amazon or Leef’s website (at the source), and a 64GB GB version will be out in July. Who knows — maybe that’ll finally put an end to the cat video and selfie clutter on your cloud service.
Filed under: Peripherals
Source: Leef
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