Hasta La Gadget!

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.

The start of May saw an abundance of groundbreaking stories about flora and fauna — first, there was the heartwarming story of Naki’o, the first dog to be fitted with four prosthetic limbs after losing his legs to frostbite. Then we were surprised and slightly disturbed to learn that scientists in Uruguay used genetic engineering to create glowing sheep with genes from the Aequorea victoria jellyfish. In other illuminating news, a team of bioengineers in San Francisco is using genes from fireflies to create plants that glow. And the Institute of Space Systems in Germany announced plans to use Heliospectra’s new LED lighting systems to conduct research into growing vegetables in outer space.

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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.

It’s been an exciting week for green building as Inhabitat reported that some of the world’s top architects unveiled plans for high-tech developments with light environmental footprints. Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) won an international design competition for Europa, a new green-roofed city outside of Paris. Construction began last week on a new solar-powered stadium for the Euro 2016 football championship designed by Herzog & de Meuron. San Francisco celebrated the reopening of the Exploratorium this week in a new net-zero building along the city’s waterfront. In Mexico City, a helipad on the roof of an office building was converted into a co-working space with a gorgeous rooftop garden. And we also profiled the Ekinoid, a spherical, self-sufficient home that sits on stilts and is built to withstand disaster.

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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.

Just a few short years ago, 3D printing seemed like science fiction; we could grasp its value, but we didn’t yet have the ability to harness its power and put it to good use. Now, we’re seeing the technology advance every day — and it’s opening up new possibilities in medical science and other fields. This week, we shared the story of one British man who received a new 3D-printed face that gave him a second chance at life. In an equally amazing story, scientists at the University of Notre Dame successfully 3D printed the entire skeleton of a living rat. California-based Signal Snowboards unveiled the world’s first 3D-printed snowboard this week. And desktop 3D printing and scanning is getting cheaper every day — Canadian company Matterform is developing a lightweight 3D scanner called the Photon that’s cheaper than a tablet.

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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.

The first week of spring kicked off with a bang for the architecture community as Japanese architect Toyo Ito was awarded the 2013 Pritzker Prize. Meanwhile Christo unveiled the world’s largest inflated indoor sculpture in Germany and MIT researchers announced plans to 3D print a pavilion inspired by the technique that silkworms use to build their cocoons. Inhabitat also showcased several futuristic skyscraper concepts — including the Soundscraper, which transforms auditory vibrations into clean energy, and the Zero Skyscraper, which is a post-apocalyptic survival structure. And we profiled some fascinating adaptive-reuse projects, including a grain elevator that was transformed into a student housing complex in Oslo and a Cold War-era missile silo that was converted into an underground home in Upstate New York.

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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.

Now that green design is entering the mainstream, we’re beginning to see the design community tackle larger, more ambitious projects using eco-friendly techniques. Case in point: This week, San Francisco transformed the Bay Bridge into the world’s largest light sculpture by outfitting it with 25,000 LED lights. Because the lights are so energy-efficient, it will cost just $15 per night to run the installation. In Hamburg, workers are putting the finishing touches on the world’s first algae-powered building, which is set to open this month at the International Building Exhibition. A company in Tokyo recently demonstrated a new skyscraper deconstruction technique that harvests energy from the demolition process and salvages almost every piece of the building for reuse. And in Copenhagen, work has begun on a combined ski resort and waste-to-energy plant, which will convert the city’s trash into energy that powers the resort.

Filed under: Misc, Science

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