A collection of interesting pictures I found over the years,...

A collection of interesting pictures I found over the years, Part 15: Architecture (look at my posts for the other parts)

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No link. But a really cool looking fishbowl…..this would...

No link. But a really cool looking fishbowl…..this would give me a heart attack every time i saw it

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Ideas Bricolaje Tools4pro - Colecciones - Google+

Ideas Bricolaje Tools4pro - Colecciones - Google+

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Apartment Tour! 300 sq. foot studio in NYC - YouTube

Apartment Tour! 300 sq. foot studio in NYC - YouTube

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Living in a Shoebox Apartment? This Hi-Tech Furniture Could Help...

Living in a Shoebox Apartment? This Hi-Tech Furniture Could Help | WIRED - YouTube

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The narrow house on Behance

The narrow house on Behance

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Experimental rolling house.

Experimental rolling house.

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Rethinking the Split House / Neri & Hu Design and Research...

Rethinking the Split House / Neri & Hu Design and Research Office in Architecture & Interior design

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Abeel House By Steven Vandenborre & Mias Architects

Abeel House By Steven Vandenborre & Mias Architects

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Paper Airplane Icons | Bitsplitting.org

Paper Airplane Icons | Bitsplitting.org

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fuckyeahphysica: The intricacies involved in launching a...

techcrunch: Surprise! Google unexpectedly announced the Android...

techcrunch:

Surprise! Google unexpectedly announced the Android N Developer Preview early. And to make things even easier for developers — and adventurous users — the preview is available as an over-the-air update.

Check out the early preview here. 

It looks *so* *bad*. It’s like Google hired Samsung designers to influence material design. Step backwards for sure.

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itsfullofstars: NASA’s next-gen Z-2 spacesuitThe Z-2 has been...

itsfullofstars:

NASA’s next-gen Z-2 spacesuit

The Z-2 has been designed purely with one purpose in mind - to allow astronauts to explore a foreign planet. The suit won’t be worn during space walks or on board spacecraft, but will be used when humans reach Mars.

“The suit is designed for maximum astronaut productivity on a planetary surface – exploring, collecting samples, and maneuvering in and out of habitats and rovers,” NASA explained.

Seems like it could be more somehow… This doesn’t really look that different.

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npr: One of the most dramatic homes in Los Angeles has just...

Jeff Green/LACMA


Jeff Green/LACMA


Tom Ferguson Photography/LACMA


Tom Ferguson Photography/LACMA

npr:

One of the most dramatic homes in Los Angeles has just been donated to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Designed in 1961 by John Lautner — an influential Southern California architect — the glass and concrete house clings to the side of a canyon. Its present owner, James Goldstein, has been revising and perfecting it for 35 years.

Goldstein — a property investor and basketball superfan — is as striking as his home. On the day of my visit he meets me in a leather cowboy hat, tight black leather pants with rows of horizontal zippers up each leg, high black boots, a blue leather jacket and a jaunty scarf around his neck. (“I’m very involved in fashion,” he tells me.)

To arrive at his house, I’ve driven up a steep hill, and down a very steep driveway. Los Angeles has its share of stunning modernist homes, but even picky architects salute this one. (Movie-makers, too — you might recognize it from The Big Lebowski or Charlie’s Angels.)

The ‘Big Lebowski’ House Is Donated To LA Art Museum

Photos: Jeff Green/LACMA and Tom Ferguson Photography/LACMA

This is a house? Crazy.

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So clean and simple - truly the Apple white aesthetic ideal.

So clean and simple - truly the Apple white aesthetic ideal.

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materialsscienceandengineering: A football helmet design that...

materialsscienceandengineering:

A football helmet design that listens to physics

A shock-absorbing football helmet system being developed at the University of Michigan could blunt some dangerous physics that today’s head protection ignores.

The engineering researchers making the system, called Mitigatium, were recently funded by a group that includes the National Football League. Their early prototype could lead to a lightweight and affordable helmet that effectively dissipates the energy from hit after hit on the field. Current helmets can’t do this, and that’s one of the reasons they aren’t very good at preventing brain injury.

“Today’s football helmets are designed to prevent skull fractures by reducing the peak force of an impact,” said Ellen Arruda, U-M professor of mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering. “And they do a good job of that. But they don’t actually dissipate energy. They leave that to the brain.”

Sports like football present big challenges for the designers of protective head gear. To dissipate energy, a helmet typically has to deform, like the bike version cracks in a collision. And disposable helmets aren’t practical for football players.

Read more.

We’re working really hard to help keep our modern day gladiators less in danger than they currently are… but is there a place for this brute-ish sport in modern, civilized society? I much prefer real football.

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materialsscienceandengineering: Graphene composite may keep...

materialsscienceandengineering:

Graphene composite may keep wings ice-free

Conductive material heats surfaces, simplifies ice removal

A thin coating of graphene nanoribbons in epoxy developed at Rice University has proven effective at melting ice on a helicopter blade.

The coating by the Rice lab of chemist James Tour may be an effective real-time de-icer for aircraft, wind turbines, transmission lines and other surfaces exposed to winter weather, according to a new paper in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces.

In tests, the lab melted centimeter-thick ice from a static helicopter rotor blade in a minus-4-degree Fahrenheit environment. When a small voltage was applied, the coating delivered electrothermal heat – called Joule heating – to the surface, which melted the ice.

The nanoribbons produced commercially by unzipping nanotubes, a process also invented at Rice, are highly conductive. Rather than trying to produce large sheets of expensive graphene, the lab determined years ago that nanoribbons in composites would interconnect and conduct electricity across the material with much lower loadings than traditionally needed.

Read more.

Let’s fly through all the blizzards!

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npr: This week, NASA is set to reach a milestone on one of its...

npr:

This week, NASA is set to reach a milestone on one of its most ambitious projects. If all goes to plan, workers will finish assembling the huge mirror of the James Webb Space Telescope — an $8 billion successor to the famous Hubble telescope.

“So far, everything — knock on wood — is going quite well,” says Bill Ochs, the telescope’s project manager at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

The massive mirror is being built in a facility that’s essentially a giant, ultra-clean gymnasium. NPR can’t go inside for risk of contamination, but I meet crew chief Dave Simm at an observation deck where we can see the mirror below. Simm works for the contractor Harris Corp., and he’s normally in there assembling it. When he is, he has to wear a white suit that covers every inch of his body.

“The only thing exposed is your eyes,” he says. (Spacecraft assembly pro tip, he adds: To use your cellphone in the clean area, try a Bluetooth headset under your protective clothing.)

Massive Space Telescope Is Finally Coming Together

Photo: Chris Gunn/NASA

This is crazy. Clean room on steroids, for some giant mirrors that shine brighter than diamonds.

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spacethatneverwas: Fictional space DSEV Kronos 1 Deep Space...

spacethatneverwas:

Fictional space DSEV Kronos 1

Deep Space Exploration Vehicle “Kronos 1″ in low earth orbit, right after leaving the orbital construction dock.

Interesting space module…

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engineeringtldr: engineering-girls: engineeringtldr: We need...

engineeringtldr:

engineering-girls:

engineeringtldr:

We need to design a bracket to take some kind of repeated bending load. One end is clamped stationary between a couple of plates, and a uniaxial, fully-reversed load with a maximum of 300 lbf rides on the end at a distance of a away from where it’s clamped. There’s a fillet where it clamps into the wall to try and keep it from fretting on a sharp corner. We’ll say it’s machined steel with an ultimate tensile strength of 82000 psi and an elastic modulus of 28 x 10^6 psi. We need it to survive basically forever. We aren’t given any dimensions, so we need to figure out exactly what this part has to look like. (Problem adapted from Machine Design: An Integrated Approach, 4th Ed., by Robert L. Norton.)

This is a pretty complicated problem - although we’re given a basic shape, we need to design this piece more or less from scratch. Here’s the basic process we’ll follow for this and other fatigue design problems:

1. Initial estimated design
   
2. Calculate nominal stresses
3. Apply fatigue stress concentration factor
   
4. Calculate principal stresses
   
5. Calculate corrected endurance limit or fatigue strength
6. Calculate safety factor
7. Modify design

This gets long and ugly, but none of the individual pieces are too bad.

Keep reading

The cool thing is being able to write code (either in a spreadsheet or another program like octave/matlab) to solve the problem by iterations for you.

YES. A thousand times yes. If you have access to a spreadsheet or similar, by all means, do out the math, plug in your numbers, and let the program do the heavy lifting for the iterations.

Code, easy engineering, school is pointless. Yes.

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