science wire

Foreclosed: Architecture Center Reimagines Suburbia After Housing Crisis
Columbia faculty talk about the Foreclosed exhibit and the mission of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture.

Finding the maths on your street
A series of walking tours launched next week show how you can discover the maths hidden in our urban surroundings. Anyone can join the free tours of London and Oxford (book your place here ) which explore how cities – their buildings, roads, railways, sewers, and power systems – are all built on mathematical foundations.

‘Invisibility’ cloak could protect buildings from earthquakes
University of Manchester mathematicians have developed the theory for a Harry Potter style 'cloaking' device which could protect buildings from earthquakes. William Parnell's team in the University's School of Mathematics have been working on the theory of invisibility cloaks which, until recently, have been merely the subject of science fiction.

Infrastructure revolution
Technology has advanced to the point where the condition of bridges, tunnels and buildings can be monitored in unprecedented detail.

Nanoelectronics: Ferroelectric devices show potential
News and Views The quest for a non-volatile memory technology that offers high storage density, high read and write speeds, and low power consumption has triggered intense research into new materials, mechanisms and device architectures. Among the successful memory technologies to emerge from these efforts have been the atomic switch, the resistive RAM and the magnetic tunnel junction.

Theatres of war: public spending on buildings for the arts
National recommendations for using public money to build arts venues are only succeeding in enforcing a system that is already flawed, a new study concludes.

Oriental Institute exhibit shows seeing isn’t always believing
The way people think about life in the ancient Middle East is largely based on the pictures, paintings and images they see in books and museums.

Durst Gift Helps Launch New Center on Urban Real Estate
Vishaan Chakrabarti, Carole Ann Fabian and Helena Durst talk about the Durst gift and the new Center for Urban Real Estate.

IEEE Micro's special issue: Boris Grot is part of it !
News in brief Boris Grot from the Parallel Systems Architecture Laboratory (PARSA) has been published in the last IEEE Micro's special issue; Top Picks from Computer Architecture Conferences. His paper "Kilo-NOC: A Heterogeneous Network-on-Chip Architecture for Scalability and Service Guarantees" has been written with collaborators from the University of Texas, NVIDIA and Carnegie Mellon University.

Intelligent Buildings Project receives gift from Wells Fargo Foundation
Yale's Intelligent Buildings Project has received $200,000 from the Wells Fargo Foundation to support groundbreaking research on energy consumption in buildings.

White roofs to make for cooler Melbourne buildings
New research launched by the University of Melbourne and the City of Melbourne will give buildings owners across Melbourne access to information that can help their buildings absorb less heat and stay cooler during hot days.

"Minergie in the UAE, We are taking advantage of our experiences"
Jean-Louis Scartezzini, head of EPFL's Solar Energy and Building Physics Laboratory, is passionate about Minergie—a Swiss label for energy consumption in buildings and the most widely applied building energy standard in the world with almost 20,000 buildings.

Giving concrete infrastructure a second life
Rather than just fixing corroding concrete infrastructure, Professor Eugen Brühwiler and his team of engineers have shown that it can be improved using ultra-high performance fiber reinforced concrete.

3 new IC Professors elevated to IEEE Fellows in 2012
Babak Falsafi, Pascal Fua and Emre Telatar have been elevated to IEEE Fellows this year. This brings the number of IC professors who are IEEE Fellows to ten, a quarter of the faculty.

Clearing the Clouds.
Clearing the Clouds: A Study of Emerging Workloads on Modern Hardware. The emergence of global-scale online services has galvanized scale-out software, characterized by splitting vast datasets and massive computation across many independent servers. In a paper appearing in ASPLOS 2012, Profs.

Here comes the sun
A new sunflower-inspired pattern increases concentrated solar efficiency. Just outside Seville, in the desert region of Andalucia, Spain, sits an oasis-like sight: a 100-meter-high pillar surrounded by rows of giant mirrors rippling outward.

‘Extreme Sleepover #7’ – on the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River
In the seventh of a series of reports contributed by Cambridge researchers, architect Michael Ramage travels to South Africa to build strength out of weakness.

Young Architecture Champion wins Australia at Large Rhodes Scholarship
14 Dec 2011 Architecture graduate Angela Darby from the University of Melbourne has a passion for sustainability and design and hopes to bring these two disciplines together through her studies at Oxford University.

Le Corbusier, a revised vision of the architect and his work
Roberto Gargiani unveils a different vision of Switzerland's most famous architect - Le Corbusier.

Winners announced in portable classrooms for the future comp
An international jury has deliberated over design ideas submitted to the Melbourne School of Design competition to revolutionise the humble re-locatable classroom, and the results are now in.

MIT: First prototype built from MIT’s effort to construct houses for $1,000 each
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Home prices in many of the world's most famous cities run to well over $1,000 per square foot.