Innovation

Acoustic Fabric

Engineers at MIT and The Rhode Island School of Design have developed a piezoelectric fabric that can capture sounds by detecting vibrations and convert them into electric signals like a microphone. It is envisaged that the acoustic fabric could be used to monitor heart rates and respiratory sounds of the wearer. The fabric can also reverse the process and play sound that can be picked up by other fabric.

Mackintosh Hill House Chain Mail Box

In Helensburgh in Scotland, famous designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh built his showcase Hill House in 1904. A weaker Portland cement was used in the construction and is now unfortunately crumbling after over 100 years of exposure to one of the wettest regions of Scotland. To preserve the house and protect it from the rain, The National Trust has built a massive chain mail box over the house which will keep it dry but also ventilated. The box includes 32.4 million hand sewn steel rings!

Automatic Plane Photos

Luke Berndt created a system to automatically photograph planes that fly over his house in Washington D.C. The skybot system uses the transponder of the aircraft to info the camera where in the sky to point at to take the photo. The camera moves and photographs until the plane is out of range or a new plane is in range. A machine learning custom vision cloud function then confirms that a plane is present in each photo and posts the best one to the Skybot website along with its identification detail from the FAA database..

Ocean Battery

Dutch startup Ocean Grazer has designed an ocean battery that uses excess renewable energy to pump 20 million litres of low pressure water from a concrete reservoir on the sea bed into a flexible bladder. When energy is needed, the bladder releases the water back into the reservoir using the force the ocean above it, driving water turbines and generating up to 10MWh of electricity as it passes back into the reservoir, at an efficiency rate of between 70 and 80 percent.  

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