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Showing posts from April, 2016

This cube superimposed over a map of Manhattan could hold all humans on the planet

A cubic building (side of 1.07km) that could hold all 7.3 billion humans on the planet. The world's tallest building, the 828m Burj Khalifa, and the 443m Empire State Building added for reference.

Australian Urban Footprint

United North American Infrastructure

Wikkel house

"Wikkel house is a small house with a groundbreaking design, because it's made out of cardboard. It is taken years to develop the patented technology wikkel house. This is how it's made. We choose a fine tree, then we cut down the tree. From the tree we make cardboard of the highest quality...  Wikkel house has 24 layers of cardboard they glued together with magic glue. Wikkel house is three times more sustainable than traditional house. Wikkel house is built to last for at least one hundred years. Wikkel house weighs only 6,000 kilograms, which means it doesn't need a foundation. And wicked house can be placed within one day. All this makes Wikkel house highly flexible.  Take sides for example, each segment is 1.2 meters deep. Your Wikkel house can have eight segments five, twelve, three or one hundred twenty-seven. There's no limit really."

What powers the world?

How much of the world’s electricity is still reliant on coal, oil and gas? Flick the switches to see where the world would go dark without fossil fuels, which countries rely the most on nuclear, and who is using entirely renewable power to keep the lights on.

Temperature of rocks at 3.5 kilometers below the surface in the continental US

Homes in greenhouses

Greenhouse in Rotterdam Rotterdam University's experimental CHIBB House . Greenhouse in Stockholm The average temperature in Stockholm in January is -3°C (27°F). For Marie Granmar and Charles Sacilotto it can be much warmer thanks to the greenhouse that blankets their home. "For example at the end of January it can be -2°C outside and it can be 15 to 20°C upstairs," explains Sacilotto. He was inspired to build a house-in-a-greenhouse through his relationship with architect Bengt Warne who began designing the first Naturhus (Nature House) in 1974. Originally Sacilotto looked for an empty lot to build an entirely new Nature House, but he eventually settled on an old summer house on the Stockholm archipelago. Using Warne’s design, he covered the small summer house, plus an addition, in 4 millimeter glass. The footprint of the greenhouse is nearly double that of the home, leaving plenty of room for a wrap-around garden, and sin

Where you can find the sunniest locations in the world

Percent of days that are cloudy each year. The darkest red areas have almost no cloudy days. The darkest blue areas are cloudy nearly every day.  Seasonality of cloud cover. Dark purple areas have the greatest variation in cloud cover from month-to-month. The map above is the work of two scientists from EarthEnv , a collaborative biodiversity project supported by Yale University, NASA, and others. It shows what percentage of days each year are cloudy, for every place on Earth. To create it they analyzed 15 years of twice-daily satellite measurements. They also used the same data to produce maps that show monthly averages, seasonal variation, and identify areas of near-constant cloud cover. Like to soak up the sun? You can head to Northern Africa, Saudi Arabia, or Chile. California would also do in a pinch. If you enjoy the shade, the cloudiest places in the world turn out to be South America near the equator, the Congo River basin, and the island nations of Southeast Asia.

Surface ground depostiton of Caesium-137 released in Euroep after the Chernobyl accident

Beyond the skyscrapers

Nature in Hong Kong. Via rjl-art.com

Mapping land use scenarios

The Integrated Climate and Land use Scenarios (ICLUS) outputs are derived from a pair of models. A demographic model generates population projections for all counties of the conterminous United States to the year 2100. Those projections drive a spatial allocation model that distributes new housing units across the landscape in response to population growth.

Forest cover map by European Environment Agency

Nuclear Europe

Gridded population catrogram projection of nuclear reactors (including dusused facilities) in Europe. Nuclear power contributes only a small share to the global energy production. According to the World Energy Statistics 2015 published by the International Energy Agency (IEA) nuclear power accounts for 4.8% of the total primary energy supply worldwide, far behind oil (31.1%), coal (28.9%), natural gas (21.4%) and even behind biofuels and waste (10.2%). Of the producers of nuclear power, the United States are by far the largest with 33.2% of the world’s total, followed by France (17.1%) and Russia (7.0%). The United Kingdom’s production accounts for 2.9%. In contrast, France generates the largest share of its domestic electricity generation from nuclear power (74.4%). It is followed by Sweden (43.4%), Ukraine (43.0%) and South Korea (25.8%), while the United Kingdom comes fifth with 19.2%. Nuclear power is not a renewable source of energy. It relies on uranium which is a relati

Land use maps

Via fao.org

Fish species at risk

A fish is any member of a paraphyletic group of organisms that consist of all gill-bearing aquatic craniate animals that lack limbs with digits. Included in this definition are the living hagfish, lampreys, and cartilaginous and bony fish, as well as various extinct related groups. Most fish are ectothermic, allowing their body temperatures to vary as ambient temperatures change, though some of the large active swimmers like white shark and tuna can hold a higher core temperature. Fish are an important resource for humans worldwide, especially as food. Commercial and subsistence fishers hunt fish in wild fisheries or farm them in ponds or in cages in the ocean . They are also caught by recreational fishers, kept as pets, raised by fishkeepers, and exhibited in public aquaria. Fish have had a role in culture through the ages, serving as deities, religious symbols, and as the subjects of art, books and movies. via chartsbin.com

Do You Live in Cat Country?

Climate classification for Brazil, according to the Köppen criteria