B2U Project

Sorry babes, but Britain has quit smoking.

From Monday, small UK shops will be forced to hide cigarettes. If shop owners breach the ban, they’ll face a “maximum fine of £5,000 in the magistrates’ court and up to six months in prison, two years if they ends up in the crown court.”

Egyptian Woman Dressed Like Man For More Than 40 Years To Provide For Family

For more than four decades, Egyptian mother Sisa Abu Daooh dressed as a man to provide for her family. Last week, she was awarded the “woman breadwinner” award by the authorities in her hometown of Luxor and was congratulated in person by the Egyptian president.

Interesting piece describes a recent solar-power study. The focus: Instead of “sprawling solar farms in wild places,” panels integrated into existing city spaces.

If solar power were installed on the rooftops and urban spaces in just the fraction of the state that’s already been developed, it could generate enough electricity to meet California’s energy needs, three to five times over.

"Integrating solar facilities into the urban and suburban environment causes the least amount of land-cover change and the lowest environmental impact," Hernandez wrote in the statement announcing the findings.

"Because of the value of locating solar power-generating operations near roads and existing transmission lines, our tool identifies potentially compatible sites that are not remote, showing that installations do not necessarily have to be located in deserts.

”In other words, we should bring the solar closer to the cities they power; onto rooftops, parking lots, and otherwise useless industrial waste sites.”

Great news for black rhinos!

The Black Rhino Range Expansion Project recently created its 10th black rhino population by relocating 19 rhinos to a new home in South Africa.

The next generation of desktop 3-D printers might do away with the excruciatingly slow process that current units use. Researchers have unveiled a printer that replaces the current extruder nozzle that squeezes out melted plastic one layer at a time with light and oxygen. 

The makers of the Carbon3D printer have demonstrated a technique they call continuous liquid interface production (CLIP), which grows 3-D printed parts out of a liquid resin bath. Ultraviolet light and oxygen work to build a stronger part in layers just tens of microns wide. Build times can be reduced from hours to minutes, they say.

Their work builds on the process called stereolithography, an additive manufacturing technique developed in the 1980s that builds parts layer by layer with liquid resin cured by light. 

“By rethinking the whole approach to 3-D printing, and the chemistry and physics behind the process, we have developed a new technology that can create parts radically faster than traditional technologies by essentially ‘growing’ them in a pool of liquid,” said University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill chemistry professor Joseph DeSimone, who coinvented the technique and is also Carbon3D’s CEO. See more images and learn more below.

R x2

Kinetic sound installation by vtol features a circle of cylindrical drums which make noise whenever there are Earth tremors:

Computer algorithm collects from Internet the data on power and depth of shocks in planet’s crust and captures all the earthquakes above 0.1 (Richter magnitude scale). On an average day there are up to 200 of such shocks. This data is converted into signals that control the motors which are attached to Thunder Drum acoustic drums.

Small businesses can get free energy audits from competing local students

Robotics gloves develop to give stroke patients therapy at home.