Design Solutions For The Heat Crisis In Cities Around The World

It was 1999 when Smash Mouth dropped the smash hit All Star, stating “The ice we skate is getting pretty thin, the water’s getting warm so you might as well swim.” Since then, global temperatures have continued to rise, with no end in sight. Political will has been unable to make any grand changes, and the world remains on track to blow through the suggested hard limits set by scientists.

As a result, heatwaves have become more frequent, and of greater intensity, putting many vulnerable people at risk and causing thousands of deaths each year. This problem is worse in cities, where buildings and roads absorb more heat from the sun than natural landscapes do. This is referred to as the heat island effect, with cities often being several degrees warmer than surrounding natural areas. It’s significant enough that experts are worried some cities could become uninhabitable within decades. Obviously, that’s highly inconvenient for those currently living in said cities. How bad is the problem, and what can be done?

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Trading Bird Food For Cigarette Butts

Positive reinforcement is the process of getting someone to understand their actions result in a reward. Children get a sweet treat when they pick up all their toys and older ones might get some cash for mowing the lawn. From the perspective of the treat-giver, this is like turning treats into work. A Dutch startup wants to teach the crow population to pick up cigarette butts in exchange for bird treats.

The whole Corvidae family of birds is highly intelligent so it shouldn’t be a problem training them that they will get a reward for depositing something theĀ Hominidae family regularly throw on the street where the birds live. This idea is in turn an evolution of the open-source Crow Box.

For some, leveraging the intelligence of animals is more appealing than programming drones which could do the same thing. A vision system mixed with a drone and a manipulator could fulfull the same function but animals are self-repairing and autonomous without our code. The irony of this project is that, although it’s probably fairly easy to train crows to recognize cigarette butts, the implementation hinges on having a vision system that can recognize the butts in order to properly train the crows in the first place.

If we had the time to train crows, it would definitely be to poop on cars that don’t signal for turns. Maybe some of these winged devices can be programmed to recognize lapses in traffic laws in exchange for some electrons.

Thank you, [jo_elektro], for the tip.

 

Cityscape Infinity Table

Redditor [ squishy0eye] lacked a coffee table and wanted an infinity mirror. So, in a keen combination of the two, she built an infinity mirror table the resembles a nighttime cityscape.

Skimming over many of table’s build details, [squishy0eye] paused to inform the reader that an MDF base was used underneath the mirrors, with a hole drilled for the future power cable. For the top pane, she overlaid privacy screen mirror film onto tempered glass, turning it into a one-way mirror. The bottom pane is acrylic plastic due to the need to drill holes to hide the cables for each ‘building’ — the same mirror film was applied here as well. Wood was cut into rectangles for the building shapes and super glued around the holes and in the corresponding spots underneath to prevent any bowing in the acrylic. A small gap was left in each ‘building’ to run the 5050 non-waterproof LED strips around and back into the hole for power.

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