Lifeboat Foundation

A midst the hustle and bustle in one of Chennai’s busiest streets, Chrompet, 51-year-old S Sathyanarayanan has created a green paradise on his 1,200 sq ft terrace. He grows 400 plants including ornamental flowers such as moss roses, medicinal plants like moringa, fruits like figs, and vegetables like lady’s finger, potatoes and more.

However, what’s unique about Sathya’s garden is that he prepares a variety of liquid fertilizers using kitchen ingredients to nourish his plants. Further, he also prepares a mix of water, jaggery, and an organic Waste Decomposer (WDC) solution in a 250-litre drum. This is fed to all plants regularly, which ensures healthy and pest-free growth.

“I started terrace gardening in 2015 after my family and I moved into our newly constructed home here. Earlier, we were living on the ground floor of a rented home and I could not grow many plants, as the availability of space was an issue. I started my gardening journey with 50 pots of money plants, tulsi, tomatoes and others. Today, my garden has over 400 pots, which grow ornamental flowers, fruits, and vegetables,” says Sathya, adding that regular visitors to his garden include buzzing honey bees and chirping love birds.

We have collected that series into this new, free e-book, The American Alley: A Hidden Resource. The e-book includes the full text of the articles, along with additional illustrations and two appendices that go deeper on the design principles of the world’s most beloved “minor streets.”

Whether you’re an incremental developer, a housing or walkability advocate, a local official trying to grow your city’s tax base, or a homeowner who wants to build an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) on your property, The American Alley will help you understand why alleys were forgotten in the first place…and spur your imagination for what’s possible, now.

Interesting story.

The site will have 5,000 new apartments—along with schools and stores that all residents can walk to.

Else Labs, the company behind the countertop home cooking robot called Oliver, announced today the launch of Oliver Fleet, a commercial kitchen reimagining of its original core product.

The new Fleet solution is a respin of its original standalone Oliver home cooking robot into a solution that allows multiple units to be used and managed simultaneously in professional kitchen environments to automate cooking tasks. According to company CEO Khalid Aboujassoum, while the Oliver Fleet units look the same from the outside as the original consumer unit, they’ve been built to withstand the more rugged requirements of the professional kitchen.

Continue reading “Else Labs Announces Pro Kitchen Focused Oliver Fleet As It Pauses Rollout of Home Cooking Robot” »

Ford has started trials of its electric vehicle charging robot.

Ford’s all-electric F-150 Lightning truck can power houses for three days during blackouts utilizing its Ford Intelligent Backup Power.

Cabling in power substations is very important due to the fact that they are the longest parts of a system and therefore act as efficient antennas that pickup and or radiate noise. In HV substations, there are different kinds of conductors close to one another, such as high voltage buses, CTs, VTs, carrier couplers, bushing, control cables, substation ground conductors, and equipment ground connections.

The control cables are used to carry potential transformer outputs, current transformer outputs, circuit breaker control signals, relaying, and other communication signals. Increasingly, electronic equipment is used in switchyards and control houses.

Continue reading “The problem of induced voltages in control cables in high voltage substations” »

Cross-laminated timber and volcanic stone were used to form a round building along a lake that was designed by Mexican studio Sordo Madaleno Arquitectos.

The Valle San Nicolás Clubhouse is located on the outskirts of Valle de Bravo, about two hours from Mexico City.

Set on a 385-hectare residential development, along a lake with an 800-metre waterski run, the building holds a range of spaces for relaxing and socialising.

What seems like a sci-fi movie can be turned into reality if Japan’s technology is to be believed. Humans can travel across different planets on a train in the near future! Yes, you read that right. Japan has laid out plans in a bid to send humans to Mars and the Moon, according to The Weather Channel India.

Japan has made plans to build a glass habitat structure that would copy Earth’s gravity, atmosphere and topography to make us feel like home.

Researchers from Japan’s Kyoto University in collaboration with Kajima Construction are working on this plan that might shake up space travel, the Weather Channel reported. The researchers announced this last week in a press conference, the EurAsian Times reported.

The researcher asked the bot to write a 500 word academic thesis and submitted it to an academic journal. The paper is now being peer reviewed.

Andrew Camarata built his dream house by stacking shipping containers on each other for months, and now he has put the final touches by painting the new metalwork on the container castle.