This week the world's largest tensegrity pedestrian and cycle bridge was officially opened in Brisbane, Queensland. In fact, according to Wikipedia, it is "also the largest
Tensegrity structure in existance." Tensegrity, meaning the tensional integrity based on a synergy between balanced tension and compression components. That might sound like engineering mumbo jumbo, but now that the bridge is open an estimated 36,500 monthly passage of pedestrians and cyclists can go test the theory for themselves, as they cross the 470 metre long span as, the
Kurilpa Bridge arcs over the city's river....
Photo via Mike Thompson
What if power came at a cost to the individual? This is what Mike Thompson asks. It is the driving question behind his design, the Blood Lamp - a single use lamp that requires a drop of the users blood in order to activate. ...
Brian recently wrote that
CFL Sales are Plummeting in the US--Right When they Could Help Most, and in the comments to his post there were many complaints about how fast they burned out, how awful they looked, and how long they took to warm up. Recently at
IIDEX, a big trade show, I talked to a representative of
Standard Lighting about why my expensive PAR spotlight style CFLs took so long to warm up.
He told me that all of the cheap spiral style bulbs were designed to be pointing up in lamps as incandescent replacements, and the heat rises away from the bulb. Put it upside down in a potlight and they overheat the electronics in the base and burn out early. In the design of the spotlight style bulbs, they have to control the heat, which they do with a different amalgam of mercury that takes a lot longer to vaporize but runs a lot cooler. He said that the big mistake everyone makes is thinking that one bulb fits all, whereas just like with incandescents before them, there are dozens, even hundreds, of colours, sizes and permutations.
Important things to look for:...
LEDs are wonderful things; they are energy efficient and flexible, and creating new opportunities for designers. But just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should. Just because you can trick out your sofas like a Honda on the Fast and the Furious, doesn't make it a good idea. It is still wasting energy....
(Image: Fuz)
The intersection of beauty, functionality, and energy efficiency is what makes lamp design so fun. At TreeHugger we like us some lamps:
eerie alien lamps,
flat-pack lamps, lamps from
reused materials, lamps that are
their own packaging,
ink cartridge lamps,
cassette tape lamps,
living lamps that clean the air. In case that doesn't make the point, here's
thirteen more. Here's a practical one that won't revolutionize the lighting world, but might draw some nice compliments in the living room. The
Curly Lamp, which is available in two sizes, is make by
Fuz in the USA of recycled HDPE (100%). The shade ships unfurled and flat. Add a
compact fluorescent and "voilà!," you're in the classy and clever lighting club....
Check Out the Video Below
Okay, first of all, Project TOPLESS isn't what you think. TOPLESS stands for "Thin Organic Polymeric Light Emitting Semi-conductor Surfaces" (not your first guess, eh?), and it is a three year, £3.3M project financed 50% by the UK government and 50% by a consortium of
Thorn Lighting (UK largest lighting company),
Sumation UK and the
University of Durham (Department of Physics and Chemistry). The goal is to create "high quality white light generating single polymer, and efficient large area single pixel device architectures." In the video below, you can see one of their very cool prototypes in action....
"Only 2% of total energy consumed by LED-based lamps is used in their production."
When trying to determine the greenest option among products, it is important to take into account the
whole life-cycle of the thing; the manufacturing process, how it is used, and the disposal at the end of its life. The U.S. Department of Energy has already released a few life-cycle assessments (LCA) of LED lights (see
here and
here for a Carnegie Mellon study), and LED maker Osram has just released a new LCA study conducted by the Siemens Corporate Technology Centre for Eco Innovations. Their conclusions are pretty interesting......
The EPA says that lighting chews up 20% of the energy used in an average American home. If cutting down your consumption is a priority, then lighting can't be ignored.
Compact fluorescent bulbs are a no-brainer, and
LEDs (which use even less energy, but still cost quite a pretty penny) have started showing up on the shelves of mainstream stores like The Home Depot. Dimmer switches have been a
controversial subject, and not until digital dimmers came along have they made sense for energy-savings.
Lutron has probably sold more dimmers than anyone, and the company has recently launched a new line of
remote control dimmers and other devices that can up your home's efficiency, your fresh-gadget-factor, and probably your powers of seduction....
I'm Not Kidding
By now there's little doubt that LED-based lightbulbs are the future, and while a lot of cool LED technology still needs to make its way from the lab to the store, it's exciting to see that engineers are still finding new ways to squeeze more performance out of those semiconductor diodes. The latest breakthrough comes from the University of Connecticut, and it uses salmon DNA to create very long-lasting white LEDs (though they can be tuned to other colors). Read on for more details....
All the blogs are covering the Hydralux-4 liquid cooled LED being distributed by
EternalLEDs. Ariel at
Fast Company thinks it won't be an instant hit; Wired just
craps all over it, saying "We don’t really see the advantage of this over other LED bulbs. If Eternal LEDs had put a mini lava-lamp inside, though, we’d be happy to pay the $35."
Or, this might be a real breakthrough. We did a patent search....
Michal Czerwonka
Public Space as Alternative to Law Enforcement
At night, urban parks can become hives for gang activity and violence. A program in Los Angeles, the American gang capital, seeks to combat that phenomenon simply by keeping the lights on until midnight, reports the
New York Times.
To both locals and police, it's a bright idea. Last year, neighborhoods bordering the eight parks where lights were left on involved saw 86 percent fewer homicides and a 17 percent drop in gang-related violence. L.A. recorded the safest summer since 1967, and some parks had no homicides for the first summer in years....
Image credit:
Datexx
3W LED Lamp Detects Movement
Before I started writing for TreeHugger, I never knew how excited people could get about LED lighting. I'm more of a compost guy myself. Whether it's this
9W LED bulb replacement for incandescents, or this
remote controlled tunable LED Bulb from Sharp, posts about LEDs (even ugly ones) create both traffic and discussion here at TreeHugger. I wonder if this will be the case for the ZenLight LED - a lighting solution for hallways and bathrooms that adjusts to lighting conditions and motion to provide light when needed.
...
Photo: Sharp
Honey, I Feel More Like Cool White Today...
Sharp's introducing 9 new models of LED lightbulbs to Japan in mid-July, but the most innovative of those is the one pictured above (the others are below). What's that thing on the right? It's actually a remote control that allows you to tune the color of the DL-L60AV LED Lamp (Sharp calls it "Adjustable Color Function"), or of a series of those plugged into the same circuit. Why is that a good thing? More details on how it works and its performance below....
Professor of optics Chunlei Guo. Photo: University of Rochester
Everything is Better with Lasers
What if you could take a regular incandescent lightbulb, zap it with a powerful laser for a small fraction of a second, and make it about twice as efficient as a regular lightbulb? That seems to be what researchers at the University of Rochester did. What does the laser do? It creates an "array of nano- and micro-scale structures on the surface of [the] regular tungsten filament—the tiny wire inside a light bulb—and these structures make the tungsten become far more effective at radiating light." Read on for more details....
Sydney, Australia was the city that pioneered
Earth Hour, turning off its lights to highlight the energy issues inherent in the climate change dilemma. Now, and for the next three weeks they are turning the lights on for the same cause. Smart Light Sydney is about celebrating “sustainable innovations and the future of low-energy lighting design.”
An element of the larger
Vivid Sydney festival, Smart Light Sydney is also running a
eco lighting symposia looking at how “new technologies such as LEDs, nano-materials and advanced software design programs are revolutionising the design of light fittings and their usage in the city.” All the while asking the question, “How can architects design [...] the after dark usage and enjoyment of the city’s public spaces and buildings without wasting energy?” ...
photo credit: Inhabitat, who did a much better job
It doesn't get much more TreeHugger than dumpster diving for used cardboard and turning it into very lovely pendant lamps, does it? Well, maybe they might not have incandescent bulbs in them, but Seth Grizzle isn't happy with the quality of the light from the alternatives. Seattle's Graypants laser cuts cardboard and glues the circles into cardboard for their Scrap Lights. We interviewed Seth at ICFF....
Mike Chino at
Inhabitat
Daisuke Hiraiwa created the Stamen lamp by gluing toothpicks to a flexible backing. The results are quite beautiful; my pictures didn't do it justice so I have borrowed from
one of many at Inhabitat. Diasuke explains the process in a video:...
Photo: Mark Lennihan
Improving the Light Quality of LED Lightbulbs
LED lights have been working on overcoming two challenges: Generating pleasing light, and being low-cost. QD Vision and Nexxus Lighting have been working together on the first of these. Nexxus made LED lamps with white LEDs, and QD Vision is providing a cover with a coating of specially tuned quantum dots that help make the light-color more pleasing to the eye (mostly by adding some red into the mix, making the final result closer to what people are used to)....
Photo from New York City Audubon
Buildings are a leading cause for
bird-fatalities in the United States every year. Few green buildings exist where
bird-safety is included. Architects and designers just don’t understand the
connection between birds and the architecture. They don’t see glass. Viviana Ruiz-Gutierrez has a big idea. She wants to create the first-ever nationally recognized Bird-Friendly Building Certification. ...
We'll be working on better category archives soon. In the meantime, take a look at the
if you really want to dig around, or use the search box at the top of the page.
on 11. 5.09
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