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Earth

Earthscraper Takes Sustainable Design Underground 269

Posted by samzenpus from the moving-on-down dept.
Hugh Pickens writes"The 'Earthscraper,' a 65-story, 82,000-square-foot inverted pyramid beneath Mexico City takes a new approach to escalating megacity problems like population growth, urban sprawl, preserving open space, and conserving energy and water, promising to turn the modern high-rise, quite literally, on its head. The proposed building will be located at the Zocalo, Mexico City's major public plaza one of the few sizable open spaces left in the city of 9 million. 'It's a massive empty plot, which makes it the ideal site for our program,' says architect Esteban Suarez. The Earthscraper concept begins with a glass roof replacing the opaque stone surface of the Zocalo preserving the open space and civic uses of the Zocalo, while allowing natural lighting to flow downward into all floors of the tapering structure through clear or translucent core walls. The first 10 stories would hold a museum dedicated to the city's history and its artifacts. 'We'd almost certainly find plenty of interesting relics during the dig — dating right back to the Aztecs who built their own pyramids here,' says Suarez adding that the design incorporates a system of gardens occurring roughly every 10 stories, to help generate fresh air. One thing working in Earthscraper's favor is there are strict laws that prevent building upwards in this part of Mexico City, but no laws for building down. 'They will have to develop new laws to stop this from happening,' says Chief Design Officer Emilio Barja. 'I hope they don't [find the] time to do that.'"
Science

EU Scientists Working On Laser To Rip a Hole In Spacetime 575

Posted by samzenpus from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong? dept.
astroengine writes "Those pesky physicists are at it again; they want to build a laser so powerful that it will literally rip spacetime apart. Why? To prove the existence of virtual particles in the quantum vacuum, potentially unravel extra dimensions and possibly find the root of dark matter. The $1.6 billion Extreme Light Infrastructure Ultra-High Field Facility (known as ELI) will be built somewhere in Europe by the end of the decade and physicists are hoping the ten high-powered lasers — delivering 200 petawatts of power at a target for less than a trillionth of a second — will turn up some surprises about the very fabric of the Universe."

Submission + - Russian Telco MTS bans Skype, other VoIP

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: MTS, one of the three largest mobile carriers in Russia, have been buying up smaller cable TV and Internet providers across the country, and besides the GSM/3G cellphone service they now also offer cable TV and home broadband Internet access. And their unified TOS (Russian; mirror) for home broadband now says: "3.4.4. The customer may not use the Services for the purpose of transferring voice over the Internet; Skype and other similar software is forbidden." (screenshot). Really, why would you need to phone over the Internet, comrade, when you have a perfectly good cellphone [from MTS, assumingly]?

Comment Re:Scale (Score 1) 83

by Roman Mamedov (#36486476) Attached to: NanoNote Goes Wireless

> Do they have them for $100?

Sure, why not?

Checked eBay lately, you can get yourself a 7" Android tablet for like $65.

NanoNote has many virtues, but being cheap and "accessible" (third world, blah blah blah), is NOT one of them. On the contrary, it is WAY overpriced for what it is. And likewise so, this new wireless addon - 41 Euro, for god's sake, and you were saying something about students and poor children?

Submission + - Slashdot Still Doesn't Support IPv6 (slashdot.org) 2

Submitted by Roman Mamedov
Roman Mamedov writes: It's 2011, IPv4 addresses are officially exhausted, and the world's largest geek-oriented website, Slashdot, still doesn't support IPv6 on its most-visited address, slashdot.org. This is true even for the new AJAX and CSS redesigned version of the website released just last month. Slashdot continues to publish one IPv6-related story after another. But it has not been specific about if and how it will offer an IPv6 upgrade to the Slashdot website itself, nor named any dates.

Comment Re:Hidden content (Score 1) 2254

by Roman Mamedov (#35006042) Attached to: Slashdot Launches Re-Design
> The only "cure" to the sidebar overlap, is to reduce the size of the text to "microdot" and use my jeweler's loupe to read it. :P I installed Element Hiding Helper addon to my Adblock Plus, and killed the sidebar altogether. Never used it even once, anyway.

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