Metallic screens on the facade of Ennead’s Bridge for Laboratory Sciences at Vassar College warn birds of danger.RICHARD BARNES
ARCHITECTS’ GROWING AFFINITY for glassy buildings has given the world better views, more natural light, sexier skylines—and a lot of dead birds. The US Fish and Wildlife Service estimates about 750 million birds perish annually flying into glass façades, which can be hard to distinguish from open airspace. The problem is so bad in some places that skyscraper owners hire workers to remove expired birds from the bottoms of their buildings.
Guy Maxwell, an architect at New York-based Ennead Architects, is on a mission to mitigate this fowl holocaust. A bird lover his entire life, he first became aware of architecture’s deadly impact on avifauna 15 years ago, shortly after the completion of his firm’s Rose Center for Earth and Space at NYC’s American Museum of Natural History. The enormous glass cube afforded unimpeded views of the spherical Hayden Planetarium within, but was a deadly invisible barrier to birds. Maxwell has been working to protect feathered species ever since.
Working with him is an informal circle of anti-collision advocates that includes members of the
American Bird Conservancy,
New York City Audubon,
New Jersey Audubon, and the
Bird Safe Glass Foundation.
(“It really takes a gang of merry pranksters to pull this off,” says Maxwell.) Together, they’ve made progress on
bird-safe research,
bird-safe building regulations,
bird-safe glass, and
bird-safety awareness,
spurring changes that have already had a large, ahem, impact.
Among their recent accomplishments is the American Bird Conservancy’s creation of two avian research facilities—one at the Powdermill Nature Reserve, about an hour outside of Pittsburgh, the other inside a modified shipping container at the Bronx Zoo. (The Bronx tunnel’s design was overseen, in part, by Maxwell and his colleagues at Ennead’s research-intensive division, Ennead Lab.) Spearheaded by American Bird Conservancy Bird Collisions Campaign Manager Christine Sheppard, these testing tunnels are the only ones of their kind in the US, and allow researchers to investigate which glass treatments and lighting conditions birds will fly toward or avoid. They’ve learned, for instance, that birds won’t try to fly through vertical line patterns that are less than four inches apart, and that line patterns tend to be more effective at preventing collisions than dotted ones.
Bird testing tunnel at the Powdermill Nature Reserve outside PittsburghPAMELA CURTIN
Using this knowledge, Maxwell, Sheppard, and their confederates have consulted with glass manufacturers like
Viracon,
Guardian,
Bendheim, and
Arnold Glas
to help produce products like ceramic frit patterns and UV coatings—treatments that are visible to birds and can alert them to the presence of dangerous physical barriers.
The group’s biggest policy achievement came in 2011, when it partnered with the US Green Building Council to launch a LEED pilot credit #55 for incorporating “bird collision deterrence” into new buildings. The goal:Make buildings as visible to birds as possible, through glass technologies, exterior building treatments like screens and louvers, and decreased night lighting levels. Maxwell says it has since become LEED’s most popular pilot credit. Other victories include legislation (initiated by Golden Gate Audubon) in San Francisco, Oakland, and other Bay Area cities establishing citywide bird safe building standards. Mandatory and voluntary ordinances have been passed in New York, Minnesota, and Toronto, as well.
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SLIDE:1 / OF7 .Caption:Caption:The fractured facade of the Tracy Aviary Visitors Center in Salt Lake City was designed to keep birds away.ALAN BLAKELY
SLIDE:2 / OF7 .Caption:Caption:Solid screens keep birds from flying into the building’s windows at Ennead's Bridge for Laboratory Sciences at Vassar College.RICHARD BARNES
SLIDE:3 / OF7 .Caption:Caption:Bird-friendly glass inside Ennead's Bridge for Laboratory Sciences at Vassar College.ENNEAD ARCHITECTS
SLIDE:4 / OF7 .Caption:Caption:Frosted glass at Ennead’s Lycée Francais is another example of bird-safe design.RICHARD BARNES
SLIDE:5 / OF7 .Caption:Caption:A bird-friendly metallic screen at Ennead’s Smith College Brown Fine Arts Center.JEFF GOLDBERG-ESTO
SLIDE:6 / OF7 .Caption:Caption:Bird-friendly glass at the National Museum of American Jewish History.AISLINN WEIDELE/ENNEAD ARCHITECTSAdvertisement
SLIDE:7 / OF7 .Caption:Caption:Weiss Manfredi’s Brooklyn Botanical Garden Visitors Center employs large overhangs and striped glass to protect birds.CHRISTINE SHEPPARD
Much of the team’s research is embodied in Ennead’s Bridge for Laboratory Sciences at Vassar College. The bridge-like classroom-cum-laboratory is a case study in bird-safe architecture. Vertical metal sunscreens cover its long, curving façade. Its windows are coated in Arnold Glas’s Ornilux, a UV coating visible only to birds, and various hues of ceramic fritting (the range of colors ensures that the lines are visible to birds from a variety of species).
The concept of bird safety is changing architecture, Maxwell says. Exceptional bird-friendly designs have been completed across the country, from the fritted glass windows of Weiss Manfredi Architects’ Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center, to AJC Architects’ Tracy Aviary Visitor Center in Salt Lake City, which is fronted by fractured metal screens that keep birds from flying into its windows. “There’s generally an awareness of this problem now,” says Maxwell. “You see architects considering this when before they had no idea it was even a problem.” The public is becoming more aware of the problem, too. New York City Audubon has even created an online portal, called D-Bird, where people can report building-related bird mortalities.
Meanwhile, Maxwell and his band of bird advocates are seeking funding to ramp up their research and advocacy. They would like to build several more labs along the east coast, fight for more bird-safety legislation, and see bird-friendliness become an automatic consideration for architects.
“I’m amazed that there are still many people who don’t realize the enormity of the problem,” Maxwell says.
The gear teeth on the opposing hind-legs lock together like those in a car gear-box, ensuring almost complete synchronicity in leg movement - the legs always move within 30 ‘microseconds’ of each other, with one microsecond equal to a millionth of a second.
Previously believed to be only man-made, a natural example of a functioning gear mechanism has been discovered in a common insect - showing that evolution developed interlocking cogs long before we did.
"In Issus, the skeleton is used to solve a complex problem that the brain and nervous system can’t " Malcolm Burrows
The juvenile Issus - a plant-hopping insect found in gardens across Europe - has hind-leg joints with curved cog-like strips of opposing ‘teeth’ that intermesh, rotating like mechanical gears to synchronise the animal’s legs when it launches into a jump.
The finding demonstrates that gear mechanisms previously thought to be solely man-made have an evolutionary precedent. Scientists say this is the “first observation of mechanical gearing in a biological structure”.
Through a combination of anatomical analysis and high-speed video capture of normal Issus movements, scientists from the University of Cambridge have been able to reveal these functioning natural gears for the first time. The findings are reported in the latest issue of the journal Science.
The gears in the Issus hind-leg bear remarkable engineering resemblance to those found on every bicycle and inside every car gear-box.
Each gear tooth has a rounded corner at the point it connects to the gear strip; a feature identical to man-made gears such as bike gears – essentially a shock-absorbing mechanism to stop teeth from shearing off.
Image: Cog wheels connecting the hind legs of the plant hopper, Issus. Credit: Burrows/Sutton
This is critical for the powerful jumps that are this insect’s primary mode of transport, as even miniscule discrepancies in synchronisation between the velocities of its legs at the point of propulsion would result in “yaw rotation” - causing the Issus to spin hopelessly out of control.
The juvenile Issus - a plant-hopping insect found in gardens across Europe - has hind-leg joints with curved cog-like strips of opposing ‘teeth’ that intermesh, rotating like mechanical gears to synchronise the animal’s legs when it launches into a jump.
The finding demonstrates that gear mechanisms previously thought to be solely man-made have an evolutionary precedent. Scientists say this is the “first observation of mechanical gearing in a biological structure”.
Through a combination of anatomical analysis and high-speed video capture of normal Issus movements, scientists from the University of Cambridge have been able to reveal these functioning natural gears for the first time. The findings are reported in the latest issue of the journal Science.
The gears in the Issus hind-leg bear remarkable engineering resemblance to those found on every bicycle and inside every car gear-box.
Each gear tooth has a rounded corner at the point it connects to the gear strip; a feature identical to man-made gears such as bike gears – essentially a shock-absorbing mechanism to stop teeth from shearing off.
Image: Cog wheels connecting the hind legs of the plant hopper, Issus. Credit: Burrows/Sutton
This is critical for the powerful jumps that are this insect’s primary mode of transport, as even miniscule discrepancies in synchronisation between the velocities of its legs at the point of propulsion would result in “yaw rotation” - causing the Issus to spin hopelessly out of control.
“This precise synchronisation would be impossible to achieve through a nervous system, as neural impulses would take far too long for the extraordinarily tight coordination required,” said lead author Professor Malcolm Burrows, from Cambridge’s Department of Zoology.
“By developing mechanical gears, the Issus can just send nerve signals to its muscles to produce roughly the same amount of force - then if one leg starts to propel the jump the gears will interlock, creating absolute synchronicity.
“In Issus, the skeleton is used to solve a complex problem that the brain and nervous system can’t,” said Burrows. “This emphasises the importance of considering the properties of the skeleton in how movement is produced.”
"We usually think of gears as something that we see in human designed machinery, but we've found that that is only because we didn't look hard enough,” added co-author Gregory Sutton, now at the University of Bristol.</ 1px #666; font-size: large; margin: 10px; padding: 10px; position: center; width: 450px;">
"In Issus, the skeleton is used to solve a complex problem that the brain and nervous system can’t "
Malcolm Burrows
The juvenile Issus - a plant-hopping insect found in gardens across Europe - has hind-leg joints with curved cog-like strips of opposing ‘teeth’ that intermesh, rotating like mechanical gears to synchronise the animal’s legs when it launches into a jump.
The finding demonstrates that gear mechanisms previously thought to be solely man-made have an evolutionary precedent. Scientists say this is the “first observation of mechanical gearing in a biological structure”.
Through a combination of anatomical analysis and high-speed video capture of normal Issus movements, scientists from the University of Cambridge have been able to reveal these functioning natural gears for the first time. The findings are reported in the latest issue of the journal Science.
The gears in the Issus hind-leg bear remarkable engineering resemblance to those found on every bicycle and inside every car gear-box.
Each gear tooth has a rounded corner at the point it connects to the gear strip; a feature identical to man-made gears such as bike gears – essentially a shock-absorbing mechanism to stop teeth from shearing off.
Image: Cog wheels connecting the hind legs of the plant hopper, Issus. Credit: Burrows/Sutton
This is critical for the powerful jumps that are this insect’s primary mode of transport, as even miniscule discrepancies in synchronisation between the velocities of its legs at the point of propulsion would result in “yaw rotation” - causing the Issus to spin hopelessly out of control.
“This precise synchronisation would be impossible to achieve through a nervous system, as neural impulses would take far too long for the extraordinarily tight coordination required,” said lead author Professor Malcolm Burrows, from Cambridge’s Department of Zoology.
“By developing mechanical gears, the Issus can just send nerve signals to its muscles to produce roughly the same amount of force - then if one leg starts to propel the jump the gears will interlock, creating absolute synchronicity.
“In Issus, the skeleton is used to solve a complex problem that the brain and nervous system can’t,” said Burrows. “This emphasises the importance of considering the properties of the skeleton in how movement is produced.”
"We usually think of gears as something that we see in human designed machinery, but we've found that that is only because we didn't look hard enough,” added co-author Gregory Sutton, now at the University of Bristol.
Image: Cog wheels connecting the hind legs of the plant hopper, Issus.
Credit: Burrows/Sutton
“These gears are not designed; they are evolved - representing high speed and precision machinery evolved for synchronisation in the animal world.”
Interestingly, the mechanistic gears are only found in the insect’s juvenile – or ‘nymph’ – stages, and are lost in the final transition to adulthood. These transitions, called ‘molts’, are when animals cast off rigid skin at key points in their development in order to grow.
It’s not yet known why the Issus loses its hind-leg gears on reaching adulthood. The scientists point out that a problem with any gear system is that if one tooth on the gear breaks, the effectiveness of the whole mechanism is damaged. While gear-teeth breakage in nymphs could be repaired in the next molt, any damage in adulthood remains permanent.
It may also be down to the larger size of adults and consequently their ‘trochantera’ – the insect equivalent of the femur or thigh bones. The bigger adult trochantera might allow them to create enough friction to power the enormous leaps from leaf to leaf without the need for intermeshing gear teeth to drive it, say the scientists.
Inset image: an Issus nymph
Each gear strip in the juvenile Issus was around 400 micrometres long and had between 10 to 12 teeth, with both sides of the gear in each leg containing the same number – giving a gearing ratio of 1:1.
Unlike man-made gears, each gear tooth is asymmetrical and curved towards the point where the cogs interlock – as man-made gears need a symmetric shape to work in both rotational directions, whereas the Issus gears are only powering one way to launch the animal forward.
While there are examples of apparently ornamental cogs in the animal kingdom - such as on the shell of the cog wheel turtle or the back of the wheel bug - gears with a functional role either remain elusive or have been rendered defunct by evolution.
The Issus is the first example of a natural cog mechanism with an observable function, say the scientists.
Image: Cog wheels connecting the hind legs of the plant hopper, Issus.
Credit: Burrows/Sutton
“These gears are not designed; they are evolved - representing high speed and precision machinery evolved for synchronisation in the animal world.”
Interestingly, the mechanistic gears are only found in the insect’s juvenile – or ‘nymph’ – stages, and are lost in the final transition to adulthood. These transitions, called ‘molts’, are when animals cast off rigid skin at key points in their development in order to grow.
It’s not yet known why the Issus loses its hind-leg gears on reaching adulthood. The scientists point out that a problem with any gear system is that if one tooth on the gear breaks, the effectiveness of the whole mechanism is damaged. While gear-teeth breakage in nymphs could be repaired in the next molt, any damage in adulthood remains permanent.
It may also be down to the larger size of adults and consequently their ‘trochantera’ – the insect equivalent of the femur or thigh bones. The bigger adult trochantera might allow them to create enough friction to power the enormous leaps from leaf to leaf without the need for intermeshing gear teeth to drive it, say the scientists.
Inset image: an Issus nymph
Each gear strip in the juvenile Issus was around 400 micrometres long and had between 10 to 12 teeth, with both sides of the gear in each leg containing the same number – giving a gearing ratio of 1:1.
Unlike man-made gears, each gear tooth is asymmetrical and curved towards the point where the cogs interlock – as man-made gears need a symmetric shape to work in both rotational directions, whereas the Issus gears are only powering one way to launch the animal forward.
While there are examples of apparently ornamental cogs in the animal kingdom - such as on the shell of the cog wheel turtle or the back of the wheel bug - gears with a functional role either remain elusive or have been rendered defunct by evolution.
The Issus is the first example of a natural cog mechanism with an observable function, say the scientists.
text-align: justify;">
“This precise synchronisation would be impossible to achieve through a nervous system, as neural impulses would take far too long for the extraordinarily tight coordination required,” said lead author Professor Malcolm Burrows, from Cambridge’s Department of Zoology.
“By developing mechanical gears, the Issus can just send nerve signals to its muscles to produce roughly the same amount of force - then if one leg starts to propel the jump the gears will interlock, creating absolute synchronicity.
“In Issus, the skeleton is used to solve a complex problem that the brain and nervous system can’t,” said Burrows. “This emphasises the importance of considering the properties of the skeleton in how movement is produced.”
"We usually think of gears as something that we see in human designed machinery, but we've found that that is only because we didn't look hard enough,” added co-author Gregory Sutton, now at the University of Bristol.</ 1px #666; font-size: large; margin: 10px; padding: 10px; position: center; width: 450px;">
"In Issus, the skeleton is used to solve a complex problem that the brain and nervous system can’t "
Malcolm Burrows
The juvenile Issus - a plant-hopping insect found in gardens across Europe - has hind-leg joints with curved cog-like strips of opposing ‘teeth’ that intermesh, rotating like mechanical gears to synchronise the animal’s legs when it launches into a jump.
The finding demonstrates that gear mechanisms previously thought to be solely man-made have an evolutionary precedent. Scientists say this is the “first observation of mechanical gearing in a biological structure”.
Through a combination of anatomical analysis and high-speed video capture of normal Issus movements, scientists from the University of Cambridge have been able to reveal these functioning natural gears for the first time. The findings are reported in the latest issue of the journal Science.
The gears in the Issus hind-leg bear remarkable engineering resemblance to those found on every bicycle and inside every car gear-box.
Each gear tooth has a rounded corner at the point it connects to the gear strip; a feature identical to man-made gears such as bike gears – essentially a shock-absorbing mechanism to stop teeth from shearing off.
Image: Cog wheels connecting the hind legs of the plant hopper, Issus. Credit: Burrows/Sutton
This is critical for the powerful jumps that are this insect’s primary mode of transport, as even miniscule discrepancies in synchronisation between the velocities of its legs at the point of propulsion would result in “yaw rotation” - causing the Issus to spin hopelessly out of control.
“This precise synchronisation would be impossible to achieve through a nervous system, as neural impulses would take far too long for the extraordinarily tight coordination required,” said lead author Professor Malcolm Burrows, from Cambridge’s Department of Zoology.
“By developing mechanical gears, the Issus can just send nerve signals to its muscles to produce roughly the same amount of force - then if one leg starts to propel the jump the gears will interlock, creating absolute synchronicity.
“In Issus, the skeleton is used to solve a complex problem that the brain and nervous system can’t,” said Burrows. “This emphasises the importance of considering the properties of the skeleton in how movement is produced.”
"We usually think of gears as something that we see in human designed machinery, but we've found that that is only because we didn't look hard enough,” added co-author Gregory Sutton, now at the University of Bristol.
Image: Cog wheels connecting the hind legs of the plant hopper, Issus.
Credit: Burrows/Sutton
“These gears are not designed; they are evolved - representing high speed and precision machinery evolved for synchronisation in the animal world.”
Interestingly, the mechanistic gears are only found in the insect’s juvenile – or ‘nymph’ – stages, and are lost in the final transition to adulthood. These transitions, called ‘molts’, are when animals cast off rigid skin at key points in their development in order to grow.
It’s not yet known why the Issus loses its hind-leg gears on reaching adulthood. The scientists point out that a problem with any gear system is that if one tooth on the gear breaks, the effectiveness of the whole mechanism is damaged. While gear-teeth breakage in nymphs could be repaired in the next molt, any damage in adulthood remains permanent.
It may also be down to the larger size of adults and consequently their ‘trochantera’ – the insect equivalent of the femur or thigh bones. The bigger adult trochantera might allow them to create enough friction to power the enormous leaps from leaf to leaf without the need for intermeshing gear teeth to drive it, say the scientists.
Inset image: an Issus nymph
Each gear strip in the juvenile Issus was around 400 micrometres long and had between 10 to 12 teeth, with both sides of the gear in each leg containing the same number – giving a gearing ratio of 1:1.
Unlike man-made gears, each gear tooth is asymmetrical and curved towards the point where the cogs interlock – as man-made gears need a symmetric shape to work in both rotational directions, whereas the Issus gears are only powering one way to launch the animal forward.
While there are examples of apparently ornamental cogs in the animal kingdom - such as on the shell of the cog wheel turtle or the back of the wheel bug - gears with a functional role either remain elusive or have been rendered defunct by evolution.
The Issus is the first example of a natural cog mechanism with an observable function, say the scientists.
Image: Cog wheels connecting the hind legs of the plant hopper, Issus.
Credit: Burrows/Sutton
“These gears are not designed; they are evolved - representing high speed and precision machinery evolved for synchronisation in the animal world.”
Interestingly, the mechanistic gears are only found in the insect’s juvenile – or ‘nymph’ – stages, and are lost in the final transition to adulthood. These transitions, called ‘molts’, are when animals cast off rigid skin at key points in their development in order to grow.
It’s not yet known why the Issus loses its hind-leg gears on reaching adulthood. The scientists point out that a problem with any gear system is that if one tooth on the gear breaks, the effectiveness of the whole mechanism is damaged. While gear-teeth breakage in nymphs could be repaired in the next molt, any damage in adulthood remains permanent.
It may also be down to the larger size of adults and consequently their ‘trochantera’ – the insect equivalent of the femur or thigh bones. The bigger adult trochantera might allow them to create enough friction to power the enormous leaps from leaf to leaf without the need for intermeshing gear teeth to drive it, say the scientists.
Inset image: an Issus nymph
Each gear strip in the juvenile Issus was around 400 micrometres long and had between 10 to 12 teeth, with both sides of the gear in each leg containing the same number – giving a gearing ratio of 1:1.
Unlike man-made gears, each gear tooth is asymmetrical and curved towards the point where the cogs interlock – as man-made gears need a symmetric shape to work in both rotational directions, whereas the Issus gears are only powering one way to launch the animal forward.
While there are examples of apparently ornamental cogs in the animal kingdom - such as on the shell of the cog wheel turtle or the back of the wheel bug - gears with a functional role either remain elusive or have been rendered defunct by evolution.
The Issus is the first example of a natural cog mechanism with an observable function, say the scientists.
The pace of change in the printing industry has never been swifter. The future is arriving in record time, and it is both diverse and very exciting.
Every sector of the printing industry including macro printing is experiencing incremental, micro trends. This overview instead looks at macro trends...in micro printing and other sectors.
Large Format 3D Printing
A new wave of big format 3D printers is being introduced for use in:
Promotional applications where being large and being unique are the two keys
TheMassivit 1800 is one example of a large-format printer. Layer after additive layer is laid down to create 3D products as large as 180cm high, 150cm wide and 120cm deep.
Nano Printing – Smaller, Thinner and Less Costly
Perhaps no other sector in the industry is generating as much excitement as the integration of Nano technology with three-dimensional printing. To be fair, this printing isn't quite yet dealing in Nano size, as one nanometre is one billionth of a metre. Nanography – the intersection of printing and Nano technology – is using materials measured in micrometres (microns) which are one-millionth of a metre. That's still impressively small.
Nano printing in a three-dimensional format is becoming the fabrication method of choice for a diverse and growing range of products in use now or coming soon including:
Lithium-ion microbatteries for implants and tiny robots
Tunable acoustic arrays
Efficient energy scavengers
Diagnostic devices
Compact sensors
Nanowalls for various applications
Nano technology is allowing for small printing, but there is a similar application worth considering: thin printing.
The key is ink that becomes dry polymeric film just 500nm (nanometres) thick. It bonds instantly and permanently to the substrate without colour penetration. Its advantages are many:
Colors are amazingly vivid
Nearly any substrate is suitable including low-cost papers
Waste is minimized
There are no emissions
Energy use is very low
Water-based inks are less costly than solvent and UV-based inks
It turns out that the Nano world is a cheaper world. Tiny three-dimensional printing and thin/nanographic printing are both money savers. Thin ink means less ink and less cost. Three-dimensional printing uses less material than when molds are built first.
Printing that Lives
This is where 3D printing sounds more science fiction than reality, but as noted, the future is arriving faster than most would have estimated. The process is called bioprinting, and it is a natural extension of the advances made in 3D print technology.
According to the Australian Academy of Science's Nova site, "Biofabrication can be defined as the production of complex living and non-living biological products from raw materials such as living cells, molecules, extracellular matrices, and biomaterials."
While still in the early stages of development, biofabrication might well be used to produce living tissue such as skin, bone, blood vessels and entire organs for use in replacement rather than transplant.
While advances here are slow due to the immense complexity of cellular organisms, current technology offers hope of customised solutions not only for each medical problem but for each patient.
Similarly, three-dimensional printing will increasingly be used to produce personalized implants such as titanium bone replacements and orthodontic devices with a "perfect" fit for each recipient.
Better New World
Doomsayers abound who say we're headed for a "Brave New World" of technology run amok. These advances in printing remind us that, instead, a better new world is coming into view right now. Gutenberg's printing press revolutionized the world starting in the mid-15th Century. An evolution in printing methods soon started that has continued unabated, and the world is reaping its benefits.
Tetrapods, those curious concrete structures that resemble oversized toy jacks, protect shores across the world from life-threatening waves—but they’re not environmentally friendly or sustainable. Inspired to create a “stronger yet greener sea defense” system, Taiwanese designer Sheng-Hung Lee designed the TetraPOT, a fusion between the concrete tetrapod and natural mangroves. The innovative design uses the iconic four-pronged tetrapod shape with the insertion of a biodegradable pre-seeded pot to grow mangrove trees that filter water pollution, protect the shores, and beautify coastlines.
Lee envisions the TetraPOT as a hybrid between artificial sea defense and natural sea defense, an idea encapsulated in his design slogan: “It is not only a defense, but also an ecosystem. A home for other living [things].” The TetraPOT is an opportunity to restore the world’s mangrove forests, 35% of which has been destroyed. Unlike the common tetrapod, the TetraPOT is partly hollowed out to create room for a biodegradable pot insert, soil, and space for roots to grow. When rising tides water the pre-seeded layers, the organic layers will begin to decompose and allow the mangrove trees to expand its root system through three lower openings.
Over time, roots from one TetraPOT will connect with its neighbors as well as the shoreline to reinforce the sea defense system, reducing the risk of dislodgment. The mangroves will also attract greater biodiversity to the region and help clean the air and water. Lee, who currently works with IDEO in Shanghai, plans to work with the local government to test out TetraPOT prototypes on Chongming Island. The TetraPOT has received several prestigious awards, including the James Dyson Award and red dot Design Award.
An artist's impression of the DNC. Credit: DeepMind
The DeepMind artificial intelligence (AI) being developed by Google's parent company, Alphabet, can now intelligently build on what's already inside its memory, the system's programmers have announced.
Their new hybrid system – called a Differential Neural Computer (DNC) – pairs a neural network with the vast data storage of conventional computers, and the AI is smart enough to navigate and learn from this external data bank.
What the DNC is doing is effectively combining external memory (like the external hard drive where all your photos get stored) with the neural network approach of AI, where a massive number of interconnected nodes work dynamically to simulate a brain.
"These models... can learn from examples like neural networks, but they can also store complex data like computers," write DeepMind researchers Alexander Graves and Greg Waynein a blog post.
At the heart of the DNC is a controller that constantly optimises its responses, comparing its results with the desired and correct ones. Over time, it's able to get more and more accurate, figuring out how to use its memory data banks at the same time.
Take a family tree: after being told about certain relationships, the DNC was able to figure out other family connections on its own – writing, rewriting, and optimising its memory along the way to pull out the correct information at the right time.
Another example the researchers give is a public transit system, like the London Underground. Once it's learned the basics, the DNC can figure out more complex relationships and routes without any extra help, relying on what it's already got in its memory banks.
In other words, it's functioning like a human brain, taking data from memory (like tube station positions) and figuring out new information (like how many stops to stay on for).
Of course, any smartphone mapping app can tell you the quickest way from one tube station to another, but the difference is that the DNC isn't pulling this information out of a pre-programmed timetable – it's working out the information on its own, and juggling a lot of data in its memory all at once.
The approach means a DNC system could take what it learned about the London Underground and apply parts of its knowledge to another transport network, like the New York subway.
The system points to a future where artificial intelligence could answer questions on new topics, by deducing responses from prior experiences, without needing to have learned every possible answer beforehand.
Credit: DeepMind
Of course, that's how DeepMind was able to beat human champions at Go – by studying millions of Go moves. But by adding external memory, DNCs are able to take on much more complex tasks and work out better overall strategies, its creators say.
"Like a conventional computer, [a DNC] can use its memory to represent and manipulate complex data structures, but, like a neural network, it can learn to do so from data," the researchers explain in Nature.
In another test, the DNC was given two bits of information: "John is in the playground," and "John picked up the football." With those known facts, when asked "Where is the football?", it was able to answer correctly by combining memory with deep learning. (The football is in the playground, if you're stuck.)
Making those connections might seem like a simple task for our powerful human brains, but until now, it's been a lot harder for virtual assistants, such as Siri, to figure out.
With the advances DeepMind is making, the researchers say we're another step forward to producing a computer that can reason independently.
And then we can all start enjoying our robot-driven utopia – or technological dystopia – depending on your point of view.
Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence lab does more than just develop computer programs capable of beating the world’s best human players in the ancient game of Go. The DeepMind unit has also been working on the next generation of deep learning software that combines the ability to recognize data patterns with the memory required to decipher more complex relationships within the data.
Deep learning is the latest buzz word for artificial intelligence algorithms called neural networks that can learn over time by filtering huge amounts of relevant data through many “deep” layers. The brain-inspired neural network layers consist of nodes (also known as neurons). Tech giants such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft have been training neural networks to learn how to better handle tasks such as recognizing images of dogs or making better Chinese-to-English translations. These AI capabilities have already benefited millions of people using Google Translate and other online services.
But neural networks face huge challenges when they try to rely solely on pattern recognition without having the external memory to store and retrieve information. To improve deep learning’s capabilities, Google DeepMind created a “differentiable neural computer” (DNC) that gives neural networks an external memory for storing information for later use.
“Neural networks are like the human brain; we humans cannot assimilate massive amounts of data and we must rely on external read-write memory all the time,” says Jay McClelland, director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Computation at Stanford University. “We once relied on our physical address books and Rolodexes; now of course we rely on the read-write storage capabilities of regular computers.”
McClelland is a cognitive scientist who served as one of several independent peer reviewers for the Google DeepMind paper that describes development of this improved deep learning system. The full paper is presented in the 12 Oct 2016 issue of the journal Nature.
The DeepMind team found that the DNC system’s combination of the neural network and external memory did much better than a neural network alone in tackling the complex relationships between data points in so-called “graph tasks.” For example, they asked their system to either simply take any path between points A and B or to find the shortest travel routes based on a symbolic map of the London Underground subway.
An unaided neural network could not even finish the first level of training, based on traveling between two subway stations without trying to find the shortest route. It achieved an average accuracy of just 37 percent after going through almost two million training examples. By comparison, the neural network with access to external memory in the DNC system successfully completed the entire training curriculum and reached an average of 98.8 percent accuracy on the final lesson.
The external memory of the DNC system also proved critical to success in performing logical planning tasks such as solving simple block puzzle challenges. Again, a neural network by itself could not even finish the first lesson of the training curriculum for the block puzzle challenge. The DNC system was able to use its memory to store information about the challenge’s goals and to effectively plan ahead by writing its decisions to memory before acting upon them.
In 2014, DeepMind’s researchers developed another system, called the neural Turing machine, that also combined neural networks with external memory. But the neural Turing machine was limited in the way it could access “memories” (information) because such memories were effectively stored and retrieved in fixed blocks or arrays. The latest DNC system can access memories in any arbitrary location, McClelland explains.
The DNC system’s memory architecture even bears a certain resemblance to how the hippocampus region of the brain supports new brain cell growth and new connections in order to store new memories. Just as the DNC system uses the equivalent of time stamps to organize the storage and retrieval of memories, human “free recall” experiments have shown that people are more likely to recall certain items in the same order as first presented.
Despite these similarities, the DNC’s design was driven by computational considerations rather than taking direct inspiration from biological brains, DeepMind’s researchers write in their paper. But McClelland says that he prefers not to think of the similarities as being purely coincidental.
“The design decisions that motivated the architects of the DNC were the same as those that structured the human memory system, although the latter (in my opinion) was designed by a gradual evolutionary process, rather than by a group of brilliant AI researchers,” McClelland says.
Human brains still have significant advantages over any brain-inspired deep learning software. For example, human memory seems much better at storing information so that it is accessible by both context or content, McClelland says. He expressed hope that future deep learning and AI research could better capture the memory advantages of biological brains.
DeepMind’s DNC system and similar neural learning systems may represent crucial steps for the ongoing development of AI. But the DNC system still falls well short of what McClelland considers the most important parts of human intelligence.
The DNC is a sophisticated form of external memory, but ultimately it is like the papyrus on which Euclid wrote the elements. The insights of mathematicians that Euclid codified relied (in my view) on a gradual learning process that structured the neural circuits in their brains so that they came to be able to see relationships that others had not seen, and that structured the neural circuits in Euclid’s brain so that he could formulate what to write. We have a long way to go before we understand fully the algorithms the human brain uses to support these processes.
It’s unclear when or how Google might take advantage of the capabilities offered by the DNC system to boost its commercial products and services. The DeepMind team was “heads down in research” or too busy with travel to entertain media questions at this time, according to a Google spokesperson.
But Herbert Jaeger, professor for computational science at Jacobs University Bremen in Germany, sees the DeepMind team’s work as a “passing snapshot in a fast evolution sequence of novel neural learning architectures.” In fact, he’s confident that the DeepMind team already has something better than the DNC system described in the Nature paper. (Keep in mind that the paper was submitted back in January 2016.)
DeepMind’s work is also part of a bigger trend in deep learning, Jaeger says. The leading deep learning teams at Google and other companies are racing to build new AI architectures with many different functional modules—among them, attentional control or working memory; they then train the systems through deep learning.
“The DNC is just one among dozens of novel, highly potent, and cleverly-thought-out neural learning systems that are popping up all over the place,” Jaeger says.
Metallic screens on the facade of Ennead’s Bridge for Laboratory Sciences at Vassar College warn birds of danger.RICHARD BARNES
Bird testing tunnel at the Powdermill Nature Reserve outside PittsburghPAMELA CURTIN
