Cube-Shaped Building Bisected by Sculptural Void

Zaha Hadid Architects turns plan for a set of traditional office towers into a stunning architectural destination.

The master plan for a new business district in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, called for two traditional office towers on adjacent sites in the heart of the development. But when architects began considering the towers’ design, they envisioned fusing the two buildings to form a single monolithic structure. The result is a cube-shaped building with a dramatic free-form void through its center.

The Opus, as the building is known, is under construction as part of Business Bay, a new 195 million m2 development that is expected to become the region’s central business district. The building will rise from two plots at the core of the development, offering views of the tallest building in the world—the Burj Khalifa—as well as the Dubai Stock Exchange and other notable structures. The building will also be adjacent to a new extension of Dubai Creek. The Dubai-based development firm Omniyat Properties owns the project, and following consultations with several architecture firms selected Zaha Hadid Architects, headquartered in London, to design the building.

Even though the development’s master plan called for two separate 30-story tall towers, the architects were drawn by the idea of joining the towers and leaving a void between them. The idea was inspired by the notion of carving space out of a solid block and by the importance of negative space in architecture. “It’s about the visible and the invisible, the solid and the void, and about black and white,” says Christos Passas, the project’s director for Zaha Hadid Architects. As the concept took hold, the architects improved the building’s efficiency by reducing its height to 20 stories and increasing the size of its floor plates. “We compressed and connected the towers to create this structure with a void in the middle and generate about 85,000 square meters of aboveground space,” he says.

The building was initially designed expressly as an office tower but has since evolved to accommodate multiple functions. The first four levels will house an opulent boutique hotel, Michelin-starred destination restaurants, and a cafe, all under an undulating glass roof. Levels 5 through 17 will house offices, and the top three levels—including the “bridge” that links the tops of the two towers—will house luxury apartments. The building will also have seven below-grade levels for parking and back-of-house facilities. “It’s going to be a very exciting layout because the whole building becomes a mixed-use development,” Passas says. “You will have residents in the upper levels, the workforce in the middle levels, and the people who want to go to a hotel and enjoy a night or two in Dubai in the lower levels, all using the building in a different way.”

The building will rise as two towers from a shared podium. Each of the towers will have a concrete core and will be framed in concrete using a posttensioned slab system. So-called “dancing” columns will be angled in various directions to frame the irregularly shaped void between the towers. “Those columns are not vertical because, of course, they follow the form of the void and [the] glazing on the outside of the building,” Passas says. The 50 m long bridge linking the tops of the towers will be framed using steel trusses and will serve as the essential element for completing the void’s sculptural shape. Ramboll, an engineering firm headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark, provided structural engineering services in the initial design stages, and BG+E, an engineering firm headquartered in Perth, Western Australia, is serving as the structural engineer as the project moves forward. 

The dark blue-tinted glass within the void will be illuminated at night by light-emitting diodes, which will be programmed to slowly flash, giving the impression that the void is pulsating like a heart.

The void between the two towers will do more than create an intriguing sculptural expression; it will also increase the opportunity for views out of and into the building, which will be clad entirely in glass. The dark blue-tinted glass within the void will be thermoformed to achieve the undulating shape of each panel and will be illuminated at night by light-emitting diodes, which will be programmed to slowly flash, giving the impression that the void is pulsating like a heart. The exterior glass will be somewhat silvery and covered to a fair extent by a dotted pattern—a mirrored frit. “On one hand, the dots obscure the penetration of solar radiation inside the building, and on the other hand, they also reflect the surrounding site,” Passas says. “So when someone stands in front of the building, they can see inside of the building, but they can also see the reflection behind them.”

After being delayed as a result of the 2008 global financial crisis, the building is now under construction and completion is anticipated in May 2016. At that time, the building is expected to join the ranks of Dubai’s growing list of architecturally stunning structures. “It is going to be an architectural destination with substance and good taste; it’s not a building that tries to do too many things,” Passas says. As a result, he says, “It’s going to be a place that people enjoy traveling to see simply because it is beautiful.”

The 3D Economy

The 3D Economy

Forget guns, what happens when everyone prints their own shoes?

Last May, Cody Wilson produced an ingeniously brief but nuanced manifesto about individual liberty in the age of the ever-encroaching techno-state-a single shot fired by a plastic pistol fabricated on a leased 3D printer. While Wilson dubbed his gun The Liberator, his interests and concerns are broader than merely protecting the Second Amendment. As Senior Editor Brian Doherty documented in a December reason profile, Wilson is ultimately aiming for the "transcendence of the state." And yet because of the nature of his invention, many observers reacted to his message as reductively as can be: "OMG, guns!"

Local legislators were especially prone to this response. In California, New York, and Washington, D.C., officials all floated proposals to regulate 3D printed guns. In Philadelphia, the city council successfully passed a measure prohibiting their unlicensed manufacture, with a maximum fine of $2,000.

But if armies of Davids really want to transcend the state, there are even stronger weapons at their disposal: toothbrush holders, wall vases, bottle openers, shower caddies, and tape dispensers. All these consumer goods and more you either can or will soon be able to produce using 3D printers.

Imagine what will happen when millions of people start using the tools that produced The Liberator to make, copy, swap, barter, buy, and sell all the quotidian stuff with which they furnish their lives. Rest in peace, Bed, Bath & Beyond. Thanks for all the stuff, Foxconn, but we get our gadgets from Pirate Bay and MEGA now.

Once the retail and manufacturing carnage starts to scale, the government carnage will soon follow. How can it not, when only old people pay sales tax, fewer citizens obtain their incomes from traditional easy-to-tax jobs, and large corporate taxpayers start folding like daily newspapers? Without big business, big government can't function.

3D printing is a painstaking process, with extruders or lasers methodically building up objects one layer at a time. Most consumer-level devices currently only print in plastic, and only in one color. At online platforms such as Thingiverse.com, where 3D printing enthusiasts share open-source design files and post photos of their wares, the final products often look a little rough around the edges, without the spectacular gloss and streamlining we've come to expect from, say, a Dollar General toilet bowl scrubber.

In many ways, 3D printing barely seems ready to disrupt the monochromatic knick-knacks industry, much less the world. When it takes hours to produce a pencil cup, transcending the state may prove to be a tall order.

And yet in the industrial realm, where 3D printing has been around for decades and goes by the name "additive manufacturing," companies such as Boeing and General Electric are using much more sophisticated machines to produce parts for jet engines. Medical device companies use them to custom-manufacture hearing aids, replacement knees, and designer prosthetics. In time, Cornell University professor Hod Lipson predicts in the 2013 book Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing (Wiley), 3D printers will be capable of constructing houses with plumbing and wiring in place, and printing "vanity organs" for people who want new or improved athletic abilities.

Inevitably, such technologies and capabilities will trickle down, and probably faster and more radically than many people anticipate. While MakerBot Replicators may still look a little too DIY for those of us who have yet to fully exploit the capacities of our microwave ovens, ease of use is evolving rapidly.

In January, Adobe announced that it is adding 3D printing capabilities to Photoshop, giving users the ability to design three-dimensional objects and send them to their own printers or 3D printers in the cloud. A California startup called AIO Robotics is developing a machine that points the way toward a future where the goods in the picture frame aisle at Target become just as easy to duplicate and manipulate as Metallica's back catalog. It's called Zeus. It looks like an unusually stylish kitchen appliance, and its creators, who met as students at the University of Southern California, describe it as the "world's first 3D copy machine."

Place an object in its central chamber, then push a button. Zeus scans the object in 3D. Push another button, and Zeus uses the 3D file it has created to reproduce an exact plastic replica of your object. In essence, Zeus makes "making" even easier than consuming. If you decide you really, really like the pasta bowl your mom gave you for Christmas, you don't even have to go to the mall, or surf Amazon.com to get another. Just throw it in Zeus and push a button!

In almost all visions of the 3D printed future, manufacturing changes dramatically. If a high-end 3D printer can fabricate a pistol or a panini press on demand, why bother with huge production runs, global distribution networks, warehoused inventories, and the cheap human labor that only under-regulated developing nations can provide? While it will still make sense to produce some goods in large quantities using traditional methods, manufacturing is poised to become a far more local, just-in-time, customized endeavor.

But if the nature of manufacturing is poised to change dramatically, what about the nature of consumption? In many ways, it's even harder to imagine a city of, say, 50,000 without big-box retailers than it is to imagine it without a daily newspaper. So perhaps 3D printing won't alter our old habits that substantially. We'll demand locally made kitchen mops, but we'll still get them at Target. We'll acquire a taste for craft automobile tires, but we'll obtain them from some third party that specializes in their production. Commercial transactions will still occur.

But if history is any guide, more and more of us will soon be engaging in all sorts of other behaviors too. Making our own goods. Sharing, swapping, and engaging in peer-to-peer commerce. Appropriating the ideas and designs of others and applying them to our own ends. Combining resources and collaborating on extremely large and ambitious projects we couldn't hope to accomplish alone. And over time these new behaviors will have consequential impacts on scores of products, companies, and industries.

Already, according to a study authored by Michigan Technological University engineering professor Joshua Pearce and six others, there are significant economic incentives for consumers to pursue 3D printing. According to Pearce's calculations, a person who constructs an open-source 3D printer called the RepRap at a cost of around $575 for parts can theoretically avoid paying between $290 and $1,920 a year to retailers simply by using the device to print 20 common items (iPhone case, shower curtain rings, shoe orthotics, etc.).

If you are willing to invest some time in its construction-Pearce estimates that the RepRap takes around 24 hours to build-the printer can quickly pay for itself, even if you don't use it all that often. If you start making orthotics for your neighbors, who knows, it could even turn into a profit center.

Soon, we'll begin to see the rise of manufacturing Matt Drudges and printer-sharing Reddits. So many different producers will be producing so many different products that it will become harder and harder for even well-established and trusted brands to charge for anything but the scarcest and most coveted goods. In a bid to survive, places like Walmart and Best Buy will begin to offer stuff as a subscription-you'll get 200 lbs. of goods per year for a monthly fee of $19.99.

But maybe even that will seem too steep to you, or just not as autonomous as you'd like. Ultimately, 3D printers and the distributed manufacturing they enable will democratize and mainstream survivalism. You won't need five remote acres, heavy equipment, and a lot of practical know-how to live off the grid. In the realm of your commercial life, at least, you'll be able to DIY in New York City.

Be prepared, however, to expect some pushback from your local regulators. Over the past decade or so, as newer technologies and fewer opportunities for traditional employment have prompted more people to act in entrepreneurially innovative ways, government's response has been the same: Consumers must be protected against strawberry balsamic jam made in home kitchens. Tourists must be protected against immaculately maintained carriage houses that can be rented on a daily basis for below-hotel rates. Travelers must be protected from cheap rides from the airport.

When government realizes that self-produced plastic shower curtain rings are far more potentially disruptive than self-produced plastic pistols, it'll be more than libertarian entrepreneur-iconoclasts at risk.

Engineers design ‘living materials’

Engineers design ‘living materials’

Hybrid materials combine bacterial cells with nonliving elements that can conduct electricity or emit light.

An artist's rendering of a bacterial cell engineered to produce amyloid nanofibers that incorporate particles such as quantum dots (red and green spheres) or gold nanoparticles. 

Inspired by natural materials such as bone — a matrix of minerals and other substances, including living cells — MIT engineers have coaxed bacterial cells to produce biofilms that can incorporate nonliving materials, such as gold nanoparticles and quantum dots.

These “living materials” combine the advantages of live cells, which respond to their environment, produce complex biological molecules, and span multiple length scales, with the benefits of nonliving materials, which add functions such as conducting electricity or emitting light.

The new materials represent a simple demonstration of the power of this approach, which could one day be used to design more complex devices such as solar cells, self-healing materials, or diagnostic sensors, says Timothy Lu, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering. Lu is the senior author of a paper describing the living functional materials in the March 23 issue of Nature Materials.

“Our idea is to put the living and the nonliving worlds together to make hybrid materials that have living cells in them and are functional,” Lu says. “It’s an interesting way of thinking about materials synthesis, which is very different from what people do now, which is usually a top-down approach.”

The paper’s lead author is Allen Chen, an MIT-Harvard MD-PhD student. Other authors are postdocs Zhengtao Deng, Amanda Billings, Urartu Seker, and Bijan Zakeri; recent MIT graduate Michelle Lu; and graduate student Robert Citorik.

Self-assembling materials

Lu and his colleagues chose to work with the bacterium E. coli because it naturally produces biofilms that contain so-called “curli fibers” — amyloid proteins that help E. coli attach to surfaces. Each curli fiber is made from a repeating chain of identical protein subunits called CsgA, which can be modified by adding protein fragments called peptides. These peptides can capture nonliving materials such as gold nanoparticles, incorporating them into the biofilms.

By programming cells to produce different types of curli fibers under certain conditions, the researchers were able to control the biofilms’ properties and create gold nanowires, conducting biofilms, and films studded with quantum dots, or tiny crystals that exhibit quantum mechanical properties. They also engineered the cells so they could communicate with each other and change the composition of the biofilm over time.

First, the MIT team disabled the bacterial cells’ natural ability to produce CsgA, then replaced it with an engineered genetic circuit that produces CsgA but only under certain conditions — specifically, when a molecule called AHL is present. This puts control of curli fiber production in the hands of the researchers, who can adjust the amount of AHL in the cells’ environment. When AHL is present, the cells secrete CsgA, which forms curli fibers that coalesce into a biofilm, coating the surface where the bacteria are growing.

The researchers then engineered E. coli cells to produce CsgA tagged with peptides composed of clusters of the amino acid histidine, but only when a molecule called aTc is present. The two types of engineered cells can be grown together in a colony, allowing researchers to control the material composition of the biofilm by varying the amounts of AHL and aTc in the environment. If both are present, the film will contain a mix of tagged and untagged fibers. If gold nanoparticles are added to the environment, the histidine tags will grab onto them, creating rows of gold nanowires, and a network that conducts electricity. 

‘Cells that talk to each other’

The researchers also demonstrated that the cells can coordinate with each other to control the composition of the biofilm. They designed cells that produce untagged CsgA and also AHL, which then stimulates other cells to start producing histidine-tagged CsgA.

“It’s a really simple system but what happens over time is you get curli that’s increasingly labeled by gold particles. It shows that indeed you can make cells that talk to each other and they can change the composition of the material over time,” Lu says. “Ultimately, we hope to emulate how natural systems, like bone, form. No one tells bone what to do, but it generates a material in response to environmental signals.”

To add quantum dots to the curli fibers, the researchers engineered cells that produce curli fibers along with a different peptide tag, called SpyTag, which binds to quantum dots that are coated with SpyCatcher, a protein that is SpyTag’s partner. These cells can be grown along with the bacteria that produce histidine-tagged fibers, resulting in a material that contains both quantum dots and gold nanoparticles.

These hybrid materials could be worth exploring for use in energy applications such as batteries and solar cells, Lu says. The researchers are also interested in coating the biofilms with enzymes that catalyze the breakdown of cellulose, which could be useful for converting agricultural waste to biofuels. Other potential applications include diagnostic devices and scaffolds for tissue engineering.

“I think this is really fantastic work that represents a great integration of synthetic biology and materials engineering,” says Lingchong You, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University who was not part of the research team. 

The research was funded by the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Office, the National Science Foundation, the Hertz Foundation, the Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.

Can Men Breastfeed?

Male lactation(Male breastfeeding)

Newborn babies of both sexes can produce milk, this is called neonatal milk. This is caused by combination of effects of maternal harmouns before birth. Breast milk production occurs in about 5% newborns and can remain till 2 months.

We can't consider neonatal milk as male lactation. Male lactation was of some interest toAlexander von Humboldt, who reports in Voyage aux rgions quinoxiales du Nouveau Continent of a citizen of the village Arenas (close to Cumana ) who allegedly nurtured his son for three months when his wife was ill.

Male mammals of many species have been observed to lactate under unusual or pathogenic conditions such as extreme stress, feeding castrated animals with phytoestrogens or animals with pituitary tumors. Hence it was hypothesized that while most mammals could easily develop the ability to lactate this does not provide the males, or the species with any evolutionary advantage. While the males could in theory improve the chance to pass on their genes by improving the feeding their offspring by male lactation, most of them have developed other strategies such as mating with additional partners. Presently only very few species are known where male lactation occurs and it is not well understood what evolutionary factors control the development of this trait.

There are several stories that human male can breastfeed. The stories include a sailor who put his son to his breast to quiet him and started producing milk; a South American peasant who sustained his child with his own breast milk during his wife's illness; and a Chippewa man who put his infant to his breast following the death of his wife and produced enough milk to rear the child.

The phenomenon hasn't stopped. In 2002, a Sri Lankan man named B. Wijeratne lost his wife and was left to care for their 18- month-old daughter. When the child refused powdered milk, Wijeratne tried something different. "Unable to see her cry, I offered my breast,"Wijeratne told a Sri Lankan newspaper. "That's when I discovered I could breastfeed."

Men posses mammary glands and pituitary glands which are vital components for lactating.

For a human to breastfeed these glands have to be activated somehow. In women this happens during pregnancy.

All men produce small amounts of prolactin during their lifetime. For example it's released after organism and may be responsible for the feeling of satisfaction and relaxation. But it's never present in large amount for men to breastfeed.

This often happens to mother who adopt children and suddenly find they can nurse. And according to some researchers there a long history of it happening in men too.

Simple Ways To Improve Eye Sight

More than 25 million people worldwide are affected by age-related macular degeneration and cataracts, which according to the American Optometric Association is the leading cause of blindness in people over age 55. These diseases are often caused by oxidation and inflammation of the eyes.

The good news: The most common diseases — age-related macular degeneration (ARMD), cataracts, glaucoma, and dry eye disease — are all preventable to some extent. The first step, if you smoke, then it is need to be stopped. Smoking increases your risk of cataracts, glaucoma, dry eyes, and age-related macular degeneration.

1  Eat foods that promote eye health

Research has found that foods rich in the nutrients lutein and zeaxanthin can reduce the risk of chronic eye diseases. Other studies have found that a diet rich in vitamins C and E, beta carotene, zinc, and omega-3 fatty acids can also prevent age-related eye diseases. Try to incorporate these foods into your meals:

Green, leafy vegetables such as spinach, kale, and collards

Salmon, tuna, and other oily fish

Eggs, nuts, beans, and other non-meat protein sources

Oranges and other citrus fruits or juices

2. Move your computer screen to just below eye level 

The major reason for losing eye vision is our continuous watching television and sitting in front of computer screen  and laptop . Your eyes will close slightly when you’re staring at the computer, minimizing fluid evaporation and the risk of dry eye syndrome, says John Sheppard, M.D., who directs the ophthalmology residency program at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Virginia.

  3. Wear Sunglasses  

The right kind of sunglasses will help protect your eyes from the sun's ultraviolet (UV) rays.

Choose sunglasses that block 99% to 100% of both UVA and UVB rays. Wraparound lenses help protect your eyes from the side. Polarized lenses reduce glare when driving.

If you wear contact lenses, some offer UV protection. It's still a good idea to wear sunglasses for more protection.

4. Rest Properly

Taking Enough sleep and break during the work may also help us in improving eye sight. It is  important to rest your eyes once in a while! If you work on a computer all day, your eyes are probably under a lot of strain. Take a break for about 10 minutes for every 50 minutes spent in front of the screen. Simply close your eyes for a minute or get up and walk around the office. Focus on something that isn’t a screen. You can also rest your eyes by following the 10-10-10 rule. This means you should look at something 10 feet away for 10 seconds for every 10 minutes you spend working on the computer.

Additionally, getting around eight hours of sleep a night is incredibly important for your eye health. If your eyes are well-rested, they will be in much better condition! If you currently do not sleep enough or take enough breaks at work, try it out for a week and see the difference it can make!

5. Exercise the muscles around your eyes

 This exercise is done to stimulate the muscles around your eye balls (that are present within the eye socket). Rotate your eyeballs, first to the right and left, then upwards and downwards. Do this in the clockwise and anti-clockwise direction for about three to four repetitions.

6. Bat those eyelids

Blinking is the eyes natural way to renew the moisture in the eyes and give it some much needed relief. To help your eyes relax, make it a habit to blink after every five to six seconds.

7. Turn down the heat in your house. 

Heat dries out the air, which, in turn, dries out your eyes. In the winter, you might also try adding some humidity with a humidifier or even bunching a lot of plants together in the room in which you spend the most time.

 Reference:

Rebuild Your Vision