The Japanese architectural and construction firm Sumitomo Forestry Co. has announced plans for a 70-story tall skyscraper in Tokyo constructed of wood. Known as the W350 project, the structure will be 1,148 feet tall and will include residential apartments and public spaces on multiple floors, mixed with hotel, office, and retail space.
The Guardian, which dubbed it the “Plyscraper,” noted that the $5.6 billion cost of the project will be nearly twice that of a similar glass-and-steel conventional building. The company says that the cost of the project will decline due to technological advances, as the high-rise is not scheduled for completion until 2041.
In an outline of the project, Sumitomo said the structure would be made of 90 percent wooden materials, with crisscrossing steel braces to better withstand Japan’s high seismic activity.
In 2010, Japan enacted an ordinance requiring construction companies to use wood for public buildings. Sumitomo aims to take that a step further and “Change Cities into Forests” by using materials that are more environmentally friendly.
Wooden high-rise structures are gaining popularity around the world. Portland recently approved construction of the tallest all-wood building in the U.S., an 11-story office and apartment building known as Framework.
Brock Commons, a residential structure at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, is currently the tallest wooden building in the world at 174 feet tall. The building speed was a big factor, John Metras of UBC explained to ArchDaily. “We found that working with wood, we could reduce timelines for construction,” he said. “The assembly of the wood structure went up incredibly quickly, faster than we even expected.”
Vancouver may not hold the record for long, however, as an ambitious new project planned for Chicago is a residential high-rise that’s 800 feet and 80 stories tall.
The W350 project is scheduled for completion to coincide with the company’s 350th anniversary. Balconies on all four sides will help vegetation grow along the outside of the high-rise, all the way to the top floor. The company says the new building will be an example of “urban development that is kind for humans,” with more high-rises constructed from wood and covered with greenery “making over cities as forests.”
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.