More than 7.6 billion people currently inhabit the Earth, each one an eating, breathing, space-occupying bundle of atoms. By the year 2050, experts estimate that the global population will rise by more than a quarter, bringing the total to around 9.7 billion people. That is a lot of mouths to feed and a lot of bodies to find shelter for. Already, around a billion people live in shoddy settlements, while many more reside in structures that aren’t environmentally friendly.
In an effort to design more sustainable and affordable housing for future populations, the United Nations and Yale University recently teamed together and created the Ecological Living Module, a roughly 240-square-foot tiny house, which they designed to test ways to minimize water and natural resource use.
“We clearly need more housing but the key thing is that we also need smarter housing” Erik Solheim, head of the United Nations environment program, UN Environment, said. “The housing sector uses 40 percent of the planet’s total resources and represents more than a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. So making them more efficient will benefit everyone and it’ll mean lower bills, too. Innovations like the Ecological Living Module are what we need more of.”
Constructed mainly from locally sourced, renewable materials, the Ecological Living Module is powered entirely by renewable energy. Using built-in technology, the structure has its own solar energy generation system, on-site water collection setup, basic agricultural infrastructure for growing greens, and plant-based air purification system. The unit is designed to let in natural light to lessen its energy demand, and is capable of being modified for living and working. It can accommodate up to four people, albeit in rather tight quarters.
The Yale Center for Ecosystems in Architecture worked with Gray Organschi Architecture to design and fabricate the house.
“Adequate housing is at the heart of sustainable urbanization,” said Maimunah Mohd Sharif, executive director of UN Habitat, the UN’s human settlements program. “The use of proper building materials, better planning, and improved construction techniques can make energy use in buildings more efficient. If adopted widely, this practice can create jobs and prosperity with lower greenhouse gas emissions.”
A prototype of the Ecological Living Module is on display in the UN Plaza in New York City through July 18. Future models will be designed to adapt to local climatic and cultural contexts.
Google has been finding more ways to make Gemini a part of your daily routine, from putting together playlists to ordering groceries through your favorite apps. Now it's expanding those capabilities to more services, with Google Search joining in, too.
The company has announced a new Connected Apps Platform that makes it easier for developers to bring their services to both Gemini and Search. Alongside this, Google is adding new partners to its growing lineup, bringing more of the apps people already use into its AI ecosystem.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.