Green Float: The futuristic concept that sees humans live in giant skyscrapers on floating water lilies in the middle of the Pacific

Humans in the future could live in mini floating cities that drift across the Pacific as if on giant water lilies.

The startling new concept has been dreamed up by Japanese technology firm Shimizu and is designed to be a way of harnessing green technologies and creating carbon-neutral cities.

The Green Float concept involves a number of cells, each one kilometre wide, that house between 10,000 and 50,000 people.
 

The majority of people on the cells would live in huge towers 1km high surrounded
by lush green fields
 

Each individual cell would be free to float on the Pacific Ocean near the equator but could also be joined together with other cells to form larger towns and even cities.

A group or modules, a collection of cells, would become a country in its own right.

Most people in this brave new world would live in a 1 kilometre-high ‘City in the Sky’ at the centre of each cell. More people would live in residential areas around the edge of the cell.

The central towers would be surrounded by grassland and forests and be self-sufficient in terms of food, while livestock and other farming would take place in 'plains' also surrounding the tower - all built on a lattice of 7,000-tonne honeycomb pontoons.

The towers would be built from super-light alloys with the metal deriving from magnesium in seawater.

The imaginative plan is designed to create a future carbon-neutral society and the Shimizu developers claim that living on cells in this way would cut carbon emissions by 40 per cent.
 

The floating cells, each with a City in the Sky structure at its centre, 

can join together to form larger modules
 

The City in the Sky skscrapers are designed to be carbon negative with extensive environmental technologies and recycling facilities built in

The cells would create zero waste and recycle every product and covert waste into energy using new green technologies. Islands of waste would drift around the ocean and could be ‘harvested’ to provide energy

The location of the islands is key to their success too, the designers claim.

Each group of cells would be near the equator where the climate is at its most stable and a range of technologies would be used to protect the floating cities from tidal waves and extreme weather.

To protect the inhabitants from large waves, strong elastic membranes would be attached to the lagoons around the outer edge of the cells, with the shallows above the membranes standing 30 feet above sea level.
Shimizu scientists calculate that the water pressure difference between the lagoons and the ocean would limit the movement of the membranes and buffer the force of the open sea waves.

Seawalls as high as 100 feet could also be constructed. And tsunamis in the open sea are far less dangerous than those that hit coastal areas, the designers say.
 

A country consisting of one million people would be formed after 

modules joined together one by one

Lightning rods would be fitted around the circumference of the towers and mesh lightning conductors will be placed on the exterior walls to protect against lightning strikes.

Shimizu wants to develop the first cells by 2025 and is concentrating on developing the technologies to make it happen. The concept was displayed at a recent Japanese university conference.

This is the not the first outlandish idea that Shimizu has come up with. The firm also proposes encircling the moon in a belt of solar collectors that would collect solar energy and transmit it to Earth.
 

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The cities that never sleep: Spectacular night-time photos of Earth taken from the space station that show London's lights shine brightest

We often look up at the sky at night and wonder at the stars, but from space Earth has its own impressive light show.

These pictures taken by an astronaut on the International Space Station show London, Paris lit up at night, the southern Mediterranean including Ibiza and Majorca and the light of towns snaking down the river Nile from Cairo.

One shot even captures the green northern lights spread out across the top of the earth above Britain.

Aurora Borealis in the distance on this beautiful night over Europe. 

The Strait of Dover is clear as is Paris, the City of Lights, though there is 

a little fog over the western part of England and London. 

 

Each spectacular picture shows the cities as hubs, blazing away with the power of millions of watts of electricity all at once.
Doug Wheelock, currently orbiting the earth on the ISS took the series of pictures over the last 12 days.
He said: 'You can see the Aurora Borealis in the distance on this beautiful night over Europe. The Strait of Dover is pretty clear as is Paris, the City of Lights, though there is a little fog over the western part of England and London.

'Here is Europe on a cool autumn night. We can see the Mediterranean Riviera and beautiful mosaic along the coastline from Valencia, Spain to Livorno, Italy and all the magical places in between.  

'And here we have a night view of the River Nile winding up through the Egyptian desert toward the Mediterranean Sea, and Cairo in the river delta.  

Clear outline: The Florida peninsula and the southeastern U.S. on a clear autumn night,
with moonlight over the water and the haze of the inner atmosphere visible

 

Stark contrast: The dark desolate lifeless desert of northern Africa and the
Nile River teeming with life along its shores, and the Mediterranean beyond

 

Nasa Shuttle commander Douglas H. Wheelock

He continued: 'There is such a stark contrast between the dark desolate lifeless desert of northern Africa and the Nile River teeming with life along its shores. In the distance lies the eastern Mediterranean on a beautiful autumn evening.'  
He added: 'It is incredible to see the lights of the cities and small towns against the backdrop of deep space. I am going to miss this view of our wonderful world.'
The images are a stark illustration of our incredible energy usage, particularly in the cities where lights are left on in office blocks for 24 hours and every light on every street blazes away all night.
However the latest official figures show that energy consumption per household has actually fallen from the equivalent of two tonnes of oil per household in 1980 to 1.6 tonnes last year.

Looks like there's a party going on: The Mediterranean Riviera, along the coastline from Valencia, Spain, to Livorno, Italy, and the Balearic Islands

 

The ancient gateway city of Istanbul, in Turkey is the only city in the world to span two continents, linking the Black Sea to the north and the Sea of Marmara to the south

 

The approaching dawn moves across the horizon revealing the Aurora Borealis,
or northern polar lights

 

Morning breaks over the majestic Andes mountain range in South America,
although astronaut Doug Wheelock was uncertain what peak this is

 

Unique surreal moment in space: From the Cupola, a view of the Soyuz TMA-19 'Olympus',
the spaceship that will carry Commander Wheelock home.
The Galapagos Islands can be seen through a break in the clouds below

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The Hundred Year Starship: The NASA mission that will take astronauts to Mars and leave them there forever

The mission is to boldly go where no man has gone before – on a flight to Mars.
The snag is that you’d never come back.
The U.S. space agency Nasa is actively investigating the possibility of humans colonising other worlds such as the Red Planet in an ambitious project named the Hundred Years Starship.
The settlers would be sent supplies from Earth, but would go on the understanding that it would be too costly to make the return trip.
NASA Ames Director Pete Worden revealed that one of NASA’s main research centres, Ames Research Centre, has received £1million funding to start work on the project.
The research team has also received an additional $100,000 from Nasa.
 

Astronauts would be marooned on the planet's surface and
would never be able to return home due to cost

An artist's impression of a Mars base manned by astronauts who
would have to learn to be self-sufficient

 

‘You heard it here,” Worden said at ‘Long Conversation,’ an event in San Francisco. ‘We also hope to inveigle some billionaires to form a Hundred Year Starship fund.’
He added: ‘The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds. Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired.’
Worden said he has discussed the potential price tag for one-way trips to Mars with Google co-founder Larry Page, telling him such a mission could be done for $10 billion.
He said said: ‘His response was, “Can you get it down to $1 [billion] or $2billion?” So now we're starting to get a little argument over the price.’

Depending on the position of Mars in its orbit around the sun, its distance from Earth varies between 34million and 250million miles.
The most recent unmanned mission there was Nasa’s Phoenix lander, which launched in August 2007 and landed on the planet’s north polar cap in May the following year.
Experts say a nuclear-fuelled rocket could shorten the journey to about four months.
Of all the planets in the solar system, Mars is the most likely to have substantial quantities of water, making it the best bet for sustaining life. But it is a forbidding place to set up home.
Temperatures plummet way below freezing in some parts. The thin atmosphere would be a problem as it is mostly carbon dioxide, so oxygen supplies are a must.
Worden also suggested that new technologies such as synthetic biology and alterations to the human genome could also be explored ahead of the mission.
And he said that he believed the mission should visit Mars’ moons first, where scientists can do extensive telerobotics exploration of the planet. He claims that humans could be on Mars' moons by 2030.

News of the Hundred Years Starship comes as new research found that a one-way human mission to Mars is technologically feasible and would be a cheaper option than bringing astronauts back.
Writing in the Journal of Cosmology, scientists Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Paul Davies, say that the envision sending four volunteer astronauts on the first mission to permanently colonise Mars.
They write: ‘A one-way human mission to Mars would not be a fixed duration project as in the Apollo program, but the first step in establishing a permanent human presence on the planet.’
The astronauts would be sent supplies from Earth on a regular basis but they would be expected to become self-sufficient on the red planet’s surface as soon as possible.
They say: There are many reasons why a human colony on Mars is a desirable goal, scientifically and politically. The strategy of one-way missions brings this goal within technological and financial feasibility.
‘Nevertheless, to attain it would require not only major international cooperation, but a return to the exploration spirit and risk-taking ethos of the great period of Earth exploration, from Columbus to Amundsen, but which has nowadays being replaced with a culture of safety and political correctness.’
 

An artist's impression of the 100 Year Starship, the craft that
would take astronauts to colonise other planets

 

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit work on the planet's surface.
One day humans could be working alongside the robotic probe

 

They admit that the mission would come with ‘ethical considerations’ with the general public feeling that the Martian pioneers had been abandoned to their fate or sacrificed.
But they argue that these first inhabitants of Mars would be going in much the same spirit as the first white settlers of North America – travelling to a distant land, knowing that they will never return home.
They say: ‘Explorers such as Columbus, Frobisher, Scott and Amundsen, while not embarking on their voyages with the intention of staying at their destination, nevertheless took huge personal risks to explore new lands, in the knowledge that there was a significant likelihood that they would perish in the attempt.’

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New York to Sydney in just 2hrs 30mins: Nasa to develop 'hypersonic' passenger jets that travel at five times the speed of sound

NASA is planning to build hypersonic jets that will fly through the Earth’s atmosphere and slash flight times around the world to a few hours at most.
The US space agency wants to manufacture a craft that would travel at five times the speed of sound and bring in a new age of aircraft akin to a turbo-charged Concorde.
Travelling at such speed would reduce the flight time from New York to Sydney to around two-and-a-half hours, from the 21 hours it is now.
The project is thought to be aimed at making a reusable aircraft that could fly to Mars but, as with previous space technology, it could have a huge impact upon passenger transport too.
 

NASA's experimental X-43A scramjet aircraft which is capable
if reaching almost seven times the speed of sound

 

Under the NASA Aeronautics 2010 proposal, the space agency will allocate $5million per year for the next three years to make the new aircraft a reality.
The aim is to create something which can carry passengers through the atmosphere, descend and land safely before being reused.
 
According to the proposal, engineers will look into ‘entry, descent and landing of high-mass vehicles entering into planetary atmospheres’ and ‘airbreathing access to space’
NASA is also aware of the many challenges it faces to build such a machine.
The proposal says: ‘The hypersonic heating environment, coupled with the emphasis on reusability, creates additional severe technology challenges for materials, material coatings, and structures that not only carry the aerodynamic loads of the air but also repeatedly sustain high thermal loads requiring long-life and durability while minimizing weight.
‘Space access launch vehicles must be lightweight, fully reusable and easily maintained if low-cost access to space is to be achieved.’
Hypersonic aircraft is still a fairly new concept and follows on from Concorde, which flew at Mach 2, or twice the speed of sound.
A hypersonic aircraft would reach Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound.

In June this year an experimental scramjet  aircraft set a record for hypersonic flight, blazing through the air for more than three minutes at Mach 6, or more than 4,500 mph.
The X-51A Waverider scramjet was released from a B-52 bomber last week before its engine took it to Mach 6 and it flew autonomously for 200 seconds.
Scramjets work by using oxygen rushing in through the engine at supersonic speeds to ignite hydrogen fuel.

In October Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo completed its solo maiden flight after being carried aloft by its mothership to an altitude of 45,000ft and released over the Mojave Desert.
Built by famed aircraft designer Burt Rutan, the craft aims to be the first opportunity for space tourism at something close to an affordable price - tickets cost $200,000 (£125,000).
The craft is based on a prototype that won a $10million (£6.3million) prize in 2004 for being the first manned private rocket to reach space.
The six-passenger ship will undergo rigorous testing before it can carry tourists to space.

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Eating persimmon leaves inhibits weight gain and lowers lipid levels

Supplementing a high-fat diet with powdered leaves taken from Native American persimmon trees can inhibit weight gain and lower both food intake and plasma lipid levels, research shows.
Scientists believe that the rich fiber and phenolic content of persimmon leaves, which are commonly used to make tea in India, increases the amount of lipids removed from the body as feces.
"Since the persimmon leaves have beneficial effects on hemostatsis, constipation, hypertension, apoplexy, and atherosclerosis, they have been broadly applied in food and medicine," says J Lee, from the Ottogi Research Center in Kyonngi-do, The Republic of Korea and colleagues.
To investigate if the leaves also improved metabolism and lipid levels, the team fed three groups of rats either a normal control, high-fat, or high-fat with powdered whole persimmon leaf diet, for 6 weeks.
Eating the high-fat diet without persimmon leaves increased the rats' body weight by an average 114% in comparison with those fed the normal control diet.
However, rats eating the persimmon leaf supplemented high-fat diet had a final body weight similar to that of the normal control group after 6 weeks.
"Thus indicating that persimmon leaf supplementation suppressed the excess body weight gain that could be induced by high-fat feeding," say the authors in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology.
They added that these rats gained less weight because persimmon leaf consumption suppressed their food intake, perhaps via the hormone leptin, levels of which were higher in the leaf-supplemented group than the high-fat only group.
Eating persimmon leaves with a high-fat diet also created a less atherogenic lipid profile by lowering plasma total cholesterol and triglyceride concentrations, while increasing the ratio of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol to total cholesterol.
Finally, the researchers say the fact that rats eating persimmon leaves had a higher daily fecal weight than the high-fat only group, shows that the "combined effect of high-fiber and high-phenolic content in persimmon leaf itself could enhance the fecal excretion of neutral and acidic sterol."
They conclude: "Efficacy tests of lipid-lowering action of persimmon leaf suggest that this whole persimmon leaf food would be beneficial for regulation of lipid metabolism or prevention of hyperlipidemia in an experimental animal model."

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The Secret Life of Chaos, with Prof. Jim Al-Khalili

THE SECRET LiFE OF CHAOS (2010) Chaos theory has a bad name, conjuring up images of unpredictable weather, economic crashes and science gone wrong. But there is a fascinating and hidden side to Chaos, one that scientists are only now beginning to understand. It turns out that chaos theory answers a question that mankind has asked for millennia how did we get here? In this documentary, Professor Jim Al-Khalili sets out to uncover one of the great mysteries of science how does a universe that starts off as dust end up with intelligent life? How does order emerge from disorder? Its a mindbending, counterintuitive and for many people a deeply troubling idea. But Professor Al-Khalili reveals the science behind much of beauty and structure in the natural world and discovers that far from it being magic or an act of God, it is in fact an intrinsic part of the laws of physics. Amazingly, it turns out that the mathematics of chaos can explain how and why the universe creates exquisite order and pattern. And the best thing is that one doesnt need to be a scientist to understand it. The natural world is full of awe-inspiring examples of the way nature transforms simplicity into complexity. From trees to clouds to humans after watching this film youll never be able to look at the world in the same way again. Find out more about the secret life of chaos
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2012: Startling New Secrets

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2012.Startling.New.Secrets (2009): The U.S. and other governments may have conspired to hide the disturbing facts from the public, in part to prevent global panic. U.S. government actually has a secret project to try and prevent an Apocalypse. Imdb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1539105/ what is the truth behind 2012?
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