Well, exams are over (and passed), so now i won’t have to take an exam or be at a lecture again … ever. As promised the rate of articles will pick up somewhat now, so here goes.

It seems like every other story we do somehow involves MIT doing something revolutionary, those guys are really at the forefront of science/engineering. This time around they claim to have made the worlds most power-efficient solar power solution.

The contraption is basically a cleverly designed mirror that focuses the sunlight it reflects onto a small area that absorbs the heat from the light quite efficiently into copper wires, that then transfer the heat to water surrounding them. The water then heats up and eventually produces steam, that could be used to power turbines, creating electricity. I could babble on here about the design and such, but MIT’s news service is actually quite good, and they have a video with the lead-designer explaining everything quite well, and he even demonstrates how the light beam is powrful enough to quickly make a plank of wood go up in flames. So check out this video here. I can also recommend reading their press-release on the matter.

With the news hitting that Sergei Brin, supreme overlord of Google, will be hitting space with the worlds first private spaceflight to ISS, we can’t help but say: It’s good to be rich.

With a down payment of 5million dollars, space is one of the most exclusive (and least luxurious, see the broken space toilet story) destinations available to us puny humans. The company, called Space Adventures, has made a deal with the Russian space agency to get two seats on a specifically manufactured Soyuz flight starting 2011, that will take the millionaires to the international space station.

Now this is obviously great news, being a staunch capitalist myself (unlike my hippie co-writer Brink), i am very happy to see more competitors in the field of private spaceflight. I’m sure we all remember the famous SpaceShipOne, the first commercial space endevour that won the coveted X-Prize (a prize given to the first privately funded team to reach space). What you may not know, is that Richard Branson actually invested in the idea and is planning to launch Virgin Galactic very soon. The production of their vehicle (SpaceShipTwo) is finished, and they expect to start test-flights (of which there will be 50-100) this month. Now, taking a flight with Virgin Galactic will obviously not be as fun as actually going to ISS and living in zero-G. SpaceShipTwo “only” flies up to 110km (slightly more then SpaceShipOne) and then goes back to earth, giving only a short period of weightlessness and outer-spacy-ness, BUT it will be MUCH cheaper. The first (100) customers put in a deposit of 200.000$, from there it will slowly decline in cost over the years, and will eventually cost 20.000$ per person. Now that’s still a lot of moolah, but at least it’s something within the reach of ordinary people, and if you look at this video, i think you’ll agree that the view is worth it.

You don’t believe me? Well I almost don’t believe me myself, but this new architectural concept is simply AMAZING. While it’s normally not the main area of focus here on ReducedMass, hang on for a while and see how we might be living in the future.

This new concept is called Dynamic Architecture and boasts a number of new innovative ideas that separates it from the crowd. I’m mainly going to tell you what you can see in the promotion video and read on the website, so head over there if you want to see for yourself.

First of all, what makes the building look so cool is that each floor rotates independently around the central cylinder, making it possible to follow the Sun or whatever suits the people living there. Everybody wants to rotate the amount that is just right for them, and the building will never look the same again. With this particular feature I really hope there are only one apartment per floor, as there could be some serious fights going on around sunrise, dinnertime and sunset, making it fun for less fortunate people to come watch the building at these times. Also, I wonder if there would be some times where people were encouraged to rotate back to the original setting, resetting the looks of the building once in an while. Is this rotation business a toy that you will outgrow in a couple of weeks? Could be, but let’s see when they build the first one.

Well enough with the fun, this building has more useful ideas hidden. Between each floor are wind turbines rotating in the horizontal plane and each creating around 0.3 megawatt of electricity. With around 50 of these in a skyscraper, the building would be able to be totally self-sustainable and even release a lot of green electricity to the neighborhood. I don’t know if this would actually work, with the wings being hidden in between the floors and all, but I must assume they’ve run some simulations or similar to get the 0.3 megawatt result. Once again, we’ll figure it out if they put the thing up.

As mentioned, this building looks interesting enough to start constructing, and as far as I can tell from the site, they are already planning the first one to be raised in Dubai. In the video they are also showing how the building is constructed from modules of green material, claiming that it will only take a day to assemble a finished floor. All in all if this building can deliver everything it claims, me might have a small revolution at hand.