James Holloway
Is this one of the world's best office buildings? These are the new offices of Norwegian oil and gas outfit Statoil, built at Fonebu near Oslo in Norway. The building was lauded well before its completion towards the end of 2012. In 2009 it was singled out as Future Project of the Year at the World Architecture Festival. Last year it received the Best Commercial Building prize at the World Architecture News Awards, and more recently was nominated in the Best Office & Business Development category at this year's MIPIM real estate exhibition in Cannes (where it was beaten by The Squaire in Frankfurt). So what's significant about the design? Read More
Phase one of the London Array usurped the UK's Greater Gabbard to become the largest operational offshore wind farm in the world when its final turbine (its 175th) was commissioned on Saturday afternoon. Though construction was completed back in December, it is only now that all of the farm's turbines are supplying the UK's national grid with electrical power. The array has a total capacity of 630 MW. Read More
The designers behind the transforming D-Dynamic concept house have applied the same principle to a designer coffee table launching on Kickstarter. Read More
BioShock Infinite, the third installment in what is now the BioShock series, sees the return of Ken Levine to the helm. Along with one or two others, Levine is arguably the closest thing the video games industry has to an auteur. With metascores of 96 on both PC and Xbox 360, BioShock is held up as the pinnacle of the current gen, and so it was inevitable, given Levine's return, that expectations for Infinite would be sky high. It's fitting, then, that a city in the sky is the backdrop for the game's snaking narrative. Gizmag took a rocket ship to Columbia to find out if BioShock Infinite could possibly live up to the highest of expectations. Read More
The MS Tûranor PlanetSolar, the world's largest solar-powered boat, took to the seas once more on Thursday – this time, in the name of science. Equipped with unique instruments, the Tûranor will carry a team of scientists who will monitor the air and water of the Atlantic Ocean's Gulf Stream, a current which influences the climates of North America's east coast and Europe's west. The goal is to gain understanding of the processes which regulate climate. Read More
Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo left terra firma for her 24th glide flight on Wednesday morning. The flight was the first in which the loading and venting of the ship's nitrous system was tested. Virgin Galactic described the flight as "another key milestone on the way to our first powered flight." Read More
Whole Foods' next New York outlet looks set to become a supermarket with a difference. The supermarket chain will partner Gotham Greens to open a supermarket in Brooklyn sporting a 20,000 sq ft (1,860 sq m) rooftop greenhouse growing produce to be sold on the premises. "This project takes the discussion from food miles to food footsteps," said Gotham Greens Co-Founder, Viraj Puri. Read More
Students at the University of Warwick have announced their intention to build a human-powered submarine to compete at that highlight of the human-powered submarine events calendar, the European International Submarine Races in 2014. The team of engineering students hopes that their vessel, already named HPS Shakespeare, will beat the current speed record for a single-seat human-powered sub. Read More
Philips has announced that its 22-watt LED lightbulb is the first 100-watt tungsten equivalent bulb to have been awarded Energy Star certification. Often referred to as the A21, which is actually just one of several standard forms for light bulbs that this bulb happens to conform to, Philips' 22-W bulb puts out "nearly" 1,800 lumens for an efficacy of about 82 lumens/watt (lm/W). It's a fine spec, but not too dissimilar to the competition, which raises the question of why Philips' product has been singled out. Read More
Though not the first, GIGS.2.GO is perhaps the most tidy execution of a paper-based USB flash drives we've seen. Four sticks, or tabs, made from recycled, molded paper pulp can be torn from a credit-card sized pack. But are such sticks as "disposable" as they purport to be? Read More
