Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: environmental – Page 18

Around the world, cities are choking on smog. But a new AI system plans to analyze just how bad the situation is by aggregating data from smartphone pictures captured far and wide across cities.

The project, called AirTick, has been developed by researchers from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, reports New Scientist. The reasoning is pretty simple: Deploying air sensors isn’t cheap and takes a long time, so why not make use of the sensors that everyone has in their pocket?

The result is an app which allows people to report smog levels by uploading an image tagged with time and location. Then, a machine learning algorithm chews through the data and compares it against official air-quality measurements where it can. Over time, the team hopes the software will slowly be able to predict air quality from smartphone images alone.

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“[A]rtist Simon Beck (previously) trudges across sand or through knee-high snow to create massive geometric drawings left behind in his footprints. From sandy expanses on the shore of New Zealand to frigid outlooks in the Swiss Alps, any pristine surface that stretches for hundreds of meters can work as a suitable canvas for Beck’s designs.”

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**Spanish architect Alberto Villanueva’s Mars Utopia concept would see the planet transformed into an inhabitable environment using towers formed by bacteria**

Villanueva, who works at Idea Architecture Office, created the project while completing a masters in Environment Design at London’s Ravensbourne College. “As an architect I am worried about the overpopulation issue”. “I was studying how the most populated cities around the world are growing non-stop. At the same time I realised that at least 30 per cent of territories are in extreme environments and I wanted to understand how, with my responsibility as an architect, I could think in new ways to build in these areas,” he added.

![enter image description here](http://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2016/01/Mars-Utopia_Alberto…1568_3.jpg “enter image title here”)

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