Malaysia’s capital of Kuala Lumpur is regularly subjected to flash floods after heavy rains that remain for three to six hours, flooding the city center. After a series of devastating flash floods washed the heart of Kuala Lumpur city center and accumulated losses rose to billions of ringgit, the government approved a never-before-attempted concept to tackle the crippling floods and snarling traffic jams that plaque the Southern Gateway of the city – a SMART tunnel.
SMART stands for Stormwater Management and Road Tunnel. The 13.2m diameter tunnel consists of a 9.7km storm water bypass tunnel, with a 4km dual-deck motorway within the storm water tunnel. The main purpose of SMART is to solve the problem of flash flooding in Kuala Lumpur from the Sungai Klang and Kerayong rivers and also to reduce traffic jams during the daily rush hour.
The dual-purpose SMART tunnel begins at Kampung Berembang lake and ends at Taman Desa lake, diverting floodwaters away from the confluence of the two major rivers that run through the center of Kuala Lumpur. The 4km motorway tunnel incorporated into SMART acts as an efficient alternative route from the Southern Gateway of KL-Seremban Highway, Federal Highway, Besraya and East-West Link from entering and exiting the city centre. For motorists, the tunnel greatly reduces the travel time between the Jalan Istana Interchange and Kampung Pandan – from around 15 minutes down to just four minutes.
The SMART tunnel consist of three sections. The upper two sections are roadways that cater to traffic. Each section allows traffic to travel in one direction only. The third section at the bottom is a storm water tunnel. Under normal condition, when there is low rainfall and no storm, the motorway section is open to motorists and the storm water tunnel is closed. During moderate storm, the SMART system is activated and floodwater is diverted into the bypass tunnel in the lower channel of the motorway tunnel. The upper channel is still open to motorists. During an impending flood, the upper two roadways are closed to traffic and evacuated. Then the entire three sections of the SMART tunnel is ready to carry flood waters.
SMART opened to traffic on 14 May 2007, after four years of construction. The cost of the project was around MYR1,887m (approximately $514m). The tunnel handles 30,000 cars per day and has been used 44 times to divert floodwater.
Langkawi Sky Bridge is a 125 meters curved pedestrian cable-stayed bridge, located at the peak of Gunung Mat Chinchang mountain, on Pulau Langkawi, an island in the Langkawi archipelago in Kedah, Malaysia. Completed in 2004, this suspended bridge is located at the ‘end’ of a cable car ride which begins at the Oriental Village at the foot hill of the Machincang mountain range. The bridge is suspended from a 82 meter high single pylon and hangs at about 100 meter above ground. It swings out over the landscape to give visitors a unique spatial experience and spectacular views. The 1.8 meters wide bridge has two triangular platforms that act as ‘stops’ where you can admire the view and rest your feet.
Langkawi Sky Bridge ranks among the world’s strangest suspension bridge and constructing it was not an easy feat. The entire bridge, in all its elements had to be lifted to the top of the mountain by helicopter and was later assembled to its current position.
A quick search on what's on board Voyager 1 yield some interesting find.
Source: The Atlantic
The Message Voyager 1 Carries for Alien Civilizations
The "Golden Record" aboard the interstellar spacecraft is a time capsule of humanity, sent from 1977 to the distant future.
Megan Garber
Wikimedia Commons The year was 1977. Jimmy Carter was president. Rod Stewart topped the Billboard chart with "Tonight's the Night (Gonna Be Alright)." The economy was recovering from recession. Oil was scarce. Ties may have been wide, but patience, among many, was thin. Into that turbulent and indolent and somewhat cynical world -- and on behalf of it -- NASA launched two little probes, tiny even by spaceship standards, from Cape Canaveral. Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, were initially meant to explore Jupiter, Saturn, and their moons. They did that. But then they kept going. And going. And going. At a rate of 35,000 miles per hour. One of them, almost 35 years to the day after it left Earth behind, finally ventured beyond the influence of the body that has defined so much of life on Earth: the sun.
The Voyager probes are technically unmanned; in another sense, however, they carry all of humanity with them as they speed through space. Each craft bears an object that is, in every way, a record -- of Earth, of humanity, of humanity's drive to reach and strive and dream and connect. The two epic mementos, given the sunny hue of their aluminum coverings, have been dubbed the Golden Records. They were the product of Carl Sagan and a team that, in January 1977, realized the far-traveling probes would stand a better chance than most human spacecraft would of encountering extraterrestrial life. So they decided to undertake a task that was both uniquely human and uniquely of its moment: They would make a record that would, if discovered by aliens, represent humanity. They would make a time capsule of human civilization. One that would, as NASA puts it, "communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials." An artifact that would be epic and Quixotic in equal measure.
Telling humanity's story was, as team member Ann Druyan puts it in the phenomenal "Space" episode of Radiolab, "a sacred undertaking." She and Sagan and their group of, as she calls them, "half a dozen very flawed human beings" had taken it upon themselves to represent humanity as a culture and also as an aesthetic -- to explain to anything that might be out there who, and what, we're all about. They arrived at the idea during a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in January 1977; the Voyager probes would launch in late August and early September. Representing the entirety of human achievement in a single recording would have to be done quickly.
So the group, as humans are wont to do, divided the labor. Jon Lomberg was in charge of assembling pictures of Earth. Timothy Ferris selected the music. Druyan, the project's creative director (and later the co-writer, with Sagan, of Cosmos, and, as of 1981, Sagan's wife) oversaw the record's "Sounds of Earth" essay. Linda Salzman collected greetings from people around the world. Sagan served as the liaison with NASA. The team set about researching -- talking to historians and artists and ethnomusicologists. They reached out to political groups and documentarians. They recorded humans speaking -- among them, in perhaps the record's most iconic track, Sagan's young son saying, "Greetings from the children of planet Earth."
Wikimedia Commons The result was a time capsule that was (and still is, somewhere out there in space) much more suggestive than summative. Humanity's cosmic mix tape for, and about, itself. Included on the pair of Golden Records that blasted from Earth in 1977 are sounds of the planet, including surf and wind and thunder. The record shares the tweetings of birds, and the calls of humpback whales, and the hootings of chimpanzees. It includes, via Salzman's work, spoken greetings from earthlings rendered in 55 languages -- starting with Akkadian, spoken in Sumer about 6,000 years ago, and culminating with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect. There's music, 90 minutes' worth of it -- music that includes classic tunes from cultures around the globe, including the first two bars of Beethoven's String Quartet No. 13 in B Flat. Jimmy Carter sent a message of greeting on the record. So did U.N. Secretary General Waldheim.
And though the Golden Record does, indeed, adopt the form and the logic of a standard, late-'70s-era record, it's more accurately thought of as a kind of early CD: Its archive contains images from Earth (118 of them) as well as sound.
So how would a notional extraterrestrial, encountering this sweeping record of human existence, actually play it? Like you'd play any record. (NASA apparently assumed that alien civilizations, should they be sufficiently advanced, would be familiar with vinyl. Which is fair.) Each Golden Record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, along with a cartridge and, yep, a needle. And both include instructions -- in the symbolic language you can see etched in the image above -- that both explain the origin of the Voyager crafts and indicate how the record is meant to be played. (Ideally, NASA explains, the record is played at 16-2/3 revolutions per minute.) The logic of all this is simple: It will be tens of thousands of years (if ever) before either Voyager can make a close approach to any planetary system that lies beyond our own. "The spacecraft," Carl Sagan put it, "will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space."
He added: "But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet."
The two Voyager craft, of course, aren't the first to contain messages for beings that are foreign to us by virtue of either place of origin or stretch of time. The moon still bears the plaque left on its surface by the astronauts of Apollo: "We came in peace for all mankind." And Pioneers 10 and 11, which preceded Voyagers 1 and 2, both carried small, metal plaques that identified both their time and place of origin -- "for the benefit," NASA has it, "of any other spacefarers that might find them in the distant future."
But the Golden Records carry more than (English) words. They carry our culture. They carry the transcendent aspects of human existence: the art, the beauty, the ache, the joy. They offer what we have, and what we are, up to the cosmos -- and to anyone who might call the same space home. As Jimmy Carter, president when Earth's two Voyagers launched, put it: "This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours."
Thanks to NASA's far-flung Voyager 1 spacecraft, now
exploring the final frontier beyond our solar system, humanity can tune
into the sounds of interstellar space.
Scientists announced today (Sept. 12) that Voyager 1 left the solar system
in August 2012 after 35 years of spaceflight, making it the first craft
ever to reach interstellar space. No other manmade object has ever
travelled so far away from its home planet.
To mark the occasion, NASA unveiled the first Voyager 1 recording of the sound of interstellar space,
offering the probe's strange, otherwordly take on its new frontier. The
sounds are produced by the vibration of dense plasma, or ionized gas;
they were captured by the probe's plasma wave instrument, NASA officials
wrote in a video description. [Voyager 1's Journey to Interstellar Space: A Photo Tour]
"When you hear this recording, please recognize that this is an
historic event. It's the first time that we've ever made a recording of
sounds in interstellar space," Don Gurnett, principle investigator for
the Voyager plasma wave investigation, said in a press conference today.
Researchers used the plasma data to infer that Voyager 1 first came
into contact with the interstellar medium, effectively taking humanity
between the stars, on or around Aug. 25, 2012.
"There were two
times the instrument heard these vibrations: October to November 2012
and April to May 2013," NASA officials wrote. "Scientists noticed that
each occurrence involved a rising tone. The dashed line indicates that
the rising tones follow the same slope. This means a continuously
increasing density."
Voyager 1's plasma sensor broke in 1980, so
scientists had to get creative, and a little lucky, to figure this out. A
massive solar eruption in March 2012 arrived at the location of Voyager 1 about 13 months later, making the plasma around the probe vibrate, NASA officials said.
That vibration helped researchers understand the density of the plasma,
determining that it was 40 times more dense than measurements taken in
the outer layer of the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles and
magnetic fields that the sun puffs out around itself.
The observed density matched up very well with what researchers expected to find in interstellar space.
"Now that we have new, key data, we believe this is mankind's historic
leap into interstellar space," Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist based
at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., said in a
statement. "The Voyager team needed time to analyze those observations
and make sense of them. But we can now answer the question we've all
been asking — 'Are we there yet?' Yes, we are."
Voyager 1
launched on Sept. 5, 1977, about two weeks after its twin Voyager 2. The
two spacecraft made it through their "grand tour" of the solar system,
taking close-up looks at the Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune
systems. Their original mission ended in 1989, but the probes soldiered
on, streaking through the unexplored regions at the outer reaches of the
solar system.
The Voyager team still communicates with the two
spacecraft every day, but the probes' extreme distances pose a
challenge. At the speed of light, it takes about 17 hours for a message
to reach Earth from Voyager 1, which is currently about 12 billion miles
(19 billion kilometers) from the sun.
In 1953, the BBC filmed a train trip from London to Brighton. Thirty years later in 1983, they filmed it again and then again 30 years after that, in 2013. Here are all three films synced up and played side-by-side: You can compare the rail tracks, scenery and people.
This is a bit of a mindblower...this software presented at SIGGRAPH Asia lets you pluck objects out of photos and start manipulating them as if they were in 3D.
Wow! This is cool. Gaming industry will hit high note. Your X-box or Playstation will be obsolete.
Researchers at Tokyo University have come up with a technology that is a first and significant step away from the mouse and keyboard touchable holograms.
“Up until now, holography has been for the eyes only, and if you’d try to touch it, your hand would go right through. But now we have a technology that also adds the sensation of touch to holograms.” -Hiroyuki Shinoda, Professor, Tokyo University
The technology consists of software that uses ultrasonic waves to create pressure on the hand of a user touching the projected hologram. Researchers are using two Wiimotes from Nintendos Wii gaming system to track a users hand.
The technology was introduced at SIGGRAPH, an annual computer graphics conference, and has so far only been tested with relatively simple objects. But its inventors have big plans for touchable holograms in the future.
“For example, it’s been shown that in hospitals, there can be contamination between people due to objects that are touched communally. But if you can change the switches and such into a virtual switch, then you no longer have worry about touch contamination. This is one application that’s quite easy to see.” -Hiroyuki Shinoda, Professor, Tokyo University
Touchable holograms could be used for a wide variety of things… everything from light switches to books with each appearing when needed, and then disappearing when not. And holograms could replace the need for making new interfaces for technology, since they could be changed without having to make a new physical product.
