Inhabitat's Week in Green: A Volkswagen van, and more!
We expect to get a closer look at VW's camper van at CES this week.
Sea levels are rising as arctic ice melts, so what will cities do to combat rising tides? According to architect Vincent Callebaut, they'll set sail. This week Callebaut unveiled plans for a futuristic floating village that can be 3D-printed from plastic waste. Meanwhile, the team behind the world's largest 3D printer announced plans to create a life-size replica of Syria's Palmyra arch, which was destroyed by Islamic State militants. In other architecture news, Thomas Heatherwick wants to build a tree-covered mountain in the middle of Shanghai, and a team of Harvard students built an amazing tiny home that you can rent for $99 a night.
Hoverboards were all the rage in 2015, and this week ArcaSpace unveiled an all-electric board that floats using 36 powerful fans. Meanwhile, students in Singapore created a single-seater electric helicopter that can fly for five minutes at a time. The VW van is one of the most iconic vehicles of all time, and the company has been working an electric version for years. A recently released teaser suggests that it's set to finally debut next week at CES. We also took a first look inside Tesla's Gigafactory, Germany unveiled a bicycle superhighway, and Eindhoven's amazing Hovenring lets bikers soar above traffic.
Want to be a superhero? Check out the IrukaTact, a sonar glove that enables you to detect underwater objects like a dolphin. In other tech news, scientists just invented the world's first microchip powered by biological systems. Renewable energy is advancing by leaps and bounds: This year the US increased its wind power capacity to a whopping 70 gigawatts (that's 50,000 turbines). And to celebrate the start of the new year we've rounded up 10 design predictions for 2016 from some of the biggest names in technology and design innovation.
