The basic principles of a motion picture film camera should be well understood by most readers — after all, it’s been well over a hundred years since the Lumière brothers wowed 19th century Paris with their first films. But making one yourself is another matter entirely, as they are surprisingly complex and high-precision devices. This hasn’t stopped [Henry Kidman] from giving it a go though, and what makes his camera more remarkable is that it’s 3D printed.
The problem facing a 16mm movie camera designer lies in precisely advancing the film by one frame at the correct rate while filming, something done in the past with a small metal claw that grabs each successive sprocket. His design eschews that for a sprocket driven by a stepper motor from an Arduino. His rotary shutter is driven by another stepper motor, and he has the basis of a good camera.
The tests show promise, but he encounters a stability problem, because as it turns out, it’s difficult to print a 16mm sprocket in plastic without it warping. He solves this by aligning frames in post-processing. After fixing a range of small problems though, he has a camera that delivers a very good picture quality, and that makes us envious.
Access technology offers people with disabilities adaptive tools to use computers, smart phones and other devices. I am a blind Catholic professional with experience in academic political science. I also have training and program management experience in access technology; helping other blind and low vision users solve difficulties with their devices. As I have engaged with AI and Faith, I have noticed that the community has few current links with the conversation around accessibility, and I hope this article will begin to change that.
I will be focusing on the types of access technology I know best: screen readers and dictation. Screen readers (known as text to speech) allow the user to hear the device talking to them. Screen readers usually require the user to have some level of comfort with keyboarding or use of a touch screen. Dictation (known as speech to text) allows the user to talk to the device. Users can optionally receive a vocal response during the dictation process. To better understand the difference, note that for an iPhone, Siri is entirely voice activated while Voice Over requires the use of a touch screen by the user. Smart phones have built-in settings which allow more seamless integration of screen readers and dictation than is present on computers, for those who have a high comfort level with them (Voice Over for Apple, and Talkback for Android). Blind users often use a combination of screen readers and dictation when using AI. Because AI applications often have their own dictation abilities which also offer voice feedback, there are more options for those less comfortable with screen readers.
I hope that future articles by others more qualified will delve into access technology issues with other disabilities; adaptations for those who cannot use their arms, closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing, magnification and contrast for those with low vision, and bioethics issues around artificial body enhancements and Neurolink.
History of faith and accessibility
One of my reasons for interest in the conversation between faith and accessibility is that faith has already played a major part in uplifting people with disabilities; in particular, advancement for the blind. Technology originally for the blind has greatly impacted technology for all, as detailed in a great chapter of Andrew Leland’s book Country of the Blind. Louis Braille (1809-1852), the blind inventor of the braille reading code, was a devout Catholic who used his invention to create a larger library of sheet music for blind church organists. Religious groups took a leading role in producing and distributing braille books throughout the twentieth century, including the Xavier Society (of which I am a board member), the American Bible Society, and the Theosophical Society. Braille’s ingenuity and his attempts to develop an early version of the typewriter tested the boundaries of language and technology. Audio books, which were initially produced for the blind, are now used by many sighted readers, and many early audio books were religious.
Image description and faith
One of the lesser known uses of AI is its ability to describe images. You can share a picture or an inaccessible file with an AI application and it will provide information about what is in the image including any discernable text, along with the ability to ask further questions and share the image with another application or another person. The more common AI tools can describe images, but many of us in the blind community prefer to use apps built for the blind, including Microsoft’s Seeing AI and the blind-founded Be My Eyes. These apps predate the development of what most people think of as AI; Be My Eyes started off as an app to call human remote volunteers, while Seeing AI initially focused on reading labels; but they both received major updates in 2023.
The use of image description to benefit people of faith are numerous: from gaining a practical orientation of a sacred space, to providing a better understanding of religious art than blind people have had before. In my experience, AI applications can correctly identify the names of religious items, but continued collaboration is necessary to make sure models do not contribute to subtle misinterpretations.
Research and writing tools
Accessible AI tools allow blind users to research questions about religious doctrine, scripture, history, prayers, and current events, whether for personal study or professional work. The most common AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini have accessibility teams which use WCAG and ARIA accessibility standards. One of these is the use of headings, especially for computer users. If I press the “H” key on my computer, I can move between my prompt and the various sections of the AI’s response. Buttons to copy, share, or download a file are also relatively easy to find.
I have used AI to shorten the process of finding traditional Latin mass propers that I sing in my Church choir. As for writing, I have found ChatGPT’s ability to generate a prayer plan based on a particular faith to be helpful. Of course, like anyone else, screen reader users need to avoid pitfalls of AI-driven research that come from asking the wrong questions, and hallucinations.
One project that needs further work is making sure smaller apps designed for a particular religious viewpoint are accessible. Many of them, in my limited experience, are mostly navigable but could use improvements for better user experience, especially making certain elements more clearly labeled.
Where do we go from here? Bridging Ethics and Accessibility
I will conclude by noting that like any other group, blind people (and the smaller group of blind people who identify with a religious faith) will have a variety of opinions about AI. Some of these are influenced by our life as blind people, but also come from our other deeply held personal and intellectual commitments. As a young father, I want to limit my children’s exposure to AI at an early age, primarily because it contributes to a preexisting problem of too much time spent in the virtual world. I am concerned with over-reliance on AI among students and others who need to continue developing their skills in critical thinking and various content areas. I think we should encourage our religious leaders to avoid using AI to write sermons; rather, it should be used for background research only.
Accessible AI has opened the world of information to blind people, in some ways building on the successes of search engines and human curated projects like Wikipedia (which I was an admin for when I was a teenager). I do not want accessibility to be the reason that someone does not use AI, even if it is for a purpose I personally disapprove of.
I look forward to continuing the conversation; I’m happy to receive emails (covich7@gmail.com) and LinkedIn messages with any thoughts, especially about improving religious apps.
Views and opinions expressed by authors and editors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of AI and Faith or any of its leadership.
“… hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.” Romans 5:5 NASB
Artificial intelligence isn’t a guest visiting for a season, it has moved in and set up shop. It lives in our phones, churches, hospitals, and homes. It curates our playlists, predicts our spending, suggests our prayers, and sometimes even writes our sermons. Coexistence, then, is not optional. The question is whether we can coexist in a spiritually healthy manner, one that deepens our humanity rather than dilutes it.
To coexist faithfully means to let neither fear nor fascination rule us. Fear convinces us that AI will replace us; fascination tempts us to let it. Both miss the point. People of faith are called to live alongside technology with discernment and humility, resisting both the illusion of control and the despair of irrelevance.
For all its predictive brilliance, AI cannot pray, weep, or wonder. It can mimic compassion, but not surrender. It can analyze human emotion, but not experience it. The Franciscan imagination reminds us that creation, including the human-made world of code and circuitry, is still part of God’s world. But only humanity bears the capacity for soul, for longing, for love that suffers and redeems.
Coexistence, then, is not a negotiation with machines, it is a spiritual practice among humans about how we use them.
1. Hope as Surrender, Not Optimism
Faith-based hope is not the same as optimism. Optimism is a weather forecast; hope is a covenant. Optimism predicts outcomes; hope surrenders them.
In the Franciscan tradition, hope emerges not from certainty but from trust, trust that divine love continues to work even in confusion and disruption. As St. Francis taught, we find God not in control but in relinquishment. Hope, for Francis, was not a rosy confidence that things would turn out fine, but the willingness to walk barefoot into the unknown, trusting that God’s presence would meet him there.
When we mistake AI’s forecasts for faith’s hope, we confuse data confidence with spiritual trust. An algorithm might predict recovery rates for the sick or estimate climate outcomes for the planet. These forecasts can be useful, even inspiring, but they can’t teach us how to sit with grief, how to pray through uncertainty, or how to love what we may lose.
Hope begins where prediction ends. It is born when we choose faithfulness over control, willingness over willfulness. The AI age tempts us to measure everything, to optimize, to manage risk, to secure results. But the Franciscan path teaches that surrender is not passivity; it’s the deepest form of participation. It is the art of letting God’s grace do what our grasping cannot.
2. Solidarity as the Face of Hope
Hope in the Christian imagination is never solitary. It is, as the prophets declared, born in community. Hope is sustained not by certainty but by companionship. The Franciscan way calls this being with rather than doing for.
Solidarity is where hope breathes. It is incarnational, embodied in listening, touch, and shared presence. In this light, AI can make hope more accessible and actionable by connecting communities across distance, revealing hidden needs, or amplifying marginalized voices. It can process massive amounts of data to show us who is being left behind. It can remind us, through pattern and prediction, that our neighbor is closer than we thought.
But solidarity must remain human. A chatbot can send comforting words, but it cannot keep vigil at a bedside or shed tears that sanctify suffering. Yet it can free human caregivers from administrative burdens so that they can show up in love. When technology serves relationships rather than replaces it, it becomes a partner in the work of hope.
Francis of Assisi would recognize this: the holiness of proximity. To “be with” creation and each other is the heart of hope. Even the best-designed algorithm cannot incarnate presence. It can only point toward it. And perhaps that is its highest ethical calling, to remind us of what only we can do.
3. Prophetic Hope in Disruption
The Hebrew prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos—offered hope not in comfort but in collapse. They dared to believe that God’s newness could rise from ruins. Walter Brueggemann calls this “the horror of the old collapsing and the hope of the new emerging.”
Our era’s disruptions: climate change, displacement, and digital isolation find a mirror in the age of AI. The prophetic task is not to resist technology outright but to reclaim its direction. Faith communities have a prophetic imperative to ensure that AI serves justice, mercy, and shared flourishing.
AI can go beyond prediction when it feeds real hope: when it exposes injustice, reveals truth, or helps imagine new economies of care. Imagine algorithms that prioritize the hungry over the profitable, or systems that help restore ecological balance rather than exploit it. Prophetic hope transforms technology from a mirror of power into a window of possibility.
Yet prophecy always begins with lament. We must name the pain of our age, the loneliness, the disconnection, the temptation to substitute simulation for presence. In naming it, we keep it human. The prophets of Israel didn’t offer quick solutions; they offered faithful witness. Likewise, our hope for AI is not that it will save us, but that through it, we might rediscover what needs saving: our compassion, our humility, and our sense of shared destiny.
4. A Future Worth Coexisting With
To coexist with AI faithfully is to remember that intelligence is not wisdom, and power is not love. AI may analyze vast datasets, but faith invites us into mystery, the space where surrender becomes strength and community becomes salvation.
A spiritually healthy coexistence doesn’t idolize AI nor exile it. Instead, it consecrates the tools of our age for the service of God’s reconciling work. Technology, like fire or language, can both heal and harm. Our task is to keep it lit with compassion, humility, and justice.
This is not nostalgia for a pre-digital past; it is a call for moral imagination. Coexistence means insisting that progress must serve presence, that algorithms must bend toward mercy, and that the ultimate measure of intelligence is love.
The Franciscan tradition, with its emphasis on humility and relationality, offers an antidote to the empire of efficiency. It invites us to see AI not as a rival intelligence but as a mirror reflecting what we value. The question is not, “Can AI love?” but “Can we?”
Conclusion: The Stubborn, Sacred Hope
Artificial intelligence can calculate probabilities, but it cannot kindle hope. Hope is the province of the soul, the stubborn, sacred belief that life can be renewed even when the data says otherwise.
If we approach AI with humility, we may yet find that it sharpens our awareness of what is uniquely human: our vulnerability, our longing for connection, our capacity for grace.
In the end, coexistence with AI is less about technological control and more about spiritual formation. The future worth coexisting with will be one where our tools amplify love rather than efficiency, justice rather than profit, and wonder rather than fear.
Machines may forecast the future, but only people of faith can hope their way into it.
Views and opinions expressed by authors and editors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of AI and Faith or any of its leadership.
This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast explores how quantum computing and artificial intelligence can be combined to help physicists search for rare interactions in data from an upgraded Large Hadron Collider.
My guest is Javier Toledo-Marín, and we spoke at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada. As well as having an appointment at Perimeter, Toledo-Marín is also associated with the TRIUMF accelerator centre in Vancouver.
What do water bottles, eggs, hemp, and cement have in common? They can be engineered into strange, but functional, energy-storage devices called supercapacitors.
As their name suggests, supercapacitors are like capacitors with greater capacity. Similar to batteries, they can store a lot of energy, but they can also charge or discharge quickly, similar to a capacitor. They’re usually found where a lot of power is needed quickly and for a limited time, like as a nearly instantaneous backup electricity for a factory or data center.
Typically, supercapacitors are made up of two activated carbon or graphene electrodes, electrolytes to introduce ions to the system, and a porous sheet of polymer or glass fiber to physically separate the electrodes. When a supercapacitor is fully charged, all of the positive ions gather on one side of the separating sheet, while all of the negative ions are on the other. When it’s discharged, the ions are randomly distributed, and it can switch between these states much faster than batteries can.
Some scientists believe that supercapacitors could become more super. They think there’s potential to make these devices more sustainably, at lower-cost, and maybe even better performing if they’re built from better materials.
And maybe they’re right. Last month, a group from Michigan Technological University reported making supercapacitors from plastic water bottles that had a higher capacitance than commercial ones.
Does this finding mean recycled plastic supercapacitors will soon be everywhere? The history of similar supercapacitor sustainability experiments suggests not.
About 15 years ago, it seemed like supercapacitors were going to be in high demand. Then, because of huge investments in lithium-ion technology, batteries became tough competition, explains Yury Gogotsi, who studies materials for energy-storage devices at Drexel University, in Philadelphia. “They became so much cheaper and so much faster in delivering energy that for supercapacitors, the range of application became more limited,” he says. “Basically, the trend went from making them cheaper and available to making them perform where lithium-ion batteries cannot.”
Still, some researchers remain hopeful that environmentally friendly devices have a place in the market. Yun Hang Hu, a materials scientist on the Michigan Technological University team, sees “a promising path to commercialization [for the water-bottle-derived supercapacitor] once collection and processing challenges are addressed,” he says.
Here’s how scientists make supercapacitors with strange, unexpected materials:
Water Bottles
It turns out your old Poland Spring bottle could one day store energy instead of water. Last month in the journal Energy & Fuels, the Michigan Technological University team published a new method for converting polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the material that makes up single-use plastic water bottles, into both electrodes and separators.
As odd as it may seem, this process is “a practical blueprint for circular energy storage that can ride the existing PET supply chain,” says Hu.
To make the electrodes, the researchers first shredded bottles into 2-millimeter grains and then added powdered calcium hydroxide. They heated the mixture to 700 °C in a vacuum for 3 hours and were left with an electrically conductive carbon powder. After removing residual calcium and activating the carbon (increasing its surface area), they could shape the powder into a thin layer and use it as an electrode.
The process to produce the separators was much less intensive—the team cut bottles into squares about the size of a U.S. quarter or a 1-euro coin and used hot needles to poke holes in them. They optimized the pattern of the holes for the passage of current using specialized software. PET is a good material for a separator because of its “excellent mechanical strength, high thermal stability, and excellent insulation,” Hu says.
Filled with an electrolyte solution, the resulting supercapacitor not only demonstrated potential for eco- and finance-friendly material usage, but also slightly outperformed traditional materials on one metric. The PET device had a capacitance of 197.2 farads per gram, while an analogous device with a glass-fiber separator had a capacitance of 190.3 farads per gram.
Eggs
Wait, don’t make your breakfast sandwich just yet! You could engineer a supercapacitor from one of your ingredients instead. In 2019, a University of Virginia team showed that electrodes, electrolytes, and separators could all be made from parts of a single object—an egg.
First, the group purchased grocery store chicken eggs and sorted their parts into eggshells, eggshell membranes, and the whites and yolks.
They ground the shells into a powder and mixed them with the egg whites and yolks. The slurry was freeze-dried and brought up to 950 °C for an hour to decompose. After a cleaning process to remove calcium, the team performed heat and potassium treatments to activate the remaining carbon. They then smoothed the egg-derived activated carbon into a film to be used as electrodes. Finally, by mixing egg whites and yolks with potassium hydroxide and letting it dry for several hours, they formed a kind of gel electrolyte.
To make separators, the group simply cleaned the eggshell membranes. Because the membranes naturally have interlaced micrometer-size fibers, their inherent structures allow for ions to move across them just as manufactured separators would.
Interestingly, the resulting fully egg-based supercapacitor was flexible, with its capacitance staying steady even when the device was twisted or bent. After 5,000 cycles, the supercapacitor retained 80 percent of its original capacitance—low compared to commercial supercapacitors, but fairly on par for others made from natural materials.
Hemp
Some people may like cannabis for more medicinal purposes, but it has potential in energy storage, too. In 2024, a group from Ondokuz Mayıs University in Türkiye usedpomegranate hemp plants to produce activated carbon for an electrode.
They started by drying stems of the hemp plants in a 110 °C oven for a day and then ground the stems into a powder. Next, they added sulfuric acid and heat to create a biochar, and, finally, activated the char by saturating it with potassium hydroxide and heating it again.
After 2,000 cycles, the supercapacitor with hemp-derived electrodes still retained 98 percent of its original capacitance, which is, astoundingly, in range of those made from nonbiological materials. The carbon itself had an energy density of 65 watt-hours per kilogram, also in line with commercial supercapacitors.
Cement
It may have a hold over the construction industry, but is cement coming for the energy sector, too? In 2023, a group from MIT shared how they designed electrodes from water, nearly pure carbon, and cement. Using these materials, they say, creates a “synergy” between the hydrophilic cement and hydrophobic carbon that aids the electrodes’ ability to hold layers of ions when the supercapacitor is charged.
To test the hypothesis, the team built eight electrodes using slightly different proportions of the three ingredients, different types of carbon, and different electrode thicknesses. The electrodes were saturated with potassium chloride—an electrolyte—and capacitance measurements began.
Impressively, the cement supercapacitors were able to maintain capacitance with little loss even after 10,000 cycles. The researchers also calculated that one of their supercapacitors could store around 10 kilowatt-hours—enough to serve about one third of an average American’s daily energy use—though the number is only theoretical.
The build is based around a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. If you’re unfamiliar with the Compute Module, it’s basically a Raspberry Pi that has been designed specifically for easy integration into a larger carrier PCB. In this case, the carrier PCB interfaces all the other necessary gear to make this a fully functional computer. The PCB is installed inside a vaguely-rectangular 3D-printed enclosure, with a 5-inch TFT LCD on a sliding mount. Push the screen up, and it reveals a small-format keyboard for text entry. There’s also a hall-effect joystick and a couple of buttons for mouse control to boot. [Rahmanshaber] has designed the computer to run off a couple of different battery packs—you can use a pair of 18650 cells if you like, or switch to lager 21700 cells if you want greater capacity for longer running time.
I hugely enjoyed physics when I was a youngster. I had the opportunity both at home and school to create my own projects, which saw me make electronic circuits, crazy flying models like delta-wings and autogiros, and even a gas chromatograph with a home-made chart recorder. Eventually, this experience made me good enough to repair TV sets, and work in an R&D lab in the holidays devising new electronic flow controls.
That enjoyment continued beyond school. I ended up doing a physics degree at the University of Oxford before working on the discovery of the gluon at the DESY lab in Hamburg for my PhD. Since then I have used physics in industry – first with British Oxygen/Linde and later with Air Products & Chemicals – to solve all sorts of different problems, build innovative devices and file patents.
While some students have a similarly positive school experience and subsequent career path, not enough do. Quite simply, physics at school is the key to so many important, useful developments, both within and beyond physics. But we have a physics education problem, or to put it another way – a “future of physics” problem.
There are just not enough school students enjoying and learning physics. On top of that there are not enough teachers enjoying physics and not enough students doing practical physics. The education problem is bad for physics and for many other subjects that draw on physics. Alas, it’s not a new problem but one that has been developing for years.
Problem solving
Many good points about the future of physics learning were made by the Institute of Physics in its 2024 report Fundamentals of 11 to 19 Physics. The report called for more physics lessons to have a practical element and encouraged more 16-year-old students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland to take AS-level physics at 17 so that they carry their GCSE learning at least one step further.
Doing so would furnish students who are aiming to study another science or a technical subject with the necessary skills and give them the option to take physics A-level. Another recommendation is to link physics more closely to T-levels – two-year vocational courses in England for 16–19 year olds that are equivalent to A-levels – so that students following that path get a background in key aspects of physics, for example in engineering, construction, design and health.
But do all these suggestions solve the problem? I don’t think they are enough and we need to go further. The key change to fix the problem, I believe, is to have student groups invent, build and test their own projects. Ideally this should happen before GCSE level so that students have the enthusiasm and background knowledge to carry them happily forward into A-level physics. They will benefit from “pull learning” – pulling in knowledge and active learning that they will remember for life. And they will acquire wider life skills too.
Developing skillsets
During my time in industry, I did outreach work with schools every few weeks and gave talks with demonstrations at the Royal Institution and the Franklin Institute. For many years I also ran a Saturday Science club in Guildford, Surrey, for pupils aged 8–15.
Based on this, I wrote four Saturday Science books about the manyplayful and original demonstrations and projects that came out of it. Then at the University of Surrey, as a visiting professor, I had small teams of final-year students who devised extraordinary engineering – designing superguns for space launches, 3D printers for full-size buildings and volcanic power plants inter alia. A bonus was that other staff working with the students got more adventurous too.
But that was working with students already committed to a scientific path. So lately I’ve been working with teachers to get students to devise and build their own innovative projects. We’ve had 14–15-year-old state-school students in groups of three or four, brainstorming projects, sketching possible designs, and gathering background information. We help them and get A-level students to help too (who gain teaching experience in the process). Students not only learn physics better but also pick up important life skills like brainstorming, team-working, practical work, analysis and presentations.
We’ve seen lots of ingenuity and some great projects such as an ultrasonic scanner to sense wetness of cloth; a system to teach guitar by lighting up LEDs along the guitar neck; and measuring breathing using light passing through a band of Lycra around the patient below the ribs. We’ve seen the value of failure, both mistakes and genuine technical problems.
Best of all, we’ve also noticed what might be dubbed the “combination bonus” – students having to think about how they combine their knowledge of one area of physics with another. A project involving a sensor, for example, will often involve electronics as well the physics of the sensor and so student knowledge of both areas is enhanced.
Some teachers may question how you mark such projects. The answer is don’t mark them! Project work and especially group work is difficult to mark fairly and accurately, and the enthusiasm and increased learning by students working on innovative projects will feed through into standard school exam results.
Not trying to grade such projects will mean more students go on to study physics further, potentially to do a physics-related extended project qualification – equivalent to half an A-level where students research a topic to university level – and do it well. Long term, more students will take physics with them into the world of work, from physics to engineering or medicine, from research to design or teaching.
Such projects are often fun for students and teachers. Teachers are often intrigued and amazed by students’ ideas and ingenuity. So, let’s choose to do student-invented project work at school and let’s finally solve the future of physics problem.
The control of large, strongly coupled, multi-component quantum systems with complex dynamics is a challenging task.
It is, however, an essential prerequisite for the design of quantum computing platforms and for the benchmarking of quantum simulators.
A key concept here is that of quantum ergodicity. This is because quantum ergodic dynamics can be harnessed to generate highly entangled quantum states.
In classical statistical mechanics, an ergodic system evolving over time will explore all possible microstates states uniformly. Mathematically, this means that a sufficiently large collection of random samples from an ergodic process can represent the average statistical properties of the entire process.
Quantum ergodicity is simply the extension of this concept to the quantum realm.
Closely related to this is the idea of chaos. A chaotic system is one in which is very sensitive to its initial conditions. Small changes can be amplified over time, causing large changes in the future.
The ideas of chaos and ergodicity are intrinsically linked as chaotic dynamics often enable ergodicity.
Until now, it has been very challenging to predict which experimentally preparable initial states will trigger quantum chaos and ergodic dynamics over a reasonable time scale.
In a new paper published in Reports on Progress in Physics, a team of researchers have proposed an ingenious solution to this problem using the Bose–Hubbard Hamiltonian.
They took as an example ultracold atoms in an optical lattice (a typical choice for experiments in this field) to benchmark their method.
The results show that there are certain tangible threshold values which must be crossed in order to ensure the onset of quantum chaos.
These results will be invaluable for experimentalists working across a wide range of quantum sciences.
Researchers in the US have discovered that a tiny jumping worm uses static electricity to increase the chances of attaching to its unsuspecting prey.
The parasitic roundworm Steinernema carpocapsae, which live in soil, are already known to leap some 25 times their body length into the air. They do this by curling into a loop and springing in the air, rotating hundreds of times a second.
If the nematode lands successfully, it releases bacteria that kills the insect within a couple of days upon which the worm feasts and lays its eggs. At the same time, if it fails to attach to a host then it faces death itself.
While static electricity plays a role in how some non-parasitic nematodes detach from large insects, little is known whether static helps their parasitic counterparts to attach to an insect.
To investigate, researchers are Emory University and the University of California, Berkeley, conducted a series of experiments, in which they used highspeed microscopy techniques to film the worms as they leapt onto a fruit fly.
They did this by tethering a fly with a copper wire that was connected to a high-voltage power supply.
They found that a charge of a few hundred volts – similar to that generated in the wild by an insect’s wings rubbing against ions in the air – fosters a negative charge on the worm, creating an attractive force with the positively charged fly.
Carrying out simulations of the worm jumps, they found that without any electrostatics, only 1 in 19 worm trajectories successfully reached their target. The greater the voltage, however, the greater the chance of landing. For 880 V, for example, the probability was 80%.
The team also carried out experiments using a wind tunnel, finding that the presence of wind helped the nematodes drift and this also increased their chances of attaching to the insect.
“Using physics, we learned something new and interesting about an adaptive strategy in an organism,” notes Emory physicist Ranjiangshang Ran. “We’re helping to pioneer the emerging field of electrostatic ecology.”
Transparent healthcare Illustration of the fully transparent sensor that reacts to sunlight and allows real-time monitoring of UVA exposure on the skin. The device could be integrated into wearable items, such as glasses or patches. (Courtesy: Jnnovation Studio)
A flexible and wearable sensor that allows the user to monitor their exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation has been unveiled by researchers in South Korea. Based on a heterostructure of four different oxide semiconductors, the sensor’s flexible, transparent design could vastly improve the real-time monitoring of skin health.
UV light in the A band has wavelengths of 315–400 nm and comprises about 95% of UV radiation that reaches the surface of the earth. Because of its relatively long wavelength, UVA can penetrate deep into the skin. There it can alter biological molecules, damaging tissue and even causing cancer.
While covering up with clothing and using sunscreen are effective at reducing UVA exposure, researchers are keen on developing wearable sensors that can monitor UVA levels in real time. These can alert users when their UVA exposure reaches a certain level. So far, the most promising advances towards these designs have come from oxide semiconductors.
Many challenges
“For the past two decades, these materials have been widely explored for displays and thin-film transistors because of their high mobility and optical transparency,” explains Seong Jun Kang at Soongsil University, who led the research. “However, their application to transparent ultraviolet photodetectors has been limited by high persistent photocurrent, poor UV–visible discrimination, and instability under sunlight.”
While these problems can be avoided in more traditional UV sensors, such as gallium nitride and zinc oxide, these materials are opaque and rigid – making them completely unsuitable for use in wearable sensors.
In their study, Kang’s team addressed these challenges by introducing a multi-junction heterostructure, made by stacking multiple ultrathin layers of different oxide semiconductors. The four semiconductors they selected each had wide bandgaps, which made them more transparent in the visible spectrum but responsive to UV light.
The structure included zinc and tin oxide layers as n-type semiconductors (doped with electron-donating atoms) and cobalt and hafnium oxide layers as p-type semiconductors (doped with electron-accepting atoms) – creating positively charged holes. Within the heterostructure, this selection created three types of interface: p–n junctions between hafnium and tin oxide; n–n junctions between tin and zinc oxide; and p–p junctions between cobalt and hafnium oxide.
Efficient transport
When the team illuminated their heterostructure with UVA photons, the electron–hole charge separation was enhanced by the p–n junction, while the n–n and p–p junctions allowed for more efficient transport of electrons and holes respectively, improving the design’s response speed. When the illumination was removed, the electron–hole pairs could quickly decay, avoiding any false detections.
To test their design’s performance, the researchers integrated their heterostructure into a wearable detector. “In collaboration with UVision Lab, we developed an integrated Bluetooth circuit and smartphone application, enabling real-time display of UVA intensity and warning alerts when an individual’s exposure reaches the skin-type-specific minimal erythema dose (MED),” Kang describes. “When connected to the Bluetooth circuit and smartphone application, it successfully tracked real-time UVA variations and issued alerts corresponding to MED limits for various skin types.”
As well as maintaining over 80% transparency, the sensor proved highly stable and responsive, even in direct outdoor sunlight and across repeated exposure cycles. Based on this performance, the team is now confident that their design could push the capabilities of oxide semiconductors beyond their typical use in displays and into the fast-growing field of smart personal health monitoring.
“The proposed architecture establishes a design principle for high-performance transparent optoelectronics, and the integrated UVA-alert system paves the way for next-generation wearable and Internet-of-things-based environmental sensors,” Kang predicts.
You live in a house you designed and built yourself. You rely on the sun for power, heat your home with a woodstove, and farm your own fish and vegetables. The year is 2025.
This is the life of Marcin Jakubowski, the 53-year-old founder of Open Source Ecology, an open collaborative of engineers, producers, and builders developing what they call the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS). It’s a set of 50 machines—everything from a tractor to an oven to a circuit maker—that are capable of building civilization from scratch and can be reconfigured however you see fit.
Jakubowski immigrated to the US from Slupca, Poland, as a child. His first encounter with what he describes as the “prosperity of technology” was the vastness of the American grocery store. Seeing the sheer quantity and variety of perfectly ripe produce cemented his belief that abundant, sustainable living was within reach in the United States.
With a bachelor’s degree from Princeton and a doctorate in physics from the University of Wisconsin, Jakubowski had spent most of his life in school. While his peers kick-started their shiny new corporate careers, he followed a different path after he finished his degree in 2003: He bought a tractor to start a farm in Maysville, Missouri, eager to prove his ideas about abundance. “It was a clear decision to give up the office cubicle or high-level research job, which is so focused on tiny issues that one never gets to work on the big picture,” he says. But in just a short few months, his tractor broke down—and he soon went broke.
Every time his tractor malfunctioned, he had no choice but to pay John Deere for repairs—even if he knew how to fix the problem on his own. John Deere, the world’s largest manufacturer of agricultural equipment, continues to prohibit farmers from repairing their own tractors (except in Colorado, where farmers were granted a right to repair by state law in 2023). Fixing your own tractor voids any insurance or warranty, much like jailbreaking your iPhone.
Today, large agricultural manufacturers have centralized control over the market, and most commercial tractors are built with proprietary parts. Every year, farmers pay $1.2 billion in repair costs and lose an estimated $3 billion whenever their tractors break down, entirely because large agricultural manufacturers have lobbied against the right to repair since the ’90s. Currently there are class action lawsuits involving hundreds of farmers fighting for their right to do so.
“The machines own farmers. The farmers don’t own [the machines],” Jakubowski says. He grew certain that self-sufficiency relied on agricultural autonomy, which could be achieved only through free access to technology. So he set out to apply the principles of open-source software to hardware. He figured that if farmers could have access to the instructions and materials required to build their own tractors, not only would they be able to repair them, but they’d also be able to customize the vehicles for their needs. Life-changing technology should be available to all, he thought, not controlled by a select few. So, with an understanding of mechanical engineering, Jakubowski built his own tractor and put all his schematics online on his platform Open Source Ecology.
That tractor Jakubowski built is designed to be taken apart. It’s a critical part of the GVCS, a collection of plug-and-play machines that can “build a thriving economy anywhere in the world … from scratch.” The GVCS includes a 3D printer, a self-contained hydraulic power unit called the Power Cube, and more, each designed to be reconfigured for multiple purposes. There’s even a GVCS micro-home. You can use the Power Cube to power a brick press, a sawmill, a car, a CNC mill, or a bioplastic extruder, and you can build wind turbines with the frames that are used in the home.
Jakubowski compares the GVCS to Lego blocks and cites the Linux ecosystem as his inspiration. In the same way that Linux’s source code is free to inspect, modify, and redistribute, all the instructions you need to build and repurpose a GVCS machine are freely accessible online. Jakubowski envisions a future in which the GVCS parallels the Linux infrastructure, with custom tools built to optimize agriculture, construction, and material fabrication in localized contexts. “The [final form of the GVCS] must be proven to allow efficient production of food, shelter, consumer goods, cars, fuel, and other goods—except for exotic imports (coffee, bananas, advanced semiconductors),” he wrote on his Open Source Ecology wiki.
The ethos of GVCS is reminiscent of the Whole Earth Catalog, a countercultural publication that offered a combination of reviews, DIY manuals, and survival guides between 1968 and 1972. Founded by Stewart Brand, the publication had the slogan “Access to tools” and was famous for promoting self-sufficiency. It heavily featured the work of R. Buckminster Fuller, an American architect known for his geodesic domes (lightweight structures that can be built using recycled materials) and for coining the term “ephemeralization,” which refers to the ability of technology to let us do more with less material, energy, and effort.
The schematics for Marcin Jakubowski’s designs are all available online.
COURTESY OF OPEN SOURCE ECOLOGY
Jakubowski owns the publication’s entire printed output, but he offers a sharp critique of its legacy in our current culture of tech utopianism. “The first structures we built were domes. Good ideas. But the open-source part of that was not really there yet—Fuller patented his stuff,” he says. Fuller and the Whole Earth Catalog may have popularized an important philosophy of self-reliance, but to Jakubowski, their failure to advocate for open collaboration stopped the ultimate vision of sustainability from coming to fruition. “The failure of the techno-utopians to organize into a larger movement of collaborative, open, distributed production resulted in a miscarriage of techno-utopia,” he says.
With a background in physics and an understanding of mechanical engineering, Marcin Jakubowski built his own tractor.
COURTESY OF OPEN SOURCE ECOLOGY
Unlike software, hardware can’t be infinitely reproduced or instantly tested. It requires manufacturing infrastructure and specific materials, not to mention exhaustive documentation. There are physical constraints—different port standards, fluctuations in availability of materials, and more. And now that production chains are so globalized that manufacturing a hot tub can require parts from seven different countries and 14 states, how can we expect anything to be replicable in our backyard? The solution, according to Jakubowski, is to make technology “appropriate.”
Appropriate technology is technology that’s designed to be affordable and sustainable for a specific local context. The idea comes from Gandhi’s philosophy of swadeshi (self-reliance) and sarvodaya (upliftment of all) and was popularized by the economist Ernst Friedrich “Fritz” Schumacher’s book Small Is Beautiful, which discussed the concept of “intermediate technology”: “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.” Because different environments operate at different scales and with different resources, it only makes sense to tailor technology for those conditions. Solar lamps, bikes, hand-powered water pumps—anything that can be built using local materials and maintained by the local community—are among the most widely cited examples of appropriate technology.
This concept has historically been discussed in the context of facilitating economic growth in developing nations and adapting capital-intensive technology to their needs. But Jakubowski hopes to make it universal. He believes technology needs to be appropriate even in suburban and urban places with access to supermarkets, hardware stores, Amazon deliveries, and other forms of infrastructure. If technology is designed specifically for these contexts, he says, end-to-end reproduction will be possible, making more space for collaboration and innovation.
What makes Jakubowski’s technology “appropriate” is his use of reclaimed materials and off-the-shelf parts to build his machines. By using local materials and widely available components, he’s able to bypass the complex global supply chains that proprietary technology often requires. He also structures his schematics around concepts already familiar to most people who are interested in hardware, making his building instructions easier to follow.
Everything you need to build Jakubowski’s machines should be available around you, just as everything you need to know about how to repair or operate the machine is online—from blueprints to lists of materials to assembly instructions and testing protocols. “If you’ve got a wrench, you’ve got a tractor,” his manual reads.
This spirit dates back to the ’70s, when the idea of building things “moved out of the retired person’s garage and into the young person’s relationship with the Volkswagen,” says Brand. He references John Muir’s 1969 book How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot and fondly recalls how the Beetle’s simple design and easily swapped parts made it common for owners to rebody their cars, combining the chassis of one with the body of another. He also mentions the impact of the Ford Model T cars that, with a few extra parts, were made into tractors during the Great Depression.
For Brand, the focus on repairability is critical in the modern context. There was a time when John Deere tractors were “appropriate” in Jakubowski’s terms, Brand says: “A century earlier, John Deere took great care to make sure that his plowshares could be taken apart and bolted together, that you can undo and redo them, replace parts, and so on.” The company “attracted insanely loyal customers because they looked out for the farmers so much,” Brand says, but “they’ve really reversed the orientation.” Echoing Jakubowski’s initial motivation for starting OSE, Brand insists that technology is appropriate to the extent that it is repairable.
Even if you can find all the parts you need from Lowe’s, building your own tractor is still intimidating. But for some, the staggering price advantage is reason enough to take on the challenge: A GVCS tractor costs $12,000 to build, whereas a commercial tractor averages around $120,000 to buy, not including the individual repairs that might be necessary over its lifetime at a cost of $500 to $20,000 each. And gargantuan though it may seem, the task of building a GVCS tractor or other machine is doable: Just a few years after the project launched in 2008, more than 110 machines had been built by enthusiasts from Chile, Nicaragua, Guatemala, China, India, Italy, and Turkey, just to name a few places.
Of the many machines developed, what’s drawn the most interest from GVCS enthusiasts is the one nicknamed “The Liberator,” which presses local soil into compressed earth blocks, or CEBs—a type of cost- and energy-efficient brick that can withstand extreme weather conditions. It’s been especially popular among those looking to build their own homes: A man named Aurélien Bielsa replicated the brick press in a small village in the south of France to build a house for his family in 2018, and in 2020 a group of volunteers helped a member of the Open Source Ecology community build a tiny home using blocks from one of these presses in a fishing village near northern Belize.
The CEB press, nicknamed “The Liberator,” turns local soil into energy-efficient compressed earth blocks.
COURTESY OF OPEN SOURCE ECOLOGY
Jakubowski recalls receiving an email about one of the first complete reproductions of the CEB press, built by a Texan named James Slate, who ended up starting a business selling the bricks: “When [James] sent me a picture [of our brick press], I thought it was a Photoshopped copy of our machine, but it was his. He just downloaded the plans off the internet. I knew nothing about it.” Slate described having a very limited background in engineering before building the brick press. “I had taken some mechanics classes back in high school. I mostly come from an IT computer world,” he said in an interview with Open Source Ecology. “Pretty much anyone can build one, if they put in the effort.”
Andrew Spina, an early GVCS enthusiast, agrees. Spina spent five years building versions of the GVCS tractor and Power Cube, eager to create means of self-sufficiency at an individual scale. “I’m building my own tractor because I want to understand it and be able to maintain it,” he wrote in his blog, Machining Independence. Spina’s curiosity gestures toward the broader issue of technological literacy: The more we outsource to proprietary tech, the less we understand how things work—further entrenching our need for that proprietary tech. Transparency is critical to the open-source philosophy precisely because it helps us become self-sufficient.
Since starting Open Source Ecology, Jakubowski has been the main architect behind the dozens of machines available on his platform, testing and refining his designs on a plot of land he calls the Factor e Farm in Maysville. Most GVCS enthusiasts reproduce Jakubowski’s machines for personal use; only a few have contributed to the set themselves. Of those select few, many made dedicated visits to the farm for weeks at a time to learn how to build Jakubowski’s GVCS collection. James Wise, one of the earliest and longest-term GVCS contributors, recalls setting up tents and camping out in his car to attend sessions at Jakubowski’s workshop, where visiting enthusiasts would gather to iterate on designs: “We’d have a screen on the wall of our current best idea. Then we’d talk about it.” Wise doesn’t consider himself particularly experienced on the engineering front, but after working with other visiting participants, he felt more emboldened to contribute. “Most of [my] knowledge came from [my] peers,” he says.
Jakubowski’s goal of bolstering collaboration hinges on a degree of collective proficiency. Without a community skilled with hardware, the organic innovation that the open-source approach promises will struggle to bear fruit, even if Jakubowski’s designs are perfectly appropriate and thoroughly documented.
“That’s why we’re starting a school!” said Jakubowski, when asked about his plan to build hardware literacy. Earlier this year, he announced the Future Builders Academy, an apprenticeship program where participants will be taught all the necessary skills to develop and build the affordable, self-sustaining homes that are his newest venture. Seed Eco Homes, as Jakubowski calls them, are “human-sized, panelized” modular houses complete with a biodigester, a thermal battery, a geothermal cooling system, and solar electricity. Each house is entirely energy independent and can be built in five days, at a cost of around $40,000. Over eight of these houses have been built across the country, and Jakubowski himself lives in the earliest version of the design. Seed Eco Homes are the culmination of his work on the GVCS: The structure of each house combines parts from the collection and embodies its modular philosophy. The venture represents Jakubowski’s larger goal of making everyday technology accessible. “Housing [is the] single largest cost in one’s life—and a key to so much more,” he says.
The final goal of Open Source Ecology is a “zero marginal cost” society, where producing an additional unit of a good or service costs little to nothing. Jakubowski’s interpretation of the concept (popularized by the American economist and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin) assumes that by eradicating licensing fees, decentralizing manufacturing, and fostering collaboration through education, we can develop truly equitable technology that allows us to be self-sufficient. Open-source hardware isn’t just about helping farmers build their own tractors; in Jakubowski’s view, it’s a complete reorientation of our relationship to technology.
In the first issue of the Whole Earth Catalog, a key piece of inspiration for Jakubowski’s project, Brand wrote: “We are as gods and we might as well get good at it.” In 2007, in a book Brand wrote about the publication, he corrected himself: “We are as gods and have to get good at it.” Today, Jakubowski elaborates: “We’re becoming gods with technology. Yet technology has badly failed us. We’ve seen great progress with civilization. But how free are people today compared to other times?” Cautioning against our reliance on the proprietary technology we use daily, he offers a new approach: Progress should mean not just achieving technological breakthroughs but also making everyday technology equitable.
“We don’t need more technology,” he says. “We just need to collaborate with what we have now.”
Tiffany Ng is a freelance writer exploring the relationship between art, tech, and culture. She writes Cyber Celibate, a neo-Luddite newsletter on Substack.
Engineers can fill gaps in the global response to climate change through research, design and advocacy rooted in systems thinking, one thought leader says Itoro Atakpa, Founder of GreenOrg Strategies.
“Engineers for change can bridge the gaps to support climate action and drive resilience by undertaking community-level research, building inclusive design, and developing local-level innovations that are scalable and replicable,” Ms. Atakpa said in a recent presentation to the Engineering for Change Fellowship discussing the roles engineers can take in support of the work to mitigate disaster.
Engineers trained in systems thinking may recognize Ms. Atakpa’s birdseye perspective. Climate change impacts are interconnected to the water-energy-food nexus, she says. For example, water is needed to grow food, support livestock, and cool power plants. Also, how we farm affects the availability of water and agriculture. Therefore, being aware of where vulnerabilities lie and understanding who we want to design for and what kind of impacts products will have is crucial, Ms. Atakpa says.
Moreover, engineers can design replicable technologies, conduct large-scale research studies on technical innovations, deploy large-scale technology, and engage with policymakers. In doing so, engineers mitigate the most severe risk factors associated with climate change, Ms. Atakpa says.
Engineers can also mitigate the climate impacts of a product in various stages of production. For instance, in raw materials extraction, engineers can reduce impact by recycling to lessen the need for new materials; implement precision mining to reduce energy use; and use renewable energy to mine or acquire new materials to power some extraction operations. In manufacturing, they can use energy-efficient machinery and manufacturing to lower energy consumption.
Above all, Ms. Atakpa encouraged the engineers to be creative. And they should consider ways to mitigate feedback loops so that climate change doesn’t spiral, Ms. Atakpa says.
About the Author
Mercy C. Wanjiku Nduati is the Engineering for Change Editorial Fellow for 2025. She also works on the editorial staff of the Vennomax Media Network that publishes the Industrial Journal magazine. And she has written for the magazine Kenya Engineer, published by the Institution of Engineers in Kenya. She holds a bachelor’s degree in communication and media from Egerton University.
How do you navigate the different priorities of stakeholders trying to change the built environment? What can engineering students do to contribute? Can sustainable construction techniques in Africa be applied in other countries? Dr. Rue Munemo at EPFL’s Centre for Worldwide Sustainable Construction took these questions and others following her Engineering for Change seminar, Pathways Toward Sustainable Construction in Africa. Time ran out on the Q&A, but Dr. Munemo emailed her responses to the questions she missed.
Here we present Dr. Munemo’s answers to your questions, lightly edited for print. And if you’d like to see more, find highlight clips from the presentation at the seminar’s page below.
Q: Would you talk a little bit about how you navigate the priorities of different stakeholders in terms of trying to actually get changes into the built environment? People like homeowners, sustainability organizations, government, etc.
RM: I love that question so much, because it touches on a lot of the work we do. Regardless of how you look at it, the built environment itself is complex. To introduce sustainability, you’re actually trying to tell people how to live their lives. When you look at someone like a cement producer who owns their own business, the last thing they may care about is the environment. They’re more concerned about their business surviving. And same thing for the end user; their main concern may be that they want the cement, and they’re not thinking about how it is produced.
It’s not really about forcing ideologies on people, but understanding their stances and delivering them what they need wrapped up in sustainability and resilience. You wrap it up in all their needs. You tell them, sure, you care about they care about, but if they could do it differently, at the end of the day, it’s sustainable. It’s resilient. We have to be conscientious in trying to discover solutions that include the goals of the stakeholders, because they do exist.
Problems arise when people are not trying to localize their solutions. It is a problem when someone says, ‘This worked in America, so we want to do it here.’ You have to remember, the needs for a house in in Zimbabwe are different from the needs for a house in America. You have to think about these things, because no matter what, it’s about contextualizing. That’s how you navigate this entire chaotic field.
Q: Would reducing construction equipment emissions help? Tractors, generators, pumps, delivery vans, etc.?
RM: Emissions of construction equipment are intrinsically included in the embodied emissions as a key part of processes. Attention is given to these factors with electrification of certain equipment being the main leverage point.
However, electrification is only helpful in reducing emissions if the electricity grid or supply is from a renewable source. Otherwise, the emissions are just shifted from being direct to indirect. There is plenty of merit in this, but the emissions from material extraction and production far exceeds the emissions of the equipment so for greater impact in reduction, that is why my presentation focuses more on the material and design side, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa where electrification of construction equipment requires a bit more infrastructural elements to be put in place.
Q: How should we engage policymakers?
RM: I believe there is great opportunity in engaging policymakers. Particularly, building codes and regulations in most countries are outdated and do not adequately reflect the current sustainability challenges or the potential of innovative materials. By collaborating with policymakers, industry professionals can advocate for updated standards that recognize the environmental and structural benefits of masonry and other sustainable materials.
This can include evidence-based policy briefs, pilot projects demonstrating performance, and partnerships with research institutions to build a strong case for reform. Such engagement can lead to more flexible and forward-looking regulations that encourage sustainable construction practices and reduce the environmental footprint of the built environment.
Q: In your experience, what roles can environmental NGOs play in strengthening sustainable construction roadmaps, and which of these roles do you find most valuable?
RM: I believe that NGOs are key in Africa especially in identifying the gaps that typically would be filled by local governments/public sector and mobilising resources, expertise, and community engagement to address specific challenges in sustainable construction. By leveraging their local knowledge, networks, and flexibility, NGOs can work complementary to governmental efforts, pushing initiatives that the government may not have capacity to advance on their own.
Q: I am interested in finding out how cement and other construction materials are being used in more African countries.
RM: There are quite a few articles that explore the use and choice of construction materials in Africa. The Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa has a good number of resources on this and case studies.
Q: I find the assessment that water security is ranked lowest on the priority of householders entirely unrealistic.
RM: My earlier point may not have been clear. It is not that people disregard water security; rather, many are compelled by circumstance to pursue self-construction in the absence of basic services such as electricity, water, sewage, or roads. In many such areas, households rely on boreholes, wells, or other personal water sources. Therefore, the issue is less about a lack of concern for water security and more about limited access and constrained options. Without a doubt, resilience is, and rightfully should be a priority for both sectors
Q: What do you think engineering students can do to contribute? And what can professors do to contribute? Because it’s very inspiring to hear what you’re working on.
RM: So that’s probably my favorite question. Starting with students, the most important thing now is shaping the up-and-coming engineers to come out of their degree programs with an understanding of sustainability. Sustainability is actually just a part of construction if we want the environment to work long term for everyone involved in it.
As engineers, we know a lot of things about, say, safety factors. I’m a structural engineer and I love my safety factors. But, if prior to all this research, someone had asked me, ‘How do you choose a sustainable material?’ That’s not something that you’re equipped with from the get-go.
We need to start presenting students with an understanding that they’re not in isolated fields. It’s not like a civil engineer will just be working with other civil engineers forever. You have to interact with the designer, the contractors and others. Architects need to understand that when you design a building, it shouldn’t be just for the aesthetics, but rather, how can you efficiently design that building to be more sustainable to construct for everyone involved in that process. That shouldn’t be up to the students to learn on their own. That’s up to the professors that design the courses. So it’s an interconnected link.
At the moment, I’d say attending webinars like this is quite good for engineers. And if you’re interested and would like to get in touch with me, we’re always looking to find people on the ground that are studying, that are working in Africa, to ensure that any work that we do, any ideas that we’re coming up with, are grounded in what people need. And the more people you’re connected to, the more you’re able to ensure that we are actually co-creating a good and sustainable built environment.
Q: We’re looking at built environment Africa, but this is a question that has global implications, right? What is your vision for the built environment everywhere?
RM: Yeah, so we actually do work in Asia as well. In sub-Saharan Africa, there are some cultural similarities between the different countries, even though they are all still very different. But what we’re seeing in Southeast Asia specifically is they are in a transition point. Their economies are shifting and some there’s a bit more advancement in the technology and the use of concrete in a lot of these countries.
One of the other differences between Southeast Asia and Africa is the climate and the style of housing. So it’s things like that, where the minute the style changes, then you have to rethink what kind of materials are more aligned. The approach is similar, but the people and their needs can change. The one thing we all understand, though, is with developing countries, you don’t really have control of all facets.
The Engineering for Change Seminar Series features academic laboratories researching solutions to meet the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. The world’s cutting edge research deserves a platform with a global audience. Join us for presentations of new findings from investigative teams around the globe.
Researchers, we welcome your applications to take part in the series. Please send an email to editor@engineeringforchange.org.
You’ve got a laser cutter. You’ve got a 3D printer. What do you make? [Ayushmaan45] suggests a telescope. The modest instrument isn’t going to do serious astronomy with only 8X worth of optics, but it would make a fine spyglass for a youngster.
The body is cut from MDF, and there are only a few 3D printed parts. The only other things you need are rubber bands and a pair of lenses. You don’t even need glue. We might have spray painted the inside of the scope black or used some black contact paper to cut down on reflections, although it probably wouldn’t make much difference.
Of course, depending on your lenses, you may have to make some changes. Or find new lenses, for that matter. We like that it doesn’t take any exotic parts. We also appreciate that it is easy for kids to take apart and put back together. It would be interesting to see how a motivated kid might alter the design, as well.
Arguably, the golden age of browser gaming occurred in the 00s mostly revolving around Adobe Flash. This was an era with high creativity and a low barrier of entry, and also decentralized from gatekeeping app stores. Sadly, these times have passed us by as the security concerns around Flash led to its discontinuation and most casual gamers have migrated to the app store for their fix. But that doesn’t stop some from continuing to bring gaming to the browser, even if those games were never intended for it in the first place like this browser port of Celeste.
Celeste is an indie platformer where the player climbs a mysterious mountain while confronting her inner struggles. Originally meant for consoles and PC, a group of friends including [velzie], [bomberfish], and [Toshit] aka [r58Playz] took this as a challenge especially after seeing someone else’s half finished web port of this game. Most of the build revolves around WebAssembly (wasm) and around “cursed” .NET runtime hacks which also allow the port to run the community-made Everest mod loader. It uses a multithreaded and JIT compiling version of mono-wasm backported from .NET 10 to .NET 9 to maximize performance. The team actually first started by porting Terraria to the browser, and then moved on to this Celeste port from there.
The port of Celeste can be played here, and their port of Terrariais also available, although may not support a ton of Hackaday traffic so some patience is advised. There are also GitHub repositories for Celeste and Terraria as well. With impressive ports of relatively modern games moving into the browser, perhaps we’re entering a new golden age of browser gaming; we’ve also seen things like Minecraft implemented in only HTML and CSS lately as well.
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