Inhabitat's Week in Green: Jake Dyson's lamp, wooden light bulbs and weed-killing lasers
Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week's most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us -- it's the Week in Green.
This week Inhabitat has been reporting live from New York Design Week, where we've witnessed countless innovative green designs from around the world. To kick things off, we were pretty impressed with this desk lamp designed by Jake Dyson (son of the vacuum god) that extends the life of its LED bulbs by a whopping 37 years. Also in the category of "bright shiny things we love" is QisDesign's Aurelia lamp, which bears a striking resemblance to a glowing jellyfish. We were also dazzled by UM Project's collection of retro, robot-inspired lamps, Light & Contrast's cute LED flower lights, and we were absolutely floored by Alessandro Jordão's larger-than-life LEGO chair. Can't get enough of NY Design Week? Check out all of our favorite green designs from this year's shows.
Continuing with the topic of innovative green lighting technology, artist Ryosuke Fukusada has created the impossible: a glowing wooden light bulb. Confused? The light was created using a technique called Rokuro, and it consists of an LED light bulb wrapped with a very thin layer of wood. When the bulb is turned on, it illuminates the grain of the wood. As Fukusada's creation demonstrates, LED lighting technology has taken some incredible strides recently, and we took some time to round-up 24 of our all-time favorite green lamps that look great with LED bulbs.
The wooden light bulb isn't the only surprising new creation we've seen this week - Gucci launched a sculptural pair of liquid wood sunglasses, and we were impressed with this modified desktop computer designed by Mike Schropp of TotalGeekdom that uses its own heat to grow a thick bed of wheatgrass. That's what we call green computing! We also checked out a pollution-sniffing robotic fish that was developed by scientists from the European BMT Group. The robo-fish can swim where no diver would dare to go, and send relevant information back to shore. Think that sounds weird? Then try this on for size: A team of researchers from the Leibniz University in Hannover, Germany propose using weed-killing lasers as a substitute for environmentally-destructive herbicides. Now, if only we could get a robot to operate the lasers....
And amid all the tech news this week, we still managed to do some globetrotting, keeping an eye on green architecture around the world. In Japan, the world's tallest tower, the Tokyo Skytree, finally opened. The 2,080-foot-tall space needle is officially the world's largest communication tower and the second tallest building. Over in Mumbai, we've been keeping tabs on the world's most over-the-top home, the $1-billion high-rise that India's richest man, Mukesh Ambani, built for himself. It turns out that Ambani and his family haven't even spent a night in the 27-story 'home' yet. And in Wales, the town of Monmouth has made history by becoming the world's first "Wikipedia town" by scattering QR bar codes at points of interest all over town.
