In Newark, New Jersey, a large and deceptively nondescript building is redefining the Garden State, producing millions of pounds of food per year just outside of Manhattan. This 70,000 square foot facility has the equivalent yield of over 5 million square feet of traditional farmland. Inside, a year-round, closed-loop aeroponics system employs no pesticides and requires 95% less water than field farming. This branch of AeroFarms is not alone — it’s part of a food production revolution with projects ranging from at-home and in-store micro-farms to massive facilities set up in old factories and warehouses around the world.

Technically, vertical farming can be done outside, too, by stacking planters in natural sunlight, but indoor vertical farms offer a range of advantages. Inside, there are no seasons and specialized LED lights make it possible to grow plants continuously and cycle through various crops more easily. The controlled environment and standardization of these systems also makes automation easier. In Japan, approaches have gone predictably high-tech, with endeavors like the Vegetable Factory, which is operated entirely by robots.

Spatial containment makes recycling more efficient, mitigates spoilage and reduces the risk of diseases and pests spreading beyond a specific facility. Transportation costs and energy requirements are also reduced for farms that move into old factories and warehouses right in and around cities, putting them closer to consumers. Aeroponics in general also require less material input — mainly mist and air with minimal water and soil — leading to a lighter footprint.

What started in large and independent facilities has begun to spread into mainstream grocery stores and supermarkets, too. A few years back, Target started testing direct retail micro-farms, beginning with leafy greens before moving to tomatoes, peppers and more. Since these kinds of retail spaces are climate-controlled already for the sake of both shoppers and products, less added energy is required to maintain ideal conditions.

In Berlin, a company called INFARM recently partnered with local shops to provide similar in-store services, cutting down on farm-to-table distance right in the heart of a major European metropolis. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, vertical creepers, rice paddies and broccoli fields were integrated into the design of an otherwise Modern-looking office building, brightening up the place while also providing food for the employee cafeteria.

Taking vertical integration a step further, projects like the ReGen Villages aim to incorporate stacked farms directly into residential communities. It may sound impractical or even Utopian, but at its root the idea is relatively traditional: backyard gardens and community gardening are nothing new. Coupled with walkability and density, these kinds of green-centric towns have a lot in common with New Urbanist ideas that go back decades.

Still, it is generally wise to maintain a healthy skepticism when it comes to fresh green architectural trends and technologies and eye-catching renderings. Skyscrapers covered in greenery (or treescrapers), for instance, have proven to be popular but also problematic in practice (catchy conceptual earthscrapers, groundscrapers and sidescrapers, too, for that matter). Sometimes, more practical organic solutions are hiding in plain sight. Take wood, for instance, a historically popular green building material now finding new forms and reaching new heights in tall buildings around the world. Newer is not always better.

Some extreme vertical farming ideas may indeed prove to be far-fetched and unsustainable, but market movements suggest there is a future in these kinds of facilities and approaches. Investors are putting their money where people’s mouths are, buying up disused urban real estate and developing new indoor farming technologies. Already, vertical farming is a $2,000,000,000 industry and experts project it will grow as much as 30% per year over the next decade.

Vertical farms are of course not a complete solution to ongoing threats like climate change and mounting global food crises, but they do show promise — these endeavors are slowly breaking down urban and rural barriers, reconnecting cities with the food sources that sustain them and shortening that critical distance from farm to table.

Anyone who’s hoping some version of our species will manage to survive the coming climate crisis through transhumanism might be interested to learn about this recent breakthrough: a robotic contact lens that can zoom in on command. A team of research scientists at the University of California San Diego set out to explore ways that “soft robotics” (which mimic materials found in living organisms) can be integrated with human bodies, and this is one of their projects.

They’ve created a prototype contact lens controlled by movement of the eye, so the wearer can simply blink twice to zoom in or out. The biomimetic lenses are made of elastic polymer films designed to respond to electric signals generated by the eyes when they move. The lens itself mimics the biology of the human eye, with layers that expand or contract to change its thickness, altering the amount of light that passes through it.

This kind of technology isn’t entirely new; it’s similar to eye tracking technology that lets users control wheelchairs.

“Thanks to many unique features, soft robots or soft machines have been recently explored intensively to work collaboratively with human beings. Most of the previously developed soft robots are either controlled manually or by prewritten programs. In the current work, a novel human–machine interface is developed to use electrooculographic signals generated by eye movements to control the motions and the change of focal length of a biomimetic soft lens.”

“The motion and deformation of the soft lens are achieved by the actuation of different areas of dielectric elastomer films, mimicking the working mechanisms of the eyes of human and most mammals. The system developed in the current study has the potential to be used in visual prostheses, adjustable glasses, and remotely operated robotics in the future.”

So, how long will it be before a real-life version of the sci-fi “eyeshine” surgery from Chronicles of Riddick, which enables night vision, is a thing?

Top image: Niek Beck/Flickr CC by 2.0

The dusty, rocky plains, mountains and dry riverbeds of Israel’s Negev Desert stand in for the landscape of Mars in a new experimental project that aims to help astronauts thrive on the surface of the Red Planet. SAGA Space Architects collaborated with D-MARS, a space analog research center in Israel, to create The Mars Lab – which comes complete with lightweight architecture designed to withstand Mars’ lack of atmosphere.

As SAGA explains, it’s actually the desert of Wadi Rum in southern Jordan that most closely resembles the red Martian landscape. They’ve previously experimented with imagining the future experiences of astronauts on this distant planet through “missions” with sparse food and water, no communication with the outside world and no sensory or mental stimuli, all to learn what astronauts will need out of their living environments. For the purposes of training Israeli space explorers through inhabiting confined spaces, Negev serves well, with its geology, aridity and isolation feeling similar enough to the real Martian environment. The habitat will serve as a prototype for a longer mission scheduled for next year.

“D-MARS will simulate a mission to Mars or other planets, allowing analog astronauts (or “Ramonauts”) to live on-site as real explorers; the daily routine, food, communication and other challenges will be very similar to those faced in the future during an actual planetary mission.”

“Establishing the D-MARS space analog mission in the Negev Desert will allow Israel to make a significant contribution to the world-wide effort to prepare humanity for the exploration of the planet Mars and our solar system, while also benefiting the economy, technology development and educational community of the state of Israel as a whole.”

The lightweight expandable architecture of the Mars Lab features thin faceted framework and flexible protective translucent membranes, which can withstand at least one bar of atmospheric pressure. A durable shell folds around the membrane during transit and landing to keep it from puncturing. Inside, an algae photo-bioreactor takes in carbon dioxide and produces oxygen for the astronauts. The whole thing is designed to have a minimal impact on its surroundings, both in Israel and on Mars.

Despite the fact that wood has been in use as a primary building material for millennia, it’s being hailed as the material of the future. Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

Wooden architecture is most often associated with cabins and other rustic styles, but that perception is increasingly out of date. Recent innovations are producing wood that’s capable of standing in for more environmentally harmful materials like plastic, steel, concrete and even glass. It might seem like increasing demand for wood could deplete forests more rapidly than ever, contributing to the climate crisis, but the key to sustainability lies in preserving large tracts of old growth forest while also maintaining well-managed working forests using modern methods that protect biodiversity.

Self-Shaping Wood

Wood may seem relatively inflexible when it comes to architecture, but it doesn’t have to be. Researchers at the University of Stuttgart’s Institute for Computational Design and Construction have found a way to create bending, twisting wooden structures in a process that actually makes the wood stronger than ever. But the best part is, unlike mechanical forming processes that require heavy machinery, this technique requires very little energy. “Urbach Tower” is the result of these efforts, a “shelf-shaping” 46-foot-tall tower in Germany.

The components for the tower were designed and manufactured in a flat state, and once they were assembled, the wood was allowed to go through its natural drying and shrinking process, warping it into a shape of its own creation.

Cooling Wood

A new type of wood developed by a team at the University of Maryland and the University of Colorado Boulder is capable of passively shedding heat, reflecting sunlight and warmth to lower a building’s electricity consumption. It’s created by removing a natural polymer called lignin, which holds together the molecules of wood’s other main component, cellulose. Then the wood is compressed to create a strong, pale material made up solely of cellulose fiber, and a hydrophobic compound is added to make it water-resistant. Since lignin absorbs heat, its removal gives the resulting material a cooling effect.

Fireproof Wood

Not only have those same scientists at the University of Maryland created cooling wood, they’ve found a way to make bulletproof wood through densification, which also makes it resistant to fire. The team led by Liangbing Hu first chemically treated the timber with sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfite to partially remove its lignin, then hot-pressed it to create a dense, laminated material free of the air changes that increase flammability. When burnt, the modified wood doesn’t catch fire; instead, it becomes even more fireproof by forming an insulating exterior layer of char.

Wood Based Plastics

We don’t have to give up the convenience and versatility of plastic in order to curb rampant pollution. We just have to make it out of different materials. Previously, we’ve seen plastic alternatives made of edible algae, the skeletons of arthropods like shrimp, milk proteins and mushrooms. But wood is another contender. Developed by a research group at the Technical University of Hamburg, “lignopure” is a lignin-based plastic that’s completely non-toxic and biodegradable. The lignin is released using a high-pressure process requiring only CO2, water and enzymes, producing a flexible material that can be molded, 3D printed and formed into thin layers for use as tape and packaging.

Transparent Wood

Someday soon, wood could even replace glass. Researchers at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm chemically modified wood to make it transparent without losing its mechanical properties – again, by removing the lignin. The team filled the resulting micros coping holes with acrylic to produce a translucent piece of wood with a frosted effect. Then, mixing it with polyethylene glycol, a “phase-change material” that melts at 80 degrees Fahrenheit, they make it fully transparent and capable of releasing energy when cooled, producing a clear “pane” of wood that can absorb energy during the hottest hours of the day and release it at night when it gets chilly.

Cross-Laminated Timber

Now that studies have proven the strength and fire-resistance of cross-laminated timber (CLT), building codes around the world are relaxing to enable the construction of super-tall timber towers. So many of these wooden wonders are under construction, it’s hard to keep track of them all, each vying for the title of “world’s tallest wooden building.”

CLT is an engineered material created by stacking and gluing small pieces of structural lumber, with each layer perpendicular to the one below it. The result is so durable, it’s seen as a viable alternative to steel and concrete, while being competitive in price and far less energy-intensive to manufacture. It’s also a lot more fire-resistant than timber in its natural state. All of these qualities point to the possibility of increasingly wood-filled cities in the near future.

Wooden Bricks

Lots of modular building systems use stackable components made of composite materials to eliminate the need for nails, screws and other fasteners. But almost none of them use wood like Brikawood, a a system of wooden bricks that lets you build an entire house with just a handful of tools. The interlocking pieces of wood snap together so firmly, they become totally rigid with mechanical, acoustic, thermal and anti-seismic properties, and you don’t even have to add any cladding or membranes. The walls are instantly finished on both sides.

Instead of just imagining near-future applications of holographic virtual and augmented reality that we interact with individually on a small scale, what if we expanded them to colossal proportions? “Holographic Reality” by Behruz Hairullaev, Brandon Muir and Nicholas Licausi envisions holograms as collective experiences that can provide entertainment, education, information, news and more in public places.

Sci-fi films have already envisioned huge holographic billboards, but “Holographic Reality” takes the concept a bit further with huge sports games, sculptures, light shows and more projected into the sky via modular, skyscraper-like structures, allowing cities to become massive canvases.

The designers note that virtual and augmented reality innovations tend to focus on personal applications like games that people interact with individually more often than in groups. Users are isolated by putting on headsets and absorbing the content alone, disconnecting from other people and the immediate physical world around them.

“Holographic Reality,” on the other hand, brings people together to share experiences like simultaneously broadcasted live events by making holograms part of the urban fabric. It’s not clear exactly how it would work, and some aspects of the project raise immediate concerns, like the prospect of worsening light pollution and making cities feel more cluttered than they already do. But for special events and select locations, this kind of technology could be pretty cool, and it’s probably inevitable at this point anyway.