Featured image: the Flamenco ice tower in Harbin, China, designed by architects from China and the Netherlands. Thin shells of ice can be immensely strong! (courtesy Maple Village)

This week’s show features Prof. Sigrid Adriaenssens of Princeton’s Civil Engineering Department. Modern architects must confront many coupled challenges: overpopulation, material shortages, energy conservation, natural disasters… Designing better structures on all these fronts requires transformative solutions, like those provided by Sigrid’s Form Finding Lab. Using simple principles that describe hanging meshes, the group designs thin membrane forms that are efficient, organic, and resilient to extreme loads. Hear how this paradigm shift is making headway on deployable storm surge shields, and how origami-influenced folding might enable flexible buildings that react to their environments.

Play with this fabric physics yourself! Here’s a simulation of a drape, using the same equations as Sigrid’s form finding algorithms (thanks Aatish!). And here’s a visualization with music by Jeff Snyder, with the same fabric model featured prominently.

In other news:

• Plants make up an astounding 80% of global biomass, outweighing animals by an astonishing 200x.
• Ebola is on the rise in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but this time a vaccine may be ready to stamp out the outbreak before it keeps spreading.
• A graveyard of ancient bones were found in Denmark, left in a peat bog as a result of Roman conquest 2000 years ago. Wear and tear on the bones indicates the type of battle, experience of the soldiers, and trauma on the surrounding environment after the battle.

The playlist can be found on WPRB.com or below.

Featured image: WxShift.com, a website by Climate Central, shows your local weather alongside long-term trends indicative of climate change.

This week we interviewed Greta Shum, digital communications specialist at Princeton’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. What’s the importance of communicating science? For issues like climate change that are bound to affect most lives on the planet, communication is crucial—even if the subject is complicated and often depressing! Greta will talk about her work packaging climate research findings into web series and articles for the public in her jobs at Climate Central and the Andlinger Center, working with meteorologists, researchers, and science readers in the public to help all sides understand the others. Also featured: the essential practice of listening and what it means that prestigious science journals are in English.

As we mention in the show, check out the Andlinger Center’s distillates (helpful overviews of energy policy) and WxShift, which shows your local weather today and over time to bring the effects of climate change home.

In other news:

• Not only do cowbirds steal other birds’ nests when they lay eggs, but their eggshells are much thicker than others—as they land in the nest, they often crack their competitors’ shells!
• Tourism has a big impact on the environment, not just from plane rides but also from construction and maintenance of all the infrastructure tourists need.
• Nonnative species can be a big problem, but their route to colonizing new places isn’t always straightforward. Many of them colonize place after place, using their second homes as starting points to travel elsewhere.

The playlist for the show can be found at WPRB.com or below.