Feature: The Shard's bleeding edge: anatomy of a 21st century skyscraper
Upon its completion in May 2012, the 1,017 foot tall skyscraper Shard London Bridge will be the tallest building in the European Union—but its unmissable presence on the London skyline has been felt for over a year. Since the completion of its 804 foot, 72 story concrete core in early 2011, the Shard has been the tallest building in London. In a city, country, and continent not famed for skyscrapers, the Shard more than stands out.
Observant Londoners have watched as glass facades have crept up around the core over the past weeks and months. It's impossible to look at the Shard without extrapolating its lines upwards to a point, completing the pyramidal form in the mind's eye (crick in the neck notwithstanding). But mock-ups of the completed tower show a pinnacle characterized by a fragmented crown of glassy splinters, not a neat pyramid. Architect Renzo Piano, who conceived the Shard, has compared its shape to "a 16th century pinnacle or the mast of a very tall ship." But "Shard" is the name that stuck, a name reportedly coined by Piano after criticism from the group English Heritage that his design resembled a "shard of glass."
With pressure on designers to prove the environmental credentials of their high-rise buildings and to address the safety concerns of the post-9/11 era, we asked the engineers behind the Shard to tell us how they plan to keep the Shard lean, green, and above all vertical—and why skyscrapers are needed in the 21st century.
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Gallery: how the surveillance industry markets spyware to governments
A collection of documents recently published by Wikileaks casts a light on surveillance vendors who sell intrusive monitoring technology to governments and law enforcement agencies. This growing industry—which serves countries around the world—offers the ability to monitor entire populations and circumvent the privacy and security safeguards built into conventional consumer technology.
In our report last week, we highlighted DigiTask, a German company that sells malware for law enforcement investigations. The company's marketing materials says that its software, which is deployed through zero day exploits, can intercept encryption keys to provide law enforcement agents with access to encrypted communications. DigiTask is just one of the many vendors who produce such software. In this article, we will give you a brief look at some of the marketing material that was included in the Wikileaks Spy Files.
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RIM's troubles continue: BlackBerry Playbook costing company $485 million
RIM can’t catch a break. Not only is the company coping with dismal PlayBook tablet sales, it’s also taking a near half-billion-dollar hit for sitting inventory that must now be sold at rock-bottom prices.
RIM announced on Friday that the company wouldn’t be meeting its financial targets for the year, primarily due to the unsuccessful performance of the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. It pushed 150,000 units this quarter, compared with 250,000 last quarter, and 500,000 in the first quarter of the year.
The company is offering the troubled tablet for dramatically discounted prices through Dec. 3. Prices were slashed $300 across the product line-up, and quickly sold out at retailers like Best Buy by last week’s Black Friday. Nonetheless, RIM announced today that it’s recognizing “a pre-tax provision in the third quarter of fiscal 2012 of approximately $485 million, $360 million after tax, related to its inventory valuation of BlackBerry PlayBook tablets.”
Quick to note an “increase in demand,” RIM’s co-CEO Mike Lazaridis offered up continued support for the tablet.
“RIM is committed to the BlackBerry PlayBook and believes the tablet market is still in its infancy,” he said in today’s press release. “Although a number of factors have led to the need for an inventory provision in the third quarter, we believe the PlayBook, which will be further enhanced with the upcoming PlayBook OS 2.0 software, is a compelling tablet for consumers that also offers unique security and manageability features for the enterprise.”
RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook jumped on the tablet trend a bit prematurely. The device had a number of software issues right out of the gate, most notably problems with Flash content. It garnered lackluster reviews that led to a limited distribution network as carriers like Sprint opted not to sell the device.
And no, RIM’s PR troubles don’t end with substantial loss warnings. In a microcosmic example of adding insult to injury, a couple of its employees just sparked an international incident.
The pair of RIM employees on a non-stop, Beijing-bound flight knocked back a few too many drinks and started misbehaving so badly that the plane turned around and dropped them off in Vancouver. Due to industry regulations regarding the number of hours a flight staff can work, the flight, which originated in Montreal, was grounded for 18 hours and its 314 passengers were put up in hotels for the night.
The two RIM employees were arrested for their behavior, and have to pay Air Canada a fine of $35,878 each. They’re also on one-year probation from flying Air Canada, and are suspended from RIM pending further investigation.
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Researchers short-circuit the immune system to block HIV
So far, efforts to develop a vaccine against HIV have failed. It's not that they don't induce people to make antibodies against the virus—they make plenty of those—it's just that most of the antibodies don't usually keep the virus from infecting new cells. Nevertheless, these sorts of antibodies are possible to make. A number of patients that weren't vaccinated but fail to develop AIDS following HIV infection have been identified, and some of them are protected by antibodies that successfully neutralize many strains of HIV.
Since these broadly neutralizing antibodies are the sorts of things we want out of the vaccination process, a team of labs at Caltech and UCLA decided to short-circuit the need for a vaccination, or even antibody-producing immune cells. They created a disarmed adenovirus that contained the genes needed to produce a broadly effective antibody from humans, optimizing the DNA to make sure that the antibody was made in muscle cells, and then secreted into their environment.
The modified virus was then injected into mice that had had their immune systems humanized (the stem cells in their bone marrow were killed off and then repopulated with human cells). The mice were then exposed to levels of HIV many times higher than are normally present during initial infections. Not all antibodies effectively blocked new infections, but at least one did so consistently. The resistance to new HIV infections persisted for the life of the experiments.
The authors are clearly thinking that this isn't just a demonstration that will be limited to the lab, since they argue that "Our results suggest that successful translation of this approach to humans may produce effective prophylaxis against HIV." That translation may be challenging, however, as the use of these viruses in gene therapies has been somewhat mixed. Still, it seems like a promising idea, given that it could mean a one-time needle stick for lifelong protection.
Nature, 2011. DOI: (About DOIs).
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