Holland’s glow in the dark roads

The roads in The Netherlands are getting a boost. Starting in 2013, experimental designs that glow in the dark will be installed on a couple hundred meters of road. The design, which uses a special powder that ‘charges’ in the sun and can glow for about 10 hours. Other concepts involve powders that display different designs based on weather, which could be used to remind drivers of icy conditions.

The Smart Highway by Studio Roosegaarde and infrastructure management group Heijmans won Best Future Concept at the Dutch Design Awards, and has already gone beyond pure concept. The studio has developed a photo-luminising powder that will replace road markings — it charges up in sunlight, giving it up to ten hours of glow-in-the-dark time come nightfall. “It’s like the glow in the dark paint you and I had when we were children,” designer Roosegaarde explained, “but we teamed up with a paint manufacture and pushed the development. Now, it’s almost radioactive”.

[…]

The idea is to not only use more sustainable methods of illuminating major roads, thus making them safer and more efficient, but to rethink the design of highways at the same time as we continue to rethink vehicle design. As Studio Roosegaarde sees it, connected cars and internal navigation systems linked up to the traffic news represent just one half of our future road management systems — roads need to fill their end of the bargain and become intelligent, useful drivers of information too.

• highways
• The Netherlands

From the diary of Jim Henson: Imagination Illustrated

Here’s a look at a new book based on the diary of Jim Henson called Imagination Illustrated. Here’s the foreword by his daughter Lisa and the first few pages:

Love this idea, BTW…embeddable book excerpts. More like this, please. Actually, if I were Amazon I would make Kindle previews embeddable with a big old “buy the full book at Amazon” button on the last page of the excerpt and tie it in with the Associates Program. Apparently they did offer this once upon a time but not anymore.

• books
• Imagination Illustrated
• Jim Henson

Eleanor the cheetah supermom

Cheetahs in the wild are declining. By some estimates, there are only 10,000 left outside of captivity. Cheetahs have a lot working against them, including the fact they can’t roar. One lady cheetah, however, is doing her part.

There are a rare few, however, that somehow manage to beat the odds and enjoy astonishing success in raising cubs, some even fostering the offspring of other females. Superb hunters and wise in the ways of the bush, these supermoms manage to make a kill nearly every day while keeping their brood safe on the wide-open stage of the African grasslands, beneath the very noses of lions and hyenas. One such supermom, a seven-year-old named Eleanor, is known to have mothered at least 10 percent of all the adult cheetahs in the southern Serengeti.

(via @mikenizza)

• cheetahs