Workers carry a large segment of wall in a prefab housing factoring with a doorway cut out on a factory floor.
Autodesk invests in prefab home startup to help with disaster housing

Autodesk is making a bet on the future of prefabrication for disaster housing with an investment in FactoryOS and the company’s California-based “Rapid Response Factory.” In addition to allowing the startup to begin experimenting with constructing post-natural disaster homes on the factory floor, the funding will reportedly allow the Bay Area startup to create a

An image of a large gray building with a sweeping concave roof on the water.
Why doesn’t the U.S. design buildings to survive earthquakes?

Earthquakes have been in the news lately with increasing regularity: Southern California recently experienced a July 4th quake registering 6.4 on the Richter scale followed by one just a day later at 7.1. It’s predicted that within the week there’s an 11 percent chance that a major quake could follow, and, of course, there’s the

CityIQ plans to install thousands of sensors to monitor San Diego

Smart City Expo World Congress, held this year in Barcelona, is an annual architectural, engineering, and technology exhibition dedicated to creating a better future for cities worldwide through social collaboration and urban innovation. Among the projects that were unveiled at this November’s event was CityIQ’s proposal to install 4,200 sensor nodes throughout San Diego, California, a major tech

This gravity-powered battery could be the future of energy storage

Over the last decade, the renewable energy industry has boomed due to the proliferation of new technology that is reducing the cost of construction and long-term operability. However, one critical problem still remains: storing renewable energy during lulls in wind speed or sun exposure is often prohibitively expensive. In response to this issue, Energy Vault, a subsidiary of California’s IdeaLab,

Mexico is building Latin America’s largest solar installation

While the current American government squanders time and opportunity in the pursuit of short-term profit by imposing disruptive tariffs and curtailing sustainability-focused goals, Mexico is powering ahead with a broad effort to generate up to 35 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2024. As a part of that transformative effort—until recent years, Mexico’s energy industry operated as an oil-forward,