G-Cans: massive underground water system in Japan

Mark Frauenfelder: Che sez: Tokyo is an impressive city above ground, but one of the most incredible things about this city is it's mind-bogglingly complex underground. The G-Cans Project is a massive project, begun 12 years ago, to build infrastructure for preventing overflow of the major rivers and waterways spidering the city (A serious problem for Tokyo during rainy-season and typhoon season). The underground waterway is the largest in the world and sports five 32m diameter, 65m deep concrete containment silos which are connected by 64 kilometers of tunnel sitting 50 meters beneath the surface.

The whole system is powered by 14000 horsepower turbines which can pump 200 tons of water a second into the large outlying edogawa river. I'm in the middle of playing Halflife2 right now and something like this looks like its straight out of the game or some sci-fi movie. This unbelievable gallery of photos however, is not CG, it is the real deal.

The site is all in Japanese, but if you click around the menus a bit, there are animations and diagrams of how the system works, and other interesting photos of the high-tech control center and turbine facilities. Supposedly the G-Cans project is also meant to be a tourist attraction, and can be visited for free. very cool. (Link to animation)[via Boing Boing]

Artificial dolphin tail fin

We occasionally get to write about stuff that’s been made to look like a dolphin, but we hardly ever get to talk about stuff actually made for dolphins, like this artificial fin that Bridgestone (yes, the Bridgestone that sells tires) created for a dolphin in Japan that had lost 75% of its tail from some mysterious disease. You’d think that Fuji, the dolphin they made the prosthetic tail fin for, would be grateful, but apparently she rejected it at first (it took her five months to get used to it), and even now they only keep it for 20 minutes day because, and we’re not making this up, they’re worried that it might fall off and that other dolphins would eat it.[via Engadget]

Hermit crabs get artificial shells from helping humans

Xeni Jardin: BoingBoing reader Jayson Franklin says:

"This article describes an attempt to make artificial (plastic) 'shells' to be left on the beach for wild hermit crabs. 30% of hermit crabs have shells that are too small for them, and must often resort to using refuse for housing."
Link to The Hand Up Project: Attempting to Meet the New Needs of Natural Life-Forms [via Boing Boing]

21st century googie: a house built around a cylinder

Cory Doctorow: London is full of little houses called "two-up-and-two-downs" -- a kitchen and a sitting-room on the ground floor, and two bedrooms (and a bathroom) upstairs. Two rooms up, two rooms down. It's a kind of basic building-block of London housing.

This futuristic little six-square-metre house is a modern two-up-and-two-down, with four rooms contained in a revolving cylinder that maximises the efficiency of space. This is a wonderful twenty-frist century take on googie architecture, the kind of thing that has all the designy prettiness of an iMac and all the ephemeraility of a tailfin. Link (via Pirotcar) [via Boing Boing]

Flashy fish

David Pescovitz: Science News has an interesting article about the otherworldly colors and skin patterns of reef fish.

People can theorize till the cowfish come home about what they see on a reef, but what matters is what fish see, and that's been hard to determine.

Improvements in cameras and in equipment for analyzing light and color are now inspiring new approaches to approximating a fish-eye view of the reefs. Looking at the abundant coloration from a fishy perspective, the new work demonstrates that people can be quite wrong about what's showy and what's subtle. The old questions are giving way to more-sophisticated new ones. Colors aren't just a matter of either hiding or flaunting. It may be possible to whisper and shout at the same time.

Link [via Boing Boing]