Dome of broken umbrellas takes to New York river

Take a pleasure cruise up the Harlem River this month and you surely won't miss the 24-ft (7.3-m) diameter Harvest Dome 2.0 which floats on the waters near Spuyten Duyvil Creek at the north tip of Manhattan, New York. Built to draw eyes to the city's watercourses, the dome is built from 450 discarded and broken umbrellas support by a floating ring made from 128 2-liter drinks bottles.The project is a sequel to the first Harvest Dome, and like it was built for Inwood Hill Park. The first dome came to an inauspicious end in 2011 when, en route to its final location, the pontoon of canoes transporting the dome shipwrecked and drifted to Rikers Island where, co-creator Amanda Schachter of SLO Architecture tells Gizmag, it was destroyed by prison officers.

Perhaps it was the opportunity to make amends that drew a team of architecture grads and locals to volunteer to build the thing. Schacter and her husband and partner, Alexander Levi, turned to Kickstarter to fund version 2, seeking US$7,500 – modest, by Kickstarter standards. The campaign included offers to sell parts of the original dome (complete with a certificate of authenticity that the piece had been "in custody" on Rikers) to the high bidders.

"The piece celebrates the particular tides at the Northern tip of Manhattan, at Spuyten Duyvil, home to one of the last remaining saltmarshes on the island," Schachter says. "The Dome alternates between sitting on the mudflat at low tide to floating in the water during high tide."

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Google to build green-roof California HQ

An image has been released of what looks set to become Google's new California HQ. Named Bay View, the nine-building campus is designed to maximize the likelihood of innovation-friendly chance encounters between the workforce. "You can't schedule innovation," Google's David Radcliffe tells Vanity Fair . "We want to create opportunities for people to have ideas and be able to turn to others right there and say, 'What do you think of this?'" This philosophy has fostered the design's angular office blocks, arranged back to back like nodding clergy. Despite the 1.1 million sq ft (102,000 sq m), employees will be a maximum of a 2.5-minute walk away from one another, Vanity Fair reports. Perhaps most remarkable is that this is Google's first build. In its 15-year history, Google has only ever occupied buildings previously used by others. "We've been the world's best hermit crabs: we've found other people's shell

Connectify Dispatch combines multiple internet connections into high speed bandwidth

Connectify, a company known for software that can turn your computer into a wireless hotspot, is at work on a new project called Dispatch that will turn all internet connections available to your device into one glorious (and hopefully faster and more stable) stream of high-speed bandwidth. The project appears to take some of its cues from live video broadcasting companies like LiveU , which sells custom made backpacks wired up with 3G/4G and Wi-Fi transceivers. These backpacks then spread the traffic load over whatever available networks it can connect to in order to maximize bandwidth, which is obviously a major plus if you're streaming live video. Dispatch, however, is planned as a software-only solution for the masses – no special backpack required. It will dynamically manage the traffic based on which networks provide the greatest bandwidth and have the clearest signal, which also means that even if one of the networks drops out entirely, you'll still have interne

Nerf Vulcan Sentry Gun tracks targets and avoids friendly fire

Anyone who plays video games will know that few things protect an area like a well-placed sentry gun. In the real world, though, even a person's bedroom or office could use a little protection sometimes, which is why one designer has built the Nerf Vulcan Sentry Gun. Using a custom program and some servos, the sentry can automatically locate targets and unleash a stream of foam darts at over seven times the usual speed, while keeping its owner out of the crosshairs. Britt Liv Ulrike Michelsen, a chemical and biological engineering student from Germany, designed and constructed the sentry using mostly basic electronics and some plywood. This isn't the first time she's modified a Nerf gun, but building this robotic turret is arguably her most ambitious project to date. Luckily, the Nerf Vulcan already operates using an electric motor, so controlling the actual firing mechanism through a computer was just a matter of connecting it directly to an Arduino Uno and a laptop.

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