6 high-tech refugee shelters that can be deployed in an instant

Each year, tens of thousands of people around the world are displaced from their homes by natural disasters, war and, increasingly, the effects of climate change. When this happens, emergency-response teams are tasked with the challenge of housing these refugees in a short period of time. Designers and architects are responding to this need with shelters that are quick to ship, easily assembled by a small number of people without specialized tools and durable enough to last several years. Some of them even float, make clean drinking water and harness the power of the sun.

Gallery: 6 high-tech refugee shelters that can be deployed in an instant | 6 Photos

Should Pokémon move to consoles?

Dr.

Now, while the Pokémon fans among us will obviously all play the game, some were and are hoping for more from the series. Two, in particular, have spent the past 48 hours arguing over one question: should Pokémonmove beyond Nintendo's handhelds and onto the company's fully fledged console?

Kris Naudus
Worked at The Pokemon Company for 5 ½ years.

Pokémon is a handheld series. I felt like that point was hammered home during the Sun and Moon announce video, which showed kids (and adults) playing on various Nintendo handhelds as much as it showed the actual games. We've all heard the story of how Satoshi Tajiri was inspired to create Pokémon by this childhood love of bug collecting. That initial design ethos manifests in every generation of the game, not just in the places you go or how weird the creatures get, but in finding inventive ways to get you to go outside and meet people.

The big one is the way they split Pokémon between the two versions, which meant that you had to find someone with the opposite version of the game to trade with. Granted, the Global Trade System sort of removed that requirement and all the socializing that came with it, but I still see people getting together to talk about Pokémon in person and I think it helps that you can bring your devices with you. The portability just feels so fundamental to the Pokémon experience at this point.

Aaron Souppouris
First Pokémon: Charmander (always picks Fire starters).

Let me make one thing clear, to start: I don't want Pokémon to disappear from handhelds. But I do want it to transcend both the platform and the slightly lazy habits it's slipped into. A console version of Pokémoncould work in a number of ways.

While I'd love to see Sun and Moon developed for both handheld and console concurrently, I'd settle for a console remake of an older game. My favorites, due to nostalgia more than anything else, are the Gen I games. Although they've been remade, their remakes are built on the same Game Boy Advance engine as the Gen III games... which were brought up-to-date with the release of OmegaRuby and AlphaSapphire. It feels like Gen I has been left behind. Why not take what is clearly the most nostalgia-inducing game and remake it?

I can't help but think of Level-5's PlayStation 3 game Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, which is a remake of a DS game. It shares a lot with thePokémon series -- you're exploring a world, collecting adorable "familiars" that can be tamed to fight for you, for one. But the transition to console adds a lot of additional depth, and you can't underestimate how different it is exploring this other world on a full-power console when compared to the 3DS. Ever since picking up Ni no Kuni, I've been dreaming of exploring Gen I's Kanto with the presentation and depth of emotion the original anime brought to the table.

Scientists built a book-sized, protein-powered biocomputer

Supercomputers are absurdly impressive in terms of raw power, but it comes at a price: size and energy consumption. A multi-university team of researchers might've sidestepped that, though, with protein-poweredbiocomputers. Lund University notes that where this should really be helpful is with cryptography and "mathematical optimization" because with each task it's necessary to test multiple solution sets. Unlike a traditional computer, biocomputers don't work in sequence, they operate in parallel -- leading to much faster problem solving.

The biocomputer in action, with proteins finding their way to the solution set at the bottom.

Oh and about that energy efficiency? Lund's Heiner Linke says that they require less than one percent of the power a traditional transistor does to do one calculation step.

The CBC reports that the model biocomputer used in the experiment is only about the size of a book, rather than, say, IBM's Watson (pictured above) that's comprised of some 90 server modules. The ATP-powered biocomputer is admittedly limited for now (it's only solved {2, 5, 9}), but the scientists involved say that scalability is possible and we might not be far off from seeing the tech perform more complex tasks.

"Our approach has the potential to be general and to be developed further to enable the efficient encoding and solving of a wide range of large-scale problems," the research paper says.