This week, two articles from the BBC about future technology that have my imagination swirling a bit. Enjoy:

Living buildings for tomorrow’s cities:

… It is morning, in a city of the future. Wafer-thin artificial leaves separate with the rising sun as buildings wake up. They continue to follow the sunlight over the course of the day, sucking dew and carbon dioxide out of the air. These substances are filtered into the fleshy fabric within the walls of our homes, not dead spaces but active processors, like stomachs packed with thriving microbial colonies. They generate heat, recycle grey water and filter effluents to produce rich, native soil that has a commercial value and is used to grow plants in green plots, or window boxes. We are now producers, not consumers…

Flying cars: Radical concept design aims high:

… Many of us have wished for a personal flying machine to lift us out of infuriating traffic jams and deposit us on our driveways. With recent advances in materials, power sources, and automation, those dreams may become reality more quickly than many of us realise, as I’vediscussed before. Earlier this month, US aerospace start-up Terrafugia unveiled the TF-X, a concept design for a radical new type of personal air transport vehicle. So I talked to Carl Dietrich, co-founder of the company, to find out how it might work.  “We think this is the right time to start seriously looking at the challenges associated with creating what people call a flying car,” he says. “The vision is to try to create the future of personal transportation that people have dreamed about for years.” Dietrich believes all the required technology already exists, and that initial discussions with the US Federal Aviation Administration suggest existing regulatory obstacles can be overcome….