Another brick in the wall: DNA nanotechnology has come a long way since its initial beginnings. This would not be possible without the continued development of methods for DNA assembly and new uses for DNA as a material. This Special Issue highlights some of the newest building blocks for nanodevices based on DNA.

There are six landmark architectures in the Kakioka Magnetic Observatory. The characteristics of these buildings are as follows:(1) The variation building is a semi-underground granite building that has two advantages: one is stability at room temperature in the basement, and the other is low humidity in the room above ground.(2) The thick walls of the magnetic laboratory, the new variation bui...

We examine nest construction in the ant Leptothorax tuberointerruptus at two levels: (1) the building behaviour of individual workers and (2) the collective properties (temporal and spatial) of the structures they create. We also explore, for the first time explicitly, the linkage between these two levels. Leptothorax tuberointerruptus nests occur in flat cavities which provide the roof and the...

When an emergency occurs within a building, it is safer to send autonomous mobile agents instead of human responders, to explore the area and identify hazards and victims. Existing exploration algorithms [1], [2] allow mobile agents to make distributed navigation decisions by communicating with nearby fixed sensors embedded in the environment. These algorithms are very efficient in terms of exp...

The paper presents a case study where the energy demand for a listed building constructed in 1900 is reduced. Many older buildings are listed and have restrictions that include the entire building or that include only its exterior. For the building presented, only its exterior facade is listed. The paper demonstrates measures for the improvement of the thermal insulation of the building with so...

The popularity of low cost, lightweight, and environmentally affable masonry unit in building industry carries the need to investigate more flexible and adaptable brick component as well as to retain the requirements confirmed in building standards. In this study, potential use of local materials used as lightweight building materials in solving the economic problems of housing has been investi...

Laser scanning is being increasingly applied in the documentation of buildings and archaeological sites. The documentation process sometimes involves making an inventory of bricks in walls. This paper proposes an automatic/semi-automatic segmentation method for detecting bricks in walls, in particular masonry walls. In developing the detection method the problems with detecting bricks in a 3D p...