Haft2Know

Peter van de Werken of River Flowers, a Netherlands Company, has sparked a flower revolution. He created a technique for changing each petal of a single rose to a different colour.

What makes this innovation so exciting is that you can choose the colours you want to create a perfectly custom flower arrangement. They grow while absorbing natural dye pigments through the stem.

These Roses were first presented to the public at the international Hortifair in Amsterdam and
they were an instant hit!

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Visist Hortifair: the international festival for horticultural professionals
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Who would have thought that cement could be a catalyst in the green revolution?

Italcementi, the world's fifth biggest cement producer, has been working on a technology called TX active. TX active agent is being used in cement, that, in presence of light, breaks air pollutants such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, benzene, and others through a natural chemical process called photocatalysis.

The results so far are promising: A street in the town of Segrate, near Milan, with an average traffic of 1,000 cars per hour, has been repaved with the compound, "and we have measured a reduction in nitric oxides of around 60%," says Italcementi's spokesperson Alberto Ghisalberti. In a test over an 8,000 square meter (or approximately 2 acres) industrial area paved with active blocks near Bergamo, Italcementi's hometown, the reduction was measured at 45%.

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Visit Italcementi
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Designed to resemble a billowing sail, the Burj Al Arab Hotel soars to a height of 321 metres, dominating the Dubai coastline.

At night, it offers an unforgettable sight, surrounded by choreographed colour sculptures of water and fire. This all-suite hotel reflects the finest that the world has to offer. Briefly marketed as "the world's first seven-star hotel", it was designed by Tom Wright of WS Atkins PLC. At 321 metres (1,053 ft), it is the tallest building used exclusively as a hotel. It stands on an artificial island 280 metres (919 ft) out from Jumeirah beach, and is connected to the mainland by a private curving bridge. It is an iconic structure, designed to symbolize Dubai's urban transformation and to mimic the shape of an Arab dhow (a traditional Arab sailing vessel).

Several features of the hotel required complex engineering feats to achieve. The hotel rests on an artificial island constructed 280 meters offshore. To secure a foundation, the builders drove 230 40-meter long concrete piles into the sand. The foundation is held in place not by bedrock, but by the friction of the sand and silt along the length of the piles.

Engineers created a surface layer of large rocks, which is circled with a concrete honey-comb pattern, which serves to protect the foundation from erosion. It took three years to reclaim the land from the sea, and less than three years to construct the building itself. The building contains over 70,000 cubic meters of concrete and 9,000 tons of steel.

Book your next vacation at Burj al Arab
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