A high-tech villa designed to resist earthquakes by ‘self-healing’ cracks in its own walls and monitoring vibrations through an intelligent sensor network will be built on a Greek mountainside.

The University of Leeds’ NanoManufacturing Institute (NMI) will play a crucial role in the 9.5 million European Union-funded project by developing special walls for the house that contain nano polymer particles - these will turn into a liquid when squeezed under pressure, flow into the cracks, and then harden to form a solid material.

NMI chief executive Professor Terry Wilkins said: “What we’re trying to achieve here is very exciting; we’re looking to use polymers in much tougher situations than ever before on a larger scale.”

The complete story here.

The first limited-production run of Sun SPOT Java Development Kits is now available for U.S. customers.

The Sun SPOT development kit includes everything needed to start developing applications for your Sun SPOT:
- two complete Sun SPOT devices with demo sensor boards
- a base station Sun SPOT to connect to your development machine
- software development tools
- USB cable

The development tools are compatible with Windows XP with Java runtime, PPC Mac OS X 10.4 or better and most common Linux distributions. In addition, the API specification for the initial release of the Sun SPOT libraries is available for preview.

If you have any questions or feedback, please send a message to info@SunSpotWorld.com or visit http://sunspotworld.com/products/.