City trucks – the ones that sweep the streets, haul garbage and plow snow – are essential to keep a city operating properly, but they are all rather limited in the scope of their usefulness. Instead of having three separate fleets of trucks that do one thing each, why not combine them into a kind of super-truck? That’s the idea behind designer Michal Markiewicz‘s Multifunctional City Sweeper Concept.

The concept truck would sweep the streets in the morning and gather trash in the afternoon. In the winter, it would plow the streets to make them safe for residents to drive on. Combining the three functions together would save on gas as well as storage space for trucks that are only used seasonally.

Perhaps the Multifunctional City Sweeper isn’t yet a fully fleshed-out idea. One thing the design ignores is the fact that garbage trucks are huge in order to fit in a lot of garbage. The crews usually work from sunrise to sunset, five to six days a week, just to pick up all of that trash. When would trash crews also find time to use their trucks for sweeping and plowing? Still, the design is an elegant answer to the vehicles that sit locked away and unused for a large portion of the year. Perhaps a more efficient idea would be to simply combine the sweeper and plow trucks since the two are rarely used in the same portion of the year.

The post Multi-Functional Municipal Vehicle Does ALL of the Dirty Jobs first appeared on Gajitz.

The behavior of ant colonies is truly fascinating. They work as a unit to protect and nurture their colony and its queen at any cost. This is especially evident in this incredible video from the BBC of Amazonian fire ants forming a living raft to protect their queen and her larvae. The rain forest floor is covered in several inches of water from a flood, which you might think would extinguish this ant colony. But they find a way to survive the hard times.

By linking their legs, the ants form a living raft and carry the colony, including the queen and her eggs and larvae, to safer ground. The ants are relatively helpless while floating on the water; they are at the mercy of fish who calmly pluck a few from the bunch. But when they finally reach dry ground again, they simply dry themselves off and start hunting for a new home.

The post A(i)nt They Clever? Fire Ants Built Living Raft to Save Queen first appeared on Gajitz.