MNN - Mother Nature Network

Movoto crunches the numbers in an effort to figure out the chances of your home actually being destroyed by a single, massive asteroid like 2012 DA14. Dividing the Earth's total surface area by the average square footage of the American home, they've found that there's a 1 in 2,196,267,379,587 chance that it could happen. Sweet relief! You can breath easy now folks — there's a much better chance you'll end up winning the Mega Millions.

 

Design Milk reports from the Stockholm Furniture Fair to share a few favorite finds.

 

Dezeen mourns the death of green design in a special Valentine's Day obit of sorts. So what killed it? Editor Marcus Fairs fingers our love affair with technology: "iPads! Plasma TVs! Replicator 2s! Drones! Anything, as long as we can plug it in or put batteries in it. Anything, as long as it has a touchscreen or makes a reassuring beeping sound." Fairs writes: "Until recently the design world was on a mission to save the planet; now it seems enthralled by gadgets. Adjectives like 'sustainable' and 'eco' have been usurped by upstarts such as 'smart' and 'hacked'. The cardboard furniture glut of recent years has disintegrated; recycling has gone to landfill."

 

Grist gets all hot and bothered over "farmhouse porn," the obvious Pinterest-borne successor to cabin porn and tiny house porn. Writes Sarah Laskow: "We don’t want to indulge farm fantasies too much, because the reality is that running a farm is hard work, and farms are often smelly. That might sound obvious, but it really is a problem for beginning farmers looking to lease land: Local foodies might like the idea of having their vegetables grown on their land, but once they agree to lease a plot and find out how dirty and smelly farms are, they have second thoughts."

 

Architectural Digest takes a look at a new collection of starchitect-designed (Michael Graves, Frank Gehry, Robert A.M. Stern, Zaha Hadid, etc). carpets fro Chicago-based nonprofit Arzu Studio Hope that were conceived in order to improve "the lives of Afghan women weavers and their families, based on a model of social entrepreneurship."

 

Gizmodo fancies a herd of six Tom Kundig-designed Rolling Huts located near the old-timey North Cascades outpost of Winthrop, Wash. Leslie Horn explains the mobile tent retreat thingamabobs: "The huts were created to be an alternative method of camping—a fancier yurt, if you will. They have minimal impact on the environment and despite their beautiful design, they're pretty low tech. Each hut has a sleeping platform with room for two, a fridge, microwave, and a coffee pot, Wi-Fi, and a toilet and a faucet on the outside." 

 

TreeHugger is disheartened by new data from the Energy Information Administration: Although homes built since 2000 are 30 percent larger than "vintage" models, they only consume 2 percent more energy. Encouraging news? Not really. Writes Lloyd Alter: "All of that work to improve construction standards and insulation, and the savings? A big nothing, because it all went into house size and air conditioning. The data are just depressing. More square footage, more appliances, more of everything."

 

Design*Sponge experiments with Instagram filters for a look at the "awesome" way in which "forward-thinking" hipster preservationists in Buffalo, N.Y. celebrated Valentine's Day this year: They "Heart-bombed" the city's inventory of forsaken buildings that are doomed for demolishment. In other words, they broke out with the glitter and craft scissors and plastered abandoned houses with an "explosion of paper hearts and love letters." Says Bernice Radle, founding member of Buffalo's Young Preservationists: "This is a way to shine a positive light and help the public understand that there are great buildings out there in need of attention, new ownership and ultimately — a new life."

 

Curbed travels back to 1967 to join Walter Cronkite on an "eerily accurate" and "semi-ridiculous" tour of the average America home ... circa the year 2001. That's Uncle Walter checking out a 21st century kitchen in the video below.