What is the future of humanity? What limits should we impose on our biotechnological and other scientific developments – what will happen when we don’t? Grant Bartley from Philosophy Now asks Debra Shaw from the University of East London, Blay Whitby from the University of Sussex, and David Gamez from Imperial College London, for answers. With live music from Bucky Muttel on the Chapman Stick. First broadcast on 14 February 2012 on Resonance FM.
As part of NeuroCare, researchers experiment with devices such as biocompatible chips made of graphene in order to develop carbon biointerfaces for improved neural implants.
Source: Forschungszentrum Jülich
“The blind see, the lame walk, and the deaf hear: in the future, neural implants could replace destroyed sensory cells in the eye or ear – a dream come true for humanity. One of the greatest challenges yet to be addressed is designing the interface between medical technology and human tissue. In order to overcome the limitations of existing models, scientists from Forschungszentrum Jülich and eleven other institutions involved in the NeuroCare project, which kicks off on 1 March 2012, will develop novel biointerfaces made of carbon.
For several years, biomedical researchers have been working on implants to compensate for damage to the nervous system caused by an accident or illness. They focus on tools that correct problems with basic cognitive abilities, such as a loss or impairment of eyesight or the ability to hear. In addition, they may also be used to treat traumatic injuries to the spine, drug-resistant epilepsies, psychiatric disorders, and chronic neurodegenerative diseases.
However, the technology is still in its infancy. What makes it so difficult to implement is primarily connecting living tissue and electric circuits, with flexible cell structures containing water on one side and rigid solid electrodes on the other side. NeuroCare therefore uses materials based on carbon as they are better suited to medical purposes than the metals or silicon conventionally used.”
Excerpt from a press release by Forschungszentrum Jülich. Continue HERE
Eduardo Kac: Aromapoetry is a new kind of poetry in which the compositional unit (the poem) is made up of smells. The poet “writes” the smells by conceiving the poem as an olfactory experience and then employing multiple chemical procedures to achieve his poetic goals. It goes without saying that, as in any kind of poetry, the reader is an active participant that interprets and thus ascribes his or her own meanings to the poem beyond the writer’s original motivations.
In my book Aromapoetry, the first book ever written exclusively with smells, readers find twelve aromapoems that range widely in their material structure and semantic resonance. While I composed some of my aromapoems with only one or two molecules, most of them are composed of dozens of molecules each. In some cases, a single poem has distinct olfactory zones on the page—each comprised of dozens of molecules each. In other words, the level of molecular intricacy of the works in Aromapoetry varies from the very simple to the extremely complex.
I composed the twelve poems in Aromapoetry so as to provide the reader with a broad field of aromatic experiences. The titles simultaneously delineate and open up the semantic sphere of each work. Each poem is a distinct and self-contained composition. At the same time, the book has a dynamic internal rhythm produced through the alternation of different or contrasting smells.
Every poem in the book Aromapoetry employs nanotechnology by binding an extremely thin layer of porous glass (200 nanometers thick) to every page, trapping the odorants (i.e. the volatile molecules) and releasing them very slowly. Without this nanotechnology, the fragrances would quickly dissipate and the smells would no longer be experienced after a few days. To ensure even greater longevity, a set of small bottles is integrated into the book, allowing the reader to recharge every individual page. With an eye to the distant future, the book’s summary presents key molecules used in the production of each poem.
Aromapoetry is a book to be read with the nose.
The “Archive of Years to Come” is a book-ageing machine, a chrono-chamber. Inside the machine, a book lives an accelerated history, a synthetic timeline.
Spending four hours inside is the equivalent of one real year.
Having no documented history, records or past catalogues, the library, was given a “time machine”, enabling it to age its present – thus producing a new past for a humble, unevaluated, functional community library.
The chamber operates with UVC radiation lamps and high humidity levels.
The project was originally designed for the “South Lambeth” library in London (one of the Tate’s free libraries that is currently under threat of closure).
Monitor showing the ageing process
Humidifier + humidity meter
marshall mcluhan, understanding media
Perhaps geometrical forms inside our organism are not that good.
Scanning Electron Micrograph of the surface of a kidney stone showing tetragonal crystals of Weddellite (calcium oxalate dihydrate) emerging from the amorphous central part of the stone. Horizontal length of the picture represents 0.5 mm of the figured original (30 KV, image number 15).
Via Wikipedia
Susan Oyama
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
The Graduate School and University Center, CUNY, USA
Accounts of development and evolution typically involve complementary notions of prespecification–organismic and environmental ‘labeling,’ if you will. In the case of development these can take the form of genetic programs or instructions and the like, while descriptions of evolution often invoke preexisting environmental demands or problems that organisms must meet.
The traditions of thought informing The Embodied Mind and Developmental Systems Theory (DST) both challenge such ways of conceiving life processes. Yet these traditions sprang from different grounds, and they bring distinctive sensibilities to their overlapping projects. I describe the systemic contingencies of self-organizing systems in DST, pointing out the importance of alternative pathways, both in biological processes and the theorizing they inspire.
Nidhi Subbaraman: Sick of finding out that your milk is sour only after you’ve taken a big gulp? A new technology will let you simply wave your phone over it–or any food–to get a verdict on whether it’s still edible.
Silk is a marvelously versatile material that is useful in an incredibly wide variety of settings besides luxurious underwear. You can find it in surgical sutures, flexible electronics, and other biologically friendly applications. And soon you might be finding it in your food. Scientists at Tufts University have now engineered the multitalented material into fully chewable food sensors. Pasted onto eggs, stamped onto fruit or floating in milk, they can warn you when your fruit is ripe, or when your milk has gone sour.
“We see a huge market for food,” Hu “Tiger” Tao, a postdoc at Tufts University told Co.Exist. “People are always looking forward to some kind of sensor that’s easy to use and gives you information about spoilage.”
Writen by Nidhi Subbaraman for Co.Exist. Continue HERE
NATALIE ANGIER: You may think you’re pretty familiar with your hands. You may think you know them like the back of your hand. But as the following exercises derived from the latest hand research will reveal, your pair of bioengineering sensations still hold quite a few surprises up their sleeve.
• Make a fist with your nondominant hand, knuckle side up, and then try to extend each finger individually while keeping the other digits balled up tight. For which finger is it extremely difficult, maybe even impossible, to comply?
• Now hold your hand palm up, fingers splayed straight out, and try curling your pinky inward without bending the knuckles of any other finger. Can you do it?
• Imagine you’re an expert pianist or touch-typist, working on your chosen keyboard. For every note or letter you strike, how many of your fingers will move?
• You’re at your desk and, without giving it much thought, you start reaching over for your water bottle, or your pen. What does your hand start doing long before it makes contact with the desired object?
And a high-five to our nearest nonhuman kin:
• What is the most important difference between a chimpanzee’s hands and our own? (a) the chimpanzee’s thumbs are not opposable; (b) the chimpanzee’s thumbs are shorter than ours; or (c) the chimpanzee’s thumbs are longer than ours.
Continue article via NYT
Script by Claudia Vickers, Animation by Orlando Mee, Produced by Stephan Kern.
In order to make plant production possible all over the world PlantLab delivers turnkey Plant Production Units. The cultivation units vary in size and consist of several cultivation layers on top of each other. The surface of 1 hectare cultivation area can consist of 10 modules of 1000 m² which are stacked on top of each other. The ultimate dimensions are determined based on cultivation wishes, climate wishes, investment costs, production expectations, internal transport, automation and suchlike.
Why do humans, uniquely among animals, cooperate in large numbers to advance projects for the common good? Contrary to the conventional wisdom in biology and economics, this generous and civic-minded behavior is widespread and cannot be explained simply by far-sighted self-interest or a desire to help close genealogical kin.
In A Cooperative Species, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis–pioneers in the new experimental and evolutionary science of human behavior–show that the central issue is not why selfish people act generously, but instead how genetic and cultural evolution has produced a species in which substantial numbers make sacrifices to uphold ethical norms and to help even total strangers.
The authors describe how, for thousands of generations, cooperation with fellow group members has been essential to survival. Groups that created institutions to protect the civic-minded from exploitation by the selfish flourished and prevailed in conflicts with less cooperative groups. Key to this process was the evolution of social emotions such as shame and guilt, and our capacity to internalize social norms so that acting ethically became a personal goal rather than simply a prudent way to avoid punishment.
Using experimental, archaeological, genetic, and ethnographic data to calibrate models of the co-evolution of genes and culture as well as prehistoric warfare and other forms of group competition, A Cooperative Species provides a compelling and novel account of how humans came to be moral and cooperative.
Samuel Bowles heads the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute and teaches economics at the University of Siena. Herbert Gintis holds faculty positions at the Santa Fe Institute, Central European University, and the University of Siena. The authors’ recent research has appeared in Science, Nature, American Economic Review, Journal of Theoretical Biology, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and Current Anthropology.
A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution. By Samuel Bowles & Herbert Gintis. Princeton University Press 2011. ISBN: 0691151253; 9780691151250
Text via IdeoBook
Jihyun Ryou is interested in food preservation. According to her:
“Observing the food and therefore changing the notion of food preservation, we could find the answer to current situations such as the overuse of energy and food wastage. My design is a tool to implement that knowledge in a tangible way and slowly it changes the bigger picture of society. I believe that once people are given a tool that triggers their minds and requires a mental effort to use it, new traditions and new rituals can be introduced into our culture.”
This project is about traditional oral knowledge which has been accumulated from experience and transmitted by mouth to mouth. Particularly focusing on the food preservation, it looks at a feasible way of bringing that knowledge into everyday life.
Through the research into the current situation of food preservation, I’ve learned that we hand over the responsibility of taking care of food to the technology, the refrigerator. We don’t observe the food any more and we don’t understand how to treat it.
Therefore my design looks at re-introducing and re-evaluating traditional oral knowledge of food, which is closer to nature. Furthermore, it aims to bring back the connection between different levels of living beings, we as human beings and food ingredients as other living beings.
Through the objects of everyday life, design can introduce traditional oral knowledge into people’s lives through their experience of using it. Objects make invisible knowledge evident.
Via Architizer
The Amazon is home to more species than almost anywhere else on earth. One of them, carried home recently by a group from Yale University, appears to be quite happy eating plastic in airless landfills.
The fungi, Pestalotiopsis microspora, is the first anyone has found to survive on a steady diet of polyurethane alone and–even more surprising–do this in an anaerobic (oxygen-free) environment that is close to the condition at the bottom of a landfill.
Read article via Co.Exist
New generation of sequencing technology uses nanopores to deliver ultra long read length single molecule sequence data, at competitive accuracy, on scalable electronic GridION platform. Miniaturised version of technology, MinION, will make nanopore sequencing universally accessible.
Oxford Nanopore Technologies Ltd. today presented for the first time DNA sequence data using its novel nanopore ‘strand sequencing’ technique and proprietary high performance electronic devices GridION and MinION. These data were presented by Clive G Brown, Chief Technology Officer, who outlined the Company’s pathway to a commercial product with highly disruptive features including ultra long read lengths, high throughput on electronic systems and real-time sequencing results. Oxford Nanopore intends to commercialize GridION and MinION directly to customers within 2012.
Oxford Nanopore’s GridION system consists of scalable instruments (nodes) used with consumable cartridges that contain proprietary array chips for multi-nanopore sensing. Each GridION node and cartridge is initially designed to deliver tens of Gb of sequence data per 24 hour period, with the user choosing whether to run for minutes or days according to the experiment.
Oxford Nanopore will introduce a new model of versatile pricing schemes designed to deliver a price per base that is as competitive as other leading systems at launch. Further substantial pricing improvements are expected with future development to the technology, in particular with increases in nanopore processing speed and higher density electronic sensor chips.
Oxford Nanopore has also miniaturised these devices to develop the MinION; a disposable DNA sequencing device the size of a USB memory stick whose low cost, portability and ease of use are designed to make DNA sequencing universally accessible. A single MinION is expected to retail at less than $900.
“The exquisite science behind nanopore sensing has taken nearly two decades to reach this point; a truly disruptive single molecule analysis technique, designed alongside new electronics to be a universal sequencing system. GridION and MinION are poised to deliver a completely new range of benefits to researchers and clinicians,” said Dr Gordon Sanghera, CEO of Oxford Nanopore. “Oxford Nanopore is as much an electronics company as a biotechnology company, and the development of a high-throughput electronics platform has been essential for us to design and screen a large number of new candidate nanopores and enzymes. Our toolbox is customer-ready and we will continue to develop improved nanopore devices over many years, including ongoing work in solid state devices.”
Continue to Oxford Nanopore Press Release HERE
KULTIVATOR is an experimental cooperation of organic farming and visual art practice, situated in rural village Dyestad, on the island Öland on the southeast coast of Sweden.
By installing certain functions in abandoned farm facilities, near to the active agriculture community, Kultivator provide a meeting and working space that points out the parallels between provision production and art practice, between concrete and abstract processes for survival.
Kultivator initiates and executes meetings between idealism and realism, hoping that fruitful cooperation’s should take form.
Luzinterruptus: We like to use the streets and enjoy having fun out there. Of course, we are glad to see in summer people walking, speaking and having a drink or a snack without paying the expensive prices of an outdoor bar, just so that we can sit at a public place, which we understand is intended for everybody, but some people use for private purposes.
What also annoys us is seeing how during the day and at nightime people urinate anywhere in the streets without any embarassement. They just walk along, turn round, zip down and, even in crowded places, seen by passers-by, let go.
This is what makes the centre of Madrid look so rundown and dirty, with bad smells everywhere. It is also uncomfortable to have to walk carefully in order not to touch anything that will impregnate your shoes or clothes.
Through our installation, public toilets, we have tried to attract attention -in a comical manner- about the problem we encounter when walking in centric streets and squares. Its purpose is to remind people who have this custom and also institutions so that a solution is found –perhaps by using urban furniture where people can urinate without bothering others, in case of extreme urgency…
For this reason, on the early morning 28th July we wandered along San Ildefonso Square and side streets: a very crowded area at night time when the atmosphere is great. We carried 80 male urine containers, the ones used in hospitals. Inside we poured yellow water and, what else but our lights.
Once we had located the ‘wet’ spots- following the smell trail will do- and we set up our emergency urine containers for anybody in need to use. We are aware of some of them being used…others…will be taken home…who knows for which purpose.
Via Unurth
Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia?
No one would accuse Jaroslav Flegr of being a conformist. A self-described “sloppy dresser,” the 63-year-old Czech scientist has the contemplative air of someone habitually lost in thought, and his still-youthful, square-jawed face is framed by frizzy red hair that encircles his head like a ring of fire.
Certainly Flegr’s thinking is jarringly unconventional. Starting in the early 1990s, he began to suspect that a single-celled parasite in the protozoan family was subtly manipulating his personality, causing him to behave in strange, often self-destructive ways. And if it was messing with his mind, he reasoned, it was probably doing the same to others.
The parasite, which is excreted by cats in their feces, is called Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii or Toxo for short) and is the microbe that causes toxoplasmosis—the reason pregnant women are told to avoid cats’ litter boxes. Since the 1920s, doctors have recognized that a woman who becomes infected during pregnancy can transmit the disease to the fetus, in some cases resulting in severe brain damage or death. T. gondii is also a major threat to people with weakened immunity: in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, before good antiretroviral drugs were developed, it was to blame for the dementia that afflicted many patients at the disease’s end stage. Healthy children and adults, however, usually experience nothing worse than brief flu-like symptoms before quickly fighting off the protozoan, which thereafter lies dormant inside brain cells—or at least that’s the standard medical wisdom.
Written by Kathleen McAuliffe, The Atlantic. Continue HERE
Quayola is a visual artist based in London. He investigates dialogues and the unpredictable collisions, tensions and equilibriums between the real and artificial, the figurative and abstract, the old and new. His work explores photography, geometry, time-based digital sculptures and immersive audiovisual installations and performances.
Quayola’s work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; British Film Institute, London; Royal Albert Hall, London; Gaite Lyrique, Paris; Church of Saint Eustache, Paris; Forum des Image, Paris; Grand Theatre, Bordeaux; Palais des Beaux Arts, Lille; Empac Centre, New York; Yota Space, St. Petersburg; MIS, Sao Paulo; Casa Franca, Rio de Janeiro; BAC, Geneva; Sonar Festival, Barcelona; Elekra Festival, Montreal and Clermont Ferrand Film Festival.
(>> Watch video interview by The Creators Project)
Strata #4 is a multi-channel immersive video-installation commissioned by Palais de Beaux Arts in Lille. The subject of this work is a series of iconic pieces from the museum’s Flemish collection, focusing specifically on Rubens’ and Van Dyck’s grand altarpieces. Strata #4 is the result of a study and exploration of the paintings themselves, delving beneath their figurative appearance and looking at the very rules behind the composition, color schemes and proportions of each piece. It is a precise process aimed at creating new contemporary images based on universal rules of beauty and perfection. Documenting the improbable collisions between classical figuration and contemporary abstraction, Strata #4 aims to create an harmonious dialogue between worlds that may appear very distant from one another, but in fact share so much in common.
“Strata #1” is an audio-visual installation that explores the icons of Rome’s renaissance architecture and focuses on the layering of times, functions and representations.
Through sound and visual effects, “Strata #1” concentrates on the collective imagery of particular buildings, reflecting upon the stratified historical meanings they detain in the western society through time.
A rotating ceiling is inhabited by a computer-generated particle system. The latter moves and behaves in relation the sound, coexisting harmoniously with the surrounding architecture. The video environment created within the installation becomes a hybrid between a real architectural space and an abstract two-dimensional pattern: a new space in-between the real and the artificial.
In a dynamic dialogue between sound, image and architecture, the installation plays with history and its image, giving life to a process of metamorphosis which transforms structure and function of the original architectural space. Assuming different meanings, the represented ceiling appear under a new perspective that focuses on their images rather than their historical and architectural significance.
Images: Quayola
Music: Autobam
Bitscapes is a multi-screen installation exploring and challenging the ambiguity of realism in the digital realm. Natural landscapes from the wilderness of western Australia slowly deconstruct. By losing their “photographic skin”, the illusion behind their realistic appearance is revealed.
Commissioned to mark the first anniversary of ‘Lovebytes at Millennium Galleries’ – a permanent plasma screen gallery curated by Lovebytes with the Sheffield Galleries Trust (2006)
Direction/Design: Quayola, Chiara Horn
Sound: Giorgio Sancristoforo
Coding: W. Kosma
Excerpt from Natures series
The Natures project consist in a series of multi-screen installation pieces and a live audio-visual performance in collaboration with musician Mira Calix and cellist Oliver Coates. Natures explores the dialogue between “the natural” and “the artificial”, creating a world where these two elements coexist harmoniously. Interpreting plants’ organic behaviors, computer-generated elements become part of the natural world and viceversa.
Commissioned by Faster Than Sound and Aldeburgh Music (2008)
Design/Animation: Quayola
Music: Mira Calix, Oliver Coates
Producer: Joana Seguro (Lumin)
Assistants: D. Knowles, G. Berton, Y. Li, G. Korossy, P. Marquez, Mokhtarzateh, M. Gil, G. Gremigni, G. Polizzi
Text & Images via Quayola
Ensuring that the genetic diversity of the world’s food crops is preserved for future generations is an important contribution toward the reduction of hunger and poverty in developing countries. This is where the greatest plant diversity originates and where the need for food security and the further development of agriculture is most urgent.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is established in the permafrost in the mountains of Svalbard, is designed to store duplicates of seeds from seed collections around the globe. Many of these collections are in developing countries. If seeds are lost, e.g. as a result of natural disasters, war or simply a lack of resources, the seed collections may be reestablished using seeds from Svalbard.
The loss of biological diversity is currently one of the greatest challenges facing the environment and sustainable development. The diversity of food crops is under constant pressure. The consequence could be an irreversible loss of the opportunity to grow crops adapted to climate change, new plant diseases and the needs of an expanding population.
Via The Ministry of Agriculture and Food
Performance on Exhibition set of “Kapitän Biopunk : Fermentation Madness” / IBSC at Festival For Applied Acoustic, Köln, Germany.
The project focuses on the experimentation of yeast (Sacchromyces Cerevisiae) in fruit fermentation and alcohol related issues in the society of Indonesia. The project started since the announcement of the new regulation from the Ministry of Finance (PMK) NO. 62 about the increased excise duty (tax) on alcoholic products on the 17th of March 2010. This regulation directly triggered expensive prices in retail selling of alcohol drinks in early April 2010.
As a result of this “vexation”, we started to develop this project with the intention to make a safe and cheap alcoholic beverage, using local fruit from Indonesia as the main material. The new regulation from the government indirectly created negativity of alcohol consumption. Various news articles, police and hospital statements have reported that there are many alcohol related fatalities and accidents since the regulation came into place. Some of the reports state that the alcohol consumed by the victims is due to the methanol present. In some cases, it has also been reported that some consumers mix in mosquito repellent and any other chemical compound into their drink to get the same effects as they are used to. With this in consideration, we begin to educate people on how to make safe and cheap fermented alcohol beverages, through a series of workshops and through an artistic approach in the format of an installation. The workshop format is hands on DIY practice inspired by indigenous methods fusing scientific disciplinary. Starting from the process of inoculating the yeast culture taken from natural environment, until the process of brewing. This method also aims to democratize the laboratory and liberate knowledge for wider society. The sound installation dematerializes the work of the yeast on changing the sugar into ethanol and CO2. The sounds of which change dependent on many circumstances, such as: life cycle; temperature; sugar level; types of fruit; quantity of yeast, light intensity and container volume. The audience can physically listen to the sound of fermentation thus enabling understanding of the whole process. This installation reflects the whole fringe of our imagination into the manifestation of education.
More info HERE
With the publication of ‘On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection’ on the 24th November 1859, Charles Darwin not only explained how and why we have the diversity of life we see all around us, but also showed how all life is connected.
Since then we have continued to gather evidence from a range of different disciplines including physiology, biochemistry and DNA analysis. The evidence indicates that all organisms on Earth are genetically related, a genealogical relationship that can be represented as an evolutionary tree known as the Tree of Life.
The Tree of Life illustrates how different species arise from previous species via descent with modification, and that all of life is connected. The diagram above shows the relationship between the major biological groups. The center represents the last universal ancestor of all life on earth, the outer branches the major biological groups.
The tree is based on research carried out by: David Hillis, Derrick Zwickl and Robin Gutell from the University of Texas. It is based on analysis of small sub-unit rRNA sequences sampled from about 3,000 species from throughout the Tree of Life.
Via BBC. Download a Tree of Life poster in .pdf format to print out and keep HERE
Who knew that a forkful of food could have such a far reaching effect? Science Gallery’s first foray into food, EDIBLE, tackles this vast topic from the perspective of the eater, probing how our actions as eaters shape what is sown, grown, harvested and consumed.
More Info HERE
Thanks to Design Goat we are able to hear some food. They say:
For the preview party we were asked to do a multi sensory event using sound and jelly. We had three different jellys and three sounds. We asked guests to listen to all three sounds and pick the most appetizing one, essentially tasting with their ears. We told nobody what was in any of the jellies and we are putting it up here for people to find out. We have also posted the sounds below so they can listen again.
Honey, Beetroot and Walnut
Lemon, Thyme and White Chocolate
Seattle Food Geek: It must be ultrasonic month here at Seattle Food Geek headquarters, ‘cause I’ve got another high-frequency food hack. I recently bought an ultrasonic mist generator to use as a humidifier for a meat curing chamber I’m working on. These little devices emit ultrasonic waves (around 20KHz) which cause the surrounding water to cavitate into a very fine mist without raising the water temperature. Since the mist is so fine (about 1 micron) and is instantaneous and low-temperature, I thought it might be a great way to disperse aromatics around a food or beverage. I ran a few experiments to see if it would turn alcohol into mist, but unfortunately most of the results were very poor.
Rum did bupkis. Whiskey gin were the same. Dry vermouth produced a small amount of mist, and absinthe on it’s own produced a decent fog. However, since Absinthe is meant to be consumed with added water anyway, the cocktail you see above was the best result I achieved in my limited testing. From what little I can gather, I think the mist generator relies on a relationship between the frequency of the emitted ultrasonic wave and the speed with which sound travels through water in order to produce the mist. Sound waves will move at different speeds in liquids with different densities, so perhaps tweaking frequency of the transducer would allow me to directly mist other liquids. Just a theory.
The mist generator has a ring of garish, color-changing LED lights built in – this is not part of the intended effect. However, the mist produced above the drink does add something nice to the act of drinking it; the aromatics of the absinthe are amplified by becoming airborne, so you get a pleasant hit of anise aroma before you make contact with the drink. I think there’s potential to this technique, but until I can make mists out of whatever liquid I want, and without having to submerge a plastic doodad in your cocktail, I’ll consider this to be a “promising prototype.”
Trent Arsenault has never had sex, but he’s the father of fifteen children—and counting. The more he antagonizes the FDA, and unnerves television audiences across America, the more his in-box is flooded with requests for his sperm.
Trent Arsenault was in the Borg Cube when he heard the knock. “Trent,” his father called through the door. The Borg, tucked into a canyon southeast of San Francisco, consists of a modest two-bedroom ranch house plus a few tents Trent has erected in the backyard. It’s a warren of floor-to-ceiling modular shelving built to hold all of Trent’s worldly property, which he stores in 800 bins weighing 24,000 pounds. In what was designed to be the living room, a Tempur-Pedic adjustable bed is situated within the shelving units, and an identical second bed next to the first serves as a workstation, with swing-out hospital trays for a desk.
A flat-screen TV is mounted face down, directly over Trent’s pillow, and another is mounted in his shower. Wires snake everywhere. A hose system on a timer automatically refills the birdbaths outside. Behind the house, near a lemon tree, a 50-foot antenna collects radio-astronomy data from solar flares and broadcasts Trent’s ham-radio signal. Inside, there is a low, near-constant murmur of electronic machinery: radio static, conference-call chatter from Trent’s IT security work, digital chimes, a dulcet computer voice announcing Trent’s next appointment. It is an elaborate system, and it reminds Trent, in a good way, of the devouring cybernetic empire in Star Trek. “The more complex the better.”
Written by Benjamin Wallace, NYMag. Continue HERE
The Extreme Environment Love Hotel, by Ai Hasegawa, simulates impossible places to go such as an earth of three hundred million years ago, or the surface of Jupiter by manipulating invisible but ever-present environmental factors, for example atmospheric conditions and gravity. A love hotel is a place for discrete intimacy but also a place for intensive physical and mental exercise. How might our bodies change, struggle or even adapt with varying conditions around us? For example, during the Carboniferous period, ancestors of the dragonfly Meganeura grew up to seventy-five centimeters due to the huge concentration of oxygen in the air, a tremendous boon to the insect but high levels of oxygen would be toxic to our fragile bodies.
Recent figures speculate that around 10% of children are now conceived by In Vitro Fertilization. The world around us and our reproductive technologies have given rise to new ideas of what sex is or could be and where it stands between our biologically-programmed needs and inclinations and our human fetishes and desires. Perhaps the Extreme Environments Love Hotel might give rise to new evolutions and mutations of the human body and sex and give it a brand new role away from any of these historical precedents.
Ai Hasegawa studied computer graphic animation and interactive media art at the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences, Japan. On graduating I created animations for educational TV programs in Tokyo. After moving to London I began working as an animator, character designer, illustrator and interaction designer.
David Dobbs says: As faithful readers know, I’m working on a book, provisionally titled The Orchid and the Dandelion and likely to be published next year, about the orchid-dandelion hypothesis: the notion that genes and traits that underlie some of humans’ biggest weaknesses — despair, madness, savage aggression — also underlie some of our greatest strengths — resilience, lasting happiness, empathy. If you’re used to the disease model of genes that are associated with mood and behavioral problems, this hypothesis can seem puzzling. The turn lies in viewing problems such as depression, distractibility, or even aggression as downsides of a heightened sensitivity to experience that can also generate assets and contentment.
I first wrote about the orchid-dandelion hypothesis in an Atlantic article two years ago. Last week, New Scientist published a feature I wrote about some of the research I’ve come across while researching the book. The article is behind a paywall now, so you’ll need a subscription to read it; I’ll post the whole thing here in a few weeks when the New Scientist exclusive-run period ends. In the meantime, I thought I’d excerpt here a couple passages of particular interest.
One is the opener, which describes how toddlers react to a clever test of their generosity and then lays out the gist of the hypothesis. The other is a multigenic study that sought to expand the hypothesis beyond single-gene candidate-gene studies.
Written by David Dobbs, WIRED. Continue HERE
Our built environment doesn’t have to be static. With the right synthetic biology, it can respond automatically to changes in temperature or moisture level, and even react to natural disasters, hunkering down during earthquakes or removing toxins after a toxic spill.
Synthetic-biology-based approaches to design practices, which have a material engagement with design and engineering practices, propose a new set of conditions in which architectures can alter their characteristics to suit changing environmental conditions. Living materials raise the possibility that buildings can make a positive impact on their local surroundings by performing remedial functions, that the construction of architecture could actually heal a stressed environment, for example, by removing toxins or fixing greenhouse gases. These new technologies could be on building exteriors, which present a managed interface with the environment.
Responsive architectures that are sensitive to their local environment can revitalize cities and equip communities with the ability to deal with and recover from radical disturbances in their surroundings, such as a natural disaster. Indeed, all cities should be designed with environmental crises in mind, whether they have reached the proportions of a megacity or not. Densely populated areas need to be considered potential disaster zones, where living spaces are at risk from the accumulation of toxic waste and from physical damage as a consequence of our unstable Earth. Given the present environmental challenges and worldwide population growth, fundamental changes in the expectations of buildings must be considered globally. This is a more urgent and radical requirement than current notions of sustainable development that pander to industrial developers; it promotes and demands an immediate rethinking of the way that we build our homes and cities. The strategic use of these new materials, woven into the substance of the urban landscape on building surfaces and into structural fabrics, provides an opportunity for buildings to actively participate in environmental challenges.
This installation was created with protocells, DNA-less chemical systems that can be programmed to form structures. Is this what you’re going to live in in the future?
Text and images via Co.Exist. Continue HERE
Imagine a contraceptive that could, with one or two painless 15-minute non-surgical treatments, provide months of protection from pregnancy. And imagine that the equipment needed were already in physical therapists’ offices around the world.
Sound too good to be true? For years, scientists thought so too. But new research headed by Dr. James Tsuruta in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, published Monday in the journal Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology, is gaining the contraceptive method increased respect. The kicker: This treatment would be for men—giving them the first new option since condoms and vasectomy were introduced more than a century ago.
HOW IT WORKS
The testes need to be slightly cooler than the rest of the body to properly produce sperm—the subject of countless jokes and warnings about hot tubs, laptops, and tight pants. But although hot tub or laptop use can push a man’s sperm count over the edge if he’s already low, it’s not reliable enough for contraception. What if this heat effect could be enhanced?
That’s where ultrasound comes in. Relatively inexpensive and already in use in physical therapists’ offices around the world, therapeutic ultrasound (as opposed to diagnostic ultrasound) heats deeply and increases circulation to injured joints. The physical therapist applies lubricating gel to the joint, turns on the machine, and runs the wand back and forth over the joint for 5 or 10 minutes, creating a pleasant warming sensation.
It turns out, though, that ultrasound can be used on other body parts as well. That includes the testes, and it would be for contraception rather than healing. In the current study, researchers got more than 2 1/2 months—and possibly long-lasting—contraception in rats with two 15-minute sessions of ultrasound, two days apart. And their study is the first to provide detailed insight into how ultrasound might be working, using modern equipment. But the published evidence that it works has been in plain sight for more than 35 years—not taken seriously until recently.
Via Medical Xpress. Continue HERE
Image above taken from the film “Every Thing You Always Wanted to Know About Sex” by Woody Allen.
Scientists in Edinburgh who pioneered cloning have made a technological breakthrough that could pave the way for better medical treatment of mental illnesses and nerve diseases.
Scientist Ian Wilmut with Dolly, the worlds first cloned sheep, at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh in 2001. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
The news that Edinburgh scientists had created the world’s first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep, at the university’s Roslin Institute made headlines around the world 16 years ago. Her birth raised hopes of the creation of a new generation of medicines – with a host of these breakthroughs occurring at laboratories in the university over the following decade.
And now one of the most spectacular has taken place at Edinburgh’s Centre for Regenerative Medicine, where scientists have continued to develop the technology used to make Dolly. In a series of remarkable experiments, they have created brain tissue from patients suffering from schizophrenia, bipolar depression and other mental illnesses.
The work offers spectacular rewards for doctors. From a scrap of skin taken from a patient, they can make neurones genetically identical to those in that person’s brain. These brain cells, grown in the laboratory, can then be studied to reveal the neurological secrets of their condition.
“A patient’s neurones can tell us a great deal about the psychological conditions that affect them, but you cannot stick a needle in someone’s brain and take out its cells,” said Professor Charles french-Constant, the centre’s director.
Written by Robin McKie, The Observer. Continue HERE
Adam Rutherford meets a new creature created by American scientists – the spider-goat. It is part goat, part spider, and its milk can be used to create artificial spider’s web.
It is part of a new field of research, synthetic biology, with a radical aim: to break down nature into spare parts so that we can rebuild it however we please.
This technology is already being used to make bio-diesel to power cars. Other researchers are looking at how we might, one day, control human emotions by sending ‘biological machines’ into our brains.
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