The Center for PostNatural History is dedicated to the advancement of knowledge relating to the complex interplay between culture, nature and biotechnology. The PostNatural refers to living organisms that have been altered through processes such as selective breeding or genetic engineering. The mission of the Center for PostNatural History is to acquire, interpret and provide access to a collection of living, preserved and documented organisms of postnatural origin.
The Center for PostNatural History addresses this goal through three primary initiatives:
The maintenance of a unique catalog of living, preserved and documented specimens of postnatural origin.
The production of traveling exhibitions that address the PostNatural through thematic and regional perspectives.
The establishment of a permanent exhibition and research facility for PostNatural studies.
Directed by Van Neistat, 2012. Produced on the occasion of Tom Sachs’ Space Program: MARS
Artist Tom Sachs takes his SPACE PROGRAM to the next level with a four week mission to Mars that recasts the 55,000 square foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall as an immersive space odyssey with an installation of dynamic and meticulously crafted sculptures. Using his signature bricolage technique and simple materials that comprise the daily surrounds of his New York studio, Sachs engineers the component parts of the mission—exploratory vehicles, mission control, launch platforms, suiting stations, special effects, recreational amenities, and Mars landscape—exposing as much the process of their making as the complexities of the culture they reference.
SPACE PROGRAM: MARS is a demonstration of all that is necessary for survival, scientific exploration, and colonization in extraterrestrial environs: from food delivery systems and entertainment to agriculture and human waste disposal. Sachs and his studio team of thirteen will man the installation, regularly demonstrating the myriad procedures, rituals, and tasks of their mission. The team will also “lift off” to Mars several times throughout their residency at the Armory, with real-time demonstrations playing out various narratives from take-off to landing, including planetary excursions, their first walk on the surface of Mars, collecting scientific samples, and photographing the surrounding landscape.
Climate science has a long view. The measuring of rainfall, temperature and pressure with instruments made from glass, mercury and copper wire. Scientists have been collecting data for centuries, first in hand-written notebooks, later in vast computer databases. Edmund Halley mapped the trade winds in 1686 and Benjamin Franklin traced the Gulf Stream in the eighteenth century, the first hints of truly global systems. Helmut Landsberg added statistical analysis in the twentieth century, which revealed fluctuation in what until then had felt eternally recurring to the individual. Eventually, models of Earthʼs climate emerged from the data, an attempt to grasp the forces that drive the reality of our immediate environment, our world.
But science itself is careful. Its method progresses cautiously through hypotheses and experiments, always inviting their falsification. Yet, there are moments when it gets propelled to the forefront of human affairs, such as it happened to theoretical physics when it enabled the construction of nuclear devices. Over the last fifty years, climate science has been making visible that human activity has had a significant and increasing influence on the Earthʼs atmosphere. Now it has been given the place in the spotlight, and it feels quite uncomfortable there.
Excerpt of a text written by Sascha Pohflepp. Read it HERE
The fence that divides the city of Nogales is part of a natural experiment in organizing human societies. North of the fence lies the American city of Nogales, Arizona; south of it lies the Mexican city of Nogales, Sonora. On the American side, average income and life expectancy are higher, crime and corruption are lower, health and roads are better, and elections are more democratic. Yet the geographic environment is identical on both sides of the fence, and the ethnic makeup of the human population is similar. The reasons for those differences between the two Nogaleses are the differences between the current political and economic institutions of the US and Mexico.
This example, which introduces Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, illustrates on a small scale the book’s subject.* Power, prosperity, and poverty vary greatly around the world. Norway, the world’s richest country, is 496 times richer than Burundi, the world’s poorest country (average per capita incomes $84,290 and $170 respectively, according to the World Bank). Why? That’s a central question of economics.
Excerpt of an article written by Jared Diamond, NYBooks. Continue HERE
Imahe above: Women in Darfur returning from Kutum market to the Fata Borno camp for internally displaced persons under the protection of African Union soldiers, January 2007; photograph by Gary Knight from Questions Without Answers: The World in Pictures by the Photographers of VII. The book has just been published by Phaidon.
The equivalent of two Earths will be required to support the world’s population by 2030. That is the stark warning made by the WWF’s Living Planet Report 2012, which was put together in collaboration with the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and the Global Footprint Network. It warns that the size of the planet’s population and the resulting consumption of environmental resources, such as food and fuel, is unsustainable at current rates. “If we keep on taking more renewable resources than can be replenished, then eventually they will become depleted,” the report stated. “This has already happened locally in some places, for example the collapse of cod stocks in Newfoundland in the 1980s.
Excerpt of an article written by Nicholas Edmondson, IBT. Continue HERE
Geologists at the University of Maryland have published research that could help prove or disprove Gaia theory — the notion that the Earth is one single self-regulating system.
The concept dates from the 70s and was initially formulated by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. It proposes that all organisms and their inorganic surroundings comprise a single system that maintains the conditions for life on Earth. It was initially met with skepticism from the scientific community, and remains somewhat controversial, but is now an important area of research in Earth systems science and biogeochemistry.
If the Gaia hypothesis is correct, then a number of signals should be observable in the Earth’s natural cycles and systems. One of those is that a sulfur compound made by organisms in the ocean should be stable enough in water to allow its transfer into the air, so it can then be returned to land. A team of geologists, geochemists and marine biologists led by Harry Oduro has developed a method of tracking the movement of sulfur through ocean organisms, the atmosphere and the land, potentially yielding evidence as to how strong this cycle is.
Excerpt of an article written by Duncan Geere, Wired UK. Continue HERE
HAVING helped spread the internet’s tentacles across the globe, boffins are now thinking of extending them further. Assorted space agencies believe it would be rather nifty if the world wide web encompassed more of the world than just one planet. Those at the European Space Agency (ESA) are therefore designing an interplanetary network, which might help space stations, planetary rovers, astronauts and ground stations communicate more effectively.
In October they are planning to test just such a network by getting an astronaut in the International Space Station (ISS) to control a rover on Earth. This will be a test of the technology for use on future Mars missions. They are also exploring the possibility of creating a universal information-exchange system, allowing many of the different space agencies to share data quickly.
Nestor Peccia, who heads ground-software development at the ESA, says that the main challenges are more political than technological. An interplanetary web’s assets, like Earth ground stations, relay satellites, rovers, moon stations, etc, will probably belong to national space agencies. Government agencies may be reluctant to share them with others and it may be a while before enough space entrepreneurs like Elon Musk stump up the amounts of money need in to mimic Earth-bound internet’s decentralised charm in orbit.
These would be considerable. It tends to cost around $50m just to launch a single satellite, not counting design and construction, though Mr Musk’s company, SpaceX, may yet bring that down. And a fully fledged interplanetary web would need a sizeable flotilla.
For now, orbital internet is limited to the ISS. Since January 2010 its astronauts have had access to so-called Crew Support LAN, which uses satellites to provide a brisk, reliable internet connection. Before, going online in orbit was a hassle. E-mails, tweets and other online exchanges had to be relayed through a colleague on Earth, hardly ideal, especially for intimate communications. The current system has undoubtedly improved the quality of life in the ISS, helping to ease the sense of isolation. It is a far cry from interplanetary social networking. But it is a start.
Fast forwarding from ca 1000 AD until 2003 showing Europe’s shifting borders, alliances, unions, territories, occupied land, etc.
Software: Centennia
Music: Inception OST
Volunteers and professionals at the Austrian Space Forum are testing a prototype Mars space suit in a series of ice caves that provide conditions similar to those on the Red Planet. Humanity is still far away from a manned mission to the planet, but the enthusiasts here believe it will actually happen one day.
Click HERE for a day by day report of the activities.
On 28th of April 2012, the Austrian Space Forum (OEWF) invited 20 Twitter followers to the Dachstein Mars simulation.
A Tweetup is an informal gathering of people who are using the micro-blogging platform Twitter. This MarsTweetup is a unique opportunity to follow live the Dachstein Mars simulation, to meet the spacesuit simulator Aouda.X and to discuss with scientist and space experts about analog missions.
What is learning for if it doesn’t lead to wisdom?
That’s a question worth asking in light of an ongoing cosmological street fight being waged (remarkably) in broad media daylight. The rumble tumbled into the public eye with Lawrence Krauss’ new book A Universe From Nothing. But before the scathing New York Times review and an acerbic rebuttal in The Atlantic, this physics vs. philosophy smack-down was brewing in academic back alleys for decades. At stake is a critical question living deep inside the heart of modern foundational physics: What are the limits of science?
Excerpt of an article written by astrophysicist Adam Frank, at NPR. Continue HERE
Last year physicists commemorated the centennial of the discovery of the atomic nucleus. In experiments carried out in Ernest Rutherford’s laboratory at Manchester in 1911, a beam of electrically charged particles from the radioactive decay of radium was directed at a thin gold foil. It was generally believed at the time that the mass of an atom was spread out evenly, like a pudding. In that case, the heavy charged particles from radium should have passed through the gold foil, with very little deflection. To Rutherford’s surprise, some of these particles bounced nearly straight back from the foil, showing that they were being repelled by something small and heavy within gold atoms. Rutherford identified this as the nucleus of the atom, around which electrons revolve like planets around the sun.
This was great science, but not what one would call big science. Rutherford’s experimental team consisted of one postdoc and one undergraduate. Their work was supported by a grant of just £70 from the Royal Society of London. The most expensive thing used in the experiment was the sample of radium, but Rutherford did not have to pay for it—the radium was on loan from the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Nuclear physics soon got bigger. The electrically charged particles from radium in Rutherford’s experiment did not have enough energy to penetrate the electrical repulsion of the gold nucleus and get into the nucleus itself. To break into nuclei and learn what they are, physicists in the 1930s invented cyclotrons and other machines that would accelerate charged particles to higher energies. The late Maurice Goldhaber, former director of Brookhaven Laboratory, once reminisced:
The first to disintegrate a nucleus was Rutherford, and there is a picture of him holding the apparatus in his lap. I then always remember the later picture when one of the famous cyclotrons was built at Berkeley, and all of the people were sitting in the lap of the cyclotron.
Excerpt of an article written by Steven Weinberg, The New York Review of Books. Continue HERE
Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory/Photo Researchers. Construction of an underground shaft for the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas. The SSC was supposed to be the largest particle accelerator in the world, but its funding was canceled by Congress in 1993.
Jurema Action Plant is an interactive bio-machine. It consists in a customized machine which interfaces a sensitive plant (Mimosa pudica).
Jurema Action Plant aims to empower plants by enabling them to use similar technologies as humans use. It is also explores new ways of communication and co-relation between humans, living organism and a machine. Much like humans, animals and machines, the plants have an electrical signal traveling inside them, but they do not have nerves like humans and animals; nor wires and cables like machines. This electrical signal travels inside the cells of the plant. Inspired by this phenomenon, I collaborated with professor Bert van Duijn from the Biology University and the Hortus Botanicus, both from Leiden, on a research into the Action Potential of this plant. At V2_ , we settled upon a solution in which a signal amplifier reads the differences in the electromagnetic field around the plant to determine when it is being touched. These electromagnetic variations trigger movement of the robotic structure, on which the plant is situated, by means of a custom-made circuit board. The thresholds for response are set in such a way that only touching the plant makes it move away from the person touching it.
“Their movement however generally remains invisible to us, because their muscle and nerve-like systems operate at a very slow timescale and their rooting in soil confines their motion to the movement of branches and leaves. These restrictions give plants an enormous disadvantage compared to their main aggressors: animals and humans, in many instances resulting in a loss of biodiversity and even extinction.” (Michel van Dartel, curator V2)
To measure the Action Potential from the plant some electrodes are placed in its branches. When the leaves and branches of the plant are touched this signal changes. This electrical signal travels in the plant and the Action Potential can be measured in any part of the plant, not necessarily where the electrodes are placed. If the plants can fell the touch and this signal travels inside the plant and be can be measured in any part, does it means that plants have memory, consciousness?
Since the 1960s a disparate group of scientists and former drug addicts have been advocating a radical treatment for addiction – a hallucinogen called ibogaine, derived from an African plant, that in some cases seems to obliterate withdrawal symptoms from heroin, cocaine and alcohol. So why isn’t it widely used?
Reliable Internet access on the Moon, near Mars or for astronauts on a space station? How about controlling a planetary rover from a spacecraft in deep space? These are just some of the pioneering technologies that ESA is working on for future exploration missions.
What do observation or navigation satellites orbiting Earth have in common with astronauts sending images in real time from the International Space Station? They all need to send data back home. And the complexity of sharing information across space is set to grow.
In the future, rovers on Mars or inhabited bases on the Moon will be supported by orbiting satellite fleets providing data relay and navigation services. Astronauts will fly to asteroids, hundreds of millions of kilometres from Earth, and they’ll need to link up with other astronauts, control centres and sophisticated systems on their vessels.
All of these activities will need to be interconnected, networked and managed.
When Loren Amelang bought land outside of Philo, California in 1973, it was a place to “live like hippies on the weekend”. Years later, his Silicon Valley employer put in florescent lighting and wouldn’t let employees bring in their own lights so Amelang decided to move full-time to his off-grid property and to create a space where he would have total control over his environment.
At first he lived in a tiny cabin he had built in the old sheep barn, but deciding he needed more room for his solar panels, he began building a home that would help him generate “free hot water, free power and a decent chunk of free heat”.
The entire south side of his home is covered in solar capture devices: 1600 watts of photovoltaic power, solar hot water panels, a sunroom/greenhouse and a solar hot air collector.
“The sunroom/greenhouse provides most of the free heat,” explains Amelang, “the ‘solar flue’ moderates it in warmer weather or circulates some of it into the house when needed, and the concrete walls stabilize the temperature over time”.
Putting his technical skills to use (he’s a pioneer in C++ programming), Amelang wrote over 10,000 lines of code so that his home’s water and electric systems could be operated more efficiently and automatically. An added benefit is the ability to control everything remotely, by even just a smartphone.
I’ve reached the cosmology part of my General Relativity (GR) course, and one of the early points that comes up is my traditional rant against confusing three very distinct concepts when thinking about the universe. Roughly stated, these are; What is the shape of the universe? Is the universe finite or infinite? and Will the universe expand forever or recollapse.
When we apply GR to cosmology, we make use of the simplifying assumptions, backed up by observations, that there exists a definition of time such that at a fixed value of time, the universe is spatially homogeneous (looks the same wherever the observer is) and isotropic (looks the same in all directions around a point). We then specialize to the most general metric compatible with these assumptions, and write down the resulting Einstein equations with appropriate sources (regular matter, dark matter, radiation, a cosmological constant, etc.). The solutions to these equations are the famous Friedmann, Robertson-Walker spacetimes, describing the expansion (or contraction) of the universe.
It is important to take a moment to emphasize what we have done here. GR is indeed a beautiful geometric theory describing curved spacetime. But practically, we are solving differential equations, subject to (in this case) the condition that the universe look the way it does today. Differential equations describe the local behavior of a system and so, in GR, they describe the local geometry in the neighborhood of a spacetime point.
Excerpt of an article written by Mark Trodden at DISCOVER. Continue HERE
Recent research supports the conclusions of a controversial environmental study released 40 years ago: The world is on track for disaster. So says Australian physicist Graham Turner, who revisited perhaps the most groundbreaking academic work of the 1970s,The Limits to Growth.
Written by MIT researchers for an international think tank, the Club of Rome, the study used computers to model several possible future scenarios. The business-as-usual scenario estimated that if human beings continued to consume more than nature was capable of providing, global economic collapse and precipitous population decline could occur by 2030.
However, the study also noted that unlimited economic growth was possible, if governments forged policies and invested in technologies to regulate the expansion of humanity’s ecological footprint. Prominent economists disagreed with the report’s methodology and conclusions. Yale’s Henry Wallich opposed active intervention, declaring that limiting economic growth too soon would be “consigning billions to permanent poverty.”
Turner compared real-world data from 1970 to 2000 with the business-as-usual scenario. He found the predictions nearly matched the facts. “There is a very clear warning bell being rung here,” he says. “We are not on a sustainable trajectory.”
“For the sake of confusion, let’s assume that instead of just “going dark”, the Sun ceases fusion in its core at midnight tonight. This will allow for any radiation emitted to make its way out and be emitted over the next several thousand years (since energy from fusion takes a considerable amount of time to be released from the Sun).
So when does it go dark? When and how does Earth cool off? Would all life die off, and if not, who would live/die? What kills off humans, the cold? A lack of oxygen? Something else?”
Click HERE to read a series of responses posted at Quora.
From year to year, the moon never seems to change. Craters and other formations appear to be permanent now, but the moon didn’t always look like this. Thanks to NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, we now have a better look at some of the moon’s history.
Lithium is lionized. Silicon has a whole valley named after it. But what about the silent heroes of modern technology? Rare earth elements—a set of 17 related metals, mostly shunted off to a tacked-on lower line of the periodic table—are crucial to the way we live now; responsible for miniaturizing computers and headphones, powering hybrid cars and more. The time has come to get better acquainted with the molecules that make our modern world run.
Erbium: In the Pink The applications of erbium are both deeply important, and a little silly. For instance, adding erbium to glass is about the only way to create a stable pink shade. So erbium-doped glass pops up in novelty sunglasses and decorator vases. At the same time erbium keeps information flowing around the globe. Add a little erbium to the optical fibers that carry data in the form of light pulses, and those pulses get amplified. It can also be used as part of the gain medium that amplifies light in a laser. When you do this, you end up with a laser that can be used for dental surgery and skin treatments because it doesn’t build up much heat in the human skin it’s pointed at.
Erbium is a great example of how rare earth elements work in practical applications. You won’t find very many places where a solid chunk of a single rare earth element is being used. Instead, they tend to be things that are added, in small doses, to composites and alloys. In that way, rare earth elements work a bit like vitamins, says Daniel Cordier, mineral commodity specialist with the United States Geological Survey. “Rare earths have really unique chemical and physical properties that allow them to interact with other elements and get results that neither element could get on its own,” he says.
Find about the other 3 at Popular Mechanics
All text and image via Popular Mechanics.
The epic story of radical Earthship eco architect Michael Reynolds, and his fight to build off-the-grid self-sufficient communities. If you haven’t seen it, here is the full length documentary.
Michael Reynolds, the “Garbage Warrior”, is an architect based in New Mexico and a proponent of “radically sustainable living.” He has been a forceful and controversial critic of the profession of architecture for its failure to deal with the amount of waste that building design creates. After graduating from the University of Cincinnati in 1969, Reynolds began his provocative work almost immediately. His thesis was published in Architectural Record in 1971 and the following year he built his first house from recycled materials. The structures built under his direction utilize everyday trash items like aluminum cans and plastic bottles. Instead of using conventional (and energy-consuming) recycling methods, however, Reynolds takes the discarded item and uses it as-is. His Thumb House, built in 1972, used beer cans wired together into “bricks,” which were mortared together and then plastered over. (The brick design was awarded a U.S. patent in 1973.) Reynolds calls this practice “Earthship Biotecture” and has dedicated his career to it. He cites as an epiphany the moment when he realized that any object, be it a pop bottle or an old tire, could become powerful and durable insulation when it was filled with dirt. He has written five books on the subject. Soon he was building and selling his experimental homes while continuing to use trial and error to improve them. The “Earthships” over time incorporated features designed to make them comfortable to live in while existing off the grid. Solar panels and geothermal cooling were added. The homes caught the imagination of celebrities and environmental activists. Actors Dennis Weaver and Keith Carradine each commissioned Reynolds to build high-end Earthships for them.
Most people know Kew Gardens as home of the world’s largest living plant collection but are not aware that it is also the location of an internationally important botanical research and educational institution. Going beyond the gardens as we know them, Lonelyleap produced two films for 2012′s Tropical Extravaganza Festival which showcase the behind the scenes work of Kew’s scientists whilst also exploring two of the festival’s themes, Earth and Air.
The second film in the series looks at the work of the the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership in Surrey, home to 10% of the world’s plant diversity, and how the Seed Conservation Department is helping to save wild plants and habitats for our future.
The drive-in movie theater may be a uniquely North American institution, but the icon of the wide-open American landscape recently experienced its most heroic revival in Thailand, leaping forth from its humble, grounded origins and into the clear blue waters of Nai Pi Lae lagoon on Kudu Island. For the final night of the Film on the Rocks Yao Noi Festival earlier this month, guests were taken by boat to savor a final screening on a floating cinema designed by Beijing-based architect Ole Scheeren. Scheeren’s Archipelago Cinema consisted of a floating screen, cradled between two towering rocks, and a separate raft-like auditorium, together offering a spiritual and vaguely primordial cinematic experience.
Scheeren described the project rather poetically as “A screen, nestled somewhere between the rocks. And the audience…floating…hovering above the sea, somewhere in the middle of this incredible space of the lagoon, focused on the moving images across the water: a sense of temporality, randomness, almost like driftwood. Or maybe something more architectural: modular pieces, loosely assembled, like a group of little islands that congregate to form an auditorium.”
Agnes Meyer Brandis’ poetic-scientific investigations weave fact, imagination, storytelling and myth, past, present and future. In “THE MOON GOOSE ANALOGUE: Lunar Migration Bird Facility (MGA)” the artist develops a narrative based on Godwin’s The Man in the Moone, in which the protagonist flies to the Moon in a chariot towed by ‘moon geese’. Meyer-Brandis has actualized this concept by raising eleven moon geese with astronauts’ names and imprinting them on herself as goose-mother. They live in a remote Moon analogue operated from a control room within the gallery.
This is the documentation of the project and installation:
THE MOON GOOSE ANALOGUE :
Lunar Migration Bird Facility
The project consists of 3 main elements:
1. The Moon Goose Colony (MGC)
Raising and imprinting eleven moon geese in Italy, ongoing
2. The Moon Analogue
a living space for geese, not-public installation in Italy
3. The Control Room
an installation in a public exhibition space
For further information please have a look at: ffur.de/mga
THE MOON GOOSE ANALOGUE: Lunar Migration Bird Facility
was commissioned by The Arts Catalyst and FACT Liverpool.
In partnership with: Pollinaria
Elevated land-based islands could protect people living in low-lying areas from tsunamis – and archipelagos of them could form entire towns.
LIKE giant spacecraft that have just touched down, they give the countryside an otherworldly look.
Elevated land-based islands are what one architect is proposing for the Tōhoku region of north-east Japan, the area that was devastated by last March’s magnitude 9 earthquake and the mega-tsunamis it triggered.
Keiichiro Sako of Sako Architects in Tokyo has created a blueprint in which groups of these islands form entire towns. They are designed to protect people living in low-lying areas from future tsunamis.
Tōhoku Sky Village is not just an architect’s flight of fancy: one municipality in the affected region is making moves towards building one in its locality and others could follow.
Most islands will be used for residential purposes, with between 100 and 500 houses and apartments. Fuel stations, waste disposal and storage facilities, and car parks are on lower floors. Commercial islands, meanwhile, will house factories and processing facilities for industries such as fisheries and agriculture. As well as lifting residents high above the destructive power of the waves, the design comes with a number of safety features. A reinforced gate at the back of each island automatically closes after a tsunami warning, while steps up the sides let people climb to safety.
Pulling together decades of data from the Voyager, Galileo, Cassini, and New Horizon probes, as well as the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists at the US Geological Survey have put together a complete geological map of Io, the beautiful, mysterious Jovian moon. Io is the most volcanically active object in the solar system, and its surface reflects that: unlike everything else around, it has no craters, a sign that its surface is constantly being remade. That’s thanks to volcanoes that shoot out more than 100 times more lava per year than Earth’s.
Gravity varies slightly, wherever you go. So can we measure this phenomenon with a set of Kern scales and our traveling assistant? Watch the film or explore the results so far.
Aim
If Earth was a perfect sphere of uniform density, then gravity would be consistent. But it’s not, which means gravity varies wherever you go. So can we chart those discrepancies using just a basic-range Kern scale?
Method
We’re shipping our Gnome Kit from scientist to scientist around the world. Join the experiment and you’ll receive:
1x Kern EWB 2.4 Scale
Pre-calibrated according to local gravity at Kern HQ, Balingen, Germany.
1x Kern Gnome
The perfect test-subject for two good reasons: Gnomes are already accustomed to traveling the world. They also originate from our homeland, Germany.
1x Lab gloves & 1 x Air duster
Important because dust or grease will reduce the accuracy of the results.
The power consumption of our high-tech machines and devices is hugely underestimated.
When we talk about energy consumption, all attention goes to the electricity use of a device or a machine while in operation. A 30 watt laptop is considered more energy efficient than a 300 watt refrigerator. This may sound logical, but this kind of comparisons does not make much sense if you don’t also consider the energy that was required to manufacture the devices you compare. This is especially true for high-tech products, which are produced by means of extremely material- and energy-intensive manufacturing processes. How much energy do our high-tech gadgets really consume?
The 180 watt laptop
While these reports are in themselves reason for concern, they hugely underestimate the energy use of electronic equipment. To start with, electricity consumption does not equal energy consumption. In the US, utility stations have an average efficiency of about 35 percent. If a laptop is said to consume 60 watt-hours of electricity, it consumes almost three times as much energy (around 180 watt-hour, or 648 kilojoules).
So, let’s start by multiplying all figures by 3 and we get a more realistic image of the energy consumption of our electronic equipment. Another thing that is too easily forgotten, is the energy use of the infrastructure that supports many technologies; most notably the mobile phone network and the internet (which consists of server farms, routers, switches, optical equipment and the like).
Embodied energy
Most important, however, is the energy required to manufacture all this electronic equipment (both network and, especially, consumer appliances). The energy used to produce electronic gadgets is considerably higher than the energy used during their operation. For most of the 20th century, this was different; manufacturing methods were not so energy-intensive.
An old-fashioned car uses many times more energy during its lifetime (burning gasoline) than during its manufacture. The same goes for a refrigerator or the typical incandescent light bulb: the energy required to manufacture the product pales into insignificance when compared to the energy used during its operation.
Text and Images via Low-tech Magazine. Read full article HERE
Artwork: cityscape I & II by Grace Grothaus.
Cotton production, India. Courtesy of Uwe H. Martin
Niger Delta States. Courtesy of George Osodi.
SUPPLY LINES brings visual practitioners with notable bodies of previous work on globalization together with theorists working in areas of spatial culture, geography, art history and cultural theory to critically examine concepts of resource extraction, use, circulation, and representation. It furthermore forges a collaborative and interdisciplinary mode of geographical knowledge production, with the ultimate intent of stimulating ongoing research, education and public interest in the common use of limited resources. In addition to reframing resources, in other words, Supply Lines seeks to reposition the public’s relation to them. In so doing, it aspires to contribute to participatory, community-oriented models of society, which are increasingly crucial as resource conflicts intensify.
This visual research project explores human interactions with natural resources (e.g., water, oil, silver) and the spatial and social relations ensuing from them. Rather than understanding resources as fixed or externally given, the project conceives of them as collectively produced and able to mobilize and interrelate diverse areas with one another: geographically, historically, economically, and culturally. With growing consciousness about the global limitation and unsustainability of vital resources, there is an urgent need for new means of representation to convey the complexity of such social, geopolitical, ecosystemic and climatic relations. This project’s development of new visual and theoretical material aims to contribute to expanding the notion of “resource” from a hitherto primarily economic-industrial domain toward an aesthetic-cultural context.
Hidden in the landscape of the fertile crescent of the Middle East, scientists say, lurk overlooked networks of small settlements that hold vital clues to ancient civilizations.
Beyond the impressive mounds of earth, known as tells in Arabic, that mark lost cities, researchers have found a way to give archaeologists a broader perspective of the ancient landscape. By combining spy-satellite photos obtained in the 1960s with modern multispectral images and digital maps of Earth’s surface, the researchers have created a new method for mapping large-scale patterns of human settlement. The approach, used to map some 14,000 settlement sites spanning eight millennia in 23,000 square kilometres of northeastern Syria, is published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Traditional archaeology goes straight to the biggest features — the palaces or cities — but we tend to ignore the settlements at the other end of the social spectrum,” says Jason Ur, an archaeologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who is co-author of the study. “The people who migrated to cities came from somewhere; we have to put these people back on the map.”
Such comprehensive maps promise to uncover long-term trends in urban activity. “This kind of innovative large-scale application is what remote sensing has been promising archaeology for some years now; it will certainly help us to focus our attention on the big picture,” says Graham Philip, an archaeologist at Durham University, UK.
Excerpt of an article written by Virginia Gewin at Nature. Continue HERE
Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory/Photo Researchers. Construction of an underground shaft for the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas. The SSC was supposed to be the largest particle accelerator in the world, but its funding was canceled by Congress in 1993. 
Cotton production, India. Courtesy of Uwe H. Martin
Niger Delta States. Courtesy of George Osodi.
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