Yes, Naturally

The following essay is from Yes Naturally: How Art Saves the World available in the Next Nature store. You can visit the Yes Naturally exhibit in the The Hague until August 18. 

What is nature? And who or what has a say in this? Are human beings the only ones who decide, or do plants, animals, bacteria, atmospheres, things and computers play a role as well? Yes Naturally puts anthropocentrism – centralizing the human position above all or interpreting reality exclusively in terms of human standards – in perspective. Is our arrogant placing of ourselves above all other agents in the world really justified? Is the DNA of a multicellular organism such as ourselves really so different from that of a virus? Our digestive tract looks remarkably like that of a sea squirt, which belongs to the most primitive of tunicates that have been around for more than 500 million years. And we have more in common with plants than we may on the surface suspect. Mitochondria are the energy producers of plants and animals: they are offspring of bacteria that lived in intracellular symbiosis with their hosts in an early evolutionary stage. Interconnectedness and interdependence are in fact the measure of all things.

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A Lifetime of Questions through Google

Using a screen capture tool and Google’s home page, Marius Budin has created a video that presents the true fears of humanity over the course of a lifetime. By simply typing the phrase ”I’m [X] and,” inserting the numbers 10 through 85, Marius reveals humanity’s basest insecurities, which seem to center around pregnancy and virginity. These results are compiled using the closely guarded Google search API which means that these exact search terms have been entered hundreds, thousands or even millions of times before.

It appears that we are often searching for the same answers. It is interesting to note our habitual response is now to search google for answers to life’s existential questions, rather than turning to a qualified professional or even just a friend for help. As with “Deliver us from Digital Bluntness“, this appears to be evidence of a shift in human interaction directly related to technology. In a sense, our fear of judgement means we would rather seek out help from potentially unreliable, unkind or even fake strangers than go to the people we actually know.

Google Birdhouse Shows Birds Their Way

Maybe the Taiwanese artist Shuchun Hsiao was inspired by a cold winter day to reinvent the common birdhouse in the shape of the Google Maps icon. The designer understood the importance and the omnipresence of Google Maps in our society and created the Google Birdhouse Project, a modern way to accommodate birds in urban spaces.

The iconic symbol references the “surfing” of flying birds to find their arrival point, just like Google Maps does for humans. As Shuchun Hsiao explains: “Birds have the most real experience of Google Maps. Birds can fly through the city, through streets. A birdhouse becomes their destination”.

Eye-catching, but not intrusive, these niches are also interesting urban decorations. The micro in the macro, the abstract becoming material, the virtual in the real: the result of the Google Birdhouse is bewildering and strong. Perhaps something dealing with Twitter would have been more predictable.

Anthropo-scene #2: The Mind’s Lianas

When Édouard Le Roy, Vladimir Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin started to describe in the 1920s how the “noosphere”, the sphere of the human mind, grows into the geosphere and the biosphere, they were already talking about something very real. Yet until today we continue to talk as if our global systems for communicating and exchanging thoughts are somehow immaterial and other-wordly. Today’s “clouds”, in which our data are kept safe, create the metaphor that information turns ethereal once it is stored. Yet the opposite is true. With a multitude of cables, electromagnetic interventions and very material computers, the noosphere is a geological reality of increasing volume and it is increasingly a part of Anthropocene nature. This is what Anthropo-scene #2, on the Indonesian island of Bali, shows: A new species of vine-like plant which could be aptly called Liana noospherica by a new, yet-to-come breed of naturalists that give the new entities of the noosphere scientific names.

This is the second in the Anthropo-scene series. For the first post, click here. 

Modifying Milk and Glowing Livestock

A team of scientists from the Animal Reproduction Institute of Uruguay have genetically modified nine sheep with a phosphorescent jellyfish protein. This causes the lambs to grow a neon green colour when exposed to ultraviolet light. Besides the lambs’ predisposition to glow green, they are otherwise perfectly healthy and normal.

Genetically modifying the sheep to glow under UV light is an attempt to advance and perfect the technique that will allow scientists to add beneficial new genes to livestock. Once the genes are integrated into an animal’s DNA, it can produce milk with various medical advantages for humans. Perhaps this could lead to the creation of a real-life Korova Milk Bar, the bar from “A Clockwork Orange” that offers drug-laced milk.

Story via redorbit. Image via Fundación IRAUy / J. Calvelo

Baseball Rocks

Our peculiar image of the week invites us to reflect upon the status of everyday artifacts like a baseball. Tomorrows Fossils? The rocks were fitted with a leather string by artist Elizabeth de Maray. A real baseball can be seen in the background.

Building Grows Its Own Energy from an Algae-Farming Facade

This German building, called BIK, is covered by panels filled with algae. The building pumps water, nutrients, and compressed CO2 to these panels, so that when the sun shines, the algae multiply. The system collects the algae residue and converts it to biogas, which is then burned to create usable energy. Together with a heat recovery system and solar panels on the roof, the building is completely energy independent.

Via Fast Company.

Toss the Brita: Bacteria Can Filter Antibiotics from Water

We use antibiotics for medical treatment, but the presence of antibiotics in drinking water is harmful to us and to our environment. Currently, activated carbon is used to filter out harmful antibiotics, but the effect is not perfect. A team at the University of Cincinnati has now developed and tested a new filter made of two bacterial proteins which can remove almost twice as much antibiotics as activated carbon, using only water and direct sunlight.

Compared with activated carbon filters, the bacterial protein system offers several improvements. Firstly, the new protein filter can selectively absorb antibiotics. It employs a protein pump called AcrB, a selective “garbage disposal” for the bacteria that cannot get clogged with organic matter. Secondly, direct sunlight powers the bacterial protein system. A light-driven bacterial protein called Delta-rhodopsin supplies power for the AcrB. Moreover, these bacteria can even be used to extract antibiotics for recycling, and may even eventually be used to filter our heavy metals and hormones.

Story via Phys.org and Nano Letters

Let’s Build a Garden on Mars

Typically the impact of humanity on plant life is not always positive: Deforestation, decrease of diversity, soil pollution. Doom and gloom are all around. Hence, our delight to learn there are also people dedicating their time and energy to the expansion of plant life. Surely if they do it in such remarkable ways.

Astrobiologist Dr. Louisa Preston and Designer Vanessa Harden propose to build a garden on Mars. Thats not easy. One would need a gardening robot, fitted plant species and some kind of dome structure for the plants to grow in. These two young women now started a kickstarter campaign to realize their project.

Arguably, we owe it to our fellow carbon bases plant species, to employ our space rockets to their benefit, helping them to inhabit new worlds. Additionally, the astro plants may also provide human space travelers in their nutritious needs.

Go to the kickstarter campaign.

Snow White’s Next Nature Testimonial

After the release of the Next Nature Appzine for iPad, we called for testimonials. We’re delighted to receive a message from the one and only Snow White.

With “Stealth Wear”, Hide from Unmanned Drones in Style

The dawn of the domestic drone is near. In 2015 more than 20,000 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are expected to roam through the airspace of the United States alone. These unmanned drones, equipped with thermal imaging, video and audio recorders, may enable extreme levels of aerial invasion of privacy.

But as history has shown, whenever a government attempts increased surveillance, “rebellious” citizens often create counter-methods. One such counter-method to the rise of a “global surveillance society” is artist Adam Harvey’s Stealth Wear. Stealth Wear is a clothing line that is designed to challenge authoritarian surveillance systems like drones. It is a vision for fashion that addresses “the growing need to exert control over what we are slowly losing, our privacy”. With his “Anti-Drone Garments” Harvey hopes to give some privacy back to wearers by making them invisible to the thermal imaging cameras widely used by UAVs. Two of the three garments are modeled on traditional Muslim dress, perhaps as a commentary on drone warfare in parts of the Islamic world. It is yet to be seen if people are willing to wear these garments, but the statement of these garments is clear: In Privacy We Trust.

Source: Stealth Wear

Implantable Microchip Controls Appetite

UK scientists have designed an implantable microchip that attaches to the vagus nerve, which helps to control a variety of body functions from heart rate to hunger. The chip, which is just a few millimeteres in size, is designed to read electrical and chemical signatures of appetite. The device then sends electrical signals to the brain to reduce or stop the urge to eat.

The work could provide an alternative to weight-loss surgery. Sir Stephen Bloom, one of the researchers involved in the project, says that the chip could provide an alternative to “gross surgery” and reassures potential patients that “There will be a little tiny insert and it will be so designed as to have no side effects, but restrict appetite in a natural way”.

Although this might sound revolutionary, there are other groups working on the vagus nerve to combat obesity. American companies such as EnteroMedics and IntraPace both use vagus nerve stimulation to try to reduce food consumption.

Via: BBC. Image credit: Fresh Healthy Vending. Related: Implantable Silicon-Silk Electronics, Battery-Free Implantable Neural Sensor, Phone Tooth.