Do cars have a face? You would be inclined to say yes immediately. And you would be right as well, because they do. Study has confirmed through a complex statistical analysis that many people see human facial features in the front end of automobiles and ascribe various personality traits to cars—a modern experience driven by our prehistoric psyches.
Designers have realized this for a long time; a lot of thought goes into designing the face of the car. It’s an important element of the design process. As Chris Bangle—former design director of the BWM Group Munich—puts it in the recent documentary Objectified: ‘You, as a person, can have lots of different faces, but with a car, you can only have one face. When you put on that face, it’s there forever. It becomes the cars expression.’
And people are very picky when it comes to choosing a car they will be driving daily for the next couple of years. ‘Cars are kind of like avatars, they’re a representative of ourselves.’, says Bangle, ‘You know, I show myself to the outside world through this car.’
It’s no mere coincidence that the rounded Volkswagen Beetle looks so cute you want to hug it, or that the BMW headlights in your rear mirror are saying ‘Get out of the way or I’ll run you over.’ Cars’ faces tend to show the personality of the car. If it’s a performance car, it should look like that. If it’s a cheap ecological car, it’s appearance should reflect that as well. This is not only the skill of the designer, but also has a strong scientific base. Dennis Slice—an associate professor who was closely involved with the study of Cars’ faces—says: ‘The most unique aspect of the study was that we were able to quantitatively link the perception of cars to aspects of their physical structure in a way that allows us to generate a car that would project, say, aggression, anger or masculinity or the opposite traits.’
Will car customization take extreme forms in the (near) future? Will we end up sending along a picture of ourselves when ordering a car, so that the head- and taillights, as well as the logo and the license plates, can be modeled after our very own face? Why not, we already get to choose most of the cars appearance, so customizing it’s face only seems natural…
I vividly remember being offended throughout my high-school education because ‘atoms’ where consistently presented as these perfect slick round little spheres. At one time I even called the teacher a fabricator of lies and shouted: “Atoms aren’t balls!!”.
Of course the poor man couldn’t help it, as it was just decided to teach us high-school kids a outdated, simplified 19th century version of the atom model, rather than confusing us with subatomic particles like protons, neutron, up-quarks, down-quarks, gluons and what do you have nowadays.
In retrospect I was just a kid trying to be witty after having flipped through some of the science magazines of my dad, who was a physicist. Nonetheless, I always remained keen on the underestimated role of simulations in modern science.
Are you still reading? Then this call for proposals might be for you. The STRP Festival, Institute of Complex Molecular Systems, and Animation Studio invite artists, designers and scientists to develop a new visual language for molecular structures.
“Recently, a new problem has emerged for molecular scientists. For many decennia they have used a world-wide accepted way of representing molecules, even though these molecules have never really been seen. Unfortunately, this language is not suitable to represent the increasing complexity of the molecular systems and dynamic processes that are subject of modern research. … We think that a breakthrough in this area is only possible with ideas of people with different specialisms.”
Download the full Call for Proposals (pdf).
An earlier post on this blog already displayed the possible future of sight using augmented contact lenses. Researchers at MIT take this second sight to a next level by creating a retinal implant that could help blind people regain much of their vision.
People receiving the implant would wear a pair of glasses with a built-in camera that wirelessly powers the implant and sends images to a micro-controller on the eye-ball. These are then processed and send to electrodes implanted below the retina.
Besides the immense value for blind people imagine the future possibilities for truly virtual and augmented reality. Always wanted infrared sight? Or would you prefer to hook it up to your Second Life account? You can also just watch a movie.
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Scientists of the University of Pennsylvania are creating electronics that almost completely dissolve inside the body, through the use of thin, flexible silicon electronics on silk substrates.
While implanted electronics must usually be encased to protect them from the body, these electronics don’t need protection. The whole process is pretty much seamless: The electronics on the flexible silk substrates conform to biological tissue. The silk melts away over time and the thin silicon circuits left behind don’t cause irritation because they are just nanometers thick.
To make the devices, silicon transistors about one millimeter long and 250 nanometers thick are collected on a stamp and then transferred to the surface of a thin film of silk. The silk holds each device in place, even after the array is implanted in an animal – so far the technique is tested on mice – and wetted with saline, causing it to conform to the tissue surface.
In a paper published in the journal Applied Physics Letters, the researchers report that such circuits can be implanted in animals with no adverse effects. And the performance of the transistors on silk inside the body doesn’t suffer.
The researchers are now developing silk-silicon LEDs that might act as photonic tattoos that can show blood-sugar readings, as well as arrays of conformable electrodes that might interface with the nervous system.
Journal Article: Silicon electronics on silk as a path to bioresorbable, implantable devices. Related: Conductive body paint, Phone Tooth, Metalosis Maligna. Image credit: Rogers/Omenetto. Via: Techreview.
Unlike many people fear that computers will overtake humans, Ray Kurzweil states that robots will merge with humans, robots the size of cells which can do the job way more efficient than our actual cells. An example on this are respirocytes; robots the size and functions of a red blood cell, but way more efficient (movie).
Respirocytes are able to store 1.51 billion oxygen molecules, 100% of which are accessible to the tissues. In contrast, our blood cells store about 1 billion of red blood cells and only 25% is accessible to the tissue. Replacing 10% of your actual red blood cells will enable you to do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath or allows you to stay underwater for four hours.
In his TED-talk Kurzweil calls this 2020 technology. Many major steps have been made within the field of nanotechnology and Respirocytes are quite likely to be actually manufactured someday. Hence, we may anticipate some new doping scandals world records at the Olympics of 2020.
Related: Voyage of the bacteria bots, How biotech will drive our evolution, Craig Venter: catalyst of evolution, Build a better being.
English Robins are forced to sing their song during the night. Not because they have figured out that music just sounds better in the dark, but because they can’t compete with the noise we make during the day.
Research by Richard A. Fuller et al. has revealed that English Robins are active during the night in 18 out of 67 observed areas across Sheffield, England. In one area, an English Robin was only active during the night. As it turns out, there was significantly more (human caused) noise in those areas than in the 49 areas where the English Robin only sang during the day.
Where will this lead to? Maybe our 24/7 society will silence all English Robins and other birds during the day, forcing them to develop their nocturnal lives, which in turn will lead to sleepless nights for us, because we will be treated to midnight concerts every night.
Related post: Copypaste bird, Wild birds illegaly imigrating to city zoo, Flying penguins.
Make no mistake, you’re not looking at the latest Barbie line: These are the The Pussycat Dolls. Formerly an LA stripper show burlesque show, now upgraded to be pop music sensation and the new face of female empowerment. With virtually every race and hair color represented, the collection of women seemed to have stepped straight out of an adolescent boy’s fantasy.
Yet, their polished perfection also has a certain unheimlich quality: The lips, the breasts, the heavily done faces, the oh-so-perfect noses, the shiny skins, the ’sculpted’ bodies. Too perfect to be human: this cannot be trusted.
Screenshot from the movie Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
Could the female pop group perhaps be the latest manufacture of Abyss creations, the Californian company known from Real Doll life-size silicone sex doll mannequin advertised as “the state-of-the-art for life-like human body simulation”?
The name ‘Pussycat Dolls’ certainly adds to the suspect, but then again their hit singles with titles like ‘BUTTONS‘ and ‘BEEP‘ point more in the direction of a robotics project. Perhaps professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, after his so-so attempts to create a robotic schoolteacher and doppelganger of himself, now exceeded himself with this sexy machinery? Not sure, as the comparisons go on…
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Already in the early days of modern civilization, people claimed that they could control the weather. A known example from recent history are the rituals that American Indians used to induce rain.
Nowadays, many people still tend to regard these stories as fairy-tales and consider controlling the weather impossible. In Moscow though, the mayor recently proposed a snow-free city. It proves that several countries, including the People’s Republic of China, USA and Russia, are modifying precipitation for several decades. In Russia, it is common practice to engineer dry days on public holidays and special events in Moscow.
Moscow’s plan is to disperse a mixture of silver iodide, liquid nitrogen and cement powder into clouds to trigger precipitation. This ensures that snow is banned from Moscow’s city centre, but results in a regional climate change in the areas just outside Moscow where the clouds empty their load. You can imagine the consequences…
Related: Hurricane control causes storm of lawsuits, Fight climate change: Hack the planet, China controls weather for olympics.
According to research carried out by scientists from the Columbia Environmental Research Centre, sewage water containing hormones and pesticides caused by human consumption is leading fish all over America to change gender. Within this phenomenon, male fish are turning partly-female, and are starting to produce female eggs. What it is exactly that is causing the gender-ambiguity in specific fish, and at what rate, is still to be proven. However, the scientists argue that part of the reason comes from hormones, such as birth control pills.
One might wonder how exactly this phenomenon can be understood in terms of being ‘Next Nature’, but it seems to reflect ‘nature caused by human culture’ in the sense that it perhaps lies exactly in between our ability to control ‘old nature’ and turn it into products (birth control pills) and the phenomenon of culture (the common use of extra hormones) getting so out of control that it leads to unexpected consequences.
Via: www.sueddeutsche.de
To draw attention to a stand at the publishing house of the Frankfurter Buchmesse, a publisher hired some flies. The paper mini-banners — attached with self-dissolving wax — were designed so that a fly could fly with it, but low and for short distances, constantly landing on the visitors.
Via: Scaryideas.com Related: Branded Butterfly Wings, Robo-fly, Cyborg Insects.
