Following anorexia nervosa (under eating) and bulimia nervosa (overeating), orthorexia nervosa (healty eating) is the latest eating disorder in the book. It is characterized by a fixation on eating what the sufferer considers to be healthful food, which can ultimately lead to early death.

While anorexia is typically associated with our visual culture and its unreachable beauty ideals, orthorexia seems closely related with our information age and the easy access to facts and figures. Today so many data about health benefits of our food are available – how it was processed, prepared, etc– and food packages are routinely decorated with scientifically detailed data on their contents. We are suffering from ‘overknowledge’.

While most of us respond to the food-data-overload with an occasional dosage of self chosen ignorance – forget about the facts, grab a burger! – people suffering from orthorexia will spend just as much time and energy thinking about food as someone with bulimia or anorexia.

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Via Infozaragoza. Related: The Naturalness of traveling with a Jeep, Facing Your Car, Steam Horse. Thanks iPeg.

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…

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).

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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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Related: Office garden rebellion, Virtual money – cows, coins, credit, airtime, The Nocturnal life of diurnal birds. Picture: Freakingnews.com

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAMrtHC2Ev0&rel=0

Venice, Italy is sinking. To save it, Dr. Rachel Armstrong in her TED talk argues we need to outgrow architecture made of inert materials and, well, make architecture that grows itself.

Related: Modernistic vs Next Nature architecture, Growing rooms, buildings & cities, How to print a building, Superman’s House. Thanks Jan Gillesen.

Related: Beauty kit for little girls, Virtual Miss, Photoshop Beauties, Objects of desire, Real Mario, Software that ranks female beauty.

The festival is highly resonating on the nature caused by people. They will also screen parts of the Next Nature DVD and reprint the Real Nature is not Green essay. Nature transforms along with us!

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.