What Robots dream of…
You may think it’s a cliché, but deep down inside robots want to be birds and fly high in the sky. Hooray for the good people of Festo, that demonstrate at TED how they turn the dream into a reality.
What is Next Nature?
With our attempts to cultivate nature, humankind causes the rising of a next nature, which is wild and unpredictable as ever. Wild systems, genetic surprises, autonomous machinery and splendidly beautiful black flowers. Nature changes along with us.
Archive for the ‘Nature becomes culture’ Category
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Pineberry™
More hypernatural designer-fruit. What do you get when you cross a strawberry and a pineapple? A pineberry, of course.
Some seven years ago the pineberry was taken from its native South America and grown commercially in glasshouses by Dutch company VitalBerry BV. Today pineberries are available in supermarkets throughout Europe and, like most designer-fruits, the pineberry is trademarked and has its own wikipedia page.
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Tomberry – The Worlds Smallest Tomato
Some people like berries, some like tomato’s. So what do you get when you get when the two mate? Indeed, the latest hyperfruit spotted on the selves is the Tomberry. This unusually small cultivar of tomatoes, which weight only 1-2 grams and are less than a centimeter in size, is produced by the Dutch company Eminent Food BV and distributed throughout Europe. Unsurprisingly the name Tomberry has been trademarked.
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Meet the New Meat
What do you think of lab-grown meat? “Yuck” might be your first reaction. One day, however, it could become the environmentally friendly alternative for breeding cows and pigs for meat consumption. Professor Mark Post argues in his talk at TEDxBrainport that it is relatively simple to take stem cells from an animal and grow them to produce new muscle tissue. Simply add sugar, proteins and fat and get it into shape with a bit of exercise to created edible meat. The only problem then is to find a new role for our livestock…
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Manko & Escape [#10]
The children looked startled.
‘Leaving?’, Askr asked. ‘But it’s not time yet!’, Embla said.
Manko had no clue of what was going on. Not yet time for what? The red ball turned purple and again a shock went through everyone in the room.
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First Lab-Grown Organ Transplanted
Another step in the fusion of the made & the born: Surgeons in Sweden have successfully transplanted a fully synthetic, tissue-engineered organ – a trachea– into a man with late-stage tracheal cancer.
The synthetic trachea was grown in a bioreactor, using a scaffold built out of a porous polymer, and tissue grown from the patient’s own stem cells. The surgery was performed last month by Paolo Macchiarini at Karolinska University Hospital in Huddinge, Stockholm. The patient has now made a full recovery and has been discharged from the hospital.
The transplant of the lab grown organ is a significant moment for regenerative medicine, although a trachea is much simpler than a lung, kidney or a heart, which are still far more challenging for the scientists.
Lab grown organs are expected to be superior to ordinary donor organs in several ways. They can be made to order more quickly than a donor organ can often be found; being grown from a patient’s own cells, they also do not require dangerous immunosuppressant drugs to prevent rejection.
Source: Technologyreview.
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Who will Question Bio-Engineering?
Bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe presents a parade of recent bio-engineering experiments, from glowing monkeys, to genetically boosted salmon, to cyborg insects. He asks: isn’t it time to set some ground rules? Sure. Bring it on Paul!
Now regular readers of this website already know most of the lustrous & monstrous examples, yet throughout the talk you feel a certain suspense: you-are-now-listing-to-a-real-bioethicist-who-any-minute-now-is-going-to-lay-out-some-crystal-clear-ground-rules-for-bio-engineering. Unfortunately Paul constrains himself to a call for rules, but doesn’t deliver them himself. Who will?
Thanks anyway Ewelina Szymanska.
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Virtual Offline Shopping
As the second most hardest working people on this planet, Koreans obviously dread their weekly shopping for groceries. It is therefore that Home Plus (Tesco in Europe) plastered walls of a Korean subway station with virtual shelves, allowing Koreans to shop with their smart phones while waiting on the metro.
Each product has QR code which will place the product in an online shopping cart on your smart phone. When the transaction is completed the products will be delivered to the shopper’s home within the day.
The concept makes effectively use of the commuters’ waiting time, while combining the efficiency of online shopping with the rich context of offline shopping. In this way bus stops could be transformed in small AH To Go’s and train stations into shopping malls.
Via Gizmodo, Via Design Boom
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Animal-free Meat could put a hold on Global Warming
Growing meat in the lab, rather than slaughtering animals, could become a viable alternative for people who want to cut the environmental impact of their food consumption, but cannot bear a vegetarian lifestyle.
According to scientists from Oxford University and Amsterdam University, lab-grown meat could help feed the world, while reducing the impact on the environment. It would generate only a tiny fraction of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with conventional livestock production.
The procedure of growing meat without an animal would require between 7% and 45% less energy than the same volume of conventionally produced meat such as pork, beef, or lamb. The meat labs would use only 1% of the land and 4% of the water associated with conventional meat and Greenhouse gases would be reduced by up to 96% in comparison to raising animals.
The scientists predict that if more resources are directed towards their research, the first lab-grown burger could be available in five years. It is their plan to start with mincemeat, while hoping to be able to produce steaks in ten years time.
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Typically Dubai
Presumably the only place on Earth where burkas & protein supplements coincide in jolly harmony. Peculiar image of the week. Photo by me.
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Essay: Back to the Tribe
Traditionally, technology is seen as a force that diminishes our instincts and puts us at a distance of nature. Increasingly however, we realize technology can also energize and amplify our deepest human sensibilities – even some we had forgotten about. Propelling us not so much back to, but rather forward to nature.
By VAN MENSVOORT
Almost two decades ago, Brian Eno – artist, composer, inventor, thinker – gave an interview in which he stated the problem with computers was that there is not enough Africa in them [1]. “Africa is everything that something like classical music isn’t. Classical – perhaps I should say ‘orchestral’ – music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitch wise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It’s all in little boxes.”… “Do you know what a nerd is? A nerd is a human being without enough Africa in him or her. I know this sounds sort of inversely racist to say, but I think the African connection is so important. I want so desperately for that sensibility to flood into these other areas, like computers.” … “It uses so little of my body. You’re just sitting there, and it’s quite boring. You’ve got this stupid little mouse that requires one hand, and your eyes. That’s it. What about the rest of you? No African would stand for a computer like that. It’s imprisoning.”
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Peel that Bottle
There’s nothing quite like peeling a piece of fruit, but if you end up with a bottle of Vodka after peeling, you know you have been caught in a biomimicmarketing fantasy. I guess the people of Smirnoff felt this was the most logical packaging for their fruit flavored drinks.
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Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts
Our proposal to study the financial system as an ecosystem is sometimes criticized as ‘abuse of vegetational concepts’. Interestingly enough BBC documentary maker Adam Curtis now argues the whole notion of the ecosystem is in fact a boomeranged metaphor.
In his documentary ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’, Curtis claims that the notion of the ‘ecosystem’ was, from the very beginning, based upon technological metaphors: the idea of nature as a complex machine. I hurry to emphasize that the next nature view goes exactly the other way around: the idea of complex machines as nature.
Thanks Ruben van Leer.
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Get Vegetarian Teeth and Eat Less Meat
Want to live a greener life? Eat less meat. Recently the UN appealed for a radical shift in diet, to improve individual health and ease conditions affecting the global environment. Reducing meat consumption by 10% reduces greenhouse gas emissions.
Unfortunately, humans are omnivores. Our teeth are designed to eat both meat and plants. Susana Soares and her colleagues designers and engineers of the Material Beliefs program propose to alter human teeth structures into those of herbivores, in order to become a better vegetarian.
Teeth are an essential tool for nutrition and their shape is related to diet. Herbivore animals have developed teeth structures suited to the consumption of plant material. Can our teeth structure be replaced to encourage dietary shifts that reflect social concerns?
Soon at a local dentist near you? Perhaps your government will even give you a tax cut for adopting a more sustainable veggy lifestyle? No seriously, this is bio play.
See also: Phone Tooth, Orthorexia Nervosa: the healty eating disorder.
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CopyCat
Artist Andrew Chase creates kinetic sculptures of animals. He has studied these animals intensively. After his analysis he created copies of these animals in metal with mechanics to mimic the movements of these animals. You can see the cheetah in action. He also created an elephant and giraffe out of mechanical metal parts. A fascinating way of copying old nature – suit for yourself if there is some deeper meaning – in waste metals.
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An Ecstatic Dialogue with Richard Doyle
When techno–optimist and fellow at the Hybrid Reality Institute, Jason Silva, meets with Richard Doyle, author of Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants and the Evolution of the Noosphere, we must buckle up for an Ecstatic Dialogue on language, reality, ancient Internets and how psychedelics make us human.
JASONSILVA: Your new book Darwin’s Pharmacy talks about the relationship between psychedelic plants and the accelerating evolution of the “noosphere”, which some define as the knowledge substrate of reality, the invisible, informational dimension of collective intelligence and human knowledge. Is this more or less accurate?
RICHDOYLE: The book features a set of nested claims about the evolution of mind, psychedelics (or, as I prefer and propose, “ecodelics”), and the evolution of the noosphere, but all of the claims can be understood via two claims:
(1) Ecodelics have been an integral part of the human toolkit, so suppressing them is like suppressing music, jokes or other aspects of our humanity. (Here I am following Samorini, Siegel, and others)
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(2) As integral parts of the human toolkit, ecodelics are best modeled as part of sexual selection – the competition for mates and the leaving of progeny. A careful look at Charles Darwin’s writings on sexual selection will show that sexual selection works through the management of attention – what we would now call “information technologies.” Think birdsong, bioluminescence ( the most widespread communication technology on the planet), poetry. The peacock is managing and focusing peahen attention with his feathers, so what we have called “mind” has been involved in evolution for a very long time. Mandrilles eat iboga before competing for mates.
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Pixelated Nature
What happens if your childhood experience of your environment has been solely through video games? According to artist Shawn Smith, “pixels became a sort of map from which to experience”. Hence he introduces old nature into next nature by transforming its imagery into 8-bit sculptures using hundreds of tiny wooden blocks.
In an interview with Wired Smith says “I have been around the depiction of objects and nature on screens all my life and I found myself wondering what these things look like in three dimensions.” Peculiar image of the week.
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Blue, Belgian and Beefy
The Belgian Blue is a unique cattle breed that was developed quite accidentally in the late 1800s. An chance mutation lead the cattle to develop ‘double muscling,’ which occurs when the body does not produce sufficient myostatin to regulate the growth of muscles. These body-builder animals typically have 40% more muscle mass than the typical cow or bull. Double muscling is an extremely rare occurrence. Outside of carefully selected breeds like the Belgian Blue or the Texel sheep, it has occurred only a handful of other times in animals like dogs and humans.
Animal rights activists contend that the breed is inherently cruel. Calves are usually delivered by cesarean section, as they are too large to be born naturally. Due to its massive size, the breed suffers from heart and joint problems, and can have difficulty even moving around. Both Denmark and Sweden have both attempted to ban Belgian Blues on grounds of cruelty. From turkeys that can only reproduce via artificial insemination and bulldogs that must be born by c-section, we’ve created a catalogue of organisms that could never survive outside of the human environment. Think of it as triumph of co-dependence.
