Recently were introduced, the OOMouse…
…and the Magic Mouse. Both tools are developed to browse the ones and zeros more easily.
It almost seems unfair to compare them, so I won’t. But what I would like to compare instead is both companies’ mission statements:
Open Office: Our mission statement is to create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format.
Apple: Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.
The first reads in one word: “community” (building and sharing together). The second reads: “ego” (look how good I am). Now look again at their mices.
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Peculiar image of the week by Martin Denker.
The Discovery series ‘Ways to save the planet’ the episode ‘Wrapping Greenland‘ shows how Dr. Jason Box uses reflective blankets to cover glaciers in Greenland. Due to global warming glaciers start melting causing land to flood. Dr. Jason Box argues that it is expensive to use blankets to cover all glaciers, but that it is more expensive to reorganize all coast lines.
Maybe we should make the expenses, as we ourselves have caused global warming. Maybe we should take another leap in evolution, just as our ancestors the Sapiens did to survive in constant changing conditions. But should we then focus on preventing the changes, or should we focus on adapting flexibly to them?
Related: If the implications of global warming were fair, Fight climate change, hack the planet, Doggerland – Mapping a lost world, Artificial ‘trees’ should stop climate change, Diesels global warming ready campaign, Let the Dutch bury the carbon, Humans to blame for global warming.
Are bacteria faster than a computer? According a group of biological engineers they are. The scientists have done a research in which they have used the well-known bacteria Escherichia coli to solve a mathematical problem.
The Hamiltonian path is the shortest route between city A to city B along several other cities and at which every city is visited only once. This sounds easy, however this has caused a lot of problems to the navigation systems. If you want to go from Amsterdam to Rome and visit some other European cities, there are millions of possible routes and the system will have to calculate all the separate routes to come to the final solution of the Hamiltonian path. Now the researchers have used bacteria to get a direct overview, in which the bacteria consider all the routes simultaneously.
In the research, they have modified the DNA of the bacteria and let them find the shortest route between three cities. Each city has its own combination of genes, which causes the bacteria to glow red of green. The possible routes between the cities were explored by the random shuffling of DNA. The bacteria that had found the best route fluoresced green and red, resulting in yellow colonies.
Problem solved! Althought this is just a small test and it will be difficult to program a complex computer this way, the researchers are convinced this a proof that demonstrates the possibilities of using bacteria to solve these kind of mathematical problems. According to the researchers their results validate synthetic biology as a valuable approach to biological engineering. Having a computer infected with a virus will not quite be the same anymore.
The study was published in the Journal of Biological Engineering. Related: Crash course on synthetic genomics, Bacteria that eat waste & shit petrol, Bacteria that turn CO2 into energy, Google tracks flue spread via sick searchers, Conversations at the doctor.
Bird spotting is not a typical activity for us next nature explorers, yet occasionally we bump into some birds worth mentioning (remember the amazing copy-paste bird, rubber duck XL, the wild birds illegally immigrating into city Zoo, or the plastic flamingos that almost became extinct?)
Undoubtedly these ‘plastic’ birds spotted by photographer Chris Jordan are the most macabre thus far. One wonders what Darwin would have thought of these Albatross babies fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. According to the photographer thousands of chicks a year, kick the bucket from starvation, toxicity, and choking from their diet of human trash.
Feeding your babies plastic is definitely not a good survival strategy for these poor birds. On the other hand, plastic seems to be thriving as a new material all over our planet, with no living organism able to break it down or consume it. Nietzsche already learned us that every second nature typically stresses a first nature, which in effect deteriorates, after which the victorious second nature becomes the first.
Are we ready for a plastic planet? Surely that bit of mindful recycling you are urging yourself to turn into a habit, won’t undo the effect. How long should we wait for the microbes to evolve that are able to digest plastic? Certainly there is more than enough ‘food’ for them available within the ecosystem by now. Somebody please call one of these synthetic biologists to fix us a microbe that eats plastic.
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Will we in the future still buy several needs according food in shops, or will we grow M&M’s ourselves? There is a lot happening on in the field of food technology, think for example of special cloned cow species or ‘extremely tasteful’ designers vegetables. We are radically intervening with Darwin’s survival of the fittest, since society strives to select and process the ‘best’ and ‘strongest’ species and types themselves – often based on commercial values.
According the magazine cover of Food & Wine in October 2105 the process of ‘creating’ food in factories will be outdated; next nature will grow the hyperfood itself. With a little help of technology the food/culture that society created will be combined with what we traditionally consider as nature. Think for example of the extensive use of photosynthesis to increase production of food, as they will become little factories. But also about processing design food via a biological way that for the present can only happen via complex chemical processes, e.g. the production of M&M’s through the genetic manipulating of beans. Furthermore, the special 22nd-century edition of Food & Wine explains that food will become more effective, healthy and ‘powerful’ by the integration of new developed vitamins and medicines. These will not only give us extra energy but will also power the electronic devices we use, since these will become a part of our body we’ll have to feed them as well.
Will in 2105 all factories where they produce food become redundant? And how will the physical status of future humans react upon the extra healthy food they will consume, shall it improve lifestyle in a way illness can be prevented? Fortunately or not, this cover is still merely a fantasy, hence we still have some degrees of freedom in what direction we want food design to develop. 
Related: Food design in the 21th century, The meat of tomorrow, a square fishstick, dinosaur nuggets, organic coca-cola, hyper fruit, cloned meat, potato-free potato chips, frankenwein, vegetarian hamburgers, hypernatural tomatoes, Who designed the banana?, How to grow an Orangina Bottle.
For over 40 years Australian artist Stelios Arcadious Stelarc has made art with medical instruments, prosthetics, robots, virtual reality systems and biotechnology to investigate alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body. In one of the interviews he says: The assumption being that if the body was altered it might mean adjusting its awareness.
His ‘Ear on the Arm‘ piece is a full sized ear constructed of the living cells permanently placed under the skin of Stelarc’s forearm – a clear homage to the famous tissue engineered ear mouse. The microphone and sound transmitter were supposed to be inserted inside his body within the ear shaped scaffold. This ended up to be not feasible yet due to infections that electronics caused.
The vision behind the project was to generate an alternative electronically enhanced organ to better interact and operate within the World. At the same time it provokes a debate about a desire to redesign and alternate human’s body evolutionary structure.
Stelarc points out: Now we can engineer additional and external organs to better function in the technological and media terrain we now inhabit. All very well, allthough it’s perhaps a better strategy to redesign our technological environment so that it fits our existing human physique.
Related: Phone Tooth, USB finger, High Heels, How biotech will drive our evolution, Homo desktopus, Humans are the sex organs of technology.
Written by KEVIN KELLY. Published in The Technium.
I remember the smoke the most. That pungent smell permeating the camps of tribal people. Everything they touch is infused with the lingering perfume of smoke — their food, shelter, tools, and art. Everything. Even the skin of the youngest tribal child emits smokiness when they pass by. I can hold a memento from my visits decades later and still get a whiff of that primeval scent. Anywhere in the world, no matter the tribe, steady wafts of smoke drift in from the central fire. If things are done properly, the flame never goes out. It smolders to roast bits of meat, and its embers warm bodies at night. The fire’s ever-billowing clouds of smoke dry out sleeping mats overhead, preserve hanging strips of meat, and drive away bugs at night. Fire is a universal tool, good for so many things, and it leaves an indelible mark of smoke on a society with scant other technology.
Besides the smoke I remember the immediacy of experience that opens up when the mediation of technology is removed in a rough camp. Living close to the land as hunter-gatherers do, I got colder often, hotter more frequently, soaking wet a lot, bitten by insects faster, more synchronized to rhythm of the day and seasons. Time seemed abundant. I was shocked at how quickly I could dump the cloud of technology in my modern life for a cloud of smoke.
But I was only visiting. Living in a world without technology was a refreshing vacation, but the idea of spending my whole life there was, and is, unappealing. Like you, or almost anyone else with a job today, I could sell my car this morning and with the sale proceeds instantly buy a plane ticket to a remote point on earth in the afternoon. A string of very bumpy bus rides from the airport would take me to a drop-off where within a day or two of hiking I could settle in with a technologically simple tribe. I could choose a hundred sanctuaries of hunter-gatherer tribes that still quietly thrive all around the world. At first a visitor would be completely useless, but within three months even a novice could at least pull their own weight and survive. No electricity, no woven clothes, no money, no farm crops, no media of any type — only a handful of hand-made tools. Every adult living on earth today has the resources to relocate to such a world in less than 48 hours. But no one does.
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No, this is not some solar system far, far away. Closer than you think, this is is a visualization of a botnet storm. For all you know this malicious virus, or one of its siblings, is controlling your computer – spamming thousands of innocent internet users on your behalf – at this moment. Feeling paranoid already? Yes, next nature can be harsh sometimes.
If the six hour crash course on synthetic genomics is a bit too much for you, there is always a more snappy TED lecture in which Craig Venter ponders on whether we can create new life out of our digital universe. Needles to ask what his answer is.
Dr. Venter now has a database now with about 20 million genes and thinks of them as the design components of the future. In little over half an hour the audience is walked through the latest endevours in synthetic genomics.
His talk covers topics like: How to boot up a chromosome. How he plans to replace the petrochemical energy with bacteria that turn CO2 into energy. How to take security measures. Why people who think of evolution as just one gene changing at the time have missed much of biology. And why it is a mistake to think they are trying to create life from scratch, as they are merely playin on one of the key principles of nature: all life derives from other life.
Nature changes along with us and it is changing fast. Buckle up for a catalyst of evolution.
Related: Build a better being, DNA Synthesizer, Top 10 new organisms, Mapping the DNA world, Google DNA, Poetry of Genetics, Crash course on synthetic genomics, How biotech will drive our evolution, Human genetic DNA sequencing soon child play?.
