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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Fountains are peculiar objects: We associate them with nature even though they are typically entirely artificial and man-made (unless you are living in Iceland of course).
Recently however, a fountain that wasn’t planned for emerged in California’s San Fernando Valley. An urban water pipe carrying purified recycled water, used for irrigation and industrial purpose, began leaking. The rupture sent water gushing in an immense column that towered over the roof of a nearby business.
Thousands of gallons went down the sewer before the next natural fountain was closed down more than three hours later.
Via BBC NEWS. Related: Datafountain – Money translated to water, Water shows when the heat is on. Thanks Tara.
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
Peculiar image of the week by Martin Denker.
Remember the days when the flavor of a fruity drink was simply connected to an apple, orange, strawberry, kiwi, or perhaps – if you felt really exotic – an acai berry? Nowadays we quench our thirst with hyperreal beverages that serve us engineered tastes like Green punch, Wild ice zest berry, or Power-C Dragon fruit.
The Vitaminwater brand is moving to the next level by crowdsourcing its upcoming flavor. Fans are invited to collaborate on the design of their new drink. The design contest is organized through the launch of a Flavorcreator application on Facebook (watch out: you will have to let it pull your profile information, photos, your friends’ info, and other content for the app to work). Vitaminwater enthusiasts got the opportunity to name the flavor, write the bottle copy and design the label via a contest with the winner or winning team receiving a $5,000 prize from Vitaminwater. The result will be available in stores from March 2010.
We applaud this democratization of hyperreal flavors – if it the drink is designed anyway, why not let the customers have a say – and are now anticipating the first crowdsourced piece of fruit.
Via Coolhunting. Related: Organic Coke, Hyper Fruit, Why are carrots orange? Its political, Little Trees – Smells to refresh your car, Biomimicmarketd strawberry juice, Food design in the 21th century.
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.
