Sometimes next nature breaks down and things fall back on an older nature. Luckily, this guy still had a horse around. Peculiar image of the week.
Via Kottke. Related: Steam Horse, Your grand-grand-parents new media, No Signal.
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According the magazine cover of Food & Wine in October 2105 the process of ‘creating’ food in factories will be outdated; next nature will grow the hyperfood itself.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.
Though the example product seems a little far-fetched; growth assembly could be quite revolutionary. Worldwide shipping of manufactured things is very inefficient. Why not ship devices and utensils in a single envelope? As seeds.
“Our idea of industry will grow to include nature. Genetically altered organisms will be an everyday thing. Introducing diversity and softness to a realm once dominated by heavy manufacturing. Shops will evolve into factory farms. Licenced products are grown where sold. We will no longer ship products around the world. Only seeds will be shipped as they contain all the manufacturing instructions encoded in their dna.”
Reliable data on economic growth is hard to come by in many parts of the world, especially in developing countries. Yet according to scientists, outer space offers a new perspective for measuring economic growth.
Using satellite images of nighttime lights, J. Vernon Henderson, Adam Storeygard, and David N. Weil from Brown University have created a new framework for estimating a country or region’s gross domestic product, or GDP by observing the changes in a country’s “night lights” as seen from outer space.
“Consumption of nearly all goods in the evening requires lights,” they write in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. “As income rises, so does light usage per person, in both consumption activities and many investment activities.”
Old nature provided us with a wide variety of food: fresh milk, crispy vegetables, nutritious meat. Yet this is not enough, we want more:
We want a printed steak, square fishsticks, dinosaur nuggets, organic coca-cola, hyper fruit, cloned meat, potato-free potato chips, frankenwein, vegetarian hamburgers and hypernatural tomatoes. We want vitamine+Q10 yoghurt that makes you loose weight. We want to hear the sound of a sausage when we bite it – we want notice how well designed that sausage sound really is.
Already for thousands of years people have been food designers. How will food technology develop itself into the 21th century? The Philips Food Design Probes investigate how we will eat and source our food in the future, like in 15 to 20 years. There are 3 products we might have in our homes by then:
Autimacy [aw-tih-muh-see] - noun, plural - cies. The term was coined by Simona Kicurovska.
No this is not some stellar system far away. What is it then? Lets make another picture, this time with the flashlight on…
Little over a week after the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) became operational it broke down. As the world’s largest particle accelerator isn’t working, computer simulations are the only option for a whole generation of researchers. With entire PhD’s being based on simulated data, you wonder whether physics is still an empirical science.
Today’s most ambitious scientific instruments are modern-day cathedrals in their size and complexity. Situated as much as 175 meters (570 ft) beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is designed to accelerate protons to near the speed of light and smash them together in four giant detectors spread around its 27-kilometre circumference. Built at a cost of $4.3 billion, making it not only the grandest but also the most expensive scientific instrument ever created by man.
The main argument for the creation of the LHC is to discover the Higgs bosons, an elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model in particle physics, but yet to be observed experimentally – a Nobel price is awaiting the one who makes the discovery.
SIMULATIONS REPLACE EMPIRICAL EXPERIMENTS
Physicists once hoped that the LHC would start its collisions in late 2006, but on 19 September 2008, shortly after the machine was finally switched on, an electrical short caused extensive damage along a sector of the machine. Repairs have taken longer than expected, and the LHC is not scheduled to restart before mid-November 2009.
The long delays have scattered the dreams of LHC Students who had hoped to use fresh data from the machine to use in their studies. According to the renowned Nature journal, LHC Students face data drought: “European graduate students face strict time constraints for completing their PhDs. Most universities require a thesis to be submitted within three to four years, and that means that students cannot wait for their data. Instead, their analyses are being done with data from ‘Monte Carlo’ simulations — computer programs that replicate what might come out of real collisions..”
As technology evolves, people are more and more depending on it to function properly. But the nature of technology is that it needs networks, sources, software, batteries and signal. Once these conditions fail, horror scenarios unfold for those who depend…
Supercut video by fourfour.typepad.com | Related: Cellphone Minutes, the Next Currency, Crackberry Addicts, Handset gets taken to the grave.
For people who live small…
Via Gizmodo. Related: Game on, Games become jobs, Boomeranged Metaphors, Simulating old nature on next nature. Thanks Jurrian.
Economy, as seen from Space
Food design in the 21th century
Constellation
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