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.
Technology is evolving us, says cyborg anthropologist Amber Case in her 8 minutes of TED. We become a screen-staring, button-clicking new version of homo sapiens, relying on “external brains” (cell phones and computers) to communicate, remember, even live out secondary lives. But will these machines ultimately connect or conquer us? Buckle up for some surprising insight into our cyborg selves.
Modding is the act of adapting hardware/software to have it do what you want it to do, which does not always correlate with what it is originally built to do. Biomodd(ding) is inserting a living ecosystem inside a computer system, varying from plants that grow and develop with the use of the waste heat of the computer to algae that function to cool a processor; “living cooling liquid”. In an almost symbiosis-like state nature and machine living together. Even though it, of what I’ve seen so far, ends up being quite interesting sculpture-like installations, the main importance is that they’re meant to be actually used.
In one set-up in the Phillipines they developed a multi-player game and used this structure as the server. Which resulted in: “social meeting getting translated through a sequence of events into biological growth and development.” And this is where the different levels appear; Biomodd is about the game-element, it is about the social aspect and it is about the biological aspect. And it is really cool to look at, have a look for yourself:
via: Kritische Massa: kunstkritiek en digitale kunst (Critical Mass: art-criticism and digital art), organized by Virtueel Platform.
My name is Jason Silva. I’ve spent the last 5 years hosting and producing a tv show on Al Gore’s Emmy-winning Current TV network and I’m a fellow at the Hybrid Realities Institute exploring human/technology co-evolution. My goal is to inspire you by acting as an ambassador of ideas. Here we go.
Last year, scientists managed to use the bacteria Escherichia coli to solve a mathematical problem, described in this research. This year, the building blocks of a computer are made.
Researchers at the UCSF School of Pharmacy’s Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, led by Christopher A. Voigt have just published a paper which promises to get your circuits moving. This team has been working with the same bacteria to build logic gates like the ones found in computers directly into cells, making it possible to rewire and program them. The simple logic gates used in the experiment were built into genes then inserted into E. coli cells. The logic gates then acted as the communicator between the separate strains, allowing them to be connected together. Via engadget.com
Mind control for beginners: A mouse expressing ChR2 channels in its neurons starts running when it receives blue light in its motor cortex. Unsure what applications the researchers expect to come out of their achievement – if you have any suggestions do share them in the comment box.
The experiment was conducted by Karl Deisseroth and colleagues at Stanford University. Thanks Arjen Boender.
What do you get when you combine bike parts, an electric motor, and a cow skeleton? Our peculiar object of the week was created by artist Billie Grace Lynn.
Seen at Museum of Art & Design. Image NYTimes.
With his speculative ‘acoustic garden’ David Benqué tries to explore our cultural and aesthetic relationship to nature. He states that the current debate around Genetic Engineering is centred around subjects like food and healthcare but that the altering of nature is no new development. Mankind altered nature for hundreds of years. Think of flowers and mind altering weeds. Benqué wants to question the role of our aesthetic relationship to nature in this age of synthetic biology.
Nomadic Plants are a species assembled from a group of robotic-electronic-biological organisms living in symbiosis in order to survive in habitats affected by human activity.
The nomadic plant automatically moves towards water when its bacteria require nourishment. It contains vegetation and microorganisms living symbiotically inside the body of the apparatus. The robot draws water from a contaminated river, decomposes its elements, helps to create energy to feed its brain circuits, and the surplus is then used to create life, maintaining plants that, at once, complete their own life cycle.
Gilberto Esparza created these Nomadic Plants as a metaphor for the supposed alienation of the human condition and the impact its activity has on its environment. By creating these plants nomadic plants, which obviously haven’t evolved by themselves, its creator hopes to instigate critical reflections on the ambiguity of the force wielded by technology.
Seen at HAIP Festival – New Nature.
I should tell you the story of how Manko lost a leg. You need to know about this incident to understand his recent works. So please forgive me, I first have to go back to that unfortunate day, before I continuing where we left off last month.
Manko was 23 years old, and studied sculpture at the time. He was quite impulsive and loved to do things differently than others, just for the sake of it. An example: one day he threw himself through the window of a bus stop, just to know what that would be like, but also because he would know that he had done something than none of his friends would ever do. And he did not do it for them either. He did it to feel special. The consequence of having to pick a hundred tiny splinters of glass from his face only made it more memorable.
Nanotechnology has been hailed for its benefits because of the potential ability to create drugs that could cure cancer and radiation poisoning, make miniature pollutant filters resulting in healthier air and even produce better tasting food. Excitement over these benefits has led to corporations heavily investing in the technology for their products.
However, the same properties that allow nanotechnology to be valuable give it the potential to cause unforeseen consequences for ecological and human health. To date, it’s unclear whether the benefits of nanotech outweigh the risks associated with environmental release and exposure to nanoparticles.
Environmental Health News reports that nanoparticles in sunscreens, cosmetics and hundreds of other consumer products may pose risks to the environment by damaging beneficial microbes.
Researchers Cyndee Gruden and Olga Mileyeva-Biebesheimer from the University of Toledo added varying amounts of nanoparticles to water containing bacteria. The bacteria were grown in a lab and stained with a green fluorescent. It turned out the nano-titanium dioxide – also used in personal care products – reduced biological roles of bacteria after less than an hour of exposure. The findings suggest that these particles, which end up at municipal sewage treatment plants after being washed off in showers, could eliminate microbes that play vital roles in ecosystems and help treat wastewater. Oops!
Nanotechnology is yet another example of mankind playing with fire: It requires enormous care and restraint, yet on the other hand, playing with fire is perhaps one of the very special abilities that defines us as humans.
So, you are well aware that biotech will drive our evolution, you took the crash course on synthetic genomics, you’ve got your map of the DNA world in your backpack and are now eager to redesign some microbes that turn waste into energy, eat plastic, detect flu, or build a better being altogether? You have a brilliant project plan already, but only need some – let say– euro 25.000 and a bit of help from a genomic center to turn your vision into reality? We have cake for you.
The Designers & Artists 4 Genomics Award (DA4GA) aims to explore the hybrid practice between design, art and genomics on contemporary society. If you are graduated no longer than five years ago you are eligible to submit a project plan and take a chance on winning a euro 25.000,- to realize you project in collaboration with one of the participating Genomic centers.
If we are going to mutate the made & the born, let us at least do this creatively. The application deadline is September 8th 2010.
This time no technological enhanced roosters, dogs, cats or wood lice, but sheep! The famous viral Extreme Shepherding by The Baaa-Studs.
A cat that had its back feet severed by a combine harvester has been given two prosthetic limbs in a pioneering operation by a UK vet. The custom-made implants that “peg” the ankle to the foot are bio-engineered to mimic the way deer antler bone grows through the skin.
The ground breaking operation was carried out by veterinary surgeon Noel Fitzpatrick. The cat, named Oscar, was struck by the combine harvester whilst dozing in the sun.
The prosthetic pegs, called intraosseous transcutaneous amputation prosthetics (Itaps) were developed by a team from University College London led by Professor Gordon Blunn, who is head of UCL’s Centre for Biomedical Engineering.
Professor Blunn and his team have worked in partnership with Mr Fitzpatrick to develop these weight-bearing implants, combining engineering mechanics with biology. Mr Fitzpatrick explained: “The real revolution with Oscar is that we have put a piece of metal and a flange into which skin grows into an extremely tight bone.”
“We have managed to get the bone and skin to grow into the implant and we have developed an ‘exoprosthesis’ that allows this implant to work as a see-saw on the bottom of an animal’s limbs to give him effectively normal gait.”
Professor Blunn told BBC News the idea was initially developed for patients with amputations who have a stump socket. “This means they fix their artificial limb with a sock, which fits over the stump. In a lot of cases this is successful, but you [often] get rubbing and pressure sores.”
It remains to be seen what the psychological ramifications of having bambi-style prosthetics will be for Oscar.
Via: BBC News.
Techno-artists love insects. Especially their unpredictable behaviour. Eindhoven (NL) based design studio Ehdv used tracking software and connected some camera’to a bunch of wood lice, to create graphic design and even chairs.
Insects can also become living pixels. Austrian artist Gordan Savicic re-creates a famous Aracade-video game, using a new ‘organic algorithm’: the AI of his BioPong is performed by a cockroach which carries a neon-green pixel on its shoulder. Players can control their sticks but are not able to foresee the movement of the CI (cockroach intelligence). Feeding the pixel is not allowed!
All buildings today have something in common: They are made using Victorian technologies. This involves blueprints, industrial manufacturing and construction using teams of workers. All this effort results in an inert object, which means there is a one–way transfer of energy from our environment into our homes and cities. This is not sustainable. I believe that the only possible way for us to construct genuinely sustainable homes and cities is by placing them in a constant conversation with their surroundings. In order to do this, we need to find the right language.
By Rachel Armstrong
Metabolic materials are a technology that acts as a chemical interface or language through which artificial structures such as, architecture, can connect with natural systems. I am developing this technology in collaboration with scientists working in the field of synthetic biology and origins of life sciences whose model systems of investigation are materials that belong to a new group of technologies being described as ‘living technology’ (Bedau, 2009), which possess some of the properties of living systems but are not considered ‘alive’.
The characteristic of metabolic materials is that they possess the living property of metabolism, which is a set of chemical interactions that transform one group of substances into another with the absorption or production of energy. This transfer of energy through chemical exchange directly couples the environment to the living technology and embeds it within an ecosystem. Metabolic materials work with the energy flow of matter and systems using a bottom up approach to the construction of architecture.
Last week, the U.S. Navy announced that four of their “REMUS 100” unmanned underwater vehicles sailed off-radar and stopped responding to commands. The ‘bots were part of a fleet of thirteen drones being used in a training exercise to locate mine-like objects on the ocean floor off the coast of Virginia.
After days of searching for the runaway bots using manned boats and aircrafts, the U.S. Navy has yet to find anything. So now, they’ve called in the real underwater experts: dolphins and sea lions, trained to detect mines.
The human body is increasingly recognized as a biometric source of information for a wide spectrum of issues, including security, psychopathology, personality and health. Earlier we reported that job interviews might be replaced by brain scans within five years and denoted this news as a modern technological incarnation of occult palm reading. Now it turns out that palm reading itself has found a new incarnation – it’s in the ratio of your fingers.
John T. Manning, emeritus professor in psychology of the University of Central Lancashire and the University of Liverpool, has developed a new theory about how finger length relates to human biology and behavior. In the BBC series ‘Secret of The Sexes’, Manning successfully uses finger length ratio as a predictor for athletic ability.
A significant part of theory is focused on the so-called: ’digit ratio’, which concerns the full length ratio of only two fingers: index finger (2D) vs. ring finger (4D). In women the length of both fingers is usually about equal (2D:4D digit ratio = 1.00), while in men the ring finger is usually slightly longer (digit ratio = 0.98): a tiny sex difference.
Nanowire generators could one day lead to medical devices powered by the patient’s own heart. A tiny, nearly invisible nanowire can convert the energy of pulsing, flexing muscles inside a rat’s body into electric current, researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology have shown.
Zhong Lin Wang and his research group attached special designed nano wires to a rats diaphragm and heart. When the rat breathes and its heart beats they could respective generate about four pico-amps of current at two millivolts and 30 pico-amps at about three millivolts. Although this amount of current is extremely low (a pico-amp is a million millionth of an amp), it holds many promises for powering nano sized devices. Wang’s team is now looking at combining multiple nano wires to harvest more energy.
The nano wire is made of zinc oxide and placed on a flexible polymer. By encapsulating it with another polymer the nano wire is protected from bodily fluids. The wires generate energy under mechanical stress, which is called the piezoelectric effect. Wang’s team has now proven this could effect could also work inside the body of a living being.
Perhaps someday we could charge our mobile by our own heart power?
Full paper: Advanced Materials, via: Techreview.
