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.
If your house just isn’t big enough to have a leopard, you can allways buy these 20.000 dollar cats. Nailcaps are included to prevent scratches on the matching cat furniture.
I would loooove to see Tinkebell make the worlds most expensive catbag out of this.
You can order one here | Related posts: Catbag | Stuffed toys | Lifestyle pets | Flat pets
Just like centipedes OLE can roll up into a ball when danger threatens and retract its six legs. Its heat-resistant shell is made of a ceramic-fibre compound which can withstand temperatures of 1,300 degrees centigrade while protecting the sensitive technology in its insides. (…) The beetle fights the fire with an impulse appliance. In order to protect an area the size of the Black Forest (7,000 square kilometres) from fire, 30 insects would suffice.
Janine Benyus talks about biomimcry at TED (video). Of course, weĂ‚Â likeĂ‚Â her book and appreciate the concept of biomimcry (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) a lot. Still somewhere, I am always a bit reluctant about this philosophy of design-inspired-by-old-nature. Janine’s jacket sort of sums it up: their view on the nature/culture relation tends to be rather naive.
What’s great about biomimcry is that it isn’t faking the superficial appearance of old nature (like plastic flower wallpapers), but aims to mimic old nature in its pragmatic functioning. Taking old nature as a mentor is a more modest and sympathetic attitude than the usual modernistic ‘man has to control nature’ perspective from the previous century. I would be interesting to hear Janine talk on how she thinks the categories of nature an culture would shift once the whole world has read her book.
RFID tags are tiny radio chips that resonate with a single echo when hit with a radio trigger. Kodak’s digestible tags are harmless and intentionally fragile. The tags would be covered with soft gelatin that takes a while to dissolve in the stomach. After swallowing a tag a patient need only sit next to a radio source and receiver.
They stop working when exposed to gastric acid for a specific period of time, providing a subtle way to monitor a patient’s digestive tract.
Kodak says that similar radio tags could also be embedded in an artificial knee or hip joint in such a way that they disintegrate as the joint does, warning of the need for more surgery. Attaching tags to ordinary pills could also help nurses confirm that a patient has really taken their medicine as ordered.
Read the full edible radio patent application. Via New Scientist.
The Made and the Born: Neo-Biological civillization, written by Kevin Kelly, excerpt from Out of Control : The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World, Kevin Kelly (1995) Perseus Books Group, ISBN-13: 978-0201483406.
I am sealed in a cottage of glass that is completely airtight. Inside I breathe my exhalations. Yet the air is fresh, blown by fans. My urine and excrement are recycled by a system of ducts, pipes, wires, plants, and marsh-microbes, and redeemed into water and food which I can eat. Tasty food. Good water.
Last night it snowed outside. Inside this experimental capsule it is warm, humid, and cozy. This morning the thick interior windows drip with heavy condensation. Plants crowd my space. I am surrounded by large banana leaves — huge splashes of heartwarming yellow-green color — and stringy vines of green beans entwining every vertical surface. About half the plants in this hut are food plants, and from these I harvested my dinner.
Genetically modified plants may be the green solution for cleaning up polluted sites. Researchers David Salt and John Freeman aim to develop plants that remove toxic metals from the environment in a process known as phytoremediation, or extract useful metals from soil, a process known as phytomining.
The attack of the metal eating plants! Much cheaper than bulldozing the soil and carting it off for landfill or to some decontamination facility.
In 1998 at the introduction of the iMac , Apple declared that the “i” stood for “internet”. Apple later adopted the “i” prefix across its consumer hardware and software lines. Losing its original meaning, the “i” became a “sub-brand”. In January, at the Macworld San Francisco Conference 2007, Apple Inc. introduced the iPhone.
In reaction to the introduction of the new prestigious tool, some nice “i”mages were created by both iLovers and iHaters. Check this photoshop-contest:
Another peculiar object, from Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 4.
Animals do not shape their living environment as radically as humans, but why don’t we give them some help. James Auger envisions animals, birds, reptiles and even fish becoming appreciative techno-geeks, using specially engineered gadgets to help them overcome their evolutionary shortcomings, promote their chances of survival or just simply lead easier and more comfortable lives.
Via Wired, Related: A mouse can scare the cat away, Audio Tooth.
The message is put on the seeds (before they are planted) with a laser. After the seed grows into plants, the message is emblazoned on the leaves for all to read. Can of Words is available with the following messages: Thank You, Good Luck and Get Well.
We are waiting for someone to take it to the next level and plant entire trees with ad messages on them. Comes fall, you’ll have entire streets covered with your nextnature leaflets.
Via Techdiva.
26-year old Claudia Mitchell has become the first woman to get outfitted with a bionic arm, with which she’s able to perform functions simply by thinking about them. The arm was designed by researchers at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and works by detecting the movement’s of Mitchell’s chest muscle, which has been rewired to the nerves that once served her left arm. Eventually, researchers say, the arm could even give Mitchell the sense of touch, with electrodes in the hand sending signals to her chest skin, which her brain would recognize as a sensation.
See also: telegraph.co.uk | Related post: Robotic Hand
“A glowing green logo drawn by scientists on the wing of a genetically altered butterfly could herald the day that the insects are adorned with adverts and slogans. A team at the University at Buffalo that developed the world’s first genetically modified butterfly has now adapted the work to create the fluorescent marking on the wings of the insect to demonstrate an innovative tool that will make it easier to find out what genes do, in this case those that play a role in making the patterns on wings, from stripes to eye spots.”
After reading this at Telegraph, I imagined something like the sporty butterfly picture above: Papilio Nike-Ulysses. But the original article’s abstract reads much more dryly: “Precise temporal and spatial regulation of transgene expression is a critical tool to investigate gene function in developing organisms.”
Via Adverlab, thanks to Tinkebell for the tip. Related posts: Withus Oragainstus, Wild Style.
Animal Nextnature! Using an animal as part of your lego creation. A ‘behaviour block’ can track the behaviour of the animal inside. This behavior is the nused to drive the Lego creation. This way the creation gets alive, and the animal can get enhance possibilities: a mouse can scare the cat away!
This augmented animal project was created by Joris van Gelder, Bas Groenendaal, Philip Mendels and Ivo Vos.
They make whale-like sounds, they feed, float and flock: Autonomous Light Air Vessels.
video | alavs.com
As a kid, I used to play around with toy animals made of plastic. You could stuff them and store other toys in their stomachs. Now living cows like the one in this movie start looking like my toy cows. A walking container of— yeah, a container of what? The faeces in this cows guts is a distasteful semi-finished product, nothing to be associated with a fresh glass of milk, or a good grilled biece of beef on your plate. The trick is in my observation of the cow: While watching this interesting video, I caught myself wondering when the moment would arrive we could get our bottles of milk ‘straight from the cow’ and have a natural experience of drinking milk again. I have to think about this for a while, so maybe I’ll write something about this later. Now I have some empty bottles to bring to the glass barge.
Christian Kerrigan’s project, Growing a Ship in a Yew Forest “explores the possibilities of a symbiotic relationship between two different systems of organization, technology and nature— to theoretically alter newly planted trees in the last remaining Yew forest.”(Kingley Vale)
Architect & Editor of ‘The Space Between’magazine, Christian Kerrigan investigates in his recent work, how man’s ability to control his surroundings is intimately linked with his advancing capabilities of using technology. Christian says “We have reached a point in our evolution where we are now capable of creating design criteria to manipulate natural growth and development.”
By controlling the manipulation of refined armatures, calibrating devices and designed corsets; the system is capable of controlling the growth of a ship inside the forest. The ship will grow over a period of two hundred years and will exist as a hidden architecture inside the trees.
The number of animals transformed into bots is increasing. In Japan they have created a new species to investigate ocean-life: this watersnake carries a camera, swims like an eal and is just as slippery on land.
Related post: Robocarp
technoblog.com (video) | also see: snakerobots.com and roboshark
This weekend is the last change to visit the Entry 2006 exhibition in the coalwashe building, Zollverein. Over 300 exhibits from more than 20 countries are on display. Next nature is one of the three theme’s of the Entry Paradise exhibition. If you don’t have a chance for a visit, here are some pictures.
