Vector Stones
These stones were dug up by future archaeologists, some centuries after the integration of the digital and the material world was completed. No seriously, our peculiar image of the week was created by Veronica Ranner.
What is Next Nature?
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.
Posts Tagged ‘Hypernature’
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Glass Gem Corn Looks Like Jewelry
Most corn has been selectively bred over the centuries to be a single color: yellow, white or blue. Glass gem corn, a varietal grown by Greg Schoen, harkens back to the days when each kernel of corn was a different color. This variation is due to the fact that, rather than being identical, all the kernels are genetically distinct siblings.
The glass gem echoes the jewel caterpillar, another organism than by dint of its otherworldly beauty recently went from natural phenomena to internet phenomena. Even though we live in a time where computer graphics make every chimeric beast and landscape visible, we’re still just as – or even more –interested in natural freaks as our ancestors who once flocked to fairs and sideshows.
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Featured Page #01: Hypernature
During the coming weeks, we will present a selection of our favourite pages from the Next Nature book. To kick the series off, we’ll start with a spread about hypernature; the enhanced version of nature.
Much of the so-called ‘nature’ in our lives has taken on an artificial authenticity. Engineered tomatoes are redder, rounder, and larger than the ones from our gardens. Domestic pets could not survive in the wild, but prosper by triggering our empathy. We have made fluorescent fish, rainbow tulips and botanical gardens that contain species from every corner of the globe.
Human design has turned nature into hypernature, an exaggerated simulation of a nature that never existed. It’s better than the original, a little bit prettier and slicker, safer and more convenient. Hypernature emerges where the born and the made meet. It presents itself as nature, yet arguably, it is culture in disguise.
Note from the editor: This spread is a perfect example of the relation between this website and our Next Nature book. Over the years, we have posted several stories about hypernature, but we never really pinned the term down. The editing process of the book allowed us to study it much better and come to a better understanding of what it is, and how it should be described. Which in return resulted in the thematic sections you can find on this website, like this one about hypernature.
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Featured here are pages 124-125 from the book Next Nature: Nature Changes Along with Us. More information about the book can be found here.
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Amsterdam’s Canals by Bacterial Light
Italian architect Carlo Morsiani would like to take Amsterdam’s canals from dark, dank and filled with old bikes, to brilliant, blue, and presumably still filled with old bikes. Morsiani recently proposed adding bioluminescent members of Photobacterium to the city’s waterways. With the canals stocked with motion-sensitive bacteria, any passing boats or accidental swimmers would leave a hazy blue trail in their wake.
The idea is not entirely untenable – bioluminescent organisms congregate in such density in Vieques, Puerto Rico, that the bay has become a tourist attraction. Since these tropical organisms produce only weak light, Morsiani has a lot of genetic modification to work out before these bacteria can adjust to life in Europe. Add glowing canals to buildings coated with Photobacterium and transgenic streetlight trees, and we might never have to change a lightbulb again.
Story via The Pop-Up City.
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First “Farm”aceuticals Grown in Carrots
The United States Food and Drug Administration recently approved Elelyso, the first drug to be grown in genetically modified plant cells. Produced in carrot cells, this drug helps to treat the symptoms of Gaucher disease, a genetic disorder that causes bruising, anemia and low blood platelets.
Israeli scientists were able to insert a gene that codes for a human enzyme into carrot cells, causing the cells to produce the same protein that Gaucher patients lack. This new method should help prevent drug shortages that have affected Gaucher sufferers in the past, as well as being cheaper and less prone to infection than animal cells. Soon mothers may be telling their children to eat carrots, not just for better eyesight, but for better health across the board.
Story via Nature. Photo via Flickr user Loose Ends
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How To Grow Your Own Sneaker
Bioengineer Raymond Ong remixes the beauty & variety of nature into something nature could not have imagined. By transferring the DNA of existing animal patterns on the skin of stingray fishes, his company creates uniquely customized fish leather. This leather is then used to produce highly personalized sneakers.
Grow your own
fishsneaker at Rayfish.com. -
Making Deserts Flourish
Using only plastic sheets and an irrigation-nutrient system, a Japanese researcher has found a way to change agriculture as we know it. Professor Yuichi Mori argues in his talk at TEDx Tokyo that a film made of hydrogel with nano-sized holes in it is the most important ingredient for growing crops.
The roots of plants will attach themselves to the transparent membrane plastic and the technique uses much less fertilizer and one tenth of the water to produce the same amount of crops as in conventional agriculture.
According to Mori any surface in the world will work, from contaminated ground from the Tsunami in Japan in 2011 to the desert. This last statement is being tested at the moment, as desert greenhouses in the Middle East are supplied with the technique.
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Creating the World’s Cutest Fruit
Just like corn, bananas, and essentially any other plant we cultivate, the Cutie mandarin is the result of a concerted effort to produce an ideal food. Mandarin oranges come from wild orange trees that grew in India, possibly as long as three millennia ago. Introduced to the West in the 19th century, the mandarin has since been carefully bred, even irradiated, to bring tasty new mutations to market.
The Cutie’s peel comes off like zipper. The fruit is small, seedless, and sugar-sweet. Gone is the hassle of wrangling with a tough peel, or spitting out pips with every bite. The Cutie is, in fact, about as close to a candy bar as a fruit can get. There’s even a saccharine marketing campaign to go along with them: Cuties are made for kids.
The mandarin’s perfection, however, dispenses with a relationship that’s as old as flowering plants. Like all citrus, Cuties produce seeds when they’re pollinated. To produce a dependable snack, Cutie growers must protect their orchards from bees and other pollinators via nets, physical isolation, or other means. Effectively fencing out bees from huge sources of nectar, this widespread farming practice may be a contributing factor to hive collapse. Developers of the Tango, another mandarin variety, have bypassed this issue by producing a completely sterile fruit.
Via Smithsonian Magazine.
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Artificial Islands for a Tsunami-Proof Japan
Keiichiro Sako of Sako Architects has proposed constructing giant, drum-shaped islands on dry land as a means to protect residents of Tohoku from future tsunamis. The elevated disks come equipped with renewable energy sources in case of emergency, and gates that automatically close after a tsunami warning. While one town is already making a move to install an “island”, the cost and culture may prove prohibitive for wide-scale implementation. With a price tag of 20 billion yen, and a futuristic look, residents of conservation coastal towns may not appreciate the design.
Via Pruned and New Scientist.
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Bunny Doesn’t Grow on Trees
Having trouble getting the kids to eat their fruits and vegetables? Try turning their 5-a-day into a trendy, collectible toy. We’ve seen Buddha fruit and square watermelons before, but never anything with as much vinyl-art cache as I Like to Eat, a custom Labbit toy by Motorboat.
Peculiar image of the week. Thanks to Jeremyriad for the heads-up.
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Adorably Endangered Kitten Born to Domestic Cat Surrogate
“Crystal”, an endangered black-footed cat, was recently born to a domestic cat surrogate at the Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species. The birth was achieved using a previously frozen embryo, marking the first successful implementation of this method for this species. Last year, the center also pioneered the first in-vitro fertilization of black-footed cats. First mice, now cats, maybe Neanderthals next.
Story via the Times Picayune.
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Slavoj Žižek abandons Nature
The always excellent VPRO Tegenlight made an interview with Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek in which he talks about the ongoing ecological crisis and concludes that Nature doesn’t exist, at least not as the balanced and harmonic force we traditionally take it for.
Of course our faithful readers – yes thats you! – already long know that Nature is better understood as a dynamic force that changes along with us. Even so it is an illuminating joy to hear Žižek express it in his own eccentric words.
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Living with Nature in the Post-Suburbs
MoMA in New York has a new exhibit exploring what can be done with American’s only seemingly inexhaustible resource: foreclosed homes and sparsely inhabited suburbs. Nature-City, a proposal by WORKac, turns the cookie-cutter town of Keizer, Oregon into a model city that incorporates just about every on-trend proposition in urban planning. There’s farmer’s markets, rooftop farms, and fuel cells integrated into the buildings’ design.
After this, however, Nature-City has some clever tricks up its sleeves. A water tower housed at the top of an apartment block cascades down as an indoors waterfall. Buildings are equipped with cut-outs and internal parks to encourage animal migration. The strangest structure might be an enormous dome that uses methane from the city’s waste to heat public swimming pools. As an update on Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, it’s playful, utopian, and probably a nice place to live.
For more photos, visit Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream.
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Lucy McRay – Swallowable Parfum
Know garlic? Now imagine you could make something that functions alike, but smells a lot better. Body architect Lucy McRae teams up with Harvard Biologist Sheref Mansy to create a digestible scented capsule that works through your own perspiration.
Once absorbed, fragrance molecules are excreted through the skin’s surface. A unique odor is emanated, depending on each individual’s acclimatization to temperatures, to stress, exercise, or sexual arousal. Watch Lucy’s presentation at the Next Nature Power Show.
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Better Than Nature?
At the turn of the millennium, miniaturized canines acquired the cherished status of living, designer handbag ornaments. These teeny tiny photogenic doggies, which had been shrunken from generations of in breeding, were snapped up by fashionistas who pouted alongside them in front of seas of clicking cameras.
In just a fragment of evolutionary time, today’s ‘to die for’ bio-couture has been genetically spliced with jellyfish signatures. These trophies are freer to roam and easier to find than their miniaturised predecessors, as they can glow under UV, or ‘black’ light. Although not all varieties can fit in a clutch purse yet, there is an impressive range of designer ‘glo’ organisms available in green and red (blue is possible but isn’t as impressive under UV light). Options include fruit flies, fish, mice, chickens, rabbits, pigs and cats (for glo-cats, see here, here and here).
Science justifies these media friendly creations in service of the greater public good. Yet these animals have great popular appeal that speaks little to their ability to fight cancer or other diseases. Despite their ‘freaky’ designer origins, glo pets are undeniably ‘cute’. Genetic modification is part of a spectrum of technological approaches offered by the new science of synthetic biology, which enable us to overcome the apparent lottery of nature. The fundamental ‘vanity’ at the heart of synthetic biology is that we can do ‘better’ than nature, but is this actually possible?
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Growing Plants in the Dark
While sunlight contains all colors, the dominant type of chlorophyll in plants only needs purple light to function. This simple fact has big implications for the future of farming. Crops planted in soil, of course, depend on the sun, while commercial greenhouses use white light to grow their crops. All that extra red, green and yellow energy is wasted on the plants.
PlantLab has taken advantage of chlorophyll’s little quirk. By using red and blue LEDs to create purple light, they have dramatically cut the energy needed to grow plants indoors. The special lights boost the efficiency of photosynthesis from 9% to between 12 and 15%. Growing plants in a closed system conserves heat, water, and nutrients, and cuts the need for pesticides. Since the crops no longer need access to sunlight, they can be grown in dense stacks. The future of vertical farming looks a lot like a nightclub for plants.
Watch the introductory video here.
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Any Sufficiently Advanced Civilization is Indistinguishable from Nature
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” [1]
In Western cultures, nature is a cosmological, primal ordering force and a terrestrial condition that exists in the absence of human beings. Both meanings are freely implied in everyday conversation. We distinguish ourselves from the natural world by manipulating our environment through technology. In What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly proposes that technology behaves as a form of meta-nature, which has greater potential for cultural change than the evolutionary powers of the organic world alone.
With the advent of ‘living technologies’ [2], which possess some of the properties of living systems but are not ‘truly’ alive, a new understanding of our relationship to the natural and designed world is imminent. This change in perspective is encapsulated in Koert Van Mensvoort’s term ‘next nature’, which implies thinking ‘ecologically’, rather than ‘mechanically’. The implications of next nature are profound, and will shape our appreciation of humanity and influence the world around us.
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Raise Crops on the Moon with Plant-Growing Jelly
In dry areas like the desert, on mountain tops or on the moon it’s impossible to grow anything. Or is it? A rain in the desert sparks extreme plant growth from the moment the raindrops hit the ground. As long as the ground is irrigated and fertilized, plants will grow during the warm periods of the day. For some regions, the nights are another challenge. In the desert, temperatures drop drastically at night. For farmers, its a big challenge to keep the soil “livable” for plants, and to cope with the drastic temperature differences between day and night. Money is another problem. There needs to be a stable environment for plants to grow in, at low costs. That’s what the Plant-Growing Jelly project seeks to solve.
Conceived of by industrial design students Ruud van Reijmersdal, Tom Slijkhuis, Joppe Spaans and Jeroen Rood, this speculative project consists of a gel which serves as an ideal growing environment for food crops. The gel contains all the vital nutrients for a plant to grow, and insulates it from extremes of temperatures. Isolated the plant from the outside world could enable plants to grow anywhere, even on the moon. This enriched environment would attractive for mass-production, as fruits and vegetables could grow faster, earlier, and take up less space than traditional methods.
Want to learn more about the inspiration and specifics for this project? Read the project report.
