Mothership
A ship shipping ships. Like the bees, who help the flowers propagate, have people become the sex organs of technology? Peculiar image of the week.
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 ‘Wild-systems’
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Artist Creates Portraits of Strangers Using DNA in Discarded Hair
Through cigarette butts and strands of loose hair, we constantly and carelessly discard our genetic material. One New York-based artist, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, used these random traces left behind by unsuspecting strangers to make sculptures of what their owners might look like.
In her Stranger Visions series, Dewey-Hagborg created physical models using DNA facial modeling software and a 3D printer. The masks reflect eye color, geographical roots, sex, and other traits, but not exact facial features because forensic phenotyping can’t yet fill in all the details. Stranger Visions calls attention to the potential for a culture of “genetic surveillance” made possible by inexpensive $1,000 DNA sequencers. “As a society,” says Dewey-Hagborg, ”we need to have a discussion about that.”
Soon, our entire genome may be accessible to strangers within minutes, with fears of cloning or genetic hacking to go along with it. It’s unsettling to think that our DNA, and therefore our identities, are not as precious as we think they are.
Via Designboom.
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33% of All Seafood in the United States Is Fraudulently Labeled
A new study from the marine conservation group Oceana reveals that a full one-third of seafood across the US is mislabeled. Not surprisingly, the most expensive fish is also the most lied-about. Tuna was anything but tuna 57% of the time, while red snapper was another species in a whopping 87% of all cases. While cheaper, harmless species like tilapia are often substituted for the real deal, there’s at least one health threat on record: “White tuna” might actually be escolar, a tasty fish that nonetheless causes oily, explosive diarrhea.
As with the horse meat scandal, it’s astonishing how few consumers can tell the difference between species the we assume to be wildly different. It all comes down to marketing that treats fish like brands – just as that Nike swoosh is more important than the shoe itself, the words “bluefin tuna” matter far more than the actual taste.
Image from Flickr user Whologwhy.
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Echte Natuur is niet Groen
De menselijke impact op onze planeet kan nauwelijks worden onderschat. Klimaatverandering, massa-urbanisatie, synthetische biologie. Ongerepte natuur wordt steeds zeldzamer, tegelijkertijd wordt onze technologische omgeving zo complex en oncontroleerbaar dat we deze als een natuur op zichzelf gaan ervaren. Ons beeld van natuur moet worden aangepast.
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Project Genesis
Project Genesis is a short movie which imagines an alternate world populated by old Macintosh computers, directed by Alessio Fava. In this world the computers get excited about new releases of ‘Humans’.
Via Gizmodo
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A Robot to Make Rats Depressed
The robot in the picture above chases and attacks the living rat rights besides it. The W-3, as the robot is named, is designed to make rats seriously depressed. In fact, this robot is one of the best methods to induce depression in lab rats.
Making a rat depressed might seem strange or even unethical, but researchers have already done it for years. After all, you can’t develop antidepressants without having depressed rats to test them on. Current methods to make rats depressed, like making them swim for hours or giving them electric shocks, do not quite mimic the day-to-day situations humans go through. Therefore, the researchers at Tokyo’s Waseda University developed a robot that more precisely mimics the social stressors that can trigger depression in humans.
I wonder how a depression-inducing robot for humans might look.
Story via Spectrum IEEE.
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Offshore Wind Farms Generate Their Own Microclimates
As we strive to milk all available energy from nature, we not only harvest but alter our surroundings in the process. By mixing the warm sea air with cooler air above, offshore wind farms create their own clouds and could even alter weather and storm patterns. This phenomenon might even project the future potential of constructing wind farms to disperse storms and evade natural disasters before they happen.
From the Greenopolis website: “Wind farms receive a lot of praise in the fight against climate change. Along with solar, they’re often pitched as our last hope for energy independence. Ironically, not only do they “fight” climate change but they also create micro-climates… Studies have shown that wind farms are even capable of changing weather patterns.”
Image via Greenopolis.
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‘Victimless Shelter’ Grown from Pig Cells
It’s a self-evident truth that there’s nothing that can’t be better with bacon – including housing. While Next Nature was busy dreaming up new in vitro meat (IVM) foods, the mad scientists of Terreform ONE in New York went ahead and designed an entire dwelling made of IVM pig cells. While the prototype for the “victimless shelter” is just conventional pig leather, the real deal (if it ever exists) would be a complex structure with tissue-engineered bone for support and giant sphincters for windows. We’ll leave it up to the religious authorities to decide whether a pork house is kosher.
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Chinese Whisper Challenge Pits Man Against Machine
What would happen if you let computer and man compete? Not in obvious ways, like who can do faster calculations or win the Jeopardy game show. Rather, what about a challenge right on the border of our abilities?
Speech is one such border. Many smartphones have fairly advanced speech recognition. Although humans can still recognize spoken words much better than a computer, we can easily misinterpret a message or forget it. To pit human against machine, design student Ylja Band made an online experiment in which she makes man and machine compete in the form of the Chinese whisper challenge. The human participant and the computer try to pass the same message via speech, ending up with very different results.
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Moral Shortcomings in the Technology Debate
Digital and genetic techniques increasingly influence life. Our belief in progress through technology stands in the way of a moral debate on this development.
By Rinie van Est
We keep a close watch on what voters and members of parliament want, but the future of our society is determined by something else: technological development. At least, that’s what thinkers such as Dominique Janicaud believe, who wrote: ‘Technological power is more revolutionary than any revolution; it comes from above, no one can know where it is going’. In views such as these, the role of politics is limited to properly spreading technological innovations. I do not agree with this. Without trying to undermine the revolutionary force of technology, I do think politics is capable of a democratic steering of technology to a certain degree. In fact, I believe that interaction between the political domain and the techno-economic domain is the essence of our democracy. But here, politics is neglectful, because it has a blind spot for the ideological role that technology plays in our society.
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Subjective Map of the Internet
Our peculiar image of the week was made by Koen Taselaar for Museum of the Image. Ink on paper, 220 x 150 cm. We recommend viewing in full size.
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Nature is Dead, Long live Nature
Today the human impact on our planet can hardly be underestimated. Climate change, population explosion, genetic manipulation, digital networks, hurricane control and engineered microbes. Untouched old nature is almost nowhere to be found. “We were here,” echoes all over. This omnipresence of human activity motivated some to announce the end of nature and proclaim a post natural future. Contrary to these observations, I believe that it is not nature that died, disappeared or became obsolete, rather that our notion of nature is changing.
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Army Protected Organic Foods
Over the last few decades, the public has been – and still is – creating awareness on the values of organically produced foods. For many foodies an important value of organic foods is the pure production process, without synthetic pesticides and chemical fertilizers.
The food industry tries to capitalize on this by increasing their yield in other ways. To minimize crop losses and thus maximize revenues, they have started to engineer killer bugs. These bugs are programmed to act as pesticides, eating and killing insects to protect the crops.
However, an ethical question arises. Are we now relocating the chemical process of crop preservation from the crops themselves to the insects? Is it better to modify and “enhance” these bugs, so the issue shifts from the crops to a new species and thus an altered ecosystem?
Via Businessweek. Illustration by Gerald Leung.
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Cigarettes: Bad for You, Good for Birds
Birds use whatever they can get their beaks on to build nests, including cigarette butts. Surprising new research from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México shows that instead of giving baby birds a bad case of smoker’s cough, the cigarettes in their nests might actually be helping them. The more used-up filters a nest had, the fewer nest-dwelling parasites called it home.
Since nicotine is a natural pesticide, it’s likely that trace remains of the chemical in the butts are keeping away the creepy-crawlies. The researchers still don’t know if the birds are using butts because they’re good insulators, or if they’re somehow aware of their anti-parasite properties. Birds in more wild environments have been known to line their nests with strong-smelling, bug-repelling herbs, so it’s possible they’re instinctively attracted to that special cigarette stink.
Via Io9
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Should I be Afraid of…
Beyond the doomsday hype, what should we actually fear for the future? For doom-mongers delight, the Berlin-based design studio Bold Futures made a handy poster + interactive graph of the fatal disasters that might snuff us someday.
Their doom menu ranges from irresponsible human behavior gone astray, to ‘natural’ disasters, to out-of-control technology. Notice that mixing the various scenario’s results in a lethal next nature cocktail. Let’s hope we can avoid such dystopia and manage to plot out a more rewarding track towards the future. Anyhow, we can be sure we will get the next nature we deserve.
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Painted by Robot
The Senseless Drawing Robot is a painting robot that interprets nearby street and sidewalk traffic and turns it into sprays of pigment. The robot is turning chaos into order, and then injecting that order with a bit more chaos. Japanese designers So Kanno and Takahiro Yamaguchi have found a way around the input-output nature of these drawing machines by mounting a double pendulum on top of a modified electric skateboard and a pressure-based paint system. The Senseless Drawing Robot has a level of unpredictability akin to Pollock’s dripping brush. Can we earnestly claim that this robot is doing things all that differently from Pollock?
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New Robot Turns Poo into Energy
Though disgusting, sewage is an abundant, nutrient-rich resource. Researchers at the University of West England have taken advantage of this fact by creating a robot that turns human poo into energy. The EcoBotIII has an artificial stomach that consists of layers of microbial fuel cells that digest sewage and transform them into fuel. In case you’re wondering, the robot has a “solid waste excretion mechanism“, so it can poop just like you do. The hope is that autonomous robots such as these might patrol sewer systems looking for problems, or be put to work in sewage treatment plants to drive down treatment costs.
Thanks to Yuri for the heads up.
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Desire Paths
Design by planning vs design by doing. Desire paths are unplanned paths grown by the erosion of its use. They emerge as shortcuts where constructed pathways take a circuitous route. Perhaps one day, all our roads will be desire paths.
