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February 26 2012
The future of Assisted Living
Arjen Born, a Dutch Photographer, envisions the future of assisted living through hilarious and moving photographs.
Photography often reside in the realm of the nostalgic past, but Arjen dares to look forward. He does not question if robots will assist us in our daily life, he questions how robots will do this.
Via GUP
February 23 2012
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.
February 21 2012
Nanotech Bracelet Detects Allergies
Designed by Luc de Smet, Awear is a speculative bracelet that can detect and record the sources of allergies for children in uncontrolled environments, such as schools and playgrounds. While the child wears the bracelet, parents or teachers can check the results on a computer or smartphone. It can be removed at any time when it is deemed no longer necessary or in the way.
Awear works by using an array of nanosize Raman spectroscopes that can scan any surface where light pierces. These miniature spectroscopes would look inside the wearer’s skin to see if an allergic reaction is occurring, and then analyze the surrounding air to detect what allergens are in range. GPS or another similar technology would record the location. The bracelet could be linked with others to share information, and could be modified to give warnings when certain known allergens are in range.
Want to design your own speculative nanotech? Check out the Call for Products in the second edition of the NANO Supermarket.
February 20 2012
Surviving Progress
Click here to view the embedded video.
Montreal filmmakers Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks’ documentary feature, Surviving Progress presents the story of human advancement and reveals the risk of running the 21st century’s software — our know-how — on the ancient hardware of our primate brain which hasn’t been upgraded in 50,000 years. It is up to us to prove that making apes smarter was not an evolutionary dead-end.
Thanks Linda.
February 19 2012
February 18 2012
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.
The Universe of Things, by the British science fiction writer Gwyneth Jones (2010) [3] takes the idea of an ecological existence to its logical extreme. She examines an alien civilization whose technology is intrinsically alive. Tools are extrusions of the alien’s own biology and extend into their surroundings through a wet, chemical network.
The idea of existing in a vibrant, organic habitat is an increasingly realistic prospect as living technologies are now being designed to counter the ravages of global industrialization. These can even be implemented at a citywide scale. For example, Arup’s Songdo International Business District, in South Korea, is being built on 1,500 acres of land reclaimed from the Yellow Sea. Incorporating rainwater irrigation and a seawater canal, this design suggests that the building industry is aspiring to use living technologies to revitalize urban environments via geoengineering. The Korean artist Do Ho Suh had proposed to build a bridge that connects his homes in Seoul and New York by harnessing natural forces and using synthetic biologies to literally ‘grow’ a trans-Pacific bridge.
The apparent science fictional nature of ecological-scale projects has prompted science fiction author Karl Schroeder to observe that the large-scale harnessing of ecologies might explain our current lack of success in encountering advanced alien civilizations. Schroeder explains the Fermi Paradox – the apparent contradiction between the likelihood that extraterrestrial civilizations exist and the lack of evidence for them – by speculating that we have not yet encountered our cosmic neighbors because they are indistinguishable from their native ecology.
“Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from nature.”
Despite our visions and desires for a more ecologically integrated kind of technology, the scientific paradigm, which underpins technological development, considers the world to be a machine. Ecologist Fern Wickson argues that humans are intertwined in a complex web of biological systems and cannot be included within a definition of nature where “an atom bomb becomes as ‘natural’ as an anthill” and wonders whether there is a better definition of nature [4].
Changing the definition of nature is not the solution to Wikson’s conundrum. The scientific method is actually responsible for this paradox. If the problem of human connectedness to the natural world is to be resolved, then science itself needs to change. Modern science relies on ‘natural laws’ that use mathematical proofs and the metaphor of machines to convey its universal truths. In the 1950s Robert Rosen observed that when physics is used to describe biology, a generalization occurs that distorts reality [5].
Alan Turing noted in his essay on morphogenesis that mathematical abstraction couldn’t capture the richness of the natural world [6]. Life is a complex system that is governed by a variety of unique processes that machines simply do not possess. Life responds to its environment, constantly changes with time and is made up of functional components that enables life the ability to self-regulate [7]. Complexity challenges the epistemological basis on which modern science and industry are grounded.
So what does complex science mean for our relationship with nature? Are we separate from or intrinsically connected to the natural world? In a complex system we are both. Our actions through technology are intrinsically governed by the physical and chemical constraints of the terrestrial environment, yet we also possess agency and a capacity to modify our surroundings. But if we are connected to nature, then is Wikson right that our propensity to innovate through technology becomes a meaningless idea?
Science Fiction author and cultural commentator Bruce Sterling proposes a further play on Clarke’s dictum and wryly observes that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from its garbage.”
You’ve got to hand it to Sterling – his observational powers are immaculate! Garbage explains how we can be connected to nature – but not in an unlimited way. We subjectively distinguish ourselves from the natural world by ‘editing’ our networks through the process of making garbage. We choose what is important to us by applying cultural, rather than material criteria, which does not lend itself to empirical measurement. Turing had already grasped the importance of personal bias in dealing with complex systems and devised the ‘Imitation Game’ to address the conundrum of intelligence, which evaded an easy empirical solution. This is now more popularly know as the ‘Turing Test’ and is now being used more widely to fathom complex systems and to identify ‘life’ [8].
Suppose then, that scientist observes distant aliens that are so highly advanced that their technology works in concert with the generative natural forces of their planet. Using our current empirical methods of observation, scientists will note the alien landscapes, but they will not be able to discriminate the meaning that is flowing within its organizing networks. Yet the flow and structure of information within the planetary terrain is of vital importance in establishing just exactly what is technology, what is garbage and what is ‘life’. The issue here is how can we ‘prove’ meaning? Currently we do not have the right tools, materials and methods that enable us to ask the ‘why’ questions that Aristotle was so fond of, and which could be most revealing in this context [9].
The development of living technologies and the cultural questions that Next Nature asks are important steps to be taken along the journey towards a more ecological kind of human development. Until complex technologies can be built and deduced from their meaning: Any sufficiently advanced civilization will be indistinguishable from its nature – and also from its garbage.
Image via Zeutch.
[1]Clarke, A.C. (1973) Clarke’s Third Law, quoted from the essay Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination in Profiles of the Future, Harper and Row, p. 21.
[2] Bedau, M., (2009). Living Technology Today and Tomorrow, Special Issue: Living Buildings: Plectic Systems Architecture, Technoetic Arts A Journal of Speculative Research, Volume 7, Number 2, Intellect Books, pp.199-206.
[3] Jones, Gwyneth (2010). The Universe of Things. Seattle: Aqueduct Press.
[4] Fern Wickson, “What is nature, if it’s more than just a place without people?”, Nature 456, 29 (6 November 2008) | doi:10.1038/456029b. 2. Editorial, “Handle with care,” Nature 455, 263-264 (18 September 2008) | doi:10.1038/455263b.
[5] Rosen, R. 1996. “On the limits of Scientific knowledge” in /Boundaries and barriers:on the limits to scientific knowledge./ (J. L. Casti and A. Karlqvist, eds.). Reading: Addison-Wesley. pp199-214.
[6] Turing, A.M. (1952). The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, /Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, /Vol. 237, No. 641. (Aug. 14, 1952), pp. 37-72.
[7] Maturana, H. R. and F. J. Varela. 1980. /Autopoieses and cognition: The realization of the living. /Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
[8] L. Cronin, N. Krasnogor, B.G. Davis, C. Alexander, N. Robertson, J.H.G. Steinke, S.L.M. Schroeder, A.N. Khlobystov, G. Cooper, P.M. Gardner, P. Siepmann, B.J. Whitaker, D. Marsh,. (2006) “The imitation game—a computational chemical approach to recognizing life” Nature Biotech., 2006, 24, 1203-1205.
[9]Rosen, R. 1996. “On the limits of Scientific knowledge” in /Boundaries and barriers:on the limits to scientific knowledge./ (J. L. Casti and A. Karlqvist, eds.). Reading: Addison-Wesley. pp199-214.
February 16 2012
Conservationists Turn Their Sights on Urban Habitats
For city-dwellers, the closest ‘true wilderness’ to be found is usually the weeds sprouting in abandoned lots. Snow-capped, postcard nature might be beautiful but is often inaccessible. The Nature Conservancy, a US-based charity that buys up land to stop development, is debating re-focusing its conservation ethic on the concrete jungle. With 50% of the human population now living in cities, the Conservancy is worried that a wilderness-focused message is loosing its relevance for urbanites.
Bill Ulfelder, the director of the Nature Conservancy in New York, sees the 22,000 acres of roof in the city as a vast potential habitat. “There’s a lot of talk about rooftop gardens and storm-water catchment,” Ulfelder says, “But this is also a great opportunity to put habitat back in the city. Let’s think about habitat for pollinators and birds.” A concentrated effort to bring wild organisms back into an urban environment may mean that we can soon welcome birds more exotic than the standard pigeons, sparrows, and redtail hawks. Let’s hope our kids still remember the word for ‘heron’ or ‘magpie’.
Story via Grist. Image via Wallyg. Thanks to twitter-er Namhenderson for the heads-up.
February 09 2012
Evolution is Blind
…thus it walks into a lot of dead alleys. Peculiar image of the week.
February 08 2012
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.
February 02 2012
Hybrid Hummer
Who knows after some future energy crisis, it becomes en vogue to use a horse to pull your horseless carriage. For now it is our peculiar image of the week. Created by Walter Robinson.
February 01 2012
Bonobos (And Maybe Baboons) Domesticated Themselves
While evidence indicates that humans domesticated themselves, we’re not the only primates capable of self-domestication. Bonobos and baboons have shown they are just as capable of turning a kinder, gentler, and more cuddly culture into hardwired changes in their genomes.
Bonobos, aka the “sexy ape”, look a lot like chimpanzees and share the same forest habitat. It stands to reason that they should be similar in most other regards, but the two species are wildly different. On a physical level, bonobos have smaller skulls and canine teeth, but their greatest differences lie in the social realm. Bonobos are the laid-back lovers compared to the chimpanzee’s neurotic warmongers.
Bonobos spend more time playing and grooming than chimps. They have sex for just about any reason: so say hello, to solve conflicts, to celebrate finding food. A “bonobo handshake” is not how humans would want to start a business meeting. In the bonobo’s reduced physical stature and playful spirit, researchers have recently recognized the same changes that occurred when wolves became dogs, or when aurochs became cattle. But while dogs needed humans for domestication, bonobos have done it all on their own.
What distinguishes bonobos from their chimp cousins is food availability. Duke University anthropologist Brian Hare argues that bonobos have gorillas, or their absence, to thank for their peaceful lives. One million to two million years ago, the newly formed Congo River split the proto-bonobo-chimps into two populations. The northern population had to compete with gorillas for scarce food. This created an aggressive, scheming culture that eventually lead to Machiavellian lifestyle of the modern chimpanzee. The lucky southern population got to keep all the leaves and fruits to themselves. This abundance of resources lead to a culture of happy-go-lucky apes that, over the course of a million years, evolved into today’s bonobos.
If this process of speciation by culture seems far-fetched, a similar process has been underway for the last three decades in Kenya’s savannah. In 1983, an outbreak of bovine tuberculosis lead to a permanent change in the social structure of a troop of olive baboons. The dominant males in the so-called Forest Troop were the only baboons aggressive enough to venture to the trash heap of a tourist lodge and fight over scraps of meat tainted with tuberculosis. Every last one of the troop’s most aggressive members kneeled over dead from bad beef.
The survivors found themselves in something of a baboon utopia. Subordinate males and females were no longer subject to the violent moods and giant canines of the alphas. The Forest Troop spent more time grooming each other, and sat closer together when they were relaxing. The benefits extended all the way down to the most subordinate baboons, who showed significantly lowered levels of stress hormones.
This fascinating cultural shift has persisted for thirty years, even though aggressive, outsider males have continually moved into the troop. Though no active teaching takes place, the outsider males appear to learn the joys of non-violence all on their own, probably because females prefer to spend more time with companions that don’t bite.
As of now, there’s no evidence that the Forest Troop has changed genetically, or that it will persist given the pressure from other baboons. However, if the Forest Troop became geographically isolated, or if their culture could be transmitted to other troops, a million years or so might be sufficient to create a cuter, kinder monkey: the baboon version of the bonobo.
The case of the stress-free baboons may indicate that in the lack of savage competition for resources, highly social primates naturally gravitate towards what feels good. Maybe even early humans realized they’d rather spend their time talking, singing, and having recreational sex than ripping each other apart.
Photo by Lens Envy, LaggedOnUser, and Wikipedia.
January 25 2012
Greetings from the Ohio Turnpike
Apparently freeways have obtained a level of nostalgia that they are now suitable objects to be depicted on postcards (speaking of nostalgic objects). Perhaps one day in the future, freeways will be remembered as the fossils of a society dominated by auto-mobility. Peculiar image of the week.
January 24 2012
Dumpster Fish the Future of Farming
Cities have seen guerilla gardens, rooftop honey production, and fire escape chicken coops. Now, urban farmers may be adding aquaculture to the mix. Headed by ex-banker Christopher Toole, the Society for Aquaponic Values and Education in the Bronx, New York, raises tilapia in tanks and trashcans. Closed recirculating systems use the waste from the fish to fertilize herbs like mint and basil. Toole and his girlfriend and partner, Anya Pozdeeva, envision a future where neighborhood fish like “Bronx Best Blue Tilapia” become a thriving local industry.
Efforts from Toole and other New York tilapia pioneers like NYU professor Martin P. Schreibman may represent the future of fish. As cities grow, and wild fish stocks dwindle to near-depletion by 2050, the urban production of hardy, freshwater species like the tilapia could be a sustainable way for city-dwellers to have their fish and eat it too. Urban aquaculture faces some steep hurdles before becoming a profitable venture. Similar small-scale city fish farms have flopped over costs and lack of demand. However, there is one bright spot: In China, which has practiced fish farming since 2,000 BC, indoor recirculating aquaculture is doing a booming business.
Photo via Blue Ridge Aquaculture.
January 21 2012
Rule #7: Respect Social Standards
Part 7 of the 11 part series Golden Rules of Anthropomorphism and Design.
Anthropomorphic products enter the human social space. Humans have the most complex social behavior of any organism on Earth. Anyone or anything trying to join in should be careful to do it right. Although an anthropomorphic product may function perfectly, if it crosses social boundaries it will still tick people off. This can cause the product to become a social reject, which won’t do sales much good. Luckily, it’s not hard to figure out why things go wrong. Imagine a scenario where a person and a product interact, then replace the product with a second person. If the actions of the second person and the product don’t match up, then there’s something off about the product’s design.
Image via Anvari. For other parts in the series, see part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 and part 6.
January 15 2012
The Right to Privacy
Privacy is a right. A right given to people by telecommunications companies and social networking websites. It can be described by multiple-choice lists of settings. And it seems that people are extremely willing to downgrade their notion of privacy to the level of the visibility of their social media feed or the confidentiality of their recent viral video viewing history in order to fit the various trending models. Which naturally leads to the question of whether anybody can explain what their privacy is about.
What should feel alarming is that the conversation about privacy always arises after the fact—i.e. after it has been, allegedly, breached. Given that, one can (naively) presume that there is no issue whatsoever that needs to be reexamined as regards privacy unless privacy is contested. Very typical trick: if there’s no threat, things should stay the same. This simple mechanism is at the heart of the privacy ‘discourse’.
In principle, it is impossible to contest an idea which has never been articulated and explicitly expressed by the relevant parties—in this case the idea is privacy, and the party responsible for articulating and expressing it is people. In our setting there is no existing idea of privacy to contest, and that’s because threat always precedes articulation, as it was previously explained. Consequently, the privacy ‘discourse’ initiated in the social media context is not about discussing or reexamining the idea of privacy, it is about prescribing it. ‘Threat by threat’, so to speak. It is obvious that what we erroneously view as our articulation is the result of this process initiated by the previous threat—we always lag behind.
Although by being ‘privacy-aware’ you may meet the current standards of privacy that are set by others, this approach lacks personality. Too bad, personality is what gives worth to privacy. Sadly, people have been convinced that personal space can be defined as the negation of the non-personal (the non-non-personal) instead of the affirmation of the painstaking relationship-by-relationship building of our perimeter of intimacy. Therefore, it cannot be even named a space, but rather a formless mass of whatever remains after you know what could probably be (until the next threat cycle) non-personal. But the act of excluding everything that can be exposed does not necessarily entail that the result must be private. In my view, the much talked-about lack of privacy is not a deterioration of a concept but a total lack of concept in the first place.
January 12 2012
Baby Loading
Remember those long gone times when babies were delivered by white storks? Today they are simply downloaded into mom’s belly. How superhandy! Apparently every era creates its own myths. Filed under Boomeranged Metaphors. Peculiar image of the week.
Geek Mom and Baby are doing fine. Via Thinkgeek. Thanks Ad.
January 11 2012
Fotoshop Your Way to Beauty
Click here to view the embedded video.
Filmmaker Jesse Rosten shows his critical views on body standards by presenting the exclusive beauty breakthrough Fotoshop by Adobé. This revolutionary product features pro-pixel intensifying fauxtanical hydro-jargon microbead extract (now with nutritive volumizing technology). Maybe she’s born with it? No, we’re pretty sure it’s just Fotoshop.
This project is related to the Nanolift product presented in Next Nature’s Nano Supermarket.
Via The Cool Hunter and Jesse Rosten.
January 09 2012
A Fake Sun for Your 25/7 Life
The earth operates on a 24 hour cycle, and so do humans. For most of history, we didn’t have much choice in the matter. However, in the absence of visual cues light sunlight, some research indicates that humans naturally stick to a 25 hour schedule. So why rely on the earth’s rotation to order our lives?
I-Weather is a website and app that cycles through blue and orange light for a period of 25 hours, 40 minutes and 7 seconds. The blue ‘day’ suppresses the hormone melatonin and promotes wakefulness. The orange ‘night’ has no impact on melatonin or other hormones, allowing users to work or to drift off as they please. I-Weather acts like an online sun,”creating the world’s first artificial climate to satisfy the metabolic and physiological requirements of a human being in an environment partially or completely removed from earthly influences.” It’s good for travelers, insomniacs, and anyone with a grudge against sunlight.
For a more practical way to regulate your circadian rhythms, check out F.lux.
January 07 2012
What is Next Nature?
Click here to view the embedded video.
At the Next Nature Power Show 2011, our master of ceremony Koert Van Mensvoort, gave a mini lecture on our changing notion of Nature. Where technology and nature are traditionally seen as opposed, they now appear to merge or even trade places. Time to explore how we can design, build and live in a nature caused by people. More powershow video’s ahead!
January 03 2012
Search Where the Sun don’t Shine
You’re spending too much of your time in the sewers of the internet, planning to pigeon-rank your toilet visits or you’re simply feeling lucky? This peculiar shanzhai’d toilet paper might be for you. Made out of 100% virgin pulp, so no trees have died to whipe your behind.
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