Moonbell: Lunar musick
Moonbell is an automated music generator that plays musical scores based on lunar topographical data obtained by Japan’s Kaguya (SELENE) explorer during its orbit around the moon from late 2007 to June 2009.
[Launch Moonbell in a new window]
Full Story: Pink Tentacle
8-Story Antigravity Forest Facade Takes Root
Probably one of the best ideas I have seen all day:
When Patrick Blanc was a boy, he suspended plants from his bedroom wall and ran their roots into a fish tank. The greenery received nourishment from the diluted—ahem—fertilizer and purified the water in return. Forty-five years on, the French botanist’s gardens have grown massive in scale. One inside a Portuguese shopping mall is larger than four tennis courts, and there’s one in Kuwait that’s almost as big. But Blanc’s recently completed facade for the Athenaeum hotel in London (shown) could be his most high-profile project yet. Looming over Green Park, it’s an eight-story antigravity forest composed of 12,000 plants.
(the rest: Wired)
Microbial Fuel Cell which cleans brackish water and produces electricty
Desalinization technology has long been trapped between two competing nightmare scenarios. Without desalination, fresh water resources run out and large swaths of the earth suffer crippling water shortages. But if we desalinate on a large scale, we keep burning fossil fuels, the earth warms, the ice caps melt, and sea levels rise to wreak havoc on coastal regions.
Desalinization could theoretically solve the impending water crisis if it weren’t such an energy-intensive process; desal requires large amounts of electricity, which is primarily generated by burning fossil fuels. Call it a catch-22. But researchers at Penn State think they’ve solved the problem by creating a process that cleans wastewater while generating electricity, simultaneously removing 90 percent of salt from seawater.
(via: POPSCI
[Another potential application of this type of fuel cell is the creation of living solar panels using cyanobacteria (which can photosynthesize with limited sunlight and using the grey water from ones home to cycle through the cell as part of a purification process. ]
Bokode: The continuing evolution of the barcode
“Bokodes open up a whole new range of applications in the areas of tagging, user interaction, machine vision and near field communication not possible with traditional barcodes.”
Look forward to seeing more applications using bokode with augmented reality.
A SHORT COURSE ON SYNTHETIC GENOMICS
6 hours worth of videos on synthetic genomics presented by George Church and J. Craig Venter.
Typhonian musical
Probably the first Musical inspired by the creative occultism of Kenneth Grant, Tales Of The New Isis Lodge presents 65 minutes of lush and occult exotica issuing from a transplutonic transmitter. Drawing its structure from the ultra decadent and ornate rituals described in Grant’s book Hecate’s Fountain English Heretic guide you through Egyptian pre-history to the fungi of Yuggoth, re-imagine flower power in an Indian Tantric idiom, describe the workings of Chinese sorcerers, realise the neither-neither hidden within the jump rhythms of Count Basie and invoke Choronzon in the Crimson Desert. Aeons in its reification and packaged in delicious artwork, stylised as a homage to Grant’s Typhonian tomes.
rest at: Heuristic England thanks LAShTAL
Survival in a post-apocalypse blackout
NATURAL catastrophes such as asteroid impacts, massive volcanic eruptions or large-scale wildfires would have periodically plunged our planet into abnormal darkness. How did life survive without the sun’s life-giving rays during such episodes? With a little help from organisms that can switch to another source of energy while they wait for sunlight to pierce the darkness once more.
To figure out how organisms might have endured periods of so-called “catastrophic darkness”, Charles Cockell of the Open University’s Centre for Earth, Planetary, Space and Astronomical Research in Milton Keynes, UK, and his team placed samples of both freshwater and marine microorganisms in darkness for six months – a period similar to what might be expected following a catastrophic event. The samples included phototrophs, which convert sunlight into usable energy, and mixotrophs, which can use sunlight or consume dead organic matter.
via New Scientist
This is Your Brain on Neurotechnology
Zack Lynch is author of The Neuro Revolution: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World (St. Martin’s Press, July 2009). Neurotechnology is the emerging science of brain imaging and other new tools for both understanding and influencing our brains.
=This well-received and well-written book was conceived as a work of popular science “to broaden the conversation” on what Lynch characterizes as the coming neurosociety. Lynch looks at how neurotechnology will impact the financial markets, law enforcement, politics, advertising and marketing, artistic expression, warfare, and even the nature of human spirituality.
The book has received accolades in the mainstream press (including Jane Pauly, at NBC) and from tech figures like Vint Cerf at Google.
Lynch is the founder and executive director of the Neurotechnology Industry Organization (NIO) and co-founder of NeuroInsights. He serves on the advisory boards of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies, Science Progress, and SocialText, a social software company.
He earned an M.A in economic geography, and a double B.S. in evolutionary biology and environmental science with high honors from UCLA. His master’s thesis examined how the Internet transforms communications and commerce.
You can follow Zack on Twitter at @neurorev
h+: You characterize the Neuro Revolution as the next revolution after the agricultural, industrial, and information revolutions. Others have characterized the Nanotechnology Revolution (for example, the ability to assemble goods at the molecular level) as such a paradigm-shattering period. Do you see a relationship between these two upcoming “revolutions?”
ZACK LYNCH: Nanotechnology is an enabling technology that will fundamentally drive progress in the neurotech sector. What makes this fundamentally unique, and why the neurotechnology revolution is so profoundly important, is that we are directing our informational and nano technologies at an entirely new domain of human progress: tools for the human mind.
We’ve spent human history — the past several thousand years as I said in the book — developing tools to improve our physical world. Now we are focused on developing tools that will take our wisdom, knowledge, and capital to develop tools that will improve our inner domain. Nanotechnology will be used to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of drugs, devices, diagnostics, and brain imaging technologies.
h+: You describe a number of emerging neurotechnologies in your book, fMRI being somewhat the granddaddy of the Neuro Revolution. Where should the smart investor be watching for the next fMRI?
ZL: Physics and biochemistry labs. The latest trend in imaging is combined systems –- fMRI and a whole host of other imaging technologies. One of the issues with fMRI is that it’s not very good at temporal resolution. What we’re trying to do is marry multiple types of imaging technologies to get more refined spatial and temporal resolution in our imaging systems. GE, Philips, and Siemens are developing these combined systems.
h+: Neurotechnology seems like it’s an emerging market.
ZL: It’s actually a relatively mature market if you consider first generation neurotechnologies. Last year, companies involved in neurotechnology generated about 140 billion dollars in revenue. This includes drugs, medical and neurological devices, and diagnostics for neurological diseases, psychiatric illness, and nervous system injuries. One of the hallmark characteristics of each technological revolution is that when a technology is developed for one purpose — let’s say for the purpose of creating treatments for brain or nervous system illnesses — you then begin to see it in a wide variety of different endeavors far beyond it’s original intended use.
Who would have thought 10 years ago that we would be using imaging technologies to improve the effectiveness of marketing and advertising? Who would have thought that we would be on the cusp of developing truth detection technologies? Who would have thought that these technologies would be used to understand and perhaps help traders improve their profitability?
What we’re seeing across law enforcement, the arts, marketing, entertainment, and warfare is what is means to be human. These technologies are penetrating a wide variety of different endeavors across human society. That — in and of itself — highlights the fact that we are witnessing the very early stages of a Neuro Revolution.
Via: H+
Is LSD Good for You?
As the FDA paves the way for clinical LSD trials, scientists are exploring its medical benefits. Is acid the new Xanax? Plus, from Angelina to The Beatles, a gallery of celebrity trippers.
Bob Wold doesn’t seem like your typical acid tripper. A happily married 56-year-old contractor with four kids who lives the suburbs of Chicago, he had never considered taking psychedelic drugs until about 10 years ago. At the time, he was suffering from cluster headaches—known as “suicide” headaches because they’re so painful—for 12 hours a day, and he was spending more than $20,000 a year on medication. Then he read a post on a support-group Web site from someone who said they’d found a miracle cure for their own cluster headaches: LSD.
Wold decided to try it. “Compared to brain surgery,” he says, “taking a couple hits of LSD looked a lot more attractive.” But ever since a bust of the country’s biggest LSD lab nine years ago, the drug has become much harder to find. So Wold got his hands on the closest equivalent he could think of: psilocybin “magic” mushrooms (though he has since switched to LSD, which he says works better). The psychedelics arrived in a brown box at his doorstep from a long-distance dealer. He took one dose: about 1.5 grams. “In 15 minutes I could feel the difference,” he says. “My head was clearer than it had probably been in the past 20 years. Other medications felt like they were just covering it up.” But on acid, “All the pressure was gone.”
Living root bridges
In the depths of northeastern India, one of the wettest places on earth, bridges aren’t built – they’re grown. What could 21th century architects learn from these dynamic construction principles? I would like to see this applied on highways.
Full story at NextNature.net
