if you have not seen these movies GO WATCH THEM RIGHT NOW
(via analghost)
A great reminder.
Cyborgs, Sewers, and the Sensing City | Sustainable Cities Collective
Cities have long been seen as the antithesis – or, at least, the absence – of nature. Yet in recent years, environmentalists started rethinking their long-held prejudices against urban areas. The rise of neighborhood-based environmental justice movements, beginning in the 1980’s, forced us to confront the human side of pollution and its relationship to urban poverty. The evolution of green building standards and advances in sustainable design helped us imagine an environmentally enlightened future for our offices and homes. The growing number of city-dwellers across the planet may have played the biggest role in our shifting perceptions of cities and nature. Moving “back to the land” and “living off the grid” could never be a tenable option for three and a half billion people. The result would end up closer to an explosion in suburban sprawl than a no-impact return to simpler times. Like it or not, we’ve realized that cities will have to figure into our schemes for a sustainable planet.
According to De Franco, it is only a logical step that a series of tones can be output from your brain to a device. “It will free up a lot of people from their shy selves to a more expressive group,” he says. If there is a chance that brainwaves can be read to output music, then the problem of being tone-deaf as a singer could become a thing of the past. “A lot of people hear songs in their head and have no skill or technique to express it so another human can understand,” says De Franco. “It doesn’t mean it’s not a beautiful sound. People are working on ways of getting that out onto a score, or via electronics. But I’m not talking about a learning curve to play another instrument, I’m talking about one-to-one output to get it out of your head.”
Taking music directly from the minds of new musicians could mean a lot of new noises that had been difficult to express through traditional instrumentation and skills.
Closing the gap between man and machine
Biological systems depend on membrane receptors to communicate, while technology relies on electric fields and currents to transmit data—but scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have created a transistor modelled on living cells that it might allow electronic devices to be hooked directly to the nervous system. The transistor consists of two metal electrodes connected by a carbon nanotube, which acts as a semiconductor. The nanotubeis layered with both an insulating polymer and a lipid bi-layer that mimics the structure around cell membranes, and the transistor is then powered by adenosine triphosphate (ATP)—the energy currency of living cells. When exposed to ATP, a protein in the lipid bi-layer acts as an ion pump, shuttling sodium and potassium ions across the membrane—so when both a voltage and an ATP solution (including the ions) are applied to the device, a current flows through the electrodes. The transistor is the first example of an integrated bioelectric system; a hybrid, half-man half-machine. The technology could be used to construct seamless bioelectronic interfaces, and even help human consciousness merge with technology—imagine being mentally linked to your laptop!
Read the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory press release
(via starship-earth)
Source: sciencesoup
Engines Within the Throne, by Cathy Park Hong
We once worked as clerks
scanning moth-balled pages
into the clouds, all memories
outsourced except the fuzzy
childhood bits when
I was an undersized girl with a tic,
they numbed me with botox
I was a skinsuit
of dumb expression, just fingerprints
over my shamed
all I wanted was snow
to snuff the sun blades to shadow spokes,
muffle the drum of freeways, erase
the old realism
but this smart snow erases
nothing, seeps everywhere,
the search engine is inside us,
the world is our display
and now every industry
has dumped whole cubicles, desktops,
fax machines into developing
worlds where they stack
them as walls against
what disputed territory
we asked the old spy who drank
with Russians to gather information
the old-fashioned way,
now we have snow sensors,
so you can go spelunking
in anyone's mind,
let me borrow your child
thoughts, it's benign surveillance,
I can burrow inside, find a cave
pool with rock-colored flounder,
and find you, half-transparent
with depression.
via Poem-A-Day by Poets.org: http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/345
