It’s either the ultimate in couch comfort or a totally bizarre idea dreamed up by a pair of designers obsessed with neuroscience. Either way, the “Brainwave Sofa” is clearly a one-of-a-kind piece of furniture.
The couch’s lumpy, bumpy shape is a three-dimensional version of a brain scan, specifically a three-second recording of designer Lucas Maassen’s alpha brain waves as he closed his eyes and thought of the word “comfort.” Data from the electroencephalograph was processed by BioExplorer, a 3-D visualization program, and then fed directly into a milling machine that cut the shape out of soft foam.
Since 2006, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been orbiting Mars, currently circling approximately 300 km (187 mi) above the Martian surface. On board the MRO is HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, which has been photographing the planet for several years now at resolutions as fine as mere inches per pixel. Collected here is a group of images from HiRISE over the past few years, in either false color or grayscale, showing intricate details of landscapes both familiar and alien, from the surface of our neighboring planet, Mars. I invite you to take your time looking through these, imagining the settings – very cold, dry and distant, yet real.
It used to be you weren’t an “author” until you’d had your name come out above a few paragraphs of text in some hard, durable format involving ink and parchment. With the Internet, that is changing entirely. SEED Magazine’s take on it:
Nearly everyone reads. Soon, nearly everyone will publish. Before 1455, books were handwritten, and it took a scribe a year to produce a Bible. Today, it takes only a minute to send a tweet or update a blog. Rates of authorship are increasing by historic orders of magnitude. Nearly universal authorship, like universal literacy before it, stands to reshape society by hastening the flow of information and making individuals more influential.
To quantify our changing reading and writing habits, we plotted the number of published authors per year, since 1400, for books and more recent social media (blogs, Facebook, and Twitter). This is the first published graph of the history of authorship. We found that the number of published authors per year increased nearly tenfold every century for six centuries. By 2000, there were 1 million book authors per year. One million authors is a lot, but they are only a tiny fraction, 0.01 percent, of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth. Since 1400, book authorship has grown nearly tenfold in each century. Currently, authorship, including books and new media, is growing nearly tenfold each year. That’s 100 times faster. Authors, once a select minority, will soon be a majority.
But does increasing authorship matter? And is this increase a blip or a signpost? Authorship has risen steeply before. The period of the first steep rise, near 1500, coincides with the discovery of the New World and Protestantism, which saw the publication of the first vernacular Bible, translated by Martin Luther. The second, near 1800, includes the Industrial Revolution and its backlash, Romanticism. The current rise is much steeper.
A little history, a little word play, and a little cartography, plus seeing where Copernicus got some of his crazy ideas. What better way to get your morning started?
Drawn half a millennium ago and then swiftly forgotten, one map made us see the world as we know it today… and helped name America. But, as Toby Lester has discovered, the most powerful nation on earth also owes its name to a pun.
Almost exactly 500 years ago, in 1507, Martin Waldseemuller and Matthias Ringmann, two obscure Germanic scholars based in the mountains of eastern France, made one of the boldest leaps in the history of geographical thought – and indeed in the larger history of ideas.
Near the end of an otherwise plodding treatise titled Introduction to Cosmography, they announced to their readers the astonishing news that the world did not just consist of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the three parts of the world known since antiquity. A previously unknown fourth part of the world had recently been discovered, they declared, by the Italian merchant Amerigo Vespucci, and in his honour they had decided to give it a name: America.
But that was just the beginning. Waldseemuller and Ringman in fact had written the Introduction to Cosmography merely as a companion volume to their magnum opus: a giant and revolutionary new map of the world. It’s known today as the Waldseemuller map of 1507.
What elusive gem of inspiration causes a scientist to choose his or her vocation? And more importantly, is there a way to draw inspiration from these stories, in order to motivate the next generation? That’s the mission of The Elements of Humanity, a new series of inspirational interviews published online by MAKE magazine.
These interviews of working scientists and technologists were recorded at SciFoo, an unstructured conference on Science and Technology organized this past summer by O’Reilly Media along with Nature Magazine and Google. In an ongoing effort to get more students interested in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), Dale Dougherty, founding editor and publisher of MAKE, sought to uncover each person’s own fascination with science and how that has shaped their life’s work. “It is important to see that scientists are human and they have lots of passion for what they do. They connect their own personal interests to work they enjoy doing and which benefits others,” says Dougherty. The interviews are informal and offer a view of scientists that is not often seen in traditional media. “I wanted to know what fascinated them most about science when they were young and how they were fascinated with the work they are doing today,” said Dougherty.
The site currently features interviews with over a dozen scientists, including Drexel University mathematician Andrew Hicks, who creates unusual custom mirrors using mathematics, Fiorenzo Omenetto, a Professor of Biomedical Engineering & Physics at Tufts who is experimenting with silk as a high-tech material, and Heather Lang, who earned a PhD in “the gray area between biochemistry and physics” and who runs an after-school program teaching chess to students. While topically each scientist’s specialty differs radically from the next, what they share is a passion for science. What spark of inspiration can be harnessed to encourage more kids to become scientists? Hopefully the project finds out.
Putting all of my eggs in one basket today and focusing on Music in all its scientific glory.
First up, news that songs will now appear on Google searches. Google announced last week the integration of playable songs into its search results yesterday, and is slowly rolling the feature out to U.S. searchers. (You can test the search here for “U2 Beautiful Day.”)
“To an experienced online music listener, the feature seems a little bit random because Google is using both iLike (recently acquired by MySpace) and Rhapsody, and Pandora, each of which offers yet another experience–Rhapsody lets you play up to 25 songs per month for free, Imeem is best for finding unusual versions of popular songs (like live takes), and Pandora requires you to create a virtual radio station based on a particular artist or song, which can be useful for discovering other music you might like, but doesn’t give you an instant fix.”
For the average Internet user, however, this distinction doesn’t matter. What matters: when users go to Google to search for an artist’s name, song name, album name, or even a snippet of lyrics, they won’t just get random text links or YouTube videos. Instead, the first set of links will be to the audio recording itself–in many cases, the entire song.
Everybody knows that there’s free music available on the Internet, but most casual listeners don’t bother to find it. Now, the most-visited site on the Internet will put it right in front of their faces. As awareness spreads, it’ll be another nail in the coffin of traditional music media–why listen to the radio?–and a boon for the five companies who signed this deal with Google. Artists and record labels might also get a shot in the arm, as users discover new music for free and perhaps eventually buy a copy to keep.
Stay tuned for further developments of Google’s music search.
Speaking of creating music, I also bring to you a profile of a great music/tech inventor who died 10 years ago this month. In 1993, Leon Theremin dies in Moscow. The Russian-born inventor leaves behind a legacy that touches several technical and creative disciplines.
During his 97 years, Theremin left his indelible mark on the fields of science, radio and television broadcasting, espionage, electromagnetic circuitry design and, most famously, music.
The electronic instrument of his design which also bears his name — by all accounts the first electronic musical instrument — is notable for its whooping and sliding high-pitched squeal. The theremin has influenced popular music, classical music, television and film soundtracks, and the musical avant-garde.
Leon Theremin got started early. He first experimented with electronics and Tesla coils as a preteen. After a stint as a military radio engineer during World War I and the Russian Civil War, he went to work in 1920 with his academic mentor, experimental physicist Abram Fedorovich Ioffe, at the Physical Technical Institute in his hometown of St. Petersburg.
It was there he began to branch out, working with X-rays, high-frequency oscillators and gas-filled tubes. In one experiment, he attached a small speaker to a charged antenna and discovered that when he waved his hand in and out of the electrical field, the speaker emitted a tone. The pitch would change, rising as he moved his hand closer and dropping as he moved it farther away.
Harnessing his childhood training as a cellist, Theremin soon mastered a few simple melodies. He was able to play with a vibrato effect by quickly shaking his hand in the air, and he added a second antenna to his invention to control the master volume. He named it the “etherphone” in reference to its ghost-like, otherworldy timbre. But soon enough, everyone just began calling it the theremin.
His invention was mysterious-looking to begin with — just a simple wooden box with two antennas sticking out of it. But its funkiness was compounded by the fact that you never actually touched it. It was played by moving the hands closer to and farther away from the two antennas, giving the visual effect of the performer “playing the air.”
“I conceived of an instrument that would create sound without using any mechanical energy, like the conductor of an orchestra,” Theremin told musicologist Olivia Mattis in 1989. “The orchestra plays mechanically, using mechanical energy; the conductor just moves his hands, and his movements have an effect on the music artistry.”
The sound it produced — a whistle-like, unbroken buzz capable of connecting any two pitches with an inhuman glissando — was like nothing else.
By building thin, flexible silicon electronics on silk substrates, researchers have made electronics that almost completely dissolve inside the body. So far the research group has demonstrated arrays of transistors made on thin films of silk. While electronics must usually be encased to protect them from the body, these electronics don’t need protection, and the silk means the electronics conform to biological tissue. The silk melts away over time and the thin silicon circuits left behind don’t cause irritation because they are just nanometers thick.
“Current medical devices are very limited by the fact that the active electronics have to be ‘canned,’ or isolated from the body, and are on rigid silicon,” says Brian Litt, associate professor of neurology and bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Litt, who is working with the silk-silicon group to develop medical applications for the new devices, says they could interact with tissues in new ways. The group is developing silk-silicon LEDs that might act as photonic tattoos that can show blood-sugar readings, as well as arrays of conformable electrodes that might interface with the nervous system.
Last year, John Rogers, professor of materials science and engineering at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, developed flexible, stretchable silicon circuits whose performance matches that of their rigid counterparts. To make these devices biocompatible, Rogers’s lab collaborated with Fiorenzo Omenetto and David Kaplan, professors of bioengineering at Tufts University in Medford, MA, who last year reported making nanopatterned optical devices from silkworm-cocoon proteins.
To make the devices, silicon transistors about one millimeter long and 250 nanometers thick are collected on a stamp and then transferred to the surface of a thin film of silk. The silk holds each device in place, even after the array is implanted in an animal and wetted with saline, causing it to conform to the tissue surface. In a paper published in the journal Applied Physics Letters, the researchers report that these devices can be implanted in animals with no adverse effects. And the performance of the transistors on silk inside the body doesn’t suffer.
In the silk-silicon electronics, the silk plays a passive but important role. “Silk is mechanically strong enough to act as a support, but if you pour water on it, it conforms to the tissue surface,” says Omenetto. Silk is already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for medical implants and is broken down completely by the body into harmless by-products. The silk sheets are flexible, and can be rolled up and then unfurled during surgery, making them easier for surgeons to work with. By adjusting the processing conditions used to fabricate the films, the Tufts researchers can control the rate at which the films will degrade, from immediately after implantation to years.
The biocompatibility of silicon is not as well established as that of silk, though all studies so far have shown the material to be safe. It seems to depend on the size and shape of the silicon pieces, so the group is working to minimize them. These devices also require electrical connections of gold and titanium, which are biocompatible but not biodegradable. Rogers is developing biodegradable electrical contacts so that all that would remain is the silicon.
The group is currently designing electrodes built on silk as interfaces for the nervous system. Electrodes built on silk could, Litt says, integrate much better with biological tissues than existing electrodes, which either pierce the tissue or sit on top of it. The electrodes might be wrapped around individual peripheral nerves to help control prostheses. Arrays of silk electrodes for applications such as deep-brain stimulation, which is used to control Parkinson’s symptoms, could conform to the brain’s crevices to reach otherwise inaccessible regions. “It would be nice to see the sophistication of devices start to catch up with the sophistication of our basic science, and this technology could really close that gap,” says Litt.
Completely written By Z of GeekDad and pasted verbatim (WITH any helpful corrections made by me; I can’t help myself, I’m an editor):
I like to think that, of all the ways to express one’s unique brand of nerdery, we music geeks are an extra special breed. Whether you’re a rabid record collector or a burgeoning singer/songwriter or just a guy who can’t sleep until he knows his iPod has been properly charged and synced, you understand that music is more than mere entertainment. It is a primal force nearly as old as humankind itself. But where exactly did it all begin?
While every armchair musicologist has his own theory – mine, for example, closely follows the narrative of Mojo Nixon’s “The Story of One Chord” – it’s a question that can never truly be answered. We have, however, identified the oldest surviving complete musical composition in existence.
Known as the Seikilos epitaph, in reference to the discovery of its lyrics and musical notation engraved on an ancient tombstone, this work dates from between 200 BC and 100 AD. Yet, despite its somber moniker, the song itself is actually quite encouraging. An English translation might read:
As long as you live, shine,
Let nothing grieve you beyond measure.
For your life is short,
and time will claim its toll.
Older surviving fragments of musical works preserved on cuneiform tablets predate the epitaph by up to two millennia, but Seikilos’s song represents our earliest record of a full composition. It sort of puts the true scope of music in perspective. And it’ll also put relativity on your side when the kids start complaining about you listening to 80s New Wave on your next road trip.
Halloween is almost here (tomorrow), so it’s time to get your haunted house in gear. We’ve got some suggestions for freaking out the kids (and adults) in your neighborhood in our collection of articles below.
And remember, if you have extra tips for some gruesome, ghoulish mischief, log in and share your knowledge by contributing to the Wired wiki (or here on this blog in the comments).
Choose from the following options of frighteningly easy DIY (ha-ha, had to get a bad Halloween joke in there):
Albany, NY – The unique intersection of the worlds of art and science – including the impact of ever-evolving technologies on the emerging definition of humanity – will take center stage during the first-ever Biotech Performance Festival presented jointly by the University at Albany’s College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (“CNSE”) and UAlbany’s Department of Theatre.
The performances, to be held October 30 through November 7 at UAlbany’s Performing Arts Center, will transform the theatrical stage into a laboratory and the role of a playwright into that of a researcher, courtesy of a 90-minute evening of plays that explore how technology is redrawing what constitutes the living and the mechanical, the generated and the engineered, the synthetic and the natural.
The theatrical stage offers a unique opportunity to raise a community’s awareness and understanding of the issues that surround the cutting-edge research that defines the 21st century technological revolution. Five plays to be offered at each performance provide an outlet for a theatrical response to a world in which our perceptions of nature and culture have been greatly affected by new technologies – and provide a platform to investigate the technological revolution in our classrooms and communities.
Featured playwrights at the festival include Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Kennedy, executive director of the New York State Writers Institute at UAlbany, and Jackie Roberts, assistant professor of theatre at UAlbany and curator of the Biotech Performance Festival.
University at Albany President George M. Philip said, “This cross-campus, interdisciplinary collaboration combines the groundbreaking education and research of the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering with the distinctive artistic expression of the Department of Theatre. I applaud this exciting partnership and look forward to a performance that will be equal parts enlightening, educational and entertaining.”
CNSE Senior Vice President and Chief Executive Officer Dr. Alain E. Kaloyeros said, “The UAlbany NanoCollege is delighted to partner with the Department of Theatre to present the first-ever Biotech Performance Festival, which offers an exciting opportunity to explore the educational, cultural and societal impacts of the scientific revolution being driven by nanotechnology. As the 21st century is increasingly shaped by the emergence of new and transformative technologies, this pioneering effort will promote further understanding of the growing connection between modern-day innovation and our humanity.”
Roberts said, “We are thrilled to present the Biotech Performance Festival in partnership with the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, which truly exemplifies the exciting world of modern-day scientific discovery and exploration. The collision of science with the performing arts gives us a chance to raise issues, promote dialogue and offer a bold perspective on our world as it is shaped by the emergence of new technologies. It should prove to be a unique and wonderful experience.”
Kennedy said, “The technology that is abroad in the land these days, and which is shaping a new reality for everybody, is indeed a wonder to many. But it is also a grand mystification for just as many. The Biotech Performance Festival opens up windows on how a few of these disparities might collide, how some people cope with them (or don’t) and what we might learn from the collision.”
In his play In the System, Kennedy tells the story of two small-time gamblers who embrace technology to make a killing at the racetrack. Roberts’ A Tale for Children is a modern-day mermaid story with a genetic twist. Other featured plays include It’s a Small, Small World by Alice Kauffman, in which a 15-year-old boy teaches his mother about nanotechnology; Stained Glass by Lindsay Price, which recounts the first human trial of a breakthrough cancer treatment; and the apocalyptic tale spawned by a mad scientist in The Second Coming by Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro.
Performances are scheduled for Friday and Saturday, October 30 and 31 at 8 pm; Sunday, November 1 at 2 pm; Wednesday-Friday, November 4-6 at 8 pm; and Saturday, November 7 at 2 pm. For more information, please visit http://www.albany.edu/theatre/biotechfestival.html.
