Monthly Archives: July 2009

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Swimming at the strip mall

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Macro-Sea dumpster swimming poolAs regular readers will know, I get a kick out of stories about the reclamation of disused and abandoned urban spaces. BoingBoing flagged up a rather cute and apolitical example – an organisation called Macro-Sea that transforms defunct strip malls into community spaces, most notably by building public swimming pools out of industrial-sized dumpsters.

As Jocko and I continued our correspondence I quickly learned that Steve was right (not that I ever doubted him), the pool project was a small part of something much larger. Macro-Sea has been involved with a number of artists, architects and retailers across the country working to transform defunct strip malls. “By stripping and altering its [strip malls] common architectural features, adding community space and involvement, and carefully selecting and curating vendors and the space itself Macro-Sea hopes to create and promote a place for people to shop, meet, learn, and engage with one another.” Sounds like a good plan to me and I’ve seen it happen successfully before, in Sao Paulo, Brazil a few years ago.

This project is conceptually connected to Chairman Bruce’s squelettes, and to the theory of the Temporary Autonomous Zone. As cities expand, there will be more and more of these dead spaces scattered around, and I’d like to see people making imaginitive use of them rather than waiting for the authorities to scrape together the cash to build some sterile new development… or, more likely, a new mall to replace the old. [image borrowed from article at ReadyMade Magazine]

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GM crops and the war on poverty

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field of wheatOver at The Guardian, Professor Mark Tester stands up to say that genetically modified crops are an essential component of the struggle to erase world poverty and hunger:

GM crops are not the answer to this shameful global situation, but I argue strongly that they provide another tool, another option to try to address the problem. And I do not think those of us sitting in comfortable wealth have a right to deny people the opportunity to improve their production of food. The technology is just that, a technology. Like nuclear technologies (radiotherapy or nuclear weapons) or mobile phones (communication or bomb triggers), how we use it is the main issue. I hope that the plants we have generated provide a subtle use of GM technology that will allow some positive benefits for the developing world.

He’s quite correct, of course; as we mention here quite often, the morality of a tool comes from the hand that wields it. And therein lies the rub: while GM crops have the potential to improve the lives of those less fortunate than ourselves, they can also be (and allegedly are) used to paint them into an economic corner for the purposes of maximising profits – selling farmers the only seeds that will survive the pesticides which you also manufacture, for example. [image by James Wheare]

I don’t know how it is in the States, but here in the UK GM crops are a hugely sensitive topic with a sharp polarity of opinion that has been amplified by propaganda, celebrity campaigning and emotional button-pushing from both sides of the debate. Such extreme viewpoints actually end up clouding the issue; somewhere in the shades of grey is a way to use genetic modification safely for the benefit of everyone, but until we start meeting each other half way we leave the field wide open for both poverty and profiteering to continue.

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Please support Shira Lipkin’s blogathon

Times are tough all round, but if you can spare a few bucks for a good cause you might want to check out long-term friend-of-Futurismic Shira Lipkin’s forthcoming blogathon in support of the Boston Area Rape Crisis Centre.

She’ll be posting fresh material every half hour for 24 hours on her LiveJournal on the 25th and 26th of July, and the price of your next coffee and pastry combo could help Shira and the other BARCC volunteers support people through the aftermath of rape – and work to dismantle the culture that creates it.

There are so many causes in the world that need financial support, and so little money to go around; I expect many of you have already given to a charity of some sort this year. Those of you who haven’t, please consider stumping up a little cash for this one. I’ve just pledged £10, but even a few dollars would help.

Thanks for listening. 🙂

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This blog post will self-destruct in thirty seconds

If you’ve been hankering for an intersection of nanomaterials and old spy movie cliches, today’s your day: a gang of researchers in Illinois reckon they’ve found a way to use nanoparticles to make messages that erase themselves after a certain amount of time.

A team at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, coated gold nanoparticles with a layer of hair-like molecules called 4-(11-mercaptoundecanoxy)azobenzene or MUA. When zapped with ultraviolet light, these filaments change their shape and charge distribution, causing the nanoparticles to congregate together and change colour […]

To put this colour-changing ability to good use, the team dispersed the nanoparticles in a gel and sandwiched it between plastic sheets to produce a thin, red film. When Grzybowski and his colleagues shone UV light at the film, either through a patterned mask or using a UV pen, they found they could print a range of images or write words onto the film in just a few seconds.

The colour change is not permanent, however. In the absence of UV light, the MUA gradually reverts to its original shape, allowing the nanoparticles to disperse and the images to disappear.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to work out how many times more expensive and complicated it would be to use this stuff instead of scribbling a note on some rice paper. Or whether the Etch-a-Sketch people will be tempted to build a 2.0 version.

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Achieving longevity

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moai_profileThere always seems to be some intriguing news on progress in extending lifespans, or achieving what Aubrey De Grey calls engineered negligible senescence. From Physorg we have news that a compound called rapamycin, first discovered on Easter Island, can increase the lifespans of laboratory mice:

The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and two collaborating centers reported that the Easter Island compound – called “rapamycin” after the island’s Polynesian name, Rapa Nui – extended the expected lifespan of middle-aged mice by 28 percent to 38 percent. In human terms, this would be greater than the predicted increase in extra years of life if cancer and heart disease were both cured and prevented.

Protein folding in certain species of bats has been found to lead to an increase in their lifespans:

Asish and colleagues made their discovery by extracting proteins from the livers of two long-lived bat species (Tadarida brasiliensis and Myotis velifer) and young adult mice and exposed them to chemicals known to cause protein misfolding. After examining the proteins, the scientists found that the bat proteins exhibited less damage than those of the mice, indicating that bats have a mechanism for maintaining proper structure under extreme stress.

And finally the curious case of Brooke Greenberg: who is the size of an infant, with the mental capacity of a toddler, but turned 16 in January:

In a recent paper for the journal “Mechanisms of Ageing and Development,” Walker and his co-authors, who include Pakula and All Children’s Hospital (St. Petersburg, Fla.) geneticist Maxine Sutcliffe chronicled a baffling range of inconsistencies in Brooke’s aging process. She still has baby teeth at 16, for instance. And her bone age is estimated to be more like 10 years old.

“There’ve been very minimal changes in Brooke’s brain,” Walker said. “Various parts of her body, rather than all being at the same stage, seem to be disconnected.”

A substantial increase in human lifespans would be a huge, world-changing, medical and technological achievement, but could well lead to many social problems. An excellent exploration of the effects of longevity is Bruce Sterling‘s sublime Holy Fire.

[from Physorg and abcnews][image from anoldent on flickr]