Tag: futurism

nicola tesla as david bowie as nokia

Nokia developing phone that recharges itself without mains electricity

A new prototype charging system from the company is able to power itself on nothing more than ambient radiowaves – the weak TV, radio and mobile phone signals that permanently surround us. The power harvested is small but it is almost enough to power a mobile in standby mode indefinitely without ever needing to plug it into the mains, according to Markku Rouvala, one of the researchers who developed the device at the Nokia Research Centre in Cambridge, UK.

The difference with Nokia’s prototype is that instead of harvesting tiny amounts of power (a few microwatts) from dedicated transmitters, Nokia claims it is able to scavenge relatively large amounts of power — around a thousand times as much — from signals coming from miles away. Individually the energy available in each of these signals is miniscule. But by harvesting radiowaves across a wide range of frequencies it all adds up, said Rouvala.

The trick here is to ensure that these circuits use less power than is being received, said Rouvala. So far they have been able to harvest up to 5 milliwatts. Their short-term goal is to get in excess of 20 milliwatts, enough power to keep a phone in standby mode indefinitely without having to recharge it. But this would not be enough to actually use the phone to make or receive a call, he says. So ultimately the hope is to be able to get as much as 50 milliwatts which would be sufficient to slowly recharge the battery.

Decellularisation! Organ scaffolds!

via jwz:

Hybrid hearts could solve transplant shortage

"It’s amazing, absolutely beautiful," says Doris Taylor, describing the latest addition to an array of tiny thumping hearts that sit in her lab, hooked up to an artificial blood supply. The rat hearts beat just as if there were inside a live animal, but even more remarkable is how each one has been made: by coating the stripped-down "scaffolding" of one rat’s heart with tissue grown from another rat’s stem cells.

The idea is fairly simple: take an organ from a human donor or animal, and use a mild detergent to strip away flesh, cells and DNA so that all is left is the inner "scaffold" of collagen, an "immunologically inert" protein. Add stem cells from the relevant patient to this naked shell of an organ and they will differentiate into all the cells the organ needs to function without inducing an immune response after transplant, or any new infections.

Although Taylor only added stem cells to the hearts, these cells differentiated into many different cells, in all the correct places, which is the best part of using decellularised scaffolds. The stem cells transformed into endothelial cells in the ventricles and atria, for example, and into vascular and smooth-muscle cells in the spaces for blood vessels, just as in a natural heart. Taylor thinks this happened because she pumped blood and nutrients through the organ, producing pressure in each zone which helps to determine how cells differentiate there.

But chemical, as well as mechanical, cues seem to have guided differentiation. Taylor has evidence that growth factors and peptides remained anchored to the scaffold even after the flesh was washed off. These chemicals likely signalled to the stem cells, indicating how many should migrate to which areas and what to change into in each zone. "Our mantra is to give nature the tools and get out of the way," she says.

Also: Stem cells used to restore sight

The idea to team stem cells with contact lenses came from an observation that stem cells from the cornea stick to contact lenses. To obtain the stem cells, Dr Watson took less than a millimeter of tissue from the side of each patients’ cornea. Working with colleagues at POWH and UNSW, he cultured stem cells from the tissue in extended wear contact lenses.

Within 10 to 14 days the stem cells began to attach to the cornea, replenishing damaged cells. Satisfied that the stem cells were doing their job, Dr Watson removed the lenses and the patients have been seeing with new eyes for the last 18 months.

the future is now, then and again

From sclerotic_rings,

“Fifty years ago tomorrow, with the launch and subsequent success of Explorer 1, the US officially set off the space race. With it came the discovery of what are now known as the Van Allen radiation belts surrounding Earth, marking the first real scientific discovery of the interplanetary US/Russian competition. Now, maybe, we’ll see advertisers stop using “Space Age” as a synonym for “futuristic” and maybe see its use as a synonym for “fondly nostalgic of paths not taken”.”

our production meeting went past midnight.

How William Gibson discovered science fiction.

He sits on my bed, talking to his mother on the phone, his car keys plugged into my computer, taxidermy birds at his feet, familiar with my room. I have already met his scientist father and taken pictures of them both. Possibly this makes me uncomfortable.

We have been reacquainting ourselves after six years apart in the same city. It has been interesting, though unexpected. We are very different people than when we first spent time together in the almost perpetual darkness of the constant heaven threatening raves and parties that we used to work at. (We met, like Shane and I, (and Jacques and T. Paul), as part of the first incarnation of C.R.’s Fr8-train Land.) I think we have far more in common now than we ever might have then.

Perched on the roof of his truck, we watched the night occlude the city from Spanish Banks and discussed stars and noise, art and engineering, information architecture, and how to wire lights to make bursts of sound, constellations of old ideas polished into new. When we drove back into town, swaggered into the bar, and kidnapped Shane to star-crash on my couch, it was like we completed a circle that took almost a decade to make.

Human After All.
History begins now.

At work, my boy haunts the hallway from months in the past. A reflection of when we sat here over our greasy chinese picnic and laughed over chopsticks and our mismatched everythings. His eager grin and long legs folded, the mischief in his eyes conspiring against my cleverness. It’s difficult to be there some days. I catch my ears bent listening and I almost have to close my eyes against the superimposed image of his voice sitting next to me. He’s hung up the mirror-ball I gave him for his birthday and sent me a picture from L.A. It looks like the perfect accessory. As consolation, it beats a drum within me like the clapper in a bell. We had a good thing. He remains the happiest part of my dreams.

Robert Silverberg on Philip K. Dick.

These long summer evenings have been both good and bad for me. I’ve been getting up early, it being too sticky hot to stay in bed, but as the day molasses crawls down the windowpane of the sky, I don’t feel I’m accomplishing as much as I could be. I want to be as busy as sin, not living this meandering odd-jobs existence I seem to be dreaming up daily. Tuesday I’m on set again, but I haven’t heard about call-times yet. It’s still too early to say. My flashing re-boot of a film career is suffering from the drop in the American dollar. Crews are being pared down. It’s not as cheap to shoot here as it was five years ago. I’ve been keeping my fists up, but it proves to be difficult. The industry’s not being kind to any of us. It might be time to side-step into the Jolt and Doritos fuelled modern fortress of video games, like James wants me to.

William Gibson explains why science fiction is about the present.

the future as sexy

Ed and I have made a new futurism community, techno_fetish, for scrying the internet for morsels of knowledge and skirting the singularity.

Drop by with whatever’s new, whatever’s neat. Think DiePunyHumans, think cyberpunk. So far I’ve been cheerfully using it as a tab-dump. We’re looking for information, science of all kinds, gadgets of interest and critters that fascinate.

I can hear a rat scraping around in the back of the store. I want it to be my friend.

Passion-Hill, a very delightfully wrong Benny Hill/Passion of the Christ mash-up that confirms every little inner voice belief I had telling me never to watch the film.

The miracle of the clean water straw, the lingering joy of the discoving that people in little villages in africa have the habit of climbing trees to get better reception for their cell phones, these ideas were connecting in my mind this morning. I walked to work with the flavour of the future in my head. I’m curious to know who would be interested in starting a coffee-house discussion group on things like social networks inter-reacting with technology, the internet, and what we’re doing with our journals. There’s been a lot of talk lately about using the net as a tool, but I look around and never find enough people doing it. Honestly, I don’t have a lot of time to set aside for this sort of thing, but I’m willing to give it a try. I don’t want moderated discussions or weekly topics or anything regulated, I would rather let people spill what they’ve discovered that week and give them feed-back. I want motivations, clouded or otherwise, for keeping a journal. I want explanations, links to the news that changed your perpective on what the internet offers you. I talk about this sort of thing all the time in my every day but it hardly comes up here. I’d like that to change. Game?

When the zombies come, swords don’t run out of bullets. They’re going to be having a cane-fighting workshop come next Sunday.

Last night I was madly upset, but earlier than that I stole a pineapple from a burlesque show.

I got the Real Woman talk again last night. The one that says I Cherish You But You’re Not For Fun. The Adult Elegance talk, the You’re Evil But Untouchable. I Want You But I Am Going To Go Home With her Because She Is Not As Important As You Are.

Somehow it’s satisfying, it’s a flattery I can only and utterly respect. It quells the worries that spring up whenever I spend the majority of my time with young people that perhaps they are rubbing off on me in ways that I don’t want them to, eroding my prescience with their uncountable dramas, but amusingly, it irks me too. In a completely irrational, very female way. I am fully aware, yes, that kissing me isn’t like kissing most girls, but do you have to point it out? I would like to at least occasionally pretend that I could be permissive too.

Bah.

Boys.

Also, Three dozen trained killer dolphins have escaped and may be armed. True fact.

mocking my taste in music

As a pleasant lead up to our local production of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead that Beth is organizing, I’ve found Hamlet as a text based adventure game:

It’s so unfair! You’re in trouble again, just because you called your uncle – or rather, your new stepfather, Claudius – a usurping git. It’s true, though. Your real dad was SO much better than that guy. Too bad he was found mysteriously dead in the orchard a couple of weeks back. Anyway, your mother (who was, incidentally, looking quite something today in a sparse leather number, er…) sent you to your room, and here you are.

Bedroom
You are in your luxurious palatial boudoir, all of ten feet square. There is a four-poster bed, and not much else. A portrait hangs on the wall. An exit leads north.

Also found on the internet today, Soviet space monkey pants for sale on eBay and a gallery of vintage toy rayguns, (I remember playing with number 70 once. The frontispiece was that strange dry metal that reminds me of badly melted tin.). The news is less futurist and more dystopian. In addition to the unrelenting Katrina clusterfuck, there’s loyalist riots in Belfast and Typhoon Khanun flattened 20,000 houses, and destroyed large swathes of crops, industrial units and infrastructure in Zhejiang province. This puts my wake-up “we’re going to cut off your electricity” phone-call in a bit of perspective. I may be too broke for reliable groceries, but at least I’m not swimming to the store.

However, if I had a dime to spare, I would support Planned Parenthood, Philadelphia, in a heartbeat. They’ve come up with a rather choice way to deal with protesters called Pledge-a-Picket. (Click on the link to take part.)

Every time protesters gather outside of our Locust Street health center, our patients face verbal attacks from them. They see graphic signs meant to confuse and intimidate. They are sometimes blocked from entering the building and occasionally they are videotaped. They are offered anti-choice propaganda and free rides to the closest “crisis pregnancy center.”

Staff and volunteers are also seen as targets. We are all called murderers, are lectured to about committing sins, and are told we will pay the “ultimate price” for our actions.

You can stand with others in the community against these acts of intimidation and harassment.

Here’s how it works: You decide on the amount you would like to pledge for each protester (minimum 10 cents). When protesters show up on our sidewalks, Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania will count and record their number each day from October 1 through November 30, 2005. We will place a sign outside the health center that tracks pledges and makes protesters fully aware that their actions are benefiting PPSP. At the end of the two-month campaign, we will send you an update on protest activities and a pledge reminder.