Biodesign

After seeing some horrendous product design on Gizmodo inspired by parts of the female form, I’ve been on the look out for good bio-inspired design. Luckily the team at Pure Austrian Design has pointed me towards Renate Hattinger‘s Human Interior collection. The pieces from this collection are ceramic containers modeled after the two most important organs of the body, the heart and the brain. Renate describes his work below:

The invisible inside becomes visible and gets a concrete emotional meaning by careful processing and refinement of the object’s surface. The objects are not only to be admired on pedestals and in showcases but to be used and filled. This perhaps allows an irreverent, but hopefully humorous usage of my creations.

I consider these containers to be very tongue-in-cheek, but they also convey the beauty of the human form that isn’t readily seen. I’ll probably be using the brain during Halloween to hold Gummi worms.

The Litmus

Mood Ring made useful [Yanko Design]

Credit Crisis got you down? [information aesthetics]

My new favorite blog [doraballa-ommo]

From thought to reality [Core77]

What is it about Japanese paper? [PingMag MAKE]

Going MAD

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) had its grand opening this weekend, and your intrepid scientist went to go check it out. When I got there I bought myself a membership sight unseen, not because I had such great faith in the museum, rather I would get to skip the ridiculously long line. It may not be the best reason to get a membership, but support’s support, right?

The space is really very simple, which allows for the art to take center stage. The exhibits are laid out well, so going through the museum is a continuous experience. I can’t fully endorse the architecture as I found it underwhelming. But people don’t go to museums for their architecture, they go for the exhibits. The Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary show is pretty spectacular. Highlights from the show include, Book from the Ground by artist Xu Bing, which is a very interesting piece that combines icons and images sourced from advertising, math and science, to form sentences and stories. It harkens back to the early days of written communication that utilized pictographic representation of words and concepts.

Tara Donovan’s work titled Bluffs, repurposes buttons to form a coral-like structures that is haunting and delicate, I felt as if it would fall apart if I looked at it the wrong way. Other works include those from Paul Vilinski, My Back Pages uses his old vinyl records to make butterflies. Having music formed into flying, ephemeral creatures makes a statement on the nature of sound and music itself; one can never really own a sound or piece of music, once you start listening to sound, it immediately fills your surrounding space and then proceeds to fly away. Wow! That last sentence may have been a bit too hippy dippy, even for my tastes. Stuart Haygarth‘s Spectacle, forms 1020 pairs of discarded prescription glasses into a chandelier. This is a clever use of glasses as the light passing through the lenses will have a different character depending on which pair or combination of pairs of specs it passes though.

The use of repurposed materials is clearly the common element that’s carried through the pieces in this exhibition, but it’s the variety of the materials that’s truly astounding. Works used plastic utensils, spools of thread, discarded milk bottles, furniture, shoes, heels and books to name a few. This exhibit captures the transformative aspects of art and design, where common objects can be turned into amazing pieces that are greater than the sum of their parts.

Second Lives is on display until 15 February 2009.

The Litmus

The bulb for when you have an ostentatious idea [Dylan Kehde Roelofs' Portfolio @ Behance]

Champagne’s British? [Mail Online via Liqurious]

Grain Edit celebrates its first birthday! Hooray! [Grain Edit]

A paper plate you might want to keep [WASARA via designboom]

A touch of blue is all a man needs [A Suitable Wardrobe]

Fringe: The Ghost Network

(Episode 3) Before I begin my review, I must apologize for the delay. It’s been a very hard couple of days in the lab. It seems being a scientist by day and a writer by night is harder than I had initially thought. I’m also going to change how this review is written by focusing on plot points first and then on the science.

What we learned:

We’re seeing some positive developments in Dr. Bishop and his son’s relationship, which is nice. They’re enjoying a pleasant meal together in the opening scenes of the episode. This is not to say that they’ve made their peace, Dr. Bishop continues to be critical of Peter, which implies that he still thinks that Peter needs his help. Peter doesn’t really heed his dad’s advice because Dr. Bishop’s been an absentee father and Peter’s sorting through his issues with that. It’s okay, I’ve got hope that the Bishops will patch things up.

Speaking of parental relationships, it seems that Agent Broyles is preparing Agent Dunham for something bigger; he’s being very protective. Olivia does seem to be doing her investigating with some aplomb which has garnered her attention from Massive Dynamic, but I see her sticking with the FBI. Olivia does need to get over her relationship with John. She’s visibly shaken at his funeral, which is understandable, but she lets Grant Davidson take a crucial piece of evidence from the dead Agent Mendoza because she thinks that they had a romantic relationship. What may look like grieving can always be a double agent extracting information from a dead body, I guess.

A few tidbits that were scattered throughout the episode are worth mentioning. Dr. Bishop is medicating himself, that’s fantastic! He also sings about his time in the mental institution. Who was the man in the restaurant that Peter confronted? On a related note, Dr. Bishop noticed the altercation and I think he knows more than he lets on about his son. Drug cartels know about “The Pattern”? That’s intriguing. The final point I want to mention is that Roy McComb, the supposed psychic, has the time to make pretty intricate dioramas and models of his visions. Who has the time to make dioramas?

The Science:

There were two scientific principles that were introduced in this episode: suspended animation and using the brain as a receiver. I’ll deal with this supposed suspended animation first. Suspended animation is the slowing of life processes without termination. What happened in the bus, isn’t exactly that. The passengers are exposed to a gas that hardens to a solid when exposed to the nitrogen in the air. So this is more akin in embedding. It’s definitely possible to embed entire organisms and tissues in plastic, the method I’m most familiar with, uses methyl methacrylate. Methyl methacrylate is an organic compound that forms the basis for Plexiglas. When embedding tissues in methyl methacrylate you can go from a liquid to a solid, but I’ve never heard of embedding that uses a substance that goes from a gas phase to a solid phase. Transitioning from a gas phase to a solid phase is called deposition. Researchers have had success in using chemical vapor deposition at atmospheric pressure to form thin films¹. To accomplish this type of transition from a gas to a bulk solid would require a gaseous material that undergoes rapid nitrogen-catalyzed living polymerization under atmospheric conditions. Overall it would be a pretty horrendous way to go, you would be solidified from the inside out.

Now for the good stuff. We’re introduced to Roy McComb, a man who’s been receiving psychic images for the past nine months. Fringe wouldn’t be much of a show if they didn’t try to explain this phenomenon rationally. The entire explanation hinges on iridium in Roy’s bloodstream acting like an antenna tuned to the “Ghost Network,” a communications array used by those behind “The Pattern.” The idea doesn’t seem that out there, right? The iridium picks up the signals and then the brain decodes the information into discernible images; that’s just wrong and I’ll explain why. Iridium is a non-reactive metal that’s known for it’s biocompatibility, so it’s not like the metal’s going to kill Roy. My main concern with this theory is that if a metal passes the blood brain barrier, will it interact with the neurons in the brain in a meaningful way? Without interaction the received signals can’t get interpreted. Scientists have used iridium-based microelectrodes as a diagnostic tool after brain trauma². To make this theory work the information received, via the iridium, would have to be treated as a type of visual sensory input for the brain. This sensory input would then be processed by the parts of the cerebral cortex involved in vision. Metal in the brain can not account for this type of interface between received signals and neurons. I also take issue with the transcranial magnetic stimulator that Dr. Bishop uses on the show, these devices are now hand-held and look far less garish than that in his lab. The stimulation that Dr. Bishop uses to illicit speech that relates to what Roy sees is not possible, generally such stimulation results is very general descriptions that are no where near the level of detail depicted on Fringe³.

Inconsistencies:

The information Roy initially receives is visual and that’s why he draws pictures. JJ clearly forgets this when Roy starts repeating communications that are occurring over the phone. Unless now Roy is also receiving auditory input from the “Ghost Network.” When we see the metal in Roy’s blood being pulled to the surface during his MRI, I think his recovery was far too fast. Also if there was metal in his brain he would be dead. The creators of the show definitely took some liberties here. This isn’t really inconsistent, but it is funny and deserves a mention, Dr. Bishop at one point mentions that with the proper modulation Roy’s brain could receive satellite TV. Now would this be Dish Network or DirecTV? My final inconsistency to point out is that the tape recovered from the bus would not work after being embedded, the process to recover materials after they’ve been embedded would result in the destruction of the tape.

Well those are my thoughts, happy watching!

Further Reading:

1. L Ressier, et al. Control of micro- and nanopatterns of octadecyltrimethoxysilane monolayers using nanoimprint lithography and atmospheric chemical vapor deposition. J Vac Sci Technol B. 25 (1): 17–20, 2007
2. MD Johnson, et al. Neural Interface Dynamics Following Insertion of Hydrous Iridium Oxide Microelectrode Arrays. Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, 2006. EMBS ’06. 28th Annual International Conference of the IEEE. Aug. 30 2006–Sept. 3 2006: 3178–3181
3. K Schweitzer. Fringe’s Brain Science Flirts with Facts in 3rd Episode: Hollywood Fact vs. Fiction. Popular Mechanics. September 24, 2008

The Litmus: Late Edition

This definitely makes me wish I had X-Ray Specs [Nick Veasey via Cool Hunting]

It’s Time to Play w/… [WITH via I.D.]

Make your workout fun! [Fubiz]

Metal as Wood [Portrait via Dezeen]

It’s a real humdinger [Humdinger Wind Energy via greenUPGRADER]

The Litmus: Late Edition

Oh Processing how I love thee [MAXALOT via PostSpectacular via FFFFound!]

It’s the closest thing we’ve got to Innerspace [NSF via Medgadget]

I think I just found my new source for fantastic goods [Supermandolini via FormFiftyFive]

The undone tie gets its due (I’ll be sticking with my fully tied version, I’m curmudgeonly like that) [Men's Flair]

Spoil your kid’s rotten [NOTCOT.com]

Tagged with: Design, Generative Art, Kids, Programming, Science Visualization, Shopping

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