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“What if we could have altered the track of Katrina?”
http://www.vimeo.com/10035505
“Owning the Weather” is a documentary about geo-engineering by Robert Greene. It’s about whether or not we should engineer the weather and the different impacts that this has. And not only because we can, but also because actually we are already doing so.
Words and video via Next Nature.
See also:
What follows is Jamais Cascio, who we’ve mentioned here a few times before, presenting a condensed, thirty-minute version of the Institute for the Future’s forecast for the next ten years.
This is what Futurism looks like today; not rabid predictions of jetpacks and flying cars, but sane, measured statements that pick up recent trends and forecast their result.
From Space Fellowship:
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) captured this view of the fires and smoke in three consecutive overpasses on NASA’s Terra satellite. The smooth gray-brown smoke hangs over the Russian landscape, completely obscuring the ground in places.
The fires along the southern edge of the smoke plume near the city of Razan, top image, are among the most intense. Outlined in red, a line of intense fires is generating a wall of smoke. The easternmost fire in the image is extreme enough that it produced a pyrocumulus cloud, a dense towering cloud formed when intense heat from a fire pushes air high into the atmosphere.
…
According to news reports, 520 fires were burning in western Russia on August 4. MODIS detected far fewer. It is likely that the remaining fires were hidden from the satellite’s view by the thick smoke and scattered clouds. High temperatures and severe drought dried vegetation throughout central Russia, creating hazardous fire conditions in July.
From the Guardian:
Delicate patterns in the sea breaking on Orange Beach, Alabama, more than 90 miles from the BP oil spill, cannot distract from the mess four to six inches deep on parts of the shore
Meanwhile, Mother Jones asks: “Is the BP Gusher Unstoppable?”
To create Brilliant Noise, Semiconductor (aka Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt), went through hundreds of thousands of computer files to select some of the sun’s most spectacular and unseen moments and compose a video animation on the oscillations of the star. Taken by orbiting satellites, the images reveal the energetic particles and solar wind as a rain of white noise.
Through a process of audio data processing, Semiconductor used images to control the fluctuations of sound. The sound varies, crackles, buzzes and falters according to the brightness of the image, highlighting the hidden forces at play upon the solar surface.
Words and video from we-make-money-not-art.com.
Black and white photos, taken only using natural morning light.
Link via mocoloco.com, photo from photofusion.org.
A rare textile made from the silk of more than a million wild spiders goes on display today at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
To produce this unique golden cloth, 70 people spent four years collecting golden orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar, while another dozen workers carefully extracted about 80 feet of silk filament from each of the arachnids. The resulting 11-foot by 4-foot textile is the only large piece of cloth made from natural spider silk existing in the world today.
“Spider silk is very elastic, and it has a tensile strength that is incredibly strong compared to steel or Kevlar,” said textile expert Simon Peers, who co-led the project. “There’s scientific research going on all over the world right now trying to replicate the tensile properties of spider silk and apply it to all sorts of areas in medicine and industry, but no one up until now has succeeded in replicating 100 percent of the properties of natural spider silk.”
Via wired.com.
Via nationalgeographic.com, a shot of the Trifid Nebula taken by the La Silla Paranal Observatory in Chile.
We touched on the same program in March of 2008, and now they are back with a new one this month, via we-make-money-not-art.com:
You might remember that back in May i was throwing seedballs all over Amsterdam along with Adam Zaretsky, the Waag society and other eco-enthusiast.
The VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd. comes back to town in September and this time the focus will be biology and bacterial transformation. VASTAL is a temporary research and education institute that Zaretsky has created in Amsterdam following an invitation by the Waag Society. The lectures and workshops aim to show the public what it means to work both artistically and scientifically with living organisms and materials. VASTAL also aims to make this form of art-science accessible for a broader audience and invite them to discuss the ethical and aesthetic issues at stake.
Topics include:
Designed by Fabio Novembre, the trees act as an oasis in the middle of the city Milan:
Link and photo via mocoloco.com.
Soon to be invading Japan, again. Via nationalgeographic.com.
The following speech by Karl Schroeder is an excellent summation of the future we’ve been documenting here, the world that lies just around the corner:
His thoughts on, well I guess you have to call it Nature 2.0, are a nice progression on some of Kevin Kelly’s ideas in his book Out of Control.
via BoingBoing | Futurismic
Norbert Eisenreich, a senior researcher and deputy of directors at the Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology (ICT) in Pfinztal, Germany, said his team of scientists have come up with a substance that could replace plastic: Arboform — basically, liquid wood.
It is derived from wood pulp-based lignin and can be mixed with a number of other materials to create a strong, non-toxic alternative to petroleum-based plastics, Eisenreich said, as reported by DPA news agency.
Car parts and other durable items made of this bio-plastic already exist, but the chemical hadn’t been suitable for household use until now, due to the high content of sulphurous substances used in separating the lignin from the cell fibers.
The German researchers were able to reduce the sulphur content in Arborform by about 90 percent, making it much safer for use in everyday items.
Bolstering Arboform’s environmental credentials, Eisenreich’s team also discovered that the substance was highly recyclable.
“To find that out, we produced components, broke them up into small pieces, and re-processed the broken pieces — 10 times in all. We did not detect any change in the material properties of the low-sulphur bio-plastic, so that means it can be recycled,” said Inone-Kauffmann.
From dw-world.de, via core77.com.
