Back to the Future II didn’t just predict the world in 2015 – designers say the film created a “self-fulfilling prophecy” that shapes today’s design
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.dezeen.com
See on Scoop.it – Communication design
Visitors can climb to the top of this pavilion in the Jardin des Tuileries, which is made up of a complex lattice of identical timber beams.
Designed by Kengo Kuma & Associates for Galerie Phillipe Gravier, the structure is based on small nomadic shelters, and has been assembled using techniques typical of traditional Japanese carpentry.
“The pavilion consists of identical wooden pieces that have been stacked, twisted and assembled to create a poetic dynamic volume,” said Kuma. “It offers an organic geometry by a geometric composition of wood.”
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.dezeen.com
See on Scoop.it – Communication design
At last, scientists have identified the stylist that gives hornbeam and elderberry salon-worthy hair.
In the winter of 1916-17, Alfred Wegener was serving in the German army’s weather service. Sometime that winter, perhaps in the course of his duties, he noticed something strange sprouting from the fallen logs and branches of France’s Vosges Mountains, near the border with Germany. It appeared to be luxuriant, silky hair made of ice.
Hair ice is made of ultra-fine filaments just .02mm wide but up to 20 cm long. It’s found on barkless dead wood or on wood where the bark has begun to peel away. It’s usually found on moist, rotting logs and branches lying on the ground, but sometimes found on dead parts of still-standing trees. The hair is smooth and lustrous, and may have waves, curls, or even parts, just like human hair.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: blogs.scientificamerican.com
See on Scoop.it – Communication design
maciek jasik imagines fruits and vegetables filled, not with a fleshy, edible interior, but rather plumes and puffs of vibrantly colored vapor.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.designboom.com
See on Scoop.it – Communication design
Sourced through Scoop.it from: weandthecolor.com
See on Scoop.it – Communication design
PreNav has built a new UAV system that can make the exacting movements necessary to inspect industrial equipment and tall structures, such as wind turbines and cell towers.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: electronicdesign.com
See on Scoop.it – Communication design
By 2050, the world’s population is projected to approach nine billion. With more people will come more developed land—a lot more.
Urbanization, agriculture, energy, and mining put 20 percent of the world’s remaining forests, grasslands, and other natural ecosystems at risk of conversion by 2050.
With that kind of expansion, there are sure to be harms—namely clean water, clean air, and biodiversity.
To mitigate some of those risks, scientists and geographers at the Nature Conservancy have taken a crucial step by mapping the potential impact that human growth will have on natural lands.
It’s the most comprehensive look to date at how major forms of development will take over fragile ecosystems, if left unchecked…
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.citylab.com
See on Scoop.it – Communication design
Metagenomic profiling, also called metagenomic shotgun sequencing (MSS) represents a powerful application made possible by the digital nature of next-generation sequencing technologies. In it, one basically sequences a sample isolate obtained from somewhere — a shovelful of dirt, a scoop of plankton, or anything else that contains living organisms. MSS has proven particularly useful to studies of the human microbiome, or in layman’s terms, all of the bacteria/viruses/fungi that live in our bodies.
Many such microbiota are beneficial or simply commensal (not doing harm) with us. Others, like methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), can cause severe disease. Most efforts to chart the human microbiome have focused on bacteria, whose relatively stable genomes make them amenable to assay development. Viruses, in contrast, are somewhat under-studied. Part of that is due to the small size and highly variable nature of viral genomes.
A new study in Genome Research showcases a capture-based enrichment strategy to improve virome sequencing. The ViroCap panel was developed by Todd and Kristine Wylie, who happen to be colleagues of mine at the McDonnell Genome Institute. The panel enriches for nucleic acids from 34 families of DNA or RNA viruses that infect vertebrate hosts, beautifully illustrated in a figure from the paper (see above).
At the time of the ViroCap design, NCBI GenBank contained the sequenced genomes of around 440 viral species, for a total of about 1 Gbp (billion base pairs) of sequence. After considerable bioinformatics efforts, the authors produced a ~200 Mbp sequence target and worked with Nimblegen to have it designed.
References
Wylie TN, Wylie KM, Herter BN, & Storch GA (2015). Enhanced virome sequencing through solution-based capture enrichment. Genome research PMID: 26395152
Sourced through Scoop.it from: massgenomics.org
See on Scoop.it – Communication design
Agricultural biotech giants are starting to make moves into CRISPR gene editing, saying they’ll be selling seeds engineered with the technology by the end of this decade.
DuPont said today it entered an agreement with Caribou Biosciences, a spin-off from the laboratory of Jennifer Doudna at the University of California, Berkeley, who carried out key work on CRISPR-Cas9, a technology that provides something like a find-and-replace feature for DNA.
DuPont says it is already growing corn and wheat plants edited with CRISPR in greenhouses and that field trials will start next spring.
“We are talking about bringing products to market in five to 10 years,” says Neal Gutterson, vice president for agricultural biotechnology at Pioneer Hi-Bred, part of DuPont’s $11-billion-per-year crop chemicals and biotech seed business. “That is a pretty damn good time line compared to other technology.”
DuPont is testing CRISPR to make drought-resistant corn as well as wheat genetically altered so it will breed like a hybrid, rather than self-pollinate as it typically does. Hybrid plants are vigorous, and yields can jump by 10 or 15 percent.
A growing list of plant types have already been genetically engineered with CRISPR-Cas9 in academic laboratories, including soybeans, rice, and potatoes. Last month, a Japanese team used gene editing to turn off fruit-ripening genes in tomato plants.
As part of their collaboration, DuPont said it had made an investment in Caribou, a small startup that holds commercial rights to patents Berkeley has applied for on CRISPR-Cas9. DuPont will have exclusive rights to those patents in crops like corn and soybeans, should they be approved.
Currently, most GMOs are transgenic plants that have been engineered by adding bacterial genes to the plants so that they poison insects or survive weed sprays. Thanks to biotechnology, the seed business has ballooned to about $40 billion a year, and companies like Monsanto, Dow, DuPont, and Syngenta have come to dominate it. But the need to invest millions more in a sweeping technology shift hits as depressed commodity markets have made the profitability of biotech seeds less certain.
Gutterson says DuPont thinks gene editing will kick off a new wave of products and profits. “We have no doubt that genome editing is going to have a material impact on the value proposition,” he says. “We think another whole cycle could come from genome editing.”
Gene editing could lead to some surprising creations in agriculture. For instance, peanuts have a number of proteins responsible for allergies. Getting rid of them is challenging, but allergy-free peanuts might be possible with the new technology.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.technologyreview.com
See on Scoop.it – Communication design
A new system designed by MIT computer scientists that replaces human intuition with algorithms outperforms 615 of 906 human teams.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: news.mit.edu
See on Scoop.it – Communication design