I’m sure I would lose track of time if I were to see this breath-taking, nature-inspired LED installation at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. It’s not your typical frenetic, loud-colored LED. Rather, it’s minimalist and subtle, with an aural soundtrack of sounds from nature that is specific to each visual pattern.

Read more on the construction from an arts/tech point-of-view by The Creators Project here.

jtotheizzoe:

Patterned by Nature

A new installation at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences patterns nature’s patterned complexity via a cascading wave of 3,600 LED tiles. Birds, waves, animal stripes and more. Anyone see this in person? I’d love to know your reactions.

(by Sosolimited)

This morning, while typing a reply email to one of our portfolio company CEOs, I paused mid sentence to re-read what I had written. I noticed that I could say in 33 characters what I had quickly written in 192. Years of Twitter usages is trickling down into being more aware of my level of efficiency conveying thoughts and ideas through writing.
bryce.vc, “Who’s Evolving Whom?”
Interactive map of the internet’s underwater paths Ever wondered how your email can cross the vastness of the ocean and be delivered almost instantly, anywhere in the world? It’s all down to a network of fibre-optic cables that link up the continents and transmit terabits of data every second. via: good, sunfoundation
Pop-upView Separately

Interactive map of the internet’s underwater paths

Ever wondered how your email can cross the vastness of the ocean and be delivered almost instantly, anywhere in the world? It’s all down to a network of fibre-optic cables that link up the continents and transmit terabits of data every second.

via: good, sunfoundation

Source: newscientist.com

Preserving The History of Scents

“It seems far-fetched to think we could actually start to smell the past - or somehow preserve a whiff of our daily lives. But increasingly, technology is making it possible, and historians, scientists, and perfumers are now taking the idea of smells as historical artifacts more seriously. They argue that it’s time to delve into our olfactory past, trying harder to understand how people experienced the world with their noses - and even save scents for posterity. Their efforts have already made it possible to smell fragrances worn a century ago, to re-create the smell of a rare flower even if it goes extinct, and to better understand the smells that ancient cultures appreciated or detested.

At the most scientifically ambitious end, archaeologists are using modern analytical technologies in an attempt to bring old scents to life. Techniques to analyze organic residues left behind on artifacts have been used to study diet and cooking practices in ancient cultures, and have also begun to be used to study fragrances, such as those from incense and perfume. Bonn University’s Egyptian Museum, for instance, has been working to analyze and re-create the Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut’s perfume from residue from a 3,500-year-old bottle. The museum plans to announce details soon; its curator says the perfume contained more than 80 ingredients.

Smith believes that studying smell and other senses is important, but they must be put into context. There are countless examples of how circumstance influences the way we perceive smells; for instance, wintergreen became popular in chewing gum and toothpaste in the United States after World War II, but to the British, the smell would have evoked sickness, since it was used in ointments to treat the wounds of soldiers. If we don’t understand these meanings, we’re just smelling the past as we would now - not as people did at the time.”

image: Boston Globe

Cellphones Are The Major Factor In Honeybee Decline and Death

“Scientists claim to have proved that signals from mobile phones are behind the sudden decline of the world’s bee population, which plays a vital role in both agriculture and horticulture. The study - published in the beekeepers’ magazine Apidologie - found that the phone signals confused the bees who began to fly erratically before suddenly dying. 

The scientists carried out 83 experiments in hives and recorded the bees’ reactions to mobile phones in off, standby and call-making modes.The noise produced by the bees increased more than ten-fold whenever a phone made or received a call - the noise dropped to normal level when the phone was off or on standby.

Mr Favre explained: ‘The bees’ noise drastically increases as soon as the phone rings - the rays from the phone and the noise clearly disturbs the bees.This gives the bees the signal to leave the hive. But often they are so confused they fly to their death.”

The study isn’t the first to link mobile phones with the death of bees. In 2008, a German researcher found that bees refuse to return to their hive when mobile phones are placed alongside it. Lost and disoriented, they die. The result is abandoned hives, a possible honey shortage and, most gravely, a lack of pollinators for our flowers and crops.”

Nouning for Verbing

“The English language is in a constant state of flux. New words are formed and old ones fall into disuse. But no trend has been more obtrusive in recent years than the changing of nouns into verbs

New technology is fertile ground, partly because it is constantly seeking names for things which did not previously exist: we “text” from our mobiles, “bookmark” websites, “inbox” our e-mail contacts and “friend” our acquaintances on Facebook —only, in some cases, to “defriend” them later. “Blog” had scarcely arrived as a noun before it was adopted as a verb, first intransitive and then transitive (an American friend boasts that he “blogged hand-wringers” about a subject that upset him). Conversely, verbs such as “twitter” and “tweet” have been transformed into nouns—though this process is far less common.”

Real-Time Web and Mobile for Healthcare

“Brian Dolan, editor of MobiHealthNews, said that the medical field is rapidly moving toward a more mobile and real-time future, with 72% of physicians now using smartphones.

According to Dolan, more than a quarter of the apps in the iPhone App Store’s health and medicine category are for health care professionals, and we’ll likely see more of this in the future, as remote monitoring becomes more commonplace. Apple’s own patent application for an embedded iPhone heart rate monitor is likely just the first step, for example.”

images via: technicaljones 1, 2

MIT grad student David Merrill demos Siftables — cookie-sized, computerized tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands. These future-toys can do math, play music, and talk to their friends, too. Is this the next thing in hands-on learning? Siftables aims to enable people to interact with information and media in physical, natural ways that approach interactions with physical objects in our everyday lives. As an interaction platform, Siftables applies technology and methodology from wireless sensor networks to tangible user interfaces. Siftables are independent, compact devices with sensing, graphical display, and wireless communication capabilities. They can be physically manipulated as a group to interact with digital information and media. Siftables can be used to implement any number of gestural interaction languages and HCI applications.

“The SixthSense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The hardware components are coupled in a pendant like mobile wearable device. Both the projector and the camera are connected to the mobile computing device in the user’s pocket. The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks user’s hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques. The software program processes the video stream data captured by the camera and tracks the locations of the colored markers (visual tracking fiducials) at the tip of the user’s fingers using simple computer-vision techniques. The movements and arrangements of these fiducials are interpreted into gestures that act as interaction instructions for the projected application interfaces. The maximum number of tracked fingers is only constrained by the number of unique fiducials, thus SixthSense also supports multi-touch and multi-user interaction.”

Semantic Technology - Web 3.0: “The tools of the Semantic Web are straightforward. In order to get a computer to create meaning from data you need metadata — or in other words, you need data about data. Making the World Wide Web smart requires extra computer code. The way web programmers communicate this metadata is through a computer language called RDF, or “Resource Description Framework.” According to World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, it’s one of the fundamental building blocks of the Semantic Web. News organizations such as the New York Times have already started embracing RDF, using it to help make smart links between different stories.”

Braille Illiteracy

A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age would create a post-literate generation as new forms of media eclipsed the written word. Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has become a reality for only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says she thinks that using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers. “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should be abolished,” she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”

image: Tom Schierlitz