Friday, December 30, 2011
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Video: Japan Gets Vending Machine 2.0 With See-Through Full HD Display, Facial Recognition
Maker Sanden says the machine’s display can produce text, pictures or animations in HD quality.
The company commands a 30% global market share for vending machines and is also active in the US, meaning this prototype could also make its way over to North America one day.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Friday, December 23, 2011
Thursday, December 22, 2011
02 pursuit motorcycle
MELBOURNE — Last month industrial designer Dean Benstead unveiled the 02 Pursuit — a prototype for a motorcycle fueled not by gas or electricity, but by compressed air.
Based on the geometry of a 250cc motocrosser, the O2 Pursuit prototype uses the breakthrough engine technology developed by Angelo Di Pietro of Engineair.
Benstead, a recent graduate of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), has harnessed the power that exists in the air tanks to mechanically drive the vehicle.
According to Benstead, testing of the motorcycle showed close to a quarter of an hour running time with stops at around 25-45 km/h. During stationary testing, Benstead’s team timed the speed off the back wheel, registering over 100 km/h. Preliminary testing of the prototype was limited to an indoors factory environment on a circular track.
“The bike is running a standard scuba tank which runs air compressed up to 200 bar, with further developments, we would be looking at running a tank at 400 bar with increased capacity to also increase the range,” he said.
The innovation was the result of Benstead’s final-year design research into the future of motorcycles, looking at air as a genuine alternative to petrol and electricity.
“Air was the starting point back in 2010, but I continued to explore this for the prototype because of its low-tech nature,” Benstead said. “A solar panel and a compressor now becomes your refinery and without huge battery packs to dispose of, we now have a low-cost to free powered bike with minimum impact on the environment.”
The project began mid last year at the RMIT Ecomoto, the only motorcycle-specific design studio in Australia. Led by RMIT Lecturer and Acting Program Director Simon Curtis, Benstead’s super motard bike project won him the Product Design – Automotive and Transport award at the 2010 Melbourne Design Awards.
The air engine developed by Engineair is still yet to be commercialized. The motor used in the 02 Pursuit was one of five prototypes in the world.
Benstead, recently named in Melbourne’s Top 100 most influential people, is currently working with Australia’s Engineair on a new design that can bring the technology to the market.
02 Pursuit specs:
Top Speed: >100 km/h
Weight: <100kg
Engine: ‘Di Pietro’ 9 chamber air engine
Engine Weight: 10kg
Material: Aluminiumhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
Development: Melbourne
http://www.engineair.com.au/
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Brad Burnham Explains Why SOPA Must Be Stopped
The Congressional Judiciary committee is debating a bill today called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) which nobody in the Internet industry wants to see passed. Not surprisingly, the bill was written by lobbyists for the music and movie industries, who are frustrated by their inability to go after foreign sites filled with pirated material. The piracy problem is real, but the proposed solutions in the form of this bill and the Senate’s corresponding Protect-IP Act (PIPA) will create more problems than they solve.
Brad Burnham, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, came into the TCTV studio in New York City to explain why SOPA is misguided and how it threatens to break the internet. There are many problems with SOPA, but some of the main ones are that it transfers liability for copyright infringement onto second parties like search engines, social networks, blogs, and all sorts of websites. It provides for DNS blocking much in the same way that China’s great firewall blocks foreign sites it does not want its citizens to see, raising a serious censorship issue since it would not take a court order to block these sites (although it is more complicated than a simple takedown notice).
But more than anything, the bill would inject a level of uncertainty into the internet which could chill the willingness of VCs like Burnham to invest as freely as they have and for founders to start internet companies in the first place. The internet is one of the few sources of job creation in the U.S. economy right now. We don’t need laws that will stifle it.
If you want to learn more about SOPA, read this excellent overview by Mike Masnick at TechDirt. Call your Congress person or let them know that you work for the internet.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Seth Godin on curiosity
These people are the 'curious'. Here is the reason they count. They are the ones who wake others around them from stupor. They are the ones who talk to the masses in the middle who are stuck
Seth Godin Wants You to Decide!
Student Leaders Workshop designed to introduce the next generation of leaders to social entrepreneurship and the concept of patient capital.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Field Notes ♥ Busy Beaver
We’ve been both fans and customers of the Busy Beaver Button Co. since forever. They’ve made buttons for Pinsetter, for Field Notes, and for a lot of our personal projects, too. So when Michele said, “Would you want to go over and film with them?” we were immediately out the door. We hung out in their office for a couple of hours, talking to founder Christen Carter, and put together this short doc, hopefully capturing a little of the greatness that is Busy Beaver (and along the way, showing how a Field Notes button gets made).
Fused I Say, Fused!
Field Notes: Making of Balsam Fir from Coudal Partners on Vimeo.
The inside covers and interior pages of the Balsam Fir notebooks were offset-printed in “Wet Bark Black” at Envision Graphics in Bloomingdale IL, then the covers were sent to Diecrafters in historic Cicero, IL for hot foil stamping. This is FIELD NOTES’ first foray into foil stamping, and the process is shown in the video above. The press is a Kluge EHE 14×22, manufactured by Brandtjen & Kluge in St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin. Hot foil stamping is fairly similar to letterpress printing (as seen in our Raven’s Wing video) but instead of ink, colored or metallic foil (or holograms!) are fused onto the paper with a heated die, In this case, a snow-white matte non-metallic ‘foil’ was used, rolls of the material can be seen mounted above the printer. Each roll was aligned to a specific print position on the sheet to minimize wasted foil. The finished covers went back to Bloomingdale to be cut, assembled, bound, trimmed, round-cornered, belly-banded, and shrink-wrapped, and they’ll be in your hands soon!
Letterpress and Rounded Corners
Wings: Making the Field Notes 2010 Fall Edition from Coudal Partners on Vimeo.
Sort of like “How It’s Made,” but with much cooler music. Our new film is about about the making of the Fall COLORS edition, “Raven’s Wing.”
Introducing THE STENO
Field Notes: Making of Steno Book from Coudal Partners on Vimeo.
Enjoy this quick film about the production process behind THE STENO. The covers are silk-screened. You might also be interested in our previous printing films covering letterpress and foil stamping.
We’ve been listening. Devoted Field Notes fans have asked for a larger notebook, something to keep on their desks to go along with our pocket-sized and portable originals. So today we’re announcing the new Field Notes Brand STENO BOOK.
THE STENO is 6″ by 9″ with a black, Double-O Wiring spiral binding at the top, so it lies flat, open or closed. The cover is a beefy 60 pt. “Super Duty Chipboard” from Newark Paperboard Mills, and there are 80 pages of Gregg-Ruled, Finch Paper “Opaque Smooth” 70# text paper inside. We’ve been testing them here and frankly, we wonder how we ever got on without them. They’re the perfect form to keep open on your desk at all times.
Some History on Fire Spotters and the Star of Our Film
Field Notes Fire Tower from Coudal Partners on Vimeo.
Located in Oconto County, Wisconsin in the Chequamego-Nicolet National Forest, just two miles from the community of Mountain (pop. 860) and just off Forest Road 2106, the Mountain Fire Lookout Tower rises 93 feet, well above a tree line crowded with pines, oak, and maples. The Model LS-40 tower was built in Chicago in 1932 by the Aermotor Company, and was erected by the Wisconsin Conservation Commission, first several miles east-southeast in far more isolated location reachable only by foot trail, and then disassembled by the CCC and moved closer to service roads in 1935.
In use for nearly forty years, from May through September of each year a trained fire spotter would live at the site, spending every daylight hour up in the cab keeping watch for smoke, reporting possible fires via phone to a central Northern Wisconsin fire suppression station. At one time rich with thick forests, which in turn created a massive lumber industry, the area was prone to raging fires like the 1871 Great Peshtigo Fire which resulted in thousands of deaths, twelve completely decimated towns, and millions of scorched acres. Incidents such as these created a dire need for towers like the Mountain Fire Lookout.
Originally surrounded by small living quarters, a latrine, and storage sheds, the tower itself is now all that is left on the site. The last fire called occurred on April 25th, 1970, and it is one of only 2 remaining towers from the original 19 that were built in the immediate area. After its decommission, it served briefly as a radio antenna/relay for local ambulance and law enforcement services. Between 1993 and 1994 the site was rehabilitated and converted into a public site. The Mountain Fire Lookout Tower was entered into the National Register of Historic Places in 2008.
Happy Holidays!
Field Notes Brand: The Northerly Edition from Coudal Partners on Vimeo.
Our thirteenth FIELD NOTES COLORS release, for Winter 2011, is called “The Northerly Edition,” and as always, we’re trying a few new ideas.
It's that time of the year again - Happy Holidays!
Wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
You can make your holiday a special one.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Quyen Nguyen: Color-coded surgery
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Quyen Nguyen
Quyen Nguyen uses molecular probes that make tumors -- and just the tumors -- glow, as an extraordinary aid to surgeons.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
New iPhone App Helps NASA Keep Track of Meteoroids
A new app for iPhones and iPads harnesses the power of citizen scientists to help NASA track meteoroids hitting Earth.
Monday, December 12, 2011
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Thursday, December 08, 2011
New Battery Technology at Argonne Nat. Labs
Clean Skies News goes behind the scenes where new batteries are being developed at the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory. Lee Patrick Sullivan reports.
Getting paid to break into things: Argonne's Roger Johnston on NBC
Roger Johnston and the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne break into "foolproof" systems.
Wednesday, December 07, 2011
Sarah Kay: How many lives can you live?
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Sarah Kay
A performing poet since she was 14 years old, Sarah Kay is the founder of Project V.O.I.C.E., teaching poetry and self-expression at schools across the United States
http://www.project-voice.net/about-us/
Sarah Kay is a Spoken Word Poet who grew up in New York City and began performing her poetry when she was only fourteen years old. Even though she was often the youngest poet by a decade, Sarah made herself at home at the Bowery Poetry Club, one of New York's most famous Spoken Word venues. In 2006, she joined the Bowery Poetry Club's Poetry Slam Team, NYC Urbana, and competed in the 2006 National Poetry Slam in Austin, Texas. That year, she was the youngest poet competing at Nationals. Sarah was featured on the sixth season of the television series Russell Simmons presents HBO Def Poetry Jam, where she performed her poem "Hands." She has performed in venues across the country including the United Nations, where she was a featured performer for the launch of the 2004 World Youth Report. She has also performed internationally in the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, India, and South Africa. Sarah is a published author, whose work can be found in literary publications such as Foundling Review, Damselfly Press, decomP, the Literary Bohemian, Pear Noir! among others. In 2004, Sarah founded Project V.O.I.C.E. and has since taught Spoken Word Poetry in classrooms and workshops all over the world, to students of all ages. Most recently, Sarah was a featured speaker at the 2011 TED conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design) on "The Rediscovery of Wonder" in Long Beach, California.
Sarah is featured on the CNN.com homepage
Sarah Kay is celebrating National Poetry Month on the YouTube homepage
Sarah Kay
A performing poet since she was 14 years old, Sarah Kay is the founder of Project V.O.I.C.E., teaching poetry and self-expression at schools across the United States
http://www.project-voice.net/about-us/
Sarah Kay is a Spoken Word Poet who grew up in New York City and began performing her poetry when she was only fourteen years old. Even though she was often the youngest poet by a decade, Sarah made herself at home at the Bowery Poetry Club, one of New York's most famous Spoken Word venues. In 2006, she joined the Bowery Poetry Club's Poetry Slam Team, NYC Urbana, and competed in the 2006 National Poetry Slam in Austin, Texas. That year, she was the youngest poet competing at Nationals. Sarah was featured on the sixth season of the television series Russell Simmons presents HBO Def Poetry Jam, where she performed her poem "Hands." She has performed in venues across the country including the United Nations, where she was a featured performer for the launch of the 2004 World Youth Report. She has also performed internationally in the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, India, and South Africa. Sarah is a published author, whose work can be found in literary publications such as Foundling Review, Damselfly Press, decomP, the Literary Bohemian, Pear Noir! among others. In 2004, Sarah founded Project V.O.I.C.E. and has since taught Spoken Word Poetry in classrooms and workshops all over the world, to students of all ages. Most recently, Sarah was a featured speaker at the 2011 TED conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design) on "The Rediscovery of Wonder" in Long Beach, California.
Sarah is featured on the CNN.com homepage
Sarah Kay is celebrating National Poetry Month on the YouTube homepage
Luis von Ahn: Massive-scale online collaboration
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Luis von Ahn
Luis von Ahn builds systems that combine humans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone
Tuesday, December 06, 2011
Revolutionary Rap In Tahrir Square, Cairo
Reed Lindsey reports: Salman Abdul Aziz al-Balshi and Mohammad Mohammad Youssry mix music and politics in Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt.
Sunday, December 04, 2011
Saturday, December 03, 2011
Rove interviews Kevin Clash - Elmo
Rove McManus interviews Kevin Clash who plays Elmo on Sesame Street.
Due to the high number of comments about Kevin making a joke about Rove's wife, I think it necessary to let you all know that Belinda Emmett was alive and well at the time.
Friday, December 02, 2011
Simulations have become commonplace in much of higher education in recent years, including at Northern Illinois University (NIU), where students use a
Anyone with a web connection can engage in the marketplace maneuvering, the pressure-packed decision making, and the inevitable price wars that break out among business students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
For four years, students in John Sterman’s [2] business management courses have gone toe to toe in simulated business arenas, with the latest being a concocted world of video game companies looking for an edge in marketing and selling their game consoles and software.
The university announced Nov. 30 that the simulation, known as “Platform Wars,” [3] would be freely available on the MIT Sloan Teaching Innovation Resources (MSTIR) website, following the lead of MIT’s OpenCoursWare program [4], a seminal experiment in higher education’s sharing of open source material.
Sterman, a professor in MIT’s Sloan School of Management, said the chance to employ out-of-the-box strategies in simulated business environments has proven perhaps more valuable to his students than strategizing in the real world.
“In many respects, simulation is superior to the real world when it comes to theory and learning,” said Sterman, director of MIT’s System Dynamics Group, a gathering of researchers. “[A simulation] is a safe container. Students choose strategies that may not work just to learn about it, and your actual bank account isn’t drained if you lose millions in the simulation. … Like a flight simulation, you risk nothing.”
In “Platform Wars,” students set the price of hardware, negotiate royalty rates with game makers, and decide if they should subsidize the first few games for their video game system, because, as Sterman said, “if there are no games to run on it, it’s just a big, heavy paperweight.”
“Platform Wars” often lures MIT students into price wars with their competitors. Companies in the online simulation see their prices undercut by the competition, and respond in kind.
Avoiding this vicious cycle of company destruction has served as a valuable classroom lesson for many MIT students on the precipice of the business world.
“The emotion comes into play,” Sterman said. “They know they’re supposed to signal willingness to cooperate and not trigger a price war, but feelings people have when they’re undercut are hard to overcome. … People’s not wanting to lose face gets in the way of making a good decision many times.”
Management simulations are nothing new for Sterman, who created three simulation programs before “Platform Wars.” “Salt Seller,” for example, teaches students about commodity pricing, and “Fishbanks” focuses on managing renewable resources.
These simulations take place over years or decades, helping students better understand short-term and long-term business strategies and the downfalls of getting big too fast.
Every simulator program is based on case studies read by MIT students. All four are available for free on the MSTIR website.
Simulations have become commonplace in much of higher education in recent years, including at Northern Illinois University (NIU), where students use a simulation [5] that lets users design a desired movement or action using the required formulas and algorithms that apply to all types of engineering.
Brian Coller, an associate professor of engineering at NIU, designed the simulation after showing students computer-generated NASA footage from the Mars Rover landings.
Using Coller’s program, students are required to complete the applicable formulas and algorithms to successfully steer a video game car around an oval track. Students must consider rate of speed, geometrical calculations, and all manner of mathematical information to do this.
“These projects are very open-ended, meaning that I’m not going to tell [students] everything they need to know,” Coller said. “They have to go find stuff, and they have to put things together. There’s no one right answer, … so different students can get to a solution in different ways, and that’s what real engineering is like.”
YOUBIQ™ is dedicated to the camera inside your smartphone.
Leave your digital camera at home.
Versatile Grip & Tripod
As a smartphone accessory, the Gymbl is compact and rugged. Attach it to your iPhone® 4 in seconds. Use the handheld grip or tripod on the Gymbl anytime, anywhere. Hold the camera in the position that’s best for you. With the Gymbl, you’re always in the picture.
Hands Free
With the Gymbl, you can use your iPhone® 4 hands free—at home, in a meeting, for FaceTime, when interacting with your apps, and everywhere else.
Panoramic Head
The Gymbl has a gimbal, a pivoting, panoramic head that lets you rotate the iPhone® 4 around its optical center. Use the Gymbl to take accurate panoramic photos without optical distortion. Once you’ve created the source files, use your favorite stitching software to create seamless panoramas.
Tripod Attachment
Your Gymbl attaches to any full sized tripod or other specialty mounts like a Steadycam through an industry-standard 1/4-20 threaded hole in center pivot for even more flexibility.
Ergonomic Case
The stylish, hard-shelled case protects your iPhone® 4 and attaches to the Gymbl. Feels great in your hands anytime you use your iPhone® 4.
At the heart of the Gymbl™ is a gimbal.
The Gymbl™ is versatile as:
• a comfortable grip,
• an on-the-go tripod, and
• a tripod adapter
for taking images and videos with great fidelity.
Capture great panoramas with the Gymbl™.
Use the Gymbl™ hands-free for FaceTime®…anywhere, everywhere.
YOUBIQ Home Final from YOUBIQ on Vimeo.
Versatile Grip & Tripod
As a smartphone accessory, the Gymbl is compact and rugged. Attach it to your iPhone® 4 in seconds. Use the handheld grip or tripod on the Gymbl anytime, anywhere. Hold the camera in the position that’s best for you. With the Gymbl, you’re always in the picture.
Hands Free
With the Gymbl, you can use your iPhone® 4 hands free—at home, in a meeting, for FaceTime, when interacting with your apps, and everywhere else.
Panoramic Head
The Gymbl has a gimbal, a pivoting, panoramic head that lets you rotate the iPhone® 4 around its optical center. Use the Gymbl to take accurate panoramic photos without optical distortion. Once you’ve created the source files, use your favorite stitching software to create seamless panoramas.
Tripod Attachment
Your Gymbl attaches to any full sized tripod or other specialty mounts like a Steadycam through an industry-standard 1/4-20 threaded hole in center pivot for even more flexibility.
Ergonomic Case
The stylish, hard-shelled case protects your iPhone® 4 and attaches to the Gymbl. Feels great in your hands anytime you use your iPhone® 4.
At the heart of the Gymbl™ is a gimbal.
The Gymbl™ is versatile as:
• a comfortable grip,
• an on-the-go tripod, and
• a tripod adapter
for taking images and videos with great fidelity.
Capture great panoramas with the Gymbl™.
Use the Gymbl™ hands-free for FaceTime®…anywhere, everywhere.
Thursday, December 01, 2011
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Steve Jobs and NeXT: Rare PBS Documentary circa 1986
In 1985, shortly after being fired from Apple, Steve Jobs founded NeXT, the somewhat short-lived but revolutionary company focused on higher education and business services. It was there that Jobs honed his visionary approach to computing and design, and crystalized his lens of priorities — the very qualities that made him not only a cultural icon but also a personal hero.
This fascinating PBS documentary, titled The Entrepreneurs and filmed in 1986, offers a rare glimpse of Jobs’ original vision with NeXT, from his aspirations for higher education and simulated learning environments to his decision-making process on price point and product features to his approach to company culture and motivational morale.
Merely 48 months later, Jobs stood up in front of a riveted audience at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall and introduced four fully crystalized, groundbreaking NeXT products, including “some of the neatest apps that have ever been created for any desktop platform,” “the best color that’s ever been,” and “the most important new application area in the 1990s…interpersonal computing.”
Britta Riley: A garden in my apartment
ABOUT THIS TALK
Britta Riley wanted to grow her own food (in her tiny apartment). So she and her friends developed a system for growing plants in discarded plastic bottles -- researching, testing and tweaking the system using social media, trying many variations at once and quickly arriving at the optimal system. Call it distributed DIY. And the results? Delicious.
Grow it Yourself: Hydroponic Gardening in Your Home
http://www.marthastewart.com/article/windowfarms-hydroponic-gardening-in-your-home#ooid=ZpZnBlMjpP8-DVwvtRD11JrFrH-06OSP
I, like many of you, am one of the two billion people on Earth who live in cities. And there are days -- I don't know about the rest of you guys -- but there are days when I palpably feel how much I rely on other people for pretty much everything in my life. And some days, that can even be a little scary. But what I'm here to talk to you about today is how that same interdependence is actually an extremely powerful social infrastructure that we can actually harness to help heal some of our deepest civic issues, if we apply open source collaboration.
A couple of years ago, I read an article by New York Times writer Michael Pollan in which he argued that growing even some of our own food is one of the best things that we can do for the environment. Now at the time that I was reading this, it was the middle of the winter and I definitely did not have room for a lot of dirt in my New York City apartment. So I was basically just willing to settle for just reading the next Wired magazine and finding out how the experts were going to figure out how to solve all these problems for us in the future. But that was actually exactly the point that Michael Pollan was making in this article -- was it's precisely when we hand over the responsibility for all these things to specialists that we cause the kind of messes that we see with the food system.
So, I happen to know a little bit from my own work about how NASA has been using hydroponics to explore growing food in space. And you can actually get optimal nutritional yield by running a kind of high-quality liquid soil over plants' root systems. Now to a vegetable plant, my apartment has got to be about as foreign as outer space. But I can offer some natural light and year-round climate control.
Fast-forward two years later: we now have window farms, which are vertical, hydroponic platforms for food-growing indoors. And the way it works is that there's a pump at the bottom, which periodically sends some of this liquid nutrient solution up to the top, which then trickles down through plants' root systems that are suspended in clay pellets -- so there's no dirt involved. Now light and temperature vary with each window's microclimate, so a window farm requires a farmer, and she must decide what kind of crops she is going to put in her window farm, and whether she is going to feed her food organically.
Back at the time, a window farm was no more than a technically complex idea that was going to require a lot of testing. And I really wanted it to be an open project, because hydroponics is one of the fastest growing areas of patenting in the United States right now and could possibly become another area like Monsanto, where we have a lot of corporate intellectual property in the way of people's food. So I decided that, instead of creating a product, what I was going to do was open this up to a whole bunch of co-developers.
The first few systems that we created, they kind of worked. We were actually able to grow about a salad a week in a typical New York City apartment window. And we were able to grow cherry tomatoes and cucumbers, all kinds of stuff. But the first few systems were these leaky, loud power-guzzlers that Martha Stewart would definitely never have approved. (Laughter) So to bring on more co-developers, what we did was we created a social media site on which we published the designs, we explained how they worked, and we even went so far as to point out everything that was wrong with these systems. And then we invited people all over the world to build them and experiment with us. So actually now on this website, we have 18,000 people. And we have window farms all over the world.
What we're doing is what NASA or a large corporation would call R&D, or research and development. But what we call it is R&D-I-Y, or research and develop it yourself. So for example, Jackson came along and suggested that we use air pumps instead of water pumps. It took building a whole bunch of systems to get it right, but once we did, we were able to cut our carbon footprint nearly in half. Tony in Chicago has been taking on growing experiments, like lots of other window farmers, and he's been able to get his strawberries to fruit for nine months of the year in low-light conditions by simply changing out the organic nutrients. And window farmers in Finland have been customizing their window farms for the dark days of the Finnish winters by outfitting them with LED grow lights that they're now making open source and part of the project.
So window farms have been evolving through a rapid versioning process similar to software. And with every open source project, the real benefit is the interplay between the specific concerns of people customizing their systems for their own particular concerns and the universal concerns. So my core team and I are able to concentrate on the improvements that really benefit everyone. And we're able to look out for the needs of newcomers.
So for do-it-yourselfers, we provide free, very well-tested instructions so that anyone, anywhere around the world, can build one of these systems for free. And there's a patent pending on these systems as well that's held by the community. And to fund the project, we partner to create products that we then sell to schools and to individuals who don't have time to build their own systems.
Now within our community, a certain culture has appeared. In our culture, it is better to be a tester who supports someone else's idea than it is to be just the idea guy. What we get out of this project is we get support for our own work, as well as an experience of actually contributing to the environmental movement in a way other than just screwing in new light bulbs. But I think that Eileen expresses best what we really get out of this, which is the actual joy of collaboration. So she expresses here what it's like to see someone halfway across the world having taken your idea, built upon it and then acknowledging you for contributing. If we really want to see the kind of wide consumer behavior change that we're all talking about as environmentalists and food people, maybe we just need to ditch the term "consumer" and get behind the people who are doing stuff.
Open source projects tend to have a momentum of their own. And what we're seeing is that R&D-I-Y has moved beyond just window farms and LEDs into solar panels and aquaponic systems. And we're building upon innovations of generations who went before us. And we're looking ahead at generations who really need us to retool our lives now. So we ask that you join us in rediscovering the value of citizens united, and to declare that we are all still pioneers.
(Applause)
Windowfarm Timelapse
Lincoln's Windowfarm - 2011-07-29
Indoor Gardening
Britta Riley wanted to grow her own food (in her tiny apartment). So she and her friends developed a system for growing plants in discarded plastic bottles -- researching, testing and tweaking the system using social media, trying many variations at once and quickly arriving at the optimal system. Call it distributed DIY. And the results? Delicious.
Grow it Yourself: Hydroponic Gardening in Your Home
http://www.marthastewart.com/article/windowfarms-hydroponic-gardening-in-your-home#ooid=ZpZnBlMjpP8-DVwvtRD11JrFrH-06OSP
I, like many of you, am one of the two billion people on Earth who live in cities. And there are days -- I don't know about the rest of you guys -- but there are days when I palpably feel how much I rely on other people for pretty much everything in my life. And some days, that can even be a little scary. But what I'm here to talk to you about today is how that same interdependence is actually an extremely powerful social infrastructure that we can actually harness to help heal some of our deepest civic issues, if we apply open source collaboration.
A couple of years ago, I read an article by New York Times writer Michael Pollan in which he argued that growing even some of our own food is one of the best things that we can do for the environment. Now at the time that I was reading this, it was the middle of the winter and I definitely did not have room for a lot of dirt in my New York City apartment. So I was basically just willing to settle for just reading the next Wired magazine and finding out how the experts were going to figure out how to solve all these problems for us in the future. But that was actually exactly the point that Michael Pollan was making in this article -- was it's precisely when we hand over the responsibility for all these things to specialists that we cause the kind of messes that we see with the food system.
So, I happen to know a little bit from my own work about how NASA has been using hydroponics to explore growing food in space. And you can actually get optimal nutritional yield by running a kind of high-quality liquid soil over plants' root systems. Now to a vegetable plant, my apartment has got to be about as foreign as outer space. But I can offer some natural light and year-round climate control.
Fast-forward two years later: we now have window farms, which are vertical, hydroponic platforms for food-growing indoors. And the way it works is that there's a pump at the bottom, which periodically sends some of this liquid nutrient solution up to the top, which then trickles down through plants' root systems that are suspended in clay pellets -- so there's no dirt involved. Now light and temperature vary with each window's microclimate, so a window farm requires a farmer, and she must decide what kind of crops she is going to put in her window farm, and whether she is going to feed her food organically.
Back at the time, a window farm was no more than a technically complex idea that was going to require a lot of testing. And I really wanted it to be an open project, because hydroponics is one of the fastest growing areas of patenting in the United States right now and could possibly become another area like Monsanto, where we have a lot of corporate intellectual property in the way of people's food. So I decided that, instead of creating a product, what I was going to do was open this up to a whole bunch of co-developers.
The first few systems that we created, they kind of worked. We were actually able to grow about a salad a week in a typical New York City apartment window. And we were able to grow cherry tomatoes and cucumbers, all kinds of stuff. But the first few systems were these leaky, loud power-guzzlers that Martha Stewart would definitely never have approved. (Laughter) So to bring on more co-developers, what we did was we created a social media site on which we published the designs, we explained how they worked, and we even went so far as to point out everything that was wrong with these systems. And then we invited people all over the world to build them and experiment with us. So actually now on this website, we have 18,000 people. And we have window farms all over the world.
What we're doing is what NASA or a large corporation would call R&D, or research and development. But what we call it is R&D-I-Y, or research and develop it yourself. So for example, Jackson came along and suggested that we use air pumps instead of water pumps. It took building a whole bunch of systems to get it right, but once we did, we were able to cut our carbon footprint nearly in half. Tony in Chicago has been taking on growing experiments, like lots of other window farmers, and he's been able to get his strawberries to fruit for nine months of the year in low-light conditions by simply changing out the organic nutrients. And window farmers in Finland have been customizing their window farms for the dark days of the Finnish winters by outfitting them with LED grow lights that they're now making open source and part of the project.
So window farms have been evolving through a rapid versioning process similar to software. And with every open source project, the real benefit is the interplay between the specific concerns of people customizing their systems for their own particular concerns and the universal concerns. So my core team and I are able to concentrate on the improvements that really benefit everyone. And we're able to look out for the needs of newcomers.
So for do-it-yourselfers, we provide free, very well-tested instructions so that anyone, anywhere around the world, can build one of these systems for free. And there's a patent pending on these systems as well that's held by the community. And to fund the project, we partner to create products that we then sell to schools and to individuals who don't have time to build their own systems.
Now within our community, a certain culture has appeared. In our culture, it is better to be a tester who supports someone else's idea than it is to be just the idea guy. What we get out of this project is we get support for our own work, as well as an experience of actually contributing to the environmental movement in a way other than just screwing in new light bulbs. But I think that Eileen expresses best what we really get out of this, which is the actual joy of collaboration. So she expresses here what it's like to see someone halfway across the world having taken your idea, built upon it and then acknowledging you for contributing. If we really want to see the kind of wide consumer behavior change that we're all talking about as environmentalists and food people, maybe we just need to ditch the term "consumer" and get behind the people who are doing stuff.
Open source projects tend to have a momentum of their own. And what we're seeing is that R&D-I-Y has moved beyond just window farms and LEDs into solar panels and aquaponic systems. And we're building upon innovations of generations who went before us. And we're looking ahead at generations who really need us to retool our lives now. So we ask that you join us in rediscovering the value of citizens united, and to declare that we are all still pioneers.
(Applause)
Windowfarm Timelapse
Lincoln's Windowfarm - 2011-07-29
Indoor Gardening
Louie Schwartzberg: Nature. Beauty. Gratitude.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Louie Schwartzberg
Louie Schwartzberg is an award-winning cinematographer, director and producer who captures breathtaking images that celebrate life -- revealing connections, universal rhythms, patterns and beauty.
交大材料宣傳影片
交大材料宣傳影片
00 前進交大 01 簡介 02 關於交大 03 就業工作 04 交大材料研究方向
05 關於金屬材料 06 關於電子材料 07 關於高分子材料 08 關於陶瓷材料 09 關於奈米科技
10 工學院長談話 11 材料系主任談話 12 陳智教授談話 13 材料所學生感想 14 材料系學生感想
15 結尾
00 前進交大 01 簡介 02 關於交大 03 就業工作 04 交大材料研究方向
05 關於金屬材料 06 關於電子材料 07 關於高分子材料 08 關於陶瓷材料 09 關於奈米科技
10 工學院長談話 11 材料系主任談話 12 陳智教授談話 13 材料所學生感想 14 材料系學生感想
15 結尾
Home > Courses > Materials Science and Engineering > Introduction to Solid State Chemistry > 1. Introduction to Solid State Chemistry OCW Scholar 1. I
This lecture is an introduction to the class.
Professor Sadoway begins with important information about the course objectives, organization, and expectations, and proceehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifds to introduce the subject of solid state chemistry. 3.091 integrates thorough coverage of the principles of chemistry with various applications to engineering systems. The thesis of 3.091 is that electronic structure holds the key to understanding the world around us.
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/materials-science-and-engineering/3-091sc-introduction-to-solid-state-chemistry-fall-2010/1-introduction-to-solid-state-chemistry/MIT3_091SCF09_lec1.pdf
Monday, November 28, 2011
Saturday, November 26, 2011
What If You Are…
When I started my career, all I ever heard was no. So many doors never opened, and the number of times I felt I wasn’t good enough were endless. But still something inside me kept trying. I kept asking myself, “How can I get better? How can I grow?” And my answer to that never changed – and It still hasn’t changed:
Keep trying.
Work harder.
Stay out of your head.
Ask for advice.
Ask for honesty.
Stay open.
Listen.
And no matter how bad the criticism or the word “no” feels, don’t stop believing in what you have to say photographically.
So, I say to all of you: What If you are good enough?
Whatever it is you want to do, you can do it. Whatever it is you want to be, you can be it. So go do it. That is your final assignment.
There is no way I could have ever anticipated what an online, live-streamed food photography workshop would have ignited in the thousands who watched this past weekend.
I couldn’t sleep a wink Sunday night after it was over, I was stirring so much; the energy, the adrenaline, replaying moments, thinking about the different scenes we created in one weekend, all in the name of food photography. But still, that wasn’t what kept my mind racing. It was all the tweets, Facebook messages, comments on this blog, and the hundreds of personal emails I received over the past 72 hours.
Many of them were thank you notes, others heartfelt words of gratitude – and some were very personal accounts of lost dreams that people have decided to reclaim and believe in again.
These words from you all have moved me beyond anything I could have ever imagined. Something changed for me personally, too. I have no idea what all of this means, but I do know one thing: we walked through a threshold this past weekend. No one knows how or when that will materialize or manifest, but I personally can’t wait to see what happens.
Thanks to all of you from the bottom of my heart for the support and kind words.
I’ll leave you with an excerpt from an email that especially touched me when I read it early Monday morning. I think it says everything:
“I turned forty years old a few months ago, and out of nowhere, someone just showed me how to find the passion I had when I was fourteen. What the hell, Penny? It’s a tremendous gift, and maybe I deserve it, maybe I don’t. But if I fail to do anything with it, then I would have answered that question.
Someone just took me by the shoulders, looked me in the eye, and laid out the simple truth: “If you’re not doing what you love, why not?” I have no answer for you, but that was the point, wasn’t it? There’s just no acceptable answer.
The last three days—and most especially the final hour of those three days—I heard my muse give me the ultimatum. And I don’t care that I’m forty; this fire within feels ageless.
I’m not going to say that you showed me the career I always wanted, because I’m not looking for a new career. What you showed me is much more than that: you showed me who I was, who I’ve always been. I never realized how much I needed to see myself again. I’ve lost so much recently, and I’m still listing the things I’ve lost in an endless parade of spreadsheets. But no one makes you list the dreams you’ve lost, the hopes you’ve abandoned, the passions you’ve pushed into the background.
So thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart—a heart much larger now because my muse has finally reclaimed her rightful space in it”
Friday, November 25, 2011
The Power of Food Photography
The Power of Food Photography from Penny De Los Santos on Vimeo.
When you think about food photography, it's not just about what's on the plate. It's about everything around it. The details, the scenes, the people, the culture, the history, the geography, and especially the moments. Food connects all of us. Food photography is the crossroad, where culture, food, and people come together.
On Assignment with Penny De Los Santos: Chef Joanne Chang, Boston, MA from Penny De Los Santos on Vimeo.
In Boston a few weeks ago the three of us fell in love with Chef Joanne Chang of Flour Bakery and Myers & Chang Restaurant. After a few meals and meeting her, we decided she needed to be a subject. Our subject. We found that her energy, grace and incredible food inspired us. By the end of our shoot we didn’t want to leave. I personally wanted to spend the rest of my days in a bowl of her wok-roasted mussels. Wow!
"On-Assignment with Penny" video: The Barbacoa Lady from Penny De Los Santos on Vimeo.
This is a video series called "On Assignment" with professional food and travel photographer Penny De Los Santos. Each short episode is an intimate look at being on a photographic assignment with Penny as she visually explores a subject, inspiring people and locations throughout the country. In this third episode Penny goes back to visit a very special subject in east LA. She takes you along as she shares a meal and recounts the story she did for Saveur Magazine with Flor and the lost art of barbacoa.
On Assignment with Penny De Los Santos: Austin Food Trailers from Penny De Los Santos on Vimeo.
This is a video series called "On Assignment" with professional food and travel photographer Penny De Los Santos. Each short episode is an intimate look at being on a photographic assignment with Penny as she visually explores a subject, inspiring people and locations throughout the country. In this second episode Penny goes to her hometown of Austin, Texas and talks about what she does to connect and feel at home again when re-enterring her life in Austin. She explores on bicycle her favorite food scene in Austin, food trailers, with a group of food blogger and twitter friends from around the country.
Blog: pennydelossantos.wordpress.com/
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
AMG Performance Media Track Monitor Shown
AMG recently showed its AMG Performance Media module for its cars. The video below shows the data that can be accessed via the APM. These include 0-100 km/h acceleration times, a G-meter to measure acceleration, braking and cornering forces, throttle and brake inputs, lap timer, engine output, tire pressures, engine temp and a history function for comparing your and the car’s performance across various tracks. For the enthusiast, monitoring these functions enables one to use the data to improve the performance of the car and driver combination.
These real-time data logging functions have been available for some time now from aftermarket companies. But by allowing this data to be accessed through the multifunction display, the interior of the AMG vehicle retains its look without having a tacky add-on mar the availability of the additional data.
By the way, the demonstration run you will see was done on an SLS AMG at the Hockenheim circuit in Germany.
Mercedes-Benz Classic Center
by Emmanuel (RSS feed) October 19th, 2011 at 8:11 pm
Vintage race cars, pre-war models, one-off custom cars. Any one of these cars would fetch a commanding price if it were to find itself at an auction. But for the technicians at the Mercedes-Benz Classic Center, finding themselves in the middle of this rich automotive history is all in a day’s work. Entering the shop as rusting hulks, these cars each have a story to tell and the people in the Center are justifiably proud when what was once a heap of rusty metal components is turned into a concours-quality masterpiece.
As you will see, what these master craftsmen strive for is perfection in all aspects of a restoration. Whether it is in the exact tolerances of the mechanical parts, or the authenticity of the look or even in the way it’s put together. Because of this goal towards authenticity, the cars that come out of the shop don’t look restored but are instead presented as timeless pieces of automotive history.
CLS63 AMG Design Process Time-Lapsed
We all know that Mercedes-Benzes are highly complex cars that are masterpieces from the minds of designers and engineers from the company’s tech centers. Unlike the sometimes overwhelming feeds on new models and spyshots that we get on a weekly basis, the design process is not as readily available. But now, a time-lapse video has hit YouTube, showing some elements of the design process, from the proverbial clean sheet of paper, to a digital rendering on a computer, which will become the basis for CAD/CAM processes that make up the steps in automobile production.
As you will see, the video is a demonstration of the design process and not an actual work in progress. For one, the computer has obviously been set up in a conference room and, as we said, some steps are apparently skipped. Some commenters have also noted some faults in the original sketch. But as AMG says, this is a demo of how a great car like the CLS is made into a reality, and for most of the world, it is highly informative.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Former VP and Apple Director Al Gore on Steve Jobs and More: The Full AsiaD Interview (Video)
We’re following the schedule of the actual event. Up now: Al Gore, former Vice President, Nobel Prize winner, environmental activist, sometime VC, occasional entrepreneur and all-around busy dude.
Of course, Gore talked about a wide range of issues, from the legacy of Apple’s Steve Jobs (Gore is on the company’s board), to being an adviser to Google, to the “broken” U.S. political system, to alternative energy.
Here’s his onstage interview with Walt Mossberg:
AsiaD: Jonney Shih Full Session
AsiaD: Jonney Shih Full Session
Asus chairman Jonney Shih talked with Walt Mossberg about the blurring boundaries between tablets, notebooks and smartphones at AllThingsD's AsiaD conference last month.
AsiaD: Jerry Yang Full Session
AsiaD: Jerry Yang Full Session
Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and Rose Tsou, who oversees the company's business interests in Asia, spoke with Walt Mossberg at AllThingsD's inaugural Asian conference last month.
Former VP and Apple Director Al Gore on Steve Jobs and More: The Full AsiaD Interview (Video)
We’re following the schedule of the actual event. Up now: Al Gore, former Vice President, Nobel Prize winner, environmental activist, sometime VC, occasional entrepreneur and all-around busy dude.
Of course, Gore talked about a wide range of issues, from the legacy of Apple’s Steve Jobs (Gore is on the company’s board), to being an adviser to Google, to the “broken” U.S. political system, to alternative energy.
Here’s his onstage interview with Walt Mossberg:
Sony’s Kazuo Hirai on Reviving the Iconic CE Brand and More: The Full AsiaD Interview (Video)
We are now posting the full videos from the recent AsiaD conference, which took place in Hong Kong in October.
We’ve been following the schedule of the actual event. Up now: Sony’s Kazuo Hirai.
Hirai is a key figure at the Japanese consumer electronics giant, which has been struggling to revive itself after dominance turned to years of decline; he is widely considered the second in line to CEO Howard Stringer.
In an onstage interview with Walt Mossberg, the elegant exec, who was a longtime gaming exec at Sony, talked about the next-generation (but delayed) Vita game player, smartphones and Sony’s first Google Android tablets, which are now launching.
Here’s the video:
Huawei’s John Roese on the Telecom Giant That Wants to Roar: The Full AsiaD Interview (Video)
We’re following the schedule of the actual event. Up now: John Roese, head of Huawei’s North American R&D team.
While not as well known as others, the Chinese company is the world’s second-largest maker of telecommunications and networking gear. You might hear more about it soon, though, since Huawei aims to increase its annual revenue to more than $100 billion per year within the next decade, by expanding its business beyond communications service providers.
Roese is one of the execs charged with making it so by expanding in the U.S. and focusing on research.
Here’s his onstage interview with Ina Fried:
Nvidia’s Jen-Hsun Huang on Superman Quad-Core Chip, Microsoft and Apple: The Full AsiaD Interview (Video)
We’re following the schedule of the actual event. Up now: Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang.
An early pioneer in graphics chips, the tech company is now aiming at the market for processors driving smartphones, tablets and, soon, PCs. Nvidia’s latest effort is a quad-core chip code named Kal-El, which is the Krypton moniker of Superman.
Is Huang the Man of Steel? Or, at least, can he steal some of major rival Qualcomm’s thunder?
Here’s the video of his onstage interview with Walt Mossberg:
Self-assembly and self-healing for robotic collectives
In the future, Rubenstein hopes to implement his thesis work on “Self-assembly and self-healing for robotic collectives” on the kilobots. An example of such a system is show in the video below.
Mike Rubenstein is a postdoctoral researcher from the Self-organizing Systems Research Group at Harvard. In an effort to make large swarms of robots a reality, he’s been building 1024 coin-sized robots dubbed kilobots. Challenges include making the robots low-cost and easy to assemble, recharge, reprogram and control. The final system is made with only $14 worth of parts, takes 5 minutes to assemble and can be operated in less than a minute. The open source release of all the electronics and assembly documents is expected near the end of this year.
After bording a plane with 100+ robots, Rubenstein was able to demonstrate the system at IROS.
Rezero is the name of a unique Ballbot, able to balance and drive on a single sphere.
Rezero is the name of a unique Ballbot, able to balance and drive on a single sphere. Especially designed for high acceleration, it moves in a very organic and elegant way. Rezero is the first Ballbot prototype which is able to show the full capacities of a Ballbot.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Software (Siri)
Though it comes a few days after its release, the iPhone 4S ushers in the world of iOS 5. This latest revision of Apple's mobile operating system helps to clean some of the dust off of what was starting to feel a bit dated without actually changing any fundamentals. iOS 5 introduces a slew of improvements and enhancements, some minor and some rather more major. We've already posted a particularly comprehensive iOS 5 review, so we won't blather on about it any longer here except to say it's a very solid update that will make your smartphone an even more seamless, integral part of your life.
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Alexander Tsiaras: Conception to birth -- visualized
ABOUT THIS TALK
Image-maker Alexander Tsiaras shares a powerful medical visualization, showing human development from conception to birth and beyond. (Some graphic images.)
I was offered a position as associate professor of medicine and chief of scientific visualization at Yale University in the department of medicine. And my job was to write many of the algorithms and code for NASA to do virtual surgery in preparation for the astronauts going into deep spaceflight, so they could be kept in robotic pods. One of the fascinating things about what we were actually working on is that we were seeing, using new kinds of scanning technologies, things that had just never been seen before -- I mean, not only in disease management, but also things that allowed us to see things above the body that just made you marvel.
I remember one of the first times we were looking at collagen. And your entire body, everything -- your hair, skin, bone, nails -- everything is made of collagen. And it's a kind of rope-like structure that twirls and swirls like this. And the only place that collagen changes its structure is in the cornea of your eye. In your eye, it becomes a grid formation, and therefore, it becomes transparent, as opposed to opaque. So perfectly organized a structure, it was hard not to attribute divinity to it. Because we kept on seeing this over and over and over again in different parts of the body.
One of the opportunities I had was one person was working on a really interesting micromagnetic resin imaging machine with the NIH. And what we were going to do was scan a new project on the development of the fetus from conception to birth using these kinds of new technologies. So I wrote the algorithms in code, and he built the hardware -- Paul Lauterbur -- then went onto win the Nobel Prize for inventing the MRI. I got the data. And I'm going to show you a sample of the piece, "From Conception to Birth."
(Music)
Video text: "From Conception to Birth" Oocyte Sperm Egg Inseminated 24 Hours: Baby's first division The fertilized ovum divides a few hours after fusion ... And divides anew every 12 to 15 hours. Early Embryo Yolk sack still feeding Baby. 25 Days: Heart chamber developing 32 Days: Arms & hands are developing 36 Days: Beginning of the primitive vertabrae These weeks are the period of the most rapid development of the fetus. If the fetus continues to grow at this speed for the entire nine months, it would be 1.5 tons at birth. 45 Days Embryo's heart is beating twice as fast as the mother's. 51 Days 52 Days: Developing retina, nose and fingers The fetus' continual movement in the womb is necessary for muscular and skeletal growth. 12 Weeks: Indifferent penis -- girl or boy yet to be determined 8 Months The moment of birth Delivery: the expulsion stage
(Applause)
Alexander Tsiaras: Thank you. But as you can see, when you actually start working on this data, it's pretty spectacular. And as we kept on scanning more and more, working on this project, looking at these two simple cells that have this kind of unbelievable machinery that will become the magic of you. And as we kept on working on this data, looking at small clusters of the body, these little pieces of tissue that were a trophoblast coming off of a blastocycst, all of a sudden burrowing itself into the side of the uterus, saying, "I'm here to stay." All of a sudden having conversation and communications with the estrogens, the progesterones, saying, "I'm here to stay, plant me," building this incredible trilinear fetus that becomes, within 44 days, something that you can recognize, and then at nine weeks is really kind of a little human being. The marvel of this information: How do we actually have this biological mechanism inside our body to actually see this information?
I'm going to show you something pretty unique. Here's a human heart at 25. It's just basically two strands. And like this magnificent origami, cells are developing at one million cells per second at four weeks, as it's just folding on itself. Within five weeks, you can start to see the early atrium and the early ventricles. Six weeks, these folds are now beginning with the papilla on the inside of the heart actually being able to pull down each one of those valves in your heart until you get a mature heart -- and then basically the development of the entire human body. The magic of the mechanisms inside each genetic structure saying exactly where that nerve cell should go -- the complexity of these mathematical models of how these things are indeed done are beyond human comprehension.
Even though I am a mathematician, I look at this with marvel of how do these instruction sets not make these mistakes as they build what is us? It's a mystery, it's magic, it's divinity. Then you start to take a look at adult life. Take a look at this little tuft of capillaries. It's just a tiny sub-sub-substructure, microscopic. But basically by the time you're nine months and you're given birth, you have almost 60,000 miles of vessels inside your body. I mean, and only one mile is visible. 59,999 miles that are basically bringing nutrients and taking waste away. The complexity of building that within a single system is, again, beyond any comprehension or any existing mathematics today.
And that instruction set, from the brain to every other part of the body -- look at the complexity of the folding. Where does this intelligence of knowing that a fold can actually hold more information, so as you actually watch the baby's brain grow -- and this is one of the things that we're doing right now. We're actually doing the launch of two new studies of actually scanning babies' brains from the moment they're born. Every six months until they're six years old -- we're going to be doing actually to about 250 children -- watching exactly how the gyri and the sulci of the brains fold to see how this magnificent development actually turns into memories and the marvel that is us.
And it's not just our own existence, but how does the woman's body understand to have genetic structure that not only builds her own, but then has the understanding that allows her to become a walking immunological, cardiovascular system that basically is a mobile system that can actually nurture, treat this child with a kind of marvel that is beyond, again, our comprehension -- the magic that is existence, that is us?
Thank you.
(Applause)
Image-maker Alexander Tsiaras shares a powerful medical visualization, showing human development from conception to birth and beyond. (Some graphic images.)
I was offered a position as associate professor of medicine and chief of scientific visualization at Yale University in the department of medicine. And my job was to write many of the algorithms and code for NASA to do virtual surgery in preparation for the astronauts going into deep spaceflight, so they could be kept in robotic pods. One of the fascinating things about what we were actually working on is that we were seeing, using new kinds of scanning technologies, things that had just never been seen before -- I mean, not only in disease management, but also things that allowed us to see things above the body that just made you marvel.
I remember one of the first times we were looking at collagen. And your entire body, everything -- your hair, skin, bone, nails -- everything is made of collagen. And it's a kind of rope-like structure that twirls and swirls like this. And the only place that collagen changes its structure is in the cornea of your eye. In your eye, it becomes a grid formation, and therefore, it becomes transparent, as opposed to opaque. So perfectly organized a structure, it was hard not to attribute divinity to it. Because we kept on seeing this over and over and over again in different parts of the body.
One of the opportunities I had was one person was working on a really interesting micromagnetic resin imaging machine with the NIH. And what we were going to do was scan a new project on the development of the fetus from conception to birth using these kinds of new technologies. So I wrote the algorithms in code, and he built the hardware -- Paul Lauterbur -- then went onto win the Nobel Prize for inventing the MRI. I got the data. And I'm going to show you a sample of the piece, "From Conception to Birth."
(Music)
Video text: "From Conception to Birth" Oocyte Sperm Egg Inseminated 24 Hours: Baby's first division The fertilized ovum divides a few hours after fusion ... And divides anew every 12 to 15 hours. Early Embryo Yolk sack still feeding Baby. 25 Days: Heart chamber developing 32 Days: Arms & hands are developing 36 Days: Beginning of the primitive vertabrae These weeks are the period of the most rapid development of the fetus. If the fetus continues to grow at this speed for the entire nine months, it would be 1.5 tons at birth. 45 Days Embryo's heart is beating twice as fast as the mother's. 51 Days 52 Days: Developing retina, nose and fingers The fetus' continual movement in the womb is necessary for muscular and skeletal growth. 12 Weeks: Indifferent penis -- girl or boy yet to be determined 8 Months The moment of birth Delivery: the expulsion stage
(Applause)
Alexander Tsiaras: Thank you. But as you can see, when you actually start working on this data, it's pretty spectacular. And as we kept on scanning more and more, working on this project, looking at these two simple cells that have this kind of unbelievable machinery that will become the magic of you. And as we kept on working on this data, looking at small clusters of the body, these little pieces of tissue that were a trophoblast coming off of a blastocycst, all of a sudden burrowing itself into the side of the uterus, saying, "I'm here to stay." All of a sudden having conversation and communications with the estrogens, the progesterones, saying, "I'm here to stay, plant me," building this incredible trilinear fetus that becomes, within 44 days, something that you can recognize, and then at nine weeks is really kind of a little human being. The marvel of this information: How do we actually have this biological mechanism inside our body to actually see this information?
I'm going to show you something pretty unique. Here's a human heart at 25. It's just basically two strands. And like this magnificent origami, cells are developing at one million cells per second at four weeks, as it's just folding on itself. Within five weeks, you can start to see the early atrium and the early ventricles. Six weeks, these folds are now beginning with the papilla on the inside of the heart actually being able to pull down each one of those valves in your heart until you get a mature heart -- and then basically the development of the entire human body. The magic of the mechanisms inside each genetic structure saying exactly where that nerve cell should go -- the complexity of these mathematical models of how these things are indeed done are beyond human comprehension.
Even though I am a mathematician, I look at this with marvel of how do these instruction sets not make these mistakes as they build what is us? It's a mystery, it's magic, it's divinity. Then you start to take a look at adult life. Take a look at this little tuft of capillaries. It's just a tiny sub-sub-substructure, microscopic. But basically by the time you're nine months and you're given birth, you have almost 60,000 miles of vessels inside your body. I mean, and only one mile is visible. 59,999 miles that are basically bringing nutrients and taking waste away. The complexity of building that within a single system is, again, beyond any comprehension or any existing mathematics today.
And that instruction set, from the brain to every other part of the body -- look at the complexity of the folding. Where does this intelligence of knowing that a fold can actually hold more information, so as you actually watch the baby's brain grow -- and this is one of the things that we're doing right now. We're actually doing the launch of two new studies of actually scanning babies' brains from the moment they're born. Every six months until they're six years old -- we're going to be doing actually to about 250 children -- watching exactly how the gyri and the sulci of the brains fold to see how this magnificent development actually turns into memories and the marvel that is us.
And it's not just our own existence, but how does the woman's body understand to have genetic structure that not only builds her own, but then has the understanding that allows her to become a walking immunological, cardiovascular system that basically is a mobile system that can actually nurture, treat this child with a kind of marvel that is beyond, again, our comprehension -- the magic that is existence, that is us?
Thank you.
(Applause)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
