Tea, Earl Grey. Hot.

For those in the know: yes, this header is indeed way up on the geek ladder. But it might not take as long as you might think before this science-fiction element joins the mobile phone and tablet in reality. And then you can use the quote to order a cup of tea just like Patrick Steward does. It will materialize right in front of you.

Granted, we’re still a long way off from the replicator. But 3D printing is starting to mature. You’ve probably seen examples, where the technology is used for e.g. rapid prototyping. And that is where you would expect to find this technique, right? It creates tactile mock-ups of your designs, directly from the digital drawing board. The technology is becoming more and more accessible. You can order your design from a company that specializes in 3D printing (you might have seen them at this year’s Dutch Design Week), or you can learn how to use one at one of the many Fab Labs. You can even hack your old Deskjet to create your own DIY 3D printer.

But human nature wouldn’t be human nature if we stopped at inorganic objects. For instance, researchers at Cornell University’s Cornell Creative Machines Lab created a 3D food printer. It prints everything that you can squirt out through a syringe, from cake icing to masa (tortilla dough).
Though a culinary application of 3D printing looks great on the menu, it doesn’t really benefit mankind. So what about medical applications? One of the links above already mentioned the use of bone rapid prototyping, but what if we could print bone directly? With the right materials, anything can be constructed. Use keratin and print a fingernail. The correct mixture of minerals prints enamel to repair damaged teeth. Use of 3D printing in bioscaffolding is already being discussed.
And what if we could print living tissue? Veins, nerves, muscle tissue? Eventually we might be able to reproduce single cells. The printing techniques would have to scale down to the nano level, but since we’re already able to build a car at this scale, anything is possible.

And with that, we’ve come full circle. When 3D printing on an atomic level becomes possible, the sky is the limit in terms of what we would be able to create. Including your cup of Earl Grey. With a twist of lemon.

You are what you eat

If there is one law in innovation, it is that it has no direction. A new technology leads to unanticipated, sometimes striking, applications. And not infrequently, when we see this application, it seems impossible that the technology was not in fact developed for precisely this purpose.

Body artist Lucy McRae’s new concept Swallowable Parfum does not really fall into this category. In fact, the technology she uses, is not particularly new. But a related question pops to mind: why the hell has no-one thought of this before?

The concept is: you swallow a capsule and produce fragrant sweat. In close collaboration with biochemist Sheref Mansy from the University of Trento, McRae aims to use the body’s own system of fat metabolism.

The function of this system is, normally, to get rid of large fat molecules by breaking them into smaller bits, that are subsequently thrown away out of the body – in faeces, but also through the skin, in sweat. Swallowable Parfum takes advantage of this system. The designers deceive it into breaking down molecules of their choice, resulting in small fragrance molecules that are excreted through the skin during perspiration. The result is an organic perfume, created by an interplay between your body and the swallowed capsule.

On November 5th, you can ask McRae – who was also recently featured at our own Discovery Festival – about her progress during the Next Nature Power Show, here in Amsterdam. We think Swallowable Parfum could be very big – the idea is awesome, to start with. Now let’s just hope it will actually work.

Form and function

Hawk-eye vision. Bulldozer beetles. Beavers chew down trees, and bees will defend their hive at the cost of their own lives.

Do the actions of an organism define its shape, and is that shape optimal? Does the function of an organ define its form, or is it the other way round? And how could the form be improved upon to improve functionality? These are a few of the questions that popped into my mind in response to Job van der Molen‘s work.

At first glance they look like the drawings in your high school biology study book. But Job´s drawings show familiar creatures, technologically enhanced and modified. The resulting mix may even look useful, but is ultimately impossible. Lately, he’s taken to creating sculptures based on his drawings, which look even more life-like.

Shortly after his graduation as an illustrator in 2010, he won the the Youngblood Award, a stimulation award for young and talented artists. His work often features animals, either modified as you see above, or in hybrid human-animal form.

Interested in Job´s motivations? He’ll give a 20PK micro-talk about his work at Discovery Festival 2011.

Citizen science

Uncle science needs you, and not just as a test subject. Scientists from all kinds of disciplines roam the earth (OK, the internet) in search of help. They have been doing that since the beginning of the earth (OK, the internet) – remember SETI@home? What was needed in the search for alien life back then was pure CPU power. Single computers weren’t powerful enough – so SETI scientists politely asked you whether they could use your computer during your coffee breaks. The result was a giant distributed supercomputer, that has been running for 12 years now and is still going. Should you ever be so lucky to take a coffee break, here you’ll find many more scientists who could really use your computers powers (a.o. for malaria, LHC and clean water research).

Apart from your computer, scientists also need your brain. Why? Well, developments in computer science are fast, but there are still many things that people are a lot better at than computers. Recognizing patterns for example – which is exactly why CAPTCHA’s work. It proves very difficult to formally describe to a computer how to read distorted letters, whereas humans have no problem with it whatsoever. The same goes for astronomical pictures, which Dutch primary school teacher Hanny van Arkel discovered: she saw something unusual on her Galaxy Zoo photo and had a galactic object named after her. A computer might very well have missed it.

Next step: protein folding. Proteins are important in any process you can think of in the human body. Including, for example, genetic diseases. Knowing more about the process of protein folding teaches researchers a lot about the functionality or dysfunctionality of certain variants. But how can you tell which way a certain protein will fold?

This is where you come in. Sure, computers can do a gazillion calculations a minute, but in this case, that doesn’t cut it. In protein folding, there are simply too many possibilities: a computer would take years and years to calculate them all. Whereas humans just see instinctively, like in jigsaw puzzles, that many configurations are nonsense and you don’t need to bother with them.

The analogue of these protein folding problems and actual puzzles is pretty obvious, which prompted some smart people to build Foldit, an addictive online puzzle game based on protein folding problems. Needless to say that that move rapidly increased public response. But the real good news is: Foldit has been yielding astonishing scientific results.

The Light Field Camera

The photos you see above are the result of a single capture.

I’ll let that sink in.

It demonstrates a new technology, developed by US start-up Lytro, which allows photographers to determine the focus point of a photo after the photo has been taken. It sounded impossible to me, but after reading up on the science of light fields, it acually makes sense.

In a nutshell: Using a Light Field Sensor, which captures the color, intensity and vector of incoming light, and processing this information using -obviously- highly complicated algorithms, it becomes possible to focus after image capture, instead of before image capture, as is the rule with current lenses.

This opens up loads of new imaging possibilities, from manually adjusting focus in images in post, to seamless switching between 2D- and 3D-images. I’m curious as to how much detail can be resolved.

Play around for yourself in their growing image gallery.

Hardware hacking, the next level

Hacking ordinary stuff to make it do better things than it was designed for: cool. Take the well known leaf blower-turned-hovercraft. You get to play around with duct tape, and the end result is a functioning version of an otherwise ridiculously expensive toy. Score!

Enter hardware hacking, the next level. Hacking ordinary stuff to make it do science that is actually publishable in a journal. This guy, for example, got to play around with Playstations and the end result was a functioning supercomputer. The gaming world proves to be a rich source of cheap scientific tools anyway. Wii’s have already been recognized as nice sensors for serious science and, not surprisingly, Kinects are next.

But it’s not just computers. Our favorite so far: a rain gauge made from the little speakers in greeting cards. And this is not just tinkering for fun: it’s from the Tahmo project, in which Rolf Hut and his colleagues are working on a <€100 weather monitoring system for widespread use in poor areas of Africa.

Of course, contributing to a better world is a powerful motivation. But many great things start with a much more basic urge. Hut: “I really felt the need to solder something.”

On the edge of urban environments

Rotterdam based artist Pim Palsgraaf creates work that I would absolutely have loved to see in last years Discovery Festival exhibition ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’. In the ‘Multiscape’ sculptures he shows the outgrowths of urban architecture. Comparable to tumours of urban growing he drapes found objects on stuffed animals to symbolize the contradiction between culture and nature. According to Pim’s artist statement the city seems to overcome the animal and to bring it to its knees.