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Prehistoric rock art of Iran. The ancient petroglyphs date back 4500 to 17000 years.

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By and large, we accept the use of animals as objects and tools. Sixty-two percent of Americans surveyed in a Gallup poll, for example, deemed it “morally acceptable” to use animals for medical research, and despite the growth of the animal rights movement, there aren’t many vegetarians. And what does a T-bone steak represent if not a reduction of an animal to parts, to its instrumental value? There are issues with farming, of course, especially the industrial-scale factory farming that is the norm today. But whatever our objection to the system itself, the truth is that most of us accept the idea that we can use an animal’s body to nourish out own.

For most of us, then, the real ethical question surrounding [genetically engineered] pharm animals comes down to the genetic engineering itself. Is there something about editing DNA and remixing biological material that is just inherently wrong? …critics of biotechnology worry that breaching species barriers violates the rules of God or nature or both.

…These interspecies combinations can raise unfortunate existential questions, threatening our sense of uniqueness. If we can make our cells spring to life in a sheep or make a piece of our biological code work in a beady-eyed little rodent, what is it, exactly, that separates man from beast?

Luke Jerram’s Tõhoku Japanese Earthquake Sculpture

This sculpture was made to contemplate the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

To create the sculpture a seismogram of the earthquake, was rotated using computer aided design and then printed in 3 dimensions using rapid prototyping technology.

The artwork measures 30cm x 20cm and represents 9 minutes of the earthquake. The sculpture will be presented at the Jerwood Space in London for a show called Terra. Exploring how data is read and can be represented and interpreted, the artwork is one of a series of data visualization sculptures Jerram has recently created. 

It symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem.

science-junkie:

Nineteenth Century Technique Turns Old Mouse Hearts Young

Drawing on an odd experimental technique invented more than a century ago but rarely done now, researchers [of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute] have found that a blood-borne protein makes old mouse hearts appear young and healthy again. It’s not clear yet whether humans would react the same way, but scientists are hopeful that this discovery may help treat one of the heart’s most frustrating ailments…

 As heart muscles get older, they grow thicker. The thickened heart can still pump blood out normally, but it can’t relax enough to refill between pumps. The condition is called diastolic heart failure, named after the heart’s resting, or diastolic, phase. There is currently no treatment to reverse the thickening of the heart and restore normal function.

But researchers continue to look for such a cardiac fountain of youth. One approach has been to apply a 150-year-old technique to infuse young blood into old mice. Called heterochronic parabiosis the method involves surgically linking the circulatory systems of two mice of different ages by opening a flap of skin on each mouse’s side and stitching the two together so that the same blood pumps through both creatures…

This study is a modern validation of 18th-century parabiosis science using 21st century molecular biology, says cardiologist Gerald Dorn of Washington University in St. Louis. However, use of the technique lends the research a gothic, macabre flavor, he says. “I was looking to see whether Tim Burton or Vincent Price were a part of the experimental design.”

Source: sciencemag.org

smithsonianmag:

The Unsettling Beauty of Lethal Viruses

To create a body of work he calls “Glass Microbiology,” [Luke] Jerram has enlisted the help of virologist Andrew Davidson from the University of Bristol and the expertise of professional glassblowers Kim George, Brian George and Norman Veitch. Together, the cross-disciplinary team brings hazardous pathogens, such as the H1N1 virus or HIV, to light in translucent glass forms.

The artist  insists that his sculptures be colorless, in contrast to the images scientists sometimes disseminate that are enhanced with bright hues. “Viruses have no color as they are smaller than the wavelength of light,” says Jerram, in an email. “So the artworks are created as alternative representations of viruses to the artificially colored imagery we receive through the media.” Jerram and Davidson create sketches, which they then take to the glassblowers, to see whether the intricate structures of the diseases can be replicated in glass, at approximately one million times their original size. - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

stellar-indulgence:

I’m certain you all have seen this late 20th century cultural icon dozens of times by now, but not all of you might be familiar with the controversy involved with it, unless you have read Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Connection. So, did you know…?

Letters to the editor about Pioneer 10 Plaque and Controversy

“One letter complained about sending pornography into space, a follow up letter made fun of the ignorance. Carl Sagan laments the failure of the plaque designers to make the two figures ethnically ambiguous.

What sexuality there is in the message also drew epistolary fire. The Los Angeles Times published a letter from an irate reader that went:

I must say I was shocked by the blatant display of both male and female sex organs on the front page of the Times. Surely this type of sexual exploitation is below the standards our community has come to expect from the Times. Isn’t it enough that we must tolerate the bombardment of pornography through the media of film and smut magazines? Isn’t it bad enough that our own space agency officials have found it necessary to spread this filth even beyond our own solar system?

This was followed several days later by another letter in the Times:

I certainly agree with those people who are protesting our sending those dirty pictures of naked people out into space. I think the way it should have been done would have been to visually bleep out the reproductive organs of the drawings of the man and the woman. Next to them should have been a picture of a stork carrying a little bundle from heaven. Then if we really want our celestial neighbors to know how far we have progressed intellectually, we should have included pictures of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.

The New York Daily News headlined the story in typical fashion: “Nudes and Map tell about Earth to Other Worlds.”

[…]

An article in Catholic Review criticizes the plaque because it “includes everything but God,” and suggests that, rather than a pair of human beings, it would have been better to have borne a sketch of a pair of praying hands.

Another correspondent maintains that the perspective conventions are insuperably difficult, and urges us to send the complete cadavers of a man and a woman. They would be perfectly preserved in the cold of space, and could be examined by extraterrestrials in detail. We declined on grounds of excess weight.

The front page of the Berkeley, California, Barb, apparently intending to convey an impression that the man and woman on the message were too straight, reproduced them with the caption,

“Hello. We’re from Orange County.”

This comment touches on an aspect of the representation of the man and woman that I personally feel much worse about, although it has received almost no other public notice. In the original sketches from which the engravings were made, we made a conscious attempt to have the man and woman panracial. The woman was given epicanthian folds and in other ways a partially Asian appearance. The man was given a broad nose, thick lips, and a short “Afro” haircut. Caucasian features were also present in both. We had hoped to represent at least three of the major races of mankind. The epicanthian folds, the lips, and the nose have survived into the final engraving. But because the woman’s hair is drawn only in outline, it appears to many viewers as blond, thereby destroying the possibility of a significant contribution from an Asian gene pool. Also, somewhere in the transcription from the original sketch drawing to the final engraving the Afro was transmuted into a very non-African Mediterranean-curly haircut. Nevertheless, the man and woman on the plaque are, to a significant degree, representative of the sexes and races of mankind.”

Source Material: Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Connection

In a twist straight out of the movie Inception, a duo of developers from Brooklyn, New York, have built a sleeping mask designed to allow people to have lucid dreams that they can control. While it may look like a standard sleeping mask, Remee has been billed as a special REM (Rapid Eye Movement) enhancing device that is supposed to help steer the sleeper into lucid dreaming by making the brain aware that it is dreaming. The goal of the product is to allow people to have the dreams of their choice, from driving a race car to flying to having lunch with Abraham Lincoln.

The inside of the sleeping mask features a series of six red LED lights that are too faint to wake the sleeper up, but visible enough for the brain to register them. The lights can be programed to produce a sequence designed by the user.

Sleep stages are divided into two main categories: non-REM and REM. People go back and forth between these stages throughout the night, with REM stages, where most dreaming occurs, lasting the longest towards morning.

Remee apparently notices these longer REM stages and ‘enters’ the dream via the flashing lights. The device will wait for four to five hours for the sleeper to get into the heavy REM stages before the red lights turn on.

The idea is simple: you are playing a perfect round of golf in a dream, and you see a pattern of red lights flashing in the distance.

Because the pattern is in a particular sequence, it would signal to you that you are dreaming, not unlike the totem object in Inception.

Once you realize you are in a dream, you can then decide what happens next, whether it be a quick trip to Antarctica or time travel.

Rather than encumbering the mask with buttons and controls, its inventors set up a website called sleepwithremee.com where users can adjust the setups, such as when to start the light sequence and when to repeat it. The intensity of the lights can also be changed.

moshita:

Nanotechnology engineers have 3D printed an ear from calf cells and silver nanoparticles that picks up radio signals at frequencies beyond human capacity. The creation is part of their greater plan to one day build spare parts for humans cyborgs to don.

Rather than simply adding electronics to an ear, the team from Princeton decided to try and integrate the two from the start. They 3D printed hydrogel — a polymer-based gel often used as scaffolding in tissue engineering — with calf cells, and weaved in silver nanoparticles to create an in-built antenna coil that replaces the cochlea. The calf cells matured to become cartilage and the electronics were then encased in a highly supportive ear that mirrors the complex build of the real thing. 

The team found that, as expected, having a more positive general outlook on life was associated with improved sleep quality. However, they found that the more reactive or fragile a participant’s positive emotions were in relation to external events, the more their sleep was impaired, especially for individuals high in positivity to begin with. “Previous research suggests that the experience of joy and happiness may slow down the effects of aging by fortifying health-enhancing behaviors such as restorative sleep,” said first author Anthony Ong, associate professor of human development in the College of Human Ecology. “Our study extends this research by showing that whereas possessing relatively stable high levels of positive emotion may be conducive to improved sleep, unstable highly positive feelings may be associated with poor sleep because such emotions are subject to the vicissitudes of daily influences.” Ong added, “These findings are novel because they point to the complex dynamics associated with fragile happiness and sleep that until now have been largely attributed to unhappy people.

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