Best Known As The Digital Ledger At The Core Of Bitcoin, Blockchain Is “a Great Way For Making And

New 3-D Printer Produces Delicate Soft Objects

A new method of depositing drops of soft materials in a gel could be a new way to print squishy three-dimensional products like living tissue, soft robots and flexible electronics.

In the technique created by University of Florida researchers, a computer-controlled hollow tip precisely embeds fluid droplets of silicone, hydrogel, colloids or living cells inside a granular medium bath the consistency of hand sanitizer. After using the method to make tiny complex soft structures like delicate jellyfish, a tubular knot and a gel version of the nested shapes called Russian dolls, the group says they might have created a new era for engineering. 

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Drilling for oil on Venice Beach | Via

Native Americans first discovered oil in California, as it seeped to the surface of the earth. They used it as a lubricant and sealant for canoes. It was later used for similar purposes by Spanish colonizers.

As the state’s population boomed in the decades following the gold rush of 1849, there was a rapidly growing demand for petroleum.

Drilled in 1876, the first commercially successful oil well in California was Well No. 4 in the Pico Canyon Oilfield in the Santa Susana Mountains.

More discoveries followed, from the Los Angeles City Oil Field in 1892 to Huntington Beach in 1920 and Long Beach in 1921.

By 1920, California was producing 77 million barrels of oil a year, and vast stretches of the state were occupied by derricks, drilling rigs and refineries.

In places such as Venice, California (now known as Marina del Rey), oil derricks ran right up to the shore, mingling with residential neighborhoods and pristine beaches.

Map of the Humongous Fungus: The largest living organism on Earth [1936x1310][OC] CLICK HERE FOR MORE MAPS! thelandofmaps.tumblr.com

Earlier this year, BioDigital partnered with About.com to provide interactive visualizations for common health conditions. Patients searching for information about Type 2 diabetes, for instance, are presented with a 3D model of a cell’s response to insulin, in which they can explore the process from different angles while toggling between diabetic and normal cell function. 

What’s revolutionary about the API launch, though, is that now developers can personalize the BioDigital human by integrating their own imaging data, movement data collected by wearables, and health record data, among other sources. 

So essentially, instead of clicking around the standard human model on About.com, we could soon be exploring 3D models of our own bodies, constructed with our unique health data. 

For athletes especially, the immediate advantages of virtually replicating a moving body are obvious. If you can see exactly which movements inflict pain or stress on your body, it’s much easier to understand how to avoid them. 

For medical professionals, though, the ability to visualize vast amounts of health data in real time via the BioDigital human has the potential to change the way new information is analyzed and consumed. 

 “The human body is this incredible system of systems, and there’s an infinite amount of detail,” says Sculli. “So we can start mapping cellular mechanisms, and genomic and brain activity, and all of this information that’s being collected in masses from research and wearables, and make it consumable for people.”

(via 3D Modeling Startup BioDigital Launches An API For The Human Body | TechCrunch)

Airport Land Art is (Acoustic) Baffling http://ift.tt/1SEHBCD

The PBL Climate Pledge INDC tool tracks  the emission reduction proposals and policies that countries are submitting in the run-up to the Paris Climate Summit. Updated each time new countries submit their proposals, the tool gives up-to-date information on the effects of these proposals on the projected emissions of greenhouse gases. Data via PBL.

When Firms Become Persons and Persons Become Firms: outstanding lecture

UC Berkeley Political Scientist Wendy Brown came to the London School of Economics last week to discuss her book Undoing the Demos, and her lecture (MP3) is literally the best discussion of how and why human rights are being taken away from humans and given to corporations.

Brown looks at the human rights enumerated in the US Bill of Rights, and how they have been interpreted in successive Supreme Court rulings like Hobby Lobby (corporations are people whose religious freedom entitles them to deny contraception to their workers) and Citizens United (corporations are people and have the free speech right to buy politicians). She suggests that these have been misread as merely conservative/business-oriented thinking gaining influence, and that rather, they are best understood as an ongoing project that grants personhood to companies at the expense of real people.

Brown speaks for more than an hour with almost no poli-sci/econ jargon, building elegant, beautiful arguments that should be accessible to anyone. If you listen to anything this weekend, make it this.

Neoliberal rationality — ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture — remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In vivid detail, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled. The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital; concerns with justice cede to the mandates of growth rates, credit ratings, and investment climates; liberty submits to the imperative of human capital appreciation; equality dissolves into market competition; and popular sovereignty grows incoherent. Liberal democratic practices may not survive these transformations. Radical democratic dreams may not either.

In an original and compelling theoretical argument, Brown explains how and why neoliberal reason undoes the political form and political imaginary it falsely promises to secure and reinvigorate. Through meticulous analyses of neoliberalized law, political practices, governance, and education, she charts the new common sense. Undoing the Demos makes clear that, far from being the lodestar of the twenty-first century, a future for democracy depends upon it becoming an object of struggle and rethinking.

Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution [Wendy Brown/Zone Books]

When Firms Become Persons and Persons Become Firms: neoliberal jurisprudence in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores [LSE]

MP3

Welcome to a three part series of kitchen appliance design using unconventional and sustainable materials. 

Part one of the series is a toaster designed using steam-bent bamboo plywood, glass toasting trays, a 2″x1″ touchscreen and quick-cooling coils embedded within the glass toasting trays. Gone is the bizarre popup mechanisms of toaster’s past – the toaster features wide, easy access slots. The heating coils feature quick-cooling technology and the UI tells the user when its safe to grab their toasty treats. Bamboo and glass are both sustainable and renewable and the design uses no plastic and minimal metal.

(via Bamboo and Glass Toaster Design)

“We have an opportunity to re-think how we regulate city activities for the public interest. I think the big opportunity is to harness the data streaming out of all of these activities and use it to enable a more permissive, but more accountable, “2.0” regulatory regime.”

- Nick Grossman

By focusing on peer-to-peer urbanism, we would be able to create more functional and enjoyable communities while using less resources through sharing — both on and offline. By working collaboratively, there’s an opportunity to create solutions for the masses at a lower cost for the government, and therefore for tax payers. It’s problem solving by community.

Check out the interesting examples of user-generated urbanism, agile urbanism, and today’s peer-to-peer urbanism movement in Nick’s post. 

(via loyalcx)