community, identity & science / fiction.

Loved this piece of sciency news today: common fruit flies, apparently, can survive being frozen at -5° Celsius for more than an hour, continuing development regularly afterwards and even producing healthy offspring.

cc by Joe Jimbo

One simple trick made this possible: the fruit fly larvae were fed a mixture of an amino acid called L-proline and glycerol. Both components act as cryoprotectants. Researches got the idea after they found out that an arctic variety of drosophila produce this amino acid to withstand the cold. The arctic flies are in fact so good at it that they can survice being dipped into liquid nitrogen (!), that’s about -196°Celsius.

How absolutely cool is that? Thinking this further, Does this mean that soon all those deep-freeze fantasies, allowing humans to preserve their bodies to be awoken several years, sometimes hundreds if years later, will soon become reality?!

There’s one possible application of the cryoprotectant amino acid L-proline which could become useful in the not-so-distant future: to preserve organs just a little longer before transplantation.

Makerplatz is in full swing: the idea is to bring together all people and projects that have come to life in the past years around the previously rather desolate area surrounding Moritzplatz in Kreuzberg.

My contribution was the creation of a  visual guide connecting the spaces physically (and with some data).

Makerplatz visual Guide

My contribution was the idea to create a visual guide that would connect the spaces physically and through information. This consisted of a map, assigning each space its own color . The map was enhanced through QR codes, which let you surf to the site-specific timetable of events immediately.

Using the actual Moritzplatz roundabout as the starting point, I created drip lines with each color, leading right up to the respective spaces. Of course I used DIY, eco-friendly paint. It consists of flour, a type of chalkstone and pigments. It dillutes easily and will fade away within a few days. A similar recipe can be found here.

I also experimented with balloons. I created flying sign posts in front of each location, which would give visitors a sense of direction from far away and would tell them they had reached the right location.

Digging deeper into the idea of using balloons to carry lightweight material, I teamed up with Emre who is doing a “Dream Drawing” workhsop. Creating a dreamy and cozy environmend for the workshop, we made a tent-like structure of very thin, translucent plastic foil which is held up only by balloons. The tent sides waver about a little with any kind of air movement, which makes it very dreamy indeed. Inside the tent, there’s a table and two chairs, and Emre will receive his visitors in there to teach them techniques how to capture and visualize their dreams.

Part of Makerplatz

I’m glad Jay and the ODC people saw this potential and initiated Makerplatz – for the first time I really came notice that is an exceptional entrepreneurial and creative energy all around that area.

There’s the pioneer coworking space betahaus, which has become a hub for startups in Berlin and also houses ODC; a workshops space for a community of makers and tinkerers of all kind. There’s the IMA, in which EstyLabs have quickly become a lively hub for regular workshops and conferences for Berlin’s creative class. And more recently, the huge gray giant Aufbau Haus, housing Planet Modulor and other small shops and workshops, has awoken. And then tere’s the magical community garden Prinzessinnengärten who have (wanted or unwanted) become a lunchbreak hideaway with healthy food for the Platz’ residendts.

Good times, thanks for making it happen Jay!

I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts the other day, triangulation, and this episode’s interviewee was neuro scientist Miguel Nicolelis.

One of the topics they touched was invasive brain surgery an implants. As the technology gets smarter, the risk connected to invasive brain surgery reduces, yet a risk remains. And people simply don’t like the idea of having nodes inserted into their brains.

What happens when part of our body is suddenly exchanged or enhanced by something artificial? I recall the story by ennomane who describes in detail the process of how he received a Cochlear hearing implant and had to relearn the process of hearing and differentiating between noise and patterns in this noise. One of his posts he entitles: The Cyborg hears.

Cochlear implant, image from WIkimedia Commons

Cyborg, indeed! In a way, Cyborgs are already among us. I am one of them too! I was born with a difficult heart defect called Tetralogy of Fallot. In my life, I have had various heart surgeries. Each time, the doctors replaced one of my defect valves with an implant and patched up the leaky spots with foreign tissue. My first valve implant contained tissue from a pig, my second was a homograft, meaning that it came from a human. I think I remember I was told it was from a man from the UK. The implant in me now is a melody valve: part stainless steel mesh, part valve of a cow’s heart. Heck, I’m not only Cyborg but even trans-species! The valve works beautifully, and I do feel gratitude towards the cow that produced this marvelous peace of cell tissue.

Tetralogy of Fallot, image from Wikimedia Commons

If you think about all the people already running around out there with their pace makers and implanted defillibrators (this will probably be the case for me too, in a couple of years) – then you realize that science, medicine, technology and man cannot be distinguished from one another.

I think it’s exiting and awesome to see what humans have achieved to repair and enhance broken bodies. And since a couple of years, there seems to be a new aesthetic regarding ‘weird’ and augmented bodies; a sort of flirt with the idea of pushing humanity past the borders of what is considered normal appearance. Of course, Aimee Mullins comes to mind and who knows, maybe the youth fashion of having an extra knee Cory Doctorow describes in Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom is not science fiction, but around the corner. My favorite implant would definitely be a superpower eye that can see in the dark and at long distances, and never gets tired or out of focus.

From top left clockwise - Aimee Mullins posing for a photoshoot, Aimee Mullings in her famous role as the Cheetah Woman in Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle, custom made prosthetic leg by industrial designers bespoke innovation, french artist Marion Laval-Jeantet in a performance in which she wears stilts formed like horse legs (no "real" prosthetic)