we are a culture, not a costume

The discovery of a class of bacteria—which are everywhere, in the soil and among our beneficial gut population—which can only be described as vampiric took place several years ago and while I am not sure what direction the research has taken, this strain seems especially timely given that one local hospital was found to be harbouring Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA oder Multiresistante Krankenhauskeime) in some of its wards.
News like that incited a panic among some of the clientele, battle-weary from the likes of Ebola—even though it’s endemic to most treatment facilities already and all would forego the negative publicity. These Micavibrio aeruginosavorus and related specimen called Vampirovibrio chorellavorus are purely predatory and cannot live even in nutrient-rich environments, shunning them, unless there are some other hapless bacteria to feed on—making their study rather difficult since the sample is always a contaminated one, latching on to their victims with enzyme fangs and sucking the life out of them. Subsequent culturing made pathologists hopeful that a living, evolving antibiotic agent could be used to combat those familiars (coming from the word midge, a nigget is a small insect—perhaps like Jiminy Cricket or a flea-circus—that was used as a witch’s minion, and I bet that the same terminology could apply to tinier things like germs) of our own drug abuse and hygiene.

6x6

onionoise: the Viennese Vegetable Orchestra performs Radioaktivität from Kraftwerk

placebo button: expecting more underneath the casing of a fire alarm

one teaspoon of unicorn tears: excerpts from absurdly challenging gourmet recipes

maltese falcon: interesting abstract of ancient forgeries

free-range: a look at different fruits, vegetables and nuts growing in the wild, via Presurfer

washington, this is kallstadt calling: Spiegel International visits candidate Trump’s ancestral family home in a village near Mannheim—the same place whence the Heinz dynasty hails

ringxiety or push-notification

I don’t often keep my mobile device in such close proximity to my person so as to make it an extension of my senses (say, something akin to an artist’s paint brush or a seeing impaired person’s walking stick), but sometimes when I am marching along with my phone in my bag, I’ll get false alarms that cause me to pause and check, only to find it was in my imagination.
This happens especially I think when I’m anxiously expecting a call, and I always feel a bit silly. I knew I was not quite alone in suffering from this phenomenon but had no idea that it was common enough to earn a forum, clinical studies and even a name: Phantom Vibration Syndrome. Researchers are not quite sure what causes these ghostly cues but most believe they are harmless, tiny muscle spasms that would otherwise go unnoticed (perhaps like a nascent version of Restless Leg Syndrome, which apparently becomes insufferable for some people and dreaming, twitchy dogs) that are at an amplitude sympathetic to the subsonic silent mode of our phones. Such prompts also indulge our sense of separation anxiety as these same calls and responses are our social towropes that connect us to the wider world. What do you think? Have you been haunted by phantom vibrations?

sensory reparation

Dangerous Minds has a brilliantly curated piece on the psychedelic architects of late 1960s Vienna, Hans-Rucker-Co, who first appeared on the scene and began long quite long and distinguished careers (with installations and buildings in Kassel and Düsseldorf and long-time champions of design as the founding members of the documenta exposition) with their radical Mind Expanding Programme that aimed to place wearers, bearers and inhabitants in altered states of being through transformative environments. Their creations are iconic and certain the architecture that was their later legacy was not mainstream, but it strikes me as wonderfully anachronistic that these individuals came together and developed their art first around this project. In addition to these “fly head” helmets that atomized one’s outlook, be sure to check out the mind-expander loveseat, ball pit for adults and the primogenitor of the voyeuristic fishbowl experience in Oasis Number 7 and more at the link.

jötunheimr or planet nine from outer space

Orbital perturbations of the outer most planets of our Solar System and perhaps the mysterious and unexpected geologically active surface of Pluto suggest to astronomers that a Neptune-sized world sweeping out an elongated path nearly twice as distant as Pluto at its aphelion might exist.
That far away and with such an unimaginably long year would be quite faint and the marauder would only make itself know, possibly with great disruption, only once in epochs, and so is naturally elusive—even if one’s telescope are fixed on the right patch of sky. If such a ninth planet does exist (and that seems to be a pretty big leap as other theoretical place-holders have dematerialised in the past), astronomers propose that it is an ice-giant ejected from the Solar System’s core long ago—or, even more exotically, a captured “rogue” exoplanet. That would really be something if we had been harbouring a galactic hitchhiker all this time. Native or not, maybe the new planet should be named after Thrym, king of the Ice Giant realm of Jötunheimr—which is a nemesis to the realm of men and their gods.

party of one oder telefonzelle

A merry-maker and entrepreneur from Berlin has repurposed old public telephone booths into private discotheques, complete with a jukebox selection of dance music and a light show and even doubles as a photo-booth—delivering some mementos of one’s abbreviated party. This is a pretty keen idea and enhances the list of overhauls that the more or less obsolete telephone booth is receptive to: time machine, miniature library, insect hostel, changing room for super heroes—and it does not even matter if unlike the TARDIS, it’s not bigger on the inside.

6x6

peak curtains: Swedish furniture purveyor concedes that we’ve got enough junk

man on the street: Latin American media giant purchases a controlling share of the Onion

ladders of light: rare phenomenon projects one icy village into the night sky

algorithmic: beautifully elegant approach to filtering out prime numbers

il tempo sepolto: gorgeous art nouveau era daytime hotel below the streets of Milan

rewritten by machine on new technology: the output of presenting sitcom scripts to neural networks

how does your garden grow

First appreciated by the doyenne Nag on the Lake—with the interesting disclaimer that this is in fact not the first blossom in microgravity—this image of a zinnia in space is pretty inspiring and marks at least a symbolic step towards making interplanetary voyages self-sustaining.
Not only does the absence of gravity to hold down soil and define up and down present particular challenges so too did apparently the bureaucracy that accompanies growing a flower on the International Space Station. Things were looking rather bleak for the plants until the gardener decided to break with the established protocol dictated by Mission Control and care for them as you would terrestrial counterparts and took the plants outside of the laboratory and into the station’s cupola to bask in the natural light of the Sun.