7x7

tarnkappe: world’s first graphene jacket gives it wearer super-powers

like my mom used to say, if you need calcium, eat a milkman—yep, she said it: Ze Frank (previously) returns with true facts about carnivorous plants, via The Art of Darkness

67/p churyumov-gerasimenko: peruse one hundred thousand striking images of the alien landscape of the comet that the Rosetta probe rendezvoused with

global statesman: former United Nations Secretary-General and Nobel laureate Kofi Annan has passed away

forever blowing bubbles: a look back at the financial crash of 2008 and realising how little things have changed

pulsars: instructive and interactive coding tutorials on creating generative art (previously here and here), via Waxy

take care, tcb: some superlative obituaries and appreciations on the passing of Aretha Franklin 

attention generative adversarial network

Miss Cellania has given us a home work assignment that’s going to occupy us for the next few hours at least in the form of Cris Valenzuela’s laboratory’s latest artificial intelligence generative image maker. Earlier iterations of its kind sought to caption images submitted but this programme attempts to paint abstractions of text entered. Here are a few that I requested. Learn more about the methodology behind the demonstration project, and give it a try yourself (I think it might be overwhelmed at the moment so do give it a go later) at the links above and be sure to share some of your results.

pykrete

Channeling the inventive spirit of World War II English mad scientist Geoffrey Pyke (previously) who among other suggestions to the Admiralty, recommended that bombing runs be staged from aircraft carriers with runways made of ice, reinforced with a mixture of sawdust and wood pulp called Pykrete, a London-based food studio has developed an assortment of frozen treats able to resist melting in 24°C heat for one hour, substituting fruit fibre for sawdust.
It might at first glance seem a frivolous thing to worry about but this second look at a composite material that was abandoned during the war due to other priorities and pressures could indeed translate to other applications from ways to keep foods and medications cooler for longer in places without reliable refrigeration or even something more ambitious that what Pyke envisioned himself as girders and frames to help stabilise and hold together ice sheets and icebergs until they can heal themselves. Pyke’s cousin, incidentally, Magnus was a radio and television presenter and celebrity, hosting many programmes on the topic of nutrition and food science and was the Home Doctor for Thomas Dolby’s 1982 song, She Blinded Me with Science—the one who interjects, “Science!” Maybe science and innovation can indeed save us yet.

internet caretakers

Via the Awesomer, we are directed back to Wikimedia’s Gift Shop (previously) for a look at its further adventures into street apparel with the foundation’s collaboration with Advisory Board Crystals. All proceeds go to funding the foundation and its many projects—beyond its flagship undertaking of free knowledge for all.

bongóblíða

We learn that Icelanders have a catchy-sounding colloquial term, bongóblíða—bongo weather, to describe this rather pleasant respite from the sweltering heat we’re currently enjoying, though still quite seasonable and hot conditions. The word is a lyric from the 1988 Eurovision entry Sólarsamba (Sunny Samba) from father-daughter duo Magnús Kjartansson and Margrét Gauja Magnúsdóttir. Check out the link above to see a music video of the song for pronunciation help.

island one

The always engrossing and thematic Things Magazine directs our attention to a visionary and indulgent overview about how we’ll need to reassess our geometric conceits when outer space is no longer the beyond and we are living in orbit or in transit or as colonists on world’s where constants lose their consistency due to our perceptions warped by scale.  A series of studies held at Stanford University from 1975 to 1976 invited speculation on the form that future space stations might take and produced some fantastically ambitious illustrations for insular habitats composed of toruses and Bernal spheres which were self-sustaining environments and generated artificial gravity from rotation.

The article and images invites one to imagine what will it be like to live under a wrap-around sky with the horizon at the vanishing point and gravity is not an obstacle but rather a force harnessed in one’s favour and making us a bit superhuman in our strengths and capabilities..

bran and chaff

The fact that the genetic code of rice and maize were mapped in 2002 and 2009 respectively and the wheat genome is just now being puzzled out is not a comment on the staple crop’s importance—both culturally and agriculturally, but rather testament to advances in computational power pitted against an incredibly complex blue-print that is magnitudes larger than human DNA (three billion base pairs as opposed to sixteen billion in a cell of wheat) and is composed of six copies of each chromosome (hexaploid) compared to diploid humans (XY, XX).
One wonders how much fourteen-thousand years of farming contributed to that complicated pedigree and how much was driven by natural forces.  Equipped with this more complete picture and an understanding behind the mechanism and orientation of how certain traits are expressed, after careful research and deliberation (the worst trade-offs are the ones we don’t see coming) scientists hope to be able to select for adaptable cultivars that can withstand a hotter, drier climate or varieties that don’t require pesticides or fertiliser, like this indigenous Mexican corn that can fix its own nitrogen from the air. Other applications could yield wheat-based products that are more nutritious and palatable for people with intolerance to it.

four legs good, two legs bad

After considerable difficulty in finding a publisher for his manuscript—out of fears that criticism, however veiled, might distress the alliance with the Soviets under advisement of the Ministry of Information, George Orwell’s allegory Animal Farm was first released on this date in 1945.
The work, which is a retelling of the dismantling of the Czarist Russia and the violent Stalinist origins of the Soviet Union, informed by the author’s experiences of escaping Communist purges during the Spanish Civil War and realising how easily “enlightened people in democratic countries” can become gripped by propagandists and whipped into a furore. Originally bearing the subtitle “a fairy story,” the satire—removed from contemporary events and figures—does seem to become a clumsier way of getting one’s point across and might limit the novella’s scope away from dictatorships in general, but I think that such criticism—and we should have the wherewithal to question political relevance—re-enforces the need to study our history in order to avoid repeating it.